King Kong Theory

By Virginie Despentes and Frank Wynne

Out of print in the U.S. for far too long, writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes’s autobiographical feminist manifesto is back—in an improved English translation—“blistering with anger, and so precisely phrased that it feels an injustice to summarize it” (Nadja Spiegelman, New York Review of Books).

I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh. And if I’m starting here it’s because I want to be crystal clear: I’m not here to make excuses, I’m not here to bitch. I wouldn’t swap places with anyone because being Virginie Despentes seems to me a more interesting gig than anything else out there.

Powerful, provocative, and personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of Baise-Moi and Vernon Subutex came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape and prostitution, and explodes common attitudes about sex and gender.

An autobiography, a call for revolt, a manifesto for a new punk feminism, King Kong Theory is Despentes’s most beloved and reviled work, and is here made available again in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374722869

Virginie Despentes

Virginie Despentes is a writer and filmmaker. She worked in an independent record store in the early ’90s, was a sex worker, and published her first novel, Baise Moi, when she was twenty-three. She adapted the novel for the screen in 2000, codirecting with the porn star Coralie Trinh Thi. Upon release, it became the first film to be banned in France in twenty-eight years. Despentes is the author of more than fifteen other works, including the Vernon Subutex Trilogy, Apocalypse Baby, Bye Bye Blondie, Pretty Things, and the essay collection King Kong Theory.

Book preview

BAD LIEUTENANTS

I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh. And if I’m starting here it’s because I want to be crystal clear: I’m not here to make excuses, I’m not here to bitch. I wouldn’t swap places with anyone because being Virginie Despentes seems to me a more interesting gig than anything else out there.

---

I think it’s amazing that there are also women out there who love to seduce, who know how to turn someone on, women determined to get hitched, women who smell of sex, and others who smell of cakes freshly baked for their kids’ after-school snacks. Awesome that there are women who are very gentle, others who are comfortable in their skin, young women, pretty women, women who are kittenish and radiant. Honestly, I’m really happy for all those women who’re resigned to the way the world works. I say this without a hint of irony. It just so happens that I’m not one of them. Obviously, I wouldn’t write what I write if I was beautiful, beautiful enough to turn the head of every man I met. It’s as a prole of the feminine underclass that I speak, that I spoke yesterday, that I carry on speaking today. When I was unemployed, I didn’t feel shame at being excluded, all I felt was rage. It’s the same when it comes to being a woman: I don’t feel remotely ashamed at not being some superhot babe. What I do feel, on the other hand, is fucking furious that as a woman that men don’t really find attractive, I’m constantly made to feel that I shouldn’t even exist. We have always existed. Even if there was no mention of us in novels written by men, who are only able to imagine women they want to fuck. We’ve always existed. We’ve never spoken up. Even now that women publish lots of novels, it’s rare to come across female characters who are physically unattractive or plain, incapable of loving men or of being loved by them. Quite the reverse, contemporary heroines love men, have no trouble meeting them, sleep with them within a couple of chapters, have a shattering orgasm in the space of four lines, and they all love sex. The figure of the loser in the femininity contest is not just one I find sympathetic—she is crucial to me. The same goes for social, economic, or political losers. I prefer people who don’t make the grade, for the simple reason that I don’t really make it either. And because, for the most part, we’ve got humor and creativity on our side. People who haven’t got what it takes to swagger around are often more creative. As women go, I’m more King Kong than Kate Moss. I’m the sort of woman you don’t marry, you don’t have kids with; I speak as a woman who is always too much of everything she is: too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish, so they tell me. But it’s precisely my masculine qualities that mean I’m more than just another social outcast. All the things that I love about my life, all the things that have saved me, I owe to my virility. And so I am writing this as a woman unable to attract men’s attention, to satisfy men’s desires, or to be satisfied with a place in the shadows. This, then, is the place from which I write, as a woman who’s not seductive, but is ambitious, drawn to the money I earn for myself, drawn to the power to act and to refuse, more attracted by the city than the home, eager for experiences, and incapable of settling for other people’s accounts of them. I don’t give a shit about giving hard-ons to guys who don’t do it for me. It’s never seemed particularly obvious to me that hot girls are having such a great time. I’ve always felt ugly, I’ve found it all the easier to deal with since it’s spared me from some shitty life putting up with nice guys who’d never have taken me beyond the blue horizon. I’m happy with myself as I am, more desiring than desirable. I write from here, from the warehouse of unsold women, the psychos, the skinheads, those who don’t know how to accessorize, those who are scared they stink, those with rotting teeth, those who have no clue, those that guys don’t make things easy for, those who’d fuck anyone who’s prepared to have them, the massive sluts, the scrawny skanks, the dried-up cunts, those with potbellies, those who wish they were men, those who think they are men, those who dream of being porn stars, those who don’t give a flying fuck about guys but have a thing for their girlfriends, those with fat asses, those who have dark bushy pubes and aren’t about to get a Brazilian, the women who are loud and pushy, those who smash everything in their path, those who hate perfume counters, who wear red lipstick that’s too red, those who’d die to dress like horny sluts but haven’t got the body, those who want to wear men’s clothes and beards in the street, those who want to let it all hang out, those who are prissy because they’re hung up, those who don’t know how to say no, those who are locked up so they can be controlled, those who inspire fear, those who are pathetic, those who don’t spark desire, those who are flabby, who have faces scarred with wrinkles, the ones who dream of having a face-lift, or liposuction, or having their nose broken so it can be reshaped but don’t have the money, those who are a hot mess, those who have only themselves to rely on for protection, those who don’t know how to be reassuring, those who don’t give a fuck about their kids, those who like to drink until they’re sprawled on the floor of a bar, those who don’t know how to behave; and, while I’m at it, I’m also writing for the guys who don’t want to be protectors, those who want to be but don’t know how, those who don’t know how to fight, those who cry easily, those who aren’t ambitious, or competitive, or well-hung, or aggressive, those who are timid, shy, vulnerable, those who’d rather look after the house than go out to work, those who are weak, bald, too poor to be appealing, those who long to be fucked, those who don’t want to be dependable, those who are scared on their own every night.

