King Kong Theory Read online

  Translated by Stephanie Benson

  For Karen Bach, Raffaela Anderson, and Coralie Trinh Thi

  I AM WRITING AS AN UGLY ONE FOR THE UGLY ONES: THE OLD hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuck- ables, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls who don't get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick. I'm making no excuses for myself. I'm not complaining. I would never swap places, because it seems to me that being Virginie Despentes is a more interesting business than anything else going on out there.

  I think it's wonderful that there are also women who love to seduce, who know how to seduce, others who know how to get a husband, women whose perfume is sex and others who smell of home-baked cakes for the children's tea. Wonderful that there are very gentle women, women completely at home in their femininity, young, exqui site women, flirtatious women, radiant women. I am delighted, really, for all those women who are happy with the way things are. I'm saying this without the slightest irony. It's just that I am not one of them. Of course I wouldn't write what I write if I were beautiful, so beautiful that I turned the head of every man I met. It's as a member of the lower working class of womanhood that I speak, that I spoke yesterday and am speaking again today. When I was on unemployment I was not ashamed of being a social outcast. Just furious. It's the same thing for being a woman: I am not remotely ashamed of not being a hot sexy number but I am livid that-as a girl who doesn't attract men-I am constantly made to feel as if I shouldn't even be around. We have always existed. We are just never featured in novels written by men, who only create women they want to have sex with. We have always existed, and never spoken. Even today, when women publish lots of novels, you rarely get female characters that are unattractive or plain, unsuited to loving men or to being loved by them. On the contrary, contemporary heroines adore men, meet them easily, sleep with them after just a couple of chapters, come infourlines, andthey all enjoy sex. The character of the loser in the femininity stakes doesn't just appeal to me, she's essential to me, in the same way as the social, economic, or political loser is. I prefer the guys who don't make the cut for the simple reason that I myself often don't make it. And because generally speaking, humor and invention are to be found on our side. When you don't have what it takes to think highly of yourself, you tend to be more creative. As a girl, I am more King Kong than Kate Moss. I'm the kind of girl you don't get married to, the kind you don't have babies with. I am writing as a woman who is always too much of everything-too aggressive, too noisy, too fat, too rough, too hairy, always too masculine, I am told. And yet it's my virile, masculine qualities that make me more than just any old social misfit. I owe to my very masculinity everything I like about my life, everything that has saved me. I am writing therefore as a woman incapable of attracting male attention, satisfying male desire, or being satisfied with a place in the shade. It's from here that I write, as an unattractive but ambitious woman, drawn to money I make myself, drawn to power, the power to do and to say no, drawn to the city rather than the home, excited by experience and not content with just hearing about it from others. I'm not into giving a hard-on to men that don't make me dream. It has never seemed obvious tome that good-lookers are having all that great a time. I have always felt ugly. I put up with it and now I'm starting to appreciate it for having saved me from a crap life in the company of nice, dull, small-town guys who would have taken me nowhere fast. I like myself as I am, more desiring than desirable.

