INDUSTRY NEWS

Lo·li·ta (low-lee-tuh), n.

1. A seductive young girl
2. a novel (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
3. nymphet (adj)

By most definitions and commonplace usage, the word “lolita” is generally regarded as a sexual young girl or woman.INDUSTRY NEWS

Lo·li·ta (low-lee-tuh), n.

1. A seductive young girl
2. a novel (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
3. nymphet (adj)

By most definitions and commonplace usage, the word “lolita” is generally regarded as a sexual young girl or woman. However, the term has now been a key word coined by pedophile and naturalist sites featuring girls under the age of 18. This has become a very serious and expanding problem online. Some of you may have visited our sites before. We own and operate LolitaSchool.com and LolitaHigh.com — both are part of our LolitaNetwork.com portal site. It has become increasingly evident that we could no longer use our own name, due to the current situation with illegal sites, which have either adopted names similar to ours, or built illegal sites using lolita as part of their domain name. Our concerns about the name “lolita” prompted us to consult our attorney at the time, Steve Workman, with questions regarding the legality and morality of using lolita in our domain names.

We wanted to know if there were any prior court cases over the use of lolita. Were there reasons that we would not want to use the name? Would the name give our business a higher probability of being targeted by government agencies in their witch-hunt of online adult sites?

You can imagine the various things that we were concerned about. We were simply trying to start an online business, make a decent living, and keep to ourselves. The use of the word was a major concern with us, because our business was growing so fast. In our first year of business, our gross sales almost reached the million-dollar mark, while currently in our second year we are projecting gross sales over 1.5 million. It is a business we want to protect and cultivate to be respectable and legal. We custom produce our content, or pay for custom-produced content. We do not sell it and prefer to keep it as exclusive as possible.

But that is another problem when using the name lolita. Our content is traded freely on newsgroups, stolen by other webmasters who build illegal sites, as well as people going as far as selling our videos and content on Ebay. With all of these problems, we have tried hard to maintain our sites and improve them, while at the same time, protecting them as well. This has led us to a major business and financial decision. Do we change the names of our established websites in order to establish some type of stand against this escalating problem? Do we take a chance to lose potential traffic and income because of a name? The answer to that is yes.

It took us quite a while to decide to finally change our name. Approximately two months ago, we found an underage “art” site, using lolita in its domain name and offering erotic stories. We could no longer see a way to keep the use of our name without the possibility of being confused with sites such as I have previously mentioned. We have officially changed our domains to less quality domain names, to make a point regarding the abuse of the word lolita. We will not allow ourselves, our site, or our members to be confused with such sites, even if it means loss of income and traffic. Some of you who have lolita names already know it’s impossible to get listed on most tgps and other traffic sites.

The broad ban of the phrase or use of lolita is becoming more and more common every day. In this business there are a lot of greedy and untrustworthy people. I am writing this article because I do not want to be associated with these types of people, and we should do whatever we can do to ensure they are closed down or entirely removed from our field of business. I do not know about the rest of the adult webmaster community, but I know for my company and myself several things. One, I do not want some gray-haired, 70-year old Supreme Court judge to determine what is or is not obscene. Secondly, the freedoms we have now in running our business could easily fade away by ignoring those who commit theft, or use illegal or unethical means to run their business. These types of people give our industry a bad name. I mean after all, we are not considered the most honorable people to begin with. I know that there are a lot of good people in this business — people with morals and high personal standards. However, should we choose to ignore all the things wrong with this industry, we will shortly find ourselves wondering where it all went wrong.

The current standards, and business practices used by some people working in this field need to be changed. There are many double standards, and there are many people turning a blind eye to all the things wrong with this business. Something that has always bothered me personally is the use of the word “teen”. It is the most commonly used marketing tactic in the adult industry. However, in comparing dictionary and real word usage of “teen” versus “lolita”, lolita is a far more accurate description of young girls who are sexually active; while teen by definition and by use in our everyday language is almost always referring to the age group of 13-17, not 18-19.

We do not in our day-to-day language refer to 18-19 year olds as teenagers. While they may technically be teenagers, our reference to teens most often means people under the age of 18. Why is teen so widely accepted, and lolita shunned? People who banned the use of lolita from their sites, while using advertising slogans the give the impression of pushing the limits of the minimum age requirements. It would be very good for our community to stand up and take a good look at itself. Rules and standards of our industry need to be re-evaluated and definitely redefined. We could very well wake up one morning to find ourselves without a job, car, or home. If you know of things that are wrong in this business, stand up and do something about it. We did and will probably do so again.

Daniel A. Stroven is President/CEO of Necron-Net Inc. His email address is faethor@necron-net.com.

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