Woolworths has withdrawn bedroom furniture for young girls bearing the sexually charged name Lolita after a campaign waged by a mothers’ online chat room.
The Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about 6, was on sale on the Woolworths website for £395.
A mother who was browsing the site for a new bed for her daughter was so shocked at the brand name that she posted a message on the Raisingkids. co.uk website asking other parents whether they felt the same. “Am I being particularly sensitive, or does anyone else out there think it’s bad taste for Woolies to have a kiddy bed range named ‘Lolita’?.”
A tirade of messages followed from mothers equally horrified that a young girl’s bed should be sold under such a name. Several said that they would complain to the store chain.
Whereas many mothers were familiar with Vladimir Nabokov and his famous novel, it seems that the Woolworths staff were not. At first they were baffled by the fuss. A spokesman for the company told The Times: “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. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”
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For the benefit of any other Woolworths staff, Lolita was the 12-year-old girl who became the object of her middle-aged stepfather’s sexual obsession in the literary classic of the same name. Thanks to the novel the name has come to represent sexual precociousness in young girls.
At first the store refused to withdraw the product. It said that although it wanted to appeal to the family market, “we also have to respond to customer demands and follow current trends”.
But after further outraged contact from the mothers, it decided to withdraw the bed from sale. The company said in a statement: “A product called the Lolita Midsleeper Combi was ranged online from a direct supplier. This was a bedroom set for £395. Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect. We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about.”
An internal company e-mail seen by The Times shows a panicked response by senior staff once they came to understand the association. “As discussed, we’ve got the product below on our website. Can it be hidden as soon as is possible? Then I really need to find out how it came about being on our site and who bought it,” the e-mail said.
“Lolita is a word that means sexually active young teenagers, so a young girls’ range of bedroom products is in very poor taste. We’ve had an approach from a website who are clearly a little disturbed by this.”
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Catherine Hanly, who edits the Raisingkids.co.uk site, said it was good to know that parents could have such strong influence on a company. “It’s also interesting to see how fast a multinational company can move if it’s worried about its public image.”
The decision to withdraw the bed is the latest example of online parent power. Last summer, angry parents demanded that a cinema advertisement about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann should no longer be screened before the children’s film Shrek the Third. The advertisement appeared without warning, and parents were furious that they felt obliged to tell their children about the abduction. After a campaign on the Mumsnet website, the advert was withdrawn.
In 2006 Tesco was removed its pole-dancing kit from the toys and games section of its website after it was accused of destroying children’s innocence.