My friend asked my opinion about Instagram models who have tens of thousands of men drooling over them, in the comments of the photos they post. So I added five models and began following their posts and fan interactions to let an opinion fester over time.
I was reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In Lolita, a middle-aged professor named Humbert Humbert falls in love with a twelve year old girl, Lolita, who he later step-fathers. And after becoming sexually involved with Lolita, there’s a sense of desperate dissatisfaction within Humbert. He has Lolita’s body, but he discovers he’s after he heart, which he’s not acheiving.
I’m merely speculating when I say this, but I think the inverse may be true for these models. The most primitive desire amongst humans is acceptance and the greatest fear is rejection. And the purest form of acceptance is love, which manifests as sacrifice, honesty, and selflessness. I think there are a lot of people who think they have love, but are restless within their experience of it because it isn’t true love they’ve achieved/received. Congruently, I think a lot of these women yearn for a greater acceptance, but misunderstand lust as the love they seek. The attention they garner is primitive and impulsive (and borderline creepy) compared to the genuity of love. And they’re not satisfied because what they receive is conditional, given that it predicates upon aesthetics (which age), competitive (amongst other models), and these women are receiving the manifestations of an impulse rather than the warmth of man’s greatest gift. They achieve something adjacent to what they really want, and the further from the mark they are, the most the desire increases, which manifests in increase of content, which continues to further them from what they really want.