King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes
The new Italian edition of King Kong Theory, published by Fandango Libri, with the new translation by Maurizia Balmelli, is much more faithful to the original than the previous one.
This 2006 essay, the first published by Virginie Despentes, is one of the greatest successes of queer and feminist theory in recent years, translated in sixteen countries, with over two hundred thousand copies sold in France alone.
About 14 years ago, a French friend gave me “King Kong Theory”, a small but very powerful book, which I never tire of rereading, and which has become for me a sort of survival manual for everyday sexism and a key to the nefarious episodes of violence and misogyny to which the national news has accustomed us on a daily basis.
The author is best known in Italy for the novel Baise moi (Fuck Me) and the film of the same name of which he is also co-director, whose fame is due more to the scandal it caused at the time and the subsequent censorship than to its founding origins.
The novel was a raw and merciless reflection on rape, on the condition of women and the difficulties of real emancipation from conventional roles that women and men experience in their own skin.
Analysis taken up in a more mature manner by Despentes in King Kong Theory which, having abandoned the structure of the novel, is a true political manifesto somewhere between autobiography and essay:
“I write on the side of the skanks, for the skanks, the old women, the truckers, the frigid, the badly fucked, the inscopable, the hysterical, the tarred, all those excluded from the great market of the beautiful woman.».
The story of how she became Virginie Despentes, “a free spirit, a kind of anarcho-feminist”, raped punk girl, occasional prostitute, porn director and writer, is a kind of parable in which the author demolishes all moralistic conventions on rape, prostitution and pornography on the one hand and on the “marriage contract”, motherhood and gender binarism on the other.
Starting from a feminist revolution of the 1970s that was never fully realised, as it ’did not give rise to any reorganisation regarding child custody“.” of domestic space”. nor did it ”occupy public space“, Despentes analyses the figure of the ”ideal white woman”the one who is constantly wielded under our noses, the one we should strive to resemble”. ”seductive but not slutty, well-to-do but not obliterated, working but not overachieving so as not to crush her man, thin but not a dieting maniac, staying young but not being disfigured by cosmetic surgeons, an accomplished mother but not totally absorbed by nappies and schoolwork, a good hostess but not a traditional housewife, cultured but less than a man“.
Recounting her experience of being raped as a young girl while hitchhiking, Despentes surgically analyses a mechanism that we are all familiar with: society blames the woman who has suffered that “infamy” and locks her up in her status as a victim, possibly silent and asexual, because “a woman who cared about her dignity would have preferred to be killed”, as we are taught by the various holy martyrs propagated to us by the industry. just as the various figures of martyred saints propagated to us by the industry teach us. Catholic cultural since childhood.
Once marked by the stigma of infamy, there is no choice for women but fear and self-denial: “you have to be traumatised by rape, there is a series of visible signs that you have to respect: fear
of men, the night, autonomy, disgust for sex and other amenities”.
“Post-rape, the only tolerated behaviour is to turn violence against oneself. Gaining twenty kilos, for example. Getting out of the sex market, since one has been wasted, shirking desire”... “Whore or wench, let them spontaneously get out of the married market”.
“There is a female predisposition to masochism” “pregnant and precise cultural device that predestines women to enjoy their own powerlessness, that is, the superiority of the other”.
And politics is also the ancestral, relentless enterprise that teaches women not to defend themselves” because “rape is a precise political programme: the skeleton of capitalism, it is the crude and direct representation of the exercise of power” .
Above all, women must escape the danger of male desire outside the sacred bond of marriage: “The male mystique must be constructed as something dangerous by nature, criminal, uncontrollable: man's desire is stronger than him, he cannot dominate it” .
The headlines have accustomed us well to the dramatisation of the uncontrollability of male desire, almost as if it were an alibi, in the increasingly frequent cases of aggression and feminicide that men carry out against women who claim their self-determination and escape his control: “love-crazy”, “jealousy drama” and so on.
