Shop pulls "Lolita" bed for young girls

LONDON (Reuters) - A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the web site selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In "Lolita," a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter -- but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it.

Hence they saw nothing wrong with advertising the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six until a concerned mother raised the alarm on a parenting website.

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told British newspapers.

"We had to look it up on (online encyclopedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

Woolworths said the product had now been dropped.

"Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect," the chain said.

"We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about."

SOURCE

Another case of "how'd you know what it meant?". haha I love things like this. Its like when groups point out porn that "offends" them. How did you know it existed? Oh, because you were watching it to begin with.

This "concerned mother" who was outraged was clearly in the know. She went all "Shelly". What she once embraced she now finds appalling. Hypocrite!

I find it very, VERY hard to believe that nobody at Woolworths ever heard of Nabokov's book. But if that's really the case, I'm once more confirmed in my sad belief that the world is on a downhill slope. And it's rather steep.