Attention, people who have not read Lolita: little girls are messed up in the head. Usually they grow out of it, and learn to subvert these manipulative little sadisms into the irritating head games lampooned on endless sitcoms and greeting cards.

Some of them don't ever really turn into "women", preferring to remain in the far more entertaining Play stage, but my thesis on nymphetry can wait until grad school. Or at least until Rule of Rose comes out. Here's what the Telegraph has to say about how little girls are playing the Sims:

Caroline Pelletier, a project manager at London University's Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, says: 'The Sims inspires quite a patronising attitude - that it's OK for girls to play with computers so long as it's in a domestic space, controlling characters in a maternal way, caring for them and attending to their needs.'

Yet when Pelletier's team observed girl players, they discovered a different reality. 'Girls usually use The Sims to explore subversive behaviour. They get rich and try out a wealthy lifestyle, then see who can lose the most money. They drown their babies and call in social services - they deliberately play against the game's conventions.'

Indeed, most little girls do not treat their characters nearly as maternally as their parents might hope. 'We like to put characters in the swimming-pool and then take the ladder away and see how long it takes before they drown,' explains Ellie Priest. 'Or you keep giving them drinks and won't let them go to the loo until they wee on the floor.'

I saw this back when I did the last Weekly Geek, but a reader just sent it to Tips@, marveling at how creepy it was, and wondering how legit it could possibly be. I was amused.

I forget that most of you have never seen into the brain of a wee lass, and even those that have (I know we have some female readership) may have either forgotten it, repressed it, or lived one of those bizarre, "innocent" childhoods. But rest assured, when given a safe place to practice cruelty free of consequence, most children will take the opportunity with stunning eagerness.

Boys have a well-documented and wholesome love of destruction, but when girls display similar sadism, people become hilariously unsettled. Eliza Gauger

Living Dolls [Telegraph]