And of course “the law of cops is the law of men”, as well recounted by Franca Rame in her “monologue on rape”. :
“Without realising it, I find myself in front of the police headquarters. Leaning against the wall of the building opposite, I stare at it for quite a while. I think about what I would have to face if I went in now... I hear their questions. I see their faces... their half-smiles... I think and think again... Then I make up my mind... I go home... I go home... I will report them tomorrow.“.
The status of frightened victim does not suit the punk girl Virginie who resumes hitchhiking and thus enters rightfully into the world of sluts because “since you didn't calm down afterwards, it means you must have liked it”.
In reality, she does not know how to deal with the trauma that haunts her (and will continue to haunt her for years to come) until she discovers Camille Paglia, “the most controversial of American feminists” who “proposed to think of rape as a risk to be taken, inherent in our condition as women. Paglia allowed us to imagine ourselves as warriors, no longer personally responsible for what they had sought, but ordinary victims of what one must expect to endure if one is a woman and wants to venture outside.”....” changed everything: it was no longer a matter of denial, nor of succumbing, it was a matter of living with it.
Despentes is dazzled by this vision that turns rape from a shame to be silenced to a political consciousness, a “founding trauma. Of what I am as a writer...” It is at the same time what disfigures and constitutes me”.
The transition from victim to warrior also takes place through her experience as an occasional prostitute: “prostitution was a crucial stage, in my case, of reconstruction after rape”. ”Again I found myself in a condition of ultra-femininity, but this time I derived a clear benefit from it”. Again, in her account, illuminating considerations emerge on a subject that is more topical than ever today: Why are sex workers so scary for women? Despentes gives a political interpretation: “Prostitutes constitute the only proletariat whose condition so disturbs the bourgeoisie. So much so that most women who have nothing to lose often take it for granted that prostitution should not be legalised”. Prostitution should in fact be practised in degrading environments and in conditions of extreme danger because “if the prostitute practised her trade in decent conditions” and with the legal protections of any other profession “the position of the married woman would suddenly become less attractive”.
It is important that the prostitute and the ’porn star“ remain for bourgeois women victims at the mercy of brutal male desire and never rise to the role of entrepreneurs of themselves. At most, those victims should be rescued, desexualised and brought back into civilised society, perhaps with a subordinate but ”dignified“ role. As needed, in short.
The women we hear preaching against the commodification of women, ”those who feel feminism is a secondary, luxury cause”... “are the allies of men, those of us who know best how to bend our backs and smile under domination”.”
Unfortunately, women are the worst jailers of their own kind: Through fashion, religion, women's magazines, and advertising, “the syndrome of the hostage who identifies with her jailer” is perpetrated.“”The Art of Servility. You can call it seduction and make it glamorous”.
Here are articles of the type look at home: how to avoid looking super scruffy” o Fashion at sixty: mistakes that get old, you are spoilt for choice. It is not even enough to avoid reading the everlasting idiotic women's magazines or to avoid generalist TV and Hollywood romantic comedies like the plague (not to mention that scourge of Sex & The City), we are never entirely safe from the rhetoric of the “winning woman”.
While “winning” women are both victims and executioners of themselves, perpetrating the dictatorship of beauty and submission to patriarchy, “what exactly does being a real man entail?”:” Showing aggression” ...” succeeding socially to pay for the best women”. “Being ashamed of one's delicacy (...) wearing clothes of dull colours, always wearing the same clumsy shoes, not playing with one's hair, not wearing too many rings, bracelets etc., not wearing make-up. Having to take the first step, always. (...) To fear one's homosexuality because a man must not be penetrated.”
The writer, often accused of misandry, thus expresses her solidarity with non-aligned men and calls for a collective and total change that overcomes the war between the sexes:
”Feminism is a collective adventure, for women, for men, and for others. A revolution, well on the march. It's not about pitting women's small gains against men's small gains, but rather about blowing it all out of the water. And with that, bye, girls, and better walk....” V.D.
