For the Ugly Ones: The Spiky Feminist Anger of Virginie Despentes
Virginie Despentes. Photo: Jean-François Paga.
Three things were made to fit in the palm of your hand: a gun, a bottle, and a dick. —Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi
For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. I would squirm under its gaze and soon close it. I smiled weakly whenever she was mentioned. I was ashamed; I worried my discomfort meant I was not as radical a feminist as I fancied myself.
Despentes is a legend in France, especially among young women. Much of this reputation rests on her first novel, Baise-moi (1994), a taboo-shattering book about a pair of young women, Nadine and Manu, who go on a killing spree across France. One has worked as a prostitute, the other as a porn actress; in between murders, they have graphically described sex in hotel rooms with a series of men. In 2000, Despentes codirected a film adaptation with Coralie Trinh Thi that starred Karen Bach and Raffaëla Anderson, all three former porn actresses; because the sex scenes were unsimulated, the film was hotly controversial and was initially banned in France.
But it wasn’t the violence or the graphic sex that stopped me from reading her work. In Baise-moi, I got as far as this description of Nadine’s roommate, Séverine:
Her personality is composed of … a series of cultural references that she wears the way she does her accessories: according to whatever is in fashion, with a real talent for resembling any other girl on the street.
She keeps up her personality like her bikini line, because she knows she has to pull out all the stops to get a guy to fall for her. With the ultimate goal being: become someone’s wife.
Ouch. I read that and felt uncomfortably seen; this is more or less the girl I was encouraged to be by the middle-class suburban milieu that produced me. When we first meet Séverine, she is complaining that she can’t believe a guy would fuck her and not call her again; she likes to repeat that she , according to which a man has “used” a woman he’s slept with and not called afterward, as if the woman had no agency in what transpired. I spent my teens and early twenties trying so hard to be pretty, bland, and pleasing to men. I played the dating game as if the men had all the power and I had none. Even as I went through my feminist awakening and began to actively fight the vision of femininity instilled in me, I worried that unconsciously, I was still that girl, the one whose instinct is always for pretty.