Because the archetypal white woman, sexy but not slutty, married but not meek, with a good job but not so successful she upstages her husband, slim but not hung up about food, eternally youthful without needing to be hacked at by plastic surgeons, fulfilled as a mother but not overburdened by diapers and homework, a talented hostess but not some retro housewife, intelligent but less intelligent than a man, this blissful white woman constantly being waved under our noses, this woman we’re supposed to strive to be like—though she seems to slog her guts out and gets squat in return—is someone I’ve never encountered, anywhere. I suspect she doesn’t exist.

Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

WHO’S TAKING IT UP THE ASS, YOU OR ME?

For some time now, in France, we’ve been getting shit about the 1970s. How we took the wrong turn, how we fucked things up with the sexual revolution, do we think we’re men or what, and with all our PC bullshit you have to wonder what the hell’s happened to the good old-fashioned masculinity of Dad and Granddad, who knew how to die on a battlefield and run a household with wholesome discipline. And with the law to back them up. We’re getting shit because men are scared. As though this is somehow our fault. It’s pretty amazing, and a very modern take, to say the least, for Dom to go bitching that the Sub isn’t pulling her weight … Is the white man really laying into women, or is he just trying to express his surprise at the downturn in his stock around the world? One way or the other, the way we’re being skewered, called to order, and controlled is beyond belief. One minute, we’re accused of constantly playing the victim, the next we’re told we’re fucking the wrong way, too slutty or too lovey-dovey, whatever we’re doing, we’re getting it wrong, too hard-core or not sensual enough … Obviously, this whole sexual revolution was just pearls before bimbos. Whatever we do, there’ll always be someone who’ll take the trouble

Reviews for King Kong Theory

[sublunarie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book makes me want to run outside and scream at the top of my lungs. It makes me want to tie men's shoelaces together and guffaw as I watch them fall over. It makes me want to put on a short skirt and flirt with men only to end up kissing their girlfriends. It makes me want to throw something while laughing maniacally. There are a few small instances where race is brought into the conversation, and it's not done well. At all. And the text didn't require race at those moments either, so to have dropped in a line or two, or in one case to show a very poor grasp of Audre Lorde's work, felt very disjointed and misguided. That is the reason this isn't five stars.

