KING KONG THEORY

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.