King Kong Theory

176 pages

English language

Published 2020 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

ISBN:
978-1-913097-34-9
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4 stars (2 reviews)

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 …

6 editions

French punches

4 stars

King Kong Theory straddles across genres, mixing autobiographic sketches, essay-like reflections, and what one could describe as 'lyrical tirades'. I found it a compelling and fast read, that exudes anger and frustration, but also, at some level, a love for life and pleasure. Sexual pleasure, but also writing pleasure, as it is hard not to visualise her banging away on her keyboard, to the sound of 1990s punk classics.

Despentes main themes are the patriarchal system in which we all live, and the ways this shapes and is shaped by rape, prostitution and the porn industry.

Her argument about rape comes from personal experience with the arguably most shocking and less common form of rape, at the hands of complete strangers while hitchhiking. Despentes is interested in pushing back against the shared sentiment that this is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a woman, and that it is …

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rated it

3 stars

Subjects

  • Sociology