[lethalmauve · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"What women have endured is not only the history of men, but also their own specific oppression."A collection of 7 feminist essays indisputably thought-provoking and justifiably outraged, Despentes' King Kong Theory scrutinises and explores societal standards, rape, prostitution, pornography, and women's role in literature.In sharp, vulgar, and aggressive pitch and style, arguments about the advantages of not adhering to the expected amount of femininity deter the conventional roles expected of women. When a woman automatically fits the mould of what a woman should be, her life is stiflingly laid out for her. There are no other options and choices. Despentes further declares heterosexual marriages as implicit financial contracts. From there she establishes sex work as work. She makes a good assertion of how we brand women who do such work with negatively connotative words (e.g., prostitutes) yet we don't have a single word for men who seek and pay for these services. But I think her most shockingly persuasive extrapolation is how explicitly legalising sex work (with benefits like any other job since all jobs are "degrading, difficult, and demanding") will expose traditional heterosexual marriages for what it is. It will reveal how there's little to no difference between the two ("Because if the prostitution contract became part of everyday life, the marriage contract would be shown up more clearly for what it is: a market in which for a bargain price the woman agrees to carry out a certain number of chores—notably sexual—to ensure man's comfort", "Whether they are publicly sanctioned by the marriage ceremony or covertly negotiated in the sex industry, heterosexual relationships are socially and psychologically built on the premise that men have the right to women's work", and "Like housework and bringing up children, women's sexual services must be done for free"). And of course, the biting drop of the statement "plenty of men are never as affectionate as when they are with a whore."What's unerringly upsetting amongst these essays is Despentes' acerbic take on rape and rape culture. She criticises how men who rape euphemise the act itself (using phrases like "pushed her a little", "fucked up a bit", "she was 'too drunk'" or "else a nympho just pretending not to like it"). Men are not liable for their actions. Women are conditioned to be submissive and not to defend themselves. And for fear of being labelled as "damaged goods" with a large percentage of people (particularly cops) who don't immediately believe the victim, when it's a widespread issue, make them keep the terrible assault to themselves instead.There is no one way to process the aftermath of rape. We expect a template on how women should cope and react. But this differs from person to person. This reminds me of Isabelle Huppert's character in Verhoeven's Elle. Her nonchalant response after she shared about her rape while having dinner with friends in a fine dining restaurant reflect the sentiment and the reaction of everyone around her. There is also an intersection between this book and the film with regards to rape fantasy ("It's a powerful and precise cultural mechanism that predestines female sexuality to climax from its own powerlessness"). What's often arousing is often socially embarrassing: "Our sexual fantasies say a lot about us, in the same indirect way as dreams. They don't reveal anything about what we want to happen in real life."King Kong Theory also picks and tears male-directed films apart. Particularly the ones which use rape narratives. It seems the denouement in such films is a rape-revenge to wrap up the conflict. Yet women who have lived through rape think/do otherwise. Despentes states how this is what men would do if they are in women's bodies. Much like what we often see in pornography (the depiction of over-the-top sluttiness, their engagement in gang bang, et cetera). It is how men would like to behave if they're women ("When men create female characters, it is rarely an attempt to understand what the characters are experiencing and feeling as women. It tends instead to be a way of depicting male sensibility in a female body."). We also see the portrayal of women in literature through narrow male lenses and male gazes. There are a certain disconnect and misunderstanding of how women should behave (based on men) versus how women really behave.The manipulation of female sexuality also truncates the supposed growth of women as sexual beings. Since women are presumed to stay meek, servile, docile and perhaps hand over their lives to men, their sexual needs and desire remain disregarded; female masturbation is still a taboo ("Female masturbation continues to be contemptible and secondary.") One example written in this collection is the response of the publishers with male writer's works (e.g., Genet) versus Violette Leduc's. Both are sexually coarse but only Leduc's work was toned down. Amidst the trickle of movements encouraging women to explore their sexual pleasure and kinks, a lot of work still needs to be done. And Despentes perfectly laments the usual dismissal of women about masturbation: "What relationship can you have with yourself if you systematically hand your genitals over to someone else."Despentes' King Kong Theory is an inarguably essential collection of essays. It doesn't shy away from the issues it tackles and attacks. The personal experiences of the writer enmesh with these essays which give it a first-person advantage. However, this same quality may treat some of the areas it wades through reductively. But although the aggressiveness and crudity may turn away some readers, it is anguished at the valid perpetrators and ideas. I may never entirely agree with some of them (and I don't really like Camille Paglia which she mentions here a couple of times) but it is necessary to have the discourse. Feminism is always a movement in progress; it is continuously evolving.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought this was fantastic, the kind of thing that reminds me what I first loved about feminist writing – that sense of intelligent, articulate fury levelled on behalf of common sense against the hypocrisy and idiocy of social inequalities.Virginie Despentes identifies herself firmly as a keupone rather than a bonne meuf – these are slangy verlan terms for ‘punk’ v. ‘cool chick’ which well establish both her ideology and her idiomatic tone. One imagines her writing this in a cold rage, hammering away at her laptop in some garret apartment in Paris, Bikini Kill on the record player, eyelids at half-mast, cafetière to hand, rollie in her mouth, naked from the waist down and covered in pain-au-chocolat crumbs. Virginie Despentes is cooler than you or I will ever be.Her polemic opens with an excoriating litany of what she sees as the women devalued by society – the ugly, the uptight, the unfuckable, she goes on and on in this vein for several long, freewheeling paragraphs until your pulse is racing and you're positively cheering her on as the underdog to root for. As well as setting out her position, it also neatly pre-empts the kind of criticism this kind of writing normally attracts:Je trouve ça formidable qu'il y ait aussi des femmes qui aiment séduire, qui sachent séduire, d'autres se faire épouser, des qui sentent le sexe et d'autres le gâteau du goûter des enfants qui sortent de l'école. Formidable qu'il y en ait de très douces, d'autres épanouies dans leur féminité, qu'il y en ait de jeunes, très belles, d'autres coquettes et rayonnantes. Franchement, je suis bien contente pour toutes celles à qui les choses telles qu'elles sont conviennent. C'est dit sans le moindre ironie. Il se trouve simplement que je ne fais part de celles-là. Bien sûr que je n'écrirais pas ce que j'écris si j'étais belle, belle à changer l'attitude de tous les hommes que je croise.