King Kong Theory

by Virginie Despentes

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:	9788860447005
Publisher:	Fandango Libri
Publication date:	06/05/2020
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	114
File size:	476 KB
Language:	Italian

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