King Kong Theory

by Virginie Despentes, Frank Wynne (Translator)

Overview

‘I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the frigid, the unfucked and the unfuckables, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh, and for all those guys who don’t want to be protectors, for those who would like to be but don’t know how, for those who are not ambitious, competitive, or well-endowed. Because this ideal of the seductive white woman constantly being waved under our noses – well, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist.’

  Powerful, provocative and personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of Baise-moi came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape and prostitution, and explodes common attitudes towards sex and gender. King Kong Theory is a manifesto for a new punk feminism, reissued here in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374539290
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Virginie Despentes is a writer and filmmaker, and former maid, sex worker, and freelance rock journalist. She is the author of fifteen books, including Apocalypse Baby (2010), the Vernon Subutex trilogy (2013-2017) and the autobiographical essay King Kong Theory (2006), reissued in 2020 by Fitzcarraldo Editions in a new translation by Frank Wynne.

Frank Wynne has translated works by authors including Michel Houellebecq, Patrick Modiano, Virginie Despentes and Mathias Enard. His work has earned many awards, including the IMPAC Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán and the International Dublin Literary Award.

Editorial Reviews

2021-03-12
A collection of essays by the renowned, infamous French writer and filmmaker.

At her best, Despentes is vicious, iconoclastic, filthy-mouthed, and raw. She is all of those things in this out-of-print collection, first published in French in 2006. In a piece that describes the two years the author spent as a sex worker, she writes, “when we are told that prostitution is a ‘violent act against women,’ it is an attempt to make us forget that it is marriage that is a violent act against women, and all the general shit we have to put up with.” Elsewhere, she writes, “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.” Throughout, Despentes delivers deliciously nasty condemnations of misogyny, hypocrisy, all manner of sanctimonious nonsense. She draws from pop culture as well as sources as diverse as Simone de Beauvoir and Angela Davis to make her case, which is unapologetically enraged. Toward the end of the book, she does get occasionally sloppy, contradicting her own points and resting a little too easily on crowd pleasers: “What is difficult to deal with, even today, is being a woman,” she writes near the end. At times, the momentum of the rant overwhelms the logic of the argument. Still, there is unquestionable bliss to be found in the author’s looseness of style and no-bullshit approach. “In my case,” she writes, “prostitution was a crucial step in my reconstruction after I was raped. A compensation settlement in thousand-franc installments for what had been brutally taken from me. What I could sell of myself to each client was a part of me that had remained intact.” Despentes has always been one of a kind, and her willingness to break apart all kinds of received wisdom remains vital.

Brash, blunt, unashamed, and justifiably filled with rage.

Kirkus Reviews

‘I can think of almost no book I’ve enjoyed in recent years as much as King Kong Theory – in part for its content, in part for the ferocity of its style. In a world that continues to have difficulty contending with sex work, porn, class, and sexual violence without resorting to tired tropes, Virginie Despentes offers a fresh, necessary, inspiring path forward, just as she has been doing for decades now in a variety of media. This book is a classic, and I’m so grateful for it.’
— Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

‘I love King Kong Theory. It’s a fuck-you push-back against a blood-sucking patriarchal culture that keeps murdering and raping women till they get the idea (the survivors, ha) that they should be stupidly grateful to serve men, just lucky to even be allowed to play. This is liberatory galloping prose, inhale it now and if you’ve read it before read it again in this new jangling translation, ornery and alive like we need to be. This short fiery book is essential.’ 
— Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls

‘In the dire age of corporatized and sanitised feminism, King Kong Theory is the radical – and darkly funny – manifesto we need.’ 
— Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions

‘Despentes is often described as a “rock-and-roll” Balzac ... She also resembles, by turns, William Gibson, George Eliot and Michel Houellebecq, with a sunnier attitude.’ 
— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

‘Part-memoir, part-critical treatise on masculinity and power, with reference to rape, pornography, and prostitution, King Kong Theory is the kind of book you want to place in the hands of everyone you know. It is arresting from the very first lines; there’s something aggressively incantatory about it, a kind of battle-rap braggadocio.’ 
— Lauren Elkin, Harper’s

From the Publisher