[I think it's great that there are also women who like being seductive, who know how to be seductive, and others who happily marry themselves off; some who give off an air of sex appeal and others who give off an air of kids' packed lunches. It's awesome that some are very sweet and others who glow with femininity; that some are young and gorgeous, others coquettish and radiant. I'm genuinely happy for all those women who find that the way things are suits them. I say that completely unironically. It just happens that I'm not one of them. Of course I wouldn't write what I write if I were beautiful – beautiful enough to change the attitude of all the men I came across.]Instead what interests her are the women she calls ‘femininity losers’ (la looseuse de la féminité), and what it says about society that the values associated with ‘femininity’ are what they are. Hint: nothing good.Many of those who disagree with Despentes seem to criticise her for being either unrepresentatively damaged (because she was raped as a teenager, and later worked as an occasional prostitute); or, on the contrary, for having had too privileged an experience to talk authoritatively about sex work or abuse (because she worked for herself, never had a pimp, and is a white person in the media). There is lots to disagree with her about, but all these lines of attack miss the point, since a key part of what she is arguing is that rape and sex work are in some sense central to women's experience, whereas an identity as victims with no agency is not (despite some prevailing narratives).Hence, the chapters on rape and prostitution are the most interesting, the most challenging, and, I think, the most divergent from mainstream feminist ideology. For instance, she quotes with approbation Camille Paglia's comments on rape (to the effect that being free to be raped is to be desired over the condition of being unfree and safe), and says that Paglia was, for Despentes, the first writer to demystify her own experience of rape and bring it out of the realm of ‘the unsayable, of something that must never happen under any circumstances’.Whereas the rest of the book furiously (and satisfyingly) targets male assumptions and male privileges, these sections are, if anything, rather generous to men. This is especially the case when she discusses prostitution, the attitudes around which are designed in part, she says, to ensure that male sexuality ‘remains criminalised, dangerous, antisocial and threatening. This is not true in itself, it's a social construct’.Rather, it is social attitudes in general, and those of ‘respectable women’ in particular, that attract her ire. How's this for a conversation-starter:Difficile de ne pas penser que ce que les femmes respectables ne disent pas, quand elles se préoccupent du sort des putes, c'est qu'au fond elles en craignent la concurrence. Si la prostituée exerce son commerce dans des conditions décentes, les mêmes que l'esthéticienne ou la psychiatre, si son activité est débarrassée de toutes les pressions légales qu'elle connaît actuellement, la position de femme mariée devient brusquement moins attrayante. Car si le contrat prostitutionnel se banalise, le contrat marital apparaît plus clairement comme ce qu'il est : un marché où la femme s'engage à effectuer un certain nombre de corvées assurant le confort de l'homme à des tarifs défiant toute concurrence. Notamment les tâches sexuelles.[It's hard not to feel that what respectable women aren't saying, when they're concerning themselves with what happens to whores, is that ultimately they fear the competition. If the prostitute practised her trade in decent conditions, like a beautician or a psychiatrist – if her activities were released from all the legal pressures they're currently under – then the position of the married woman would become suddenly less attractive. Because if the prostitute's contract becomes normalised, the marital contract can be seen more clearly for what it is: a transaction where women commit to carrying out a number of duties guaranteeing a man's comfort at unbeatable rates. Notably sexual tasks.]It hardly needs to be pointed out that this is an insanely cynical way to describe married women, many of whom would (like Hannah, when I nervously read this bit out to her) be pretty fucking pissed at the idea that they were simply exchanging an occasional shag for physical or financial protection. As should husbands. But ultimately the moral prohibitions against sex work are, for Despentes, simply another way of ensuring that women's activities are as unremunerative as possible.Comme le travail domestique, l'education des enfants, le service sexuel féminin doit être bénévole. L'argent, c'est l'indépendance.[Like housework, or raising children, female sexual services must be unpaid. Money would mean independence.]It's a very interesting way of framing it – ‘but why,’ as I scrawled in the margin here, ‘is sex seen as a “service” for women, and not for men?’ I'm not sure what Despentes would say to that; perhaps she would just give me a withering look and tell me to stop being so fucking naïve. (Not that Despentes thinks women have less interest in sex than men, far from it: she is cheerfully open about sleeping around, and in the chapter on porn and elsewhere, she defends women's right to an expansive, contradictory and freely-acted-on libido. However, she is also pragmatic about what she sees as culturally-conditioned differences in how men and women, on average, live out their sexual lives. Perhaps, in the end, it's not clear exactly where she stands.)A lot of what she says comes out of a specific cultural context, of course, which is often different from my own (‘90s UK’™). So some of her priorities may be different. I think this is particularly clear in her long diatribes against femininity which open and close the book, and which make more sense in France, I think, where attitudes around sex are more pragmatic than in the UK, but gender differences are much more actively enforced in a variety of small ways. (My wife's a news anchor, a field where it's always been understood that looking ‘good’ is part of the job to a much greater degree than male colleagues – but it was only in France where this was said directly and where her work was debriefed by bosses with reference to her outfit and appearance.)Despentes's conclusion, after considering the various aspects of her society throughout the book, boils down to a ‘simple proposition’ directed at the patriarchy: ‘you can all go fuck yourselves in the arse’. The simplicity of this appeals to me.As a guy, and interested in feminism, I come to books like this with certain biases and one of them (when I'm finished feeling suitably chastened) is the tendency to seek out alliances and points of connection, of which there are many in King Kong Théorie. Though she's great at analysing male behaviour, when she comes to attribute blame she does it according to social class, not sex. In the end, Despentes considers both men and women to be victims of a system that sees them as commodities – ‘men as free corpses for the state, and women as slaves for men’.Il ne s'agit pas d'opposer les petits avantages des femmes aux petits acquis des hommes, mais bien de tout foutre en l'air.[It's not about setting the few advantages of women against the few gains of men, but rather about knocking the whole fucking thing down.]As can be seen with current events, the French like a fight of this sort. And it's a project for which this smart, angry, colloquial book makes the ideal manifesto.

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Despentes' is scattered but incendiary, frank but illuminating, concise but wide ranging. Even though it is composed of what one might call short essays, the themes running through it are carried and executed with grit, vitality, and insight. It's tone isn't necessarily scholarly, but there are plenty of books like that, and the bibliography here would serve as a decent enough guide for a novice to feminist theory. Many might see the tone and structure of this book as a drawback, but that is also a benefit. For example, Despentes's reframing (through tone) of Camille Paglia's arguments about rape made them much more digestible. Perhaps because, unlike Paglia, Despentes' is a rape survivor herself. I think this book would serve as a good primer for guerrilla girls in training, aspiring radical queers, and other deviants with a bent for awareness. It's accessible, it's transgressive, it's a punch in the gut and a knife jab into the patriarchal smokescreen of systems of male power.

[tvgrl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

at first I didn't like it, then I loved it...mixed feelings, well worth reading though

[dragonflyy419 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My first thoughts on the King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes was wow … what a great book! It was written with an open in your face attitude. Despantes hits on a lot of important social issues and covers several controversial subjects including rape, prostitution, porn, and masturbation. She wrote about things that you don’t find in mainstream writings and this makes it a worthy piece of feminist literature. I would recommend anyone with an open mind to pick this book up and read it. As Despentes says in the opening line of her book …“I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones”Even if you don’t feel you are an “ugly one” I’d say this is worth a read.

[chlorine_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Un livre qui donne un grand coup de pied dans la fourmilière, et ça fait du bien ! Virginie Despentes explique par le menu comment le viol, la prostitution et la pornographie sont classiquement considérés par la société, et à quel point ces images sont dénuées de fondement et peuvent être néfastes pour les personnes concernées. Une bonne remise des pendules à l'heure, qui nous fait voir, entre beaucoup d'autres réflexions intéressantes, que la prostitution, quand elle est pratiquée dans des conditions raisonnables, n'est pas nécessairement une exploitation de la femme. Il ne manque que la prise en compte des hommes pour que ce livre soit pafait : la prostitution et le viol sont présentés comme des choses qui sont exclusivement féminines (ce qui n'invalide en rien les réflexions menées, mais fait que le livre manque l'occasion d'avoir plus d'envergure).