  So I am writing from here, as one of the left-overs, one of those weirdos, the ones who shave their heads, those who don't know how to dress, those who worry that they stink, those who have rotten teeth, those who don't know how to go about things, are never given presents by men, those who will fuck anyone who'll have them, the fat tarts, the skinny sluts, those whose cunts are always dry, those who have big bellies, those who would rather be men, those who behave as if they were men, those who think they're porn queens, who don't give a damn about guys but who are interested in their girlfriends, the ones with big asses and thick, dark body hair they don't wax, brutish, noisywomen, who destroy everythingthat gets in their way, those who don't like perfume shops, whose red lipstick is too red, who haven't got the figure to dress like hookers and yet desperately want to, women who want to wear men's clothes and a beard in the street, those who want to show it all, those whose shyness is due to their hang-ups, those who don't know how to say no, those who are locked up in order to be controlled, women who are scary, pitiful ones, women who don't turn men on, those with flabby skin and a face full of wrinkles, those who dream of plastic surgery, of liposuction, of having their nose broken so it can be reset but can't afford it, women who look like the back of a bus, those who can only rely on themselves for protection, who don't know how to comfort others, who couldn't care less about their kids, those who like to get drunk in bars and collapse on the floor, women who don't behave. And in the same vein, while I'm at it, I'm writing for men who don't want to protect, men who would like to be protective but don't know where to start, men who don't know how to fight, those who cry easily, those who aren't ambitious, competitive, well-hung or aggressive, men who are fearful, timid, vulnerable, men who prefer looking after their home to going out to work, men who are fragile, bald, too poor to be attractive, men who'd like to be fucked, men who don't want to be counted on, men who are scared to be alone at night. Because this ideal of the attractive but not whorish white woman, in a good marriage but not self-effacing, with a nice job but not so successful she outshines her man, slim but not neurotic over food, forever young without being disfigured by the surgeon's knife, a radiant mother not overwhelmed by diapers and homework, who manages her home beautifully without becoming a slave to housework, who knows a thing or two but less than a man, this happy white woman who is constantly shoved under our noses, this woman we are all supposed to work hard to resemble-never mind that she seems to be running herself ragged for not much reward-I for one have never met her, not anywhere. My hunch is that she doesn't exist.

  Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929

  FOR A WHILE NOW WE'VE BEEN REPEATEDLY TOLD ABOUT ALL the mistakes made in the i97os: how we took a wrong turn, and look at the mess we made with our sexual revolution, and do we think we're men or what, and what's happened to good old masculinity with all this shit the sort of masculinity Dad and Granddad had-men who knew how to die in a war and run a household with healthy discipline, with the law backing them up. We get an earful because men are afraid. As if it was our fault. It's astonishing, and modern to say the least-the oppressor whining because the oppressed isn't pulling her weight ... But is the white man really having a go at women here, or is he not just expressing his shock at the general downturn facing him? Whatever. The way we're being criticized, policed, and generally called to account is unbelievable! One minute we're playing too much the victim, the next we don't fuck right-too bitchy or too much in love-either way, we're not in tune-too pornographic or not sensual enough ... One thing is for sure: the sexual revolution was wasted on us; do not cast your pearls before swine. Whatever we do, someone is going to take the time to say it's shit. More or less that things were better before. Oh yeah?

  I was born in 69. I went to a co-ed school. Right from nursery school I knew that girls were just as clever as boys. I wore short skirts without anyone in my family worryi
ng about what the neighbors would say. I started taking the pill at fourteen, without any hassle. I had sex as soon as I could, and I really enjoyed it at the time, though twenty years later all I have to say about that whole era is "too cool for my own good." I left home at seventeen and had the right to live on my own without anyone making a fuss. I had always known I would work, that I didn't have to put up with a man just because he was paying the rent. I opened a bank account in my own name with no awareness of belonging to the first generation of women able to do this in France without the counter- signature of a father or a husband. I started masturbating quite late, but I already knew the word, having read it in books that were very explicit on the subject. Touching myself didn't make me some kind of antisocial monster, and what I did with my pussy was my own business. I slept with hundreds of men without ever getting pregnant, and anyway I knew where to get an abortion without anyone's permission and without putting my life at risk. I became a prostitute and walked the streets in low-cut tops and high-heeled shoes owing no one an explanation, and I kept and spent every penny I earned. I hitchhiked, I was raped, I hitchhiked again. I wrote a first novel and published it under my own, clearly female first name, not imagining for a second that when it came out I'd be continually lectured to about all the boundaries that should never be crossed. Women my age are the first to be able to live a celibate life without having to become a nun. Forced marriage has become shocking. Marital duty is no longer taken for granted. Foryears I was far from being a feminist, not out of a lack of solidarity or awareness, but because for a long time the fact of being a woman had barely constrained me. I wanted to live like a man, so I lived like a man. The feminist revolution had definitely happened. It's time to stop telling us that we were more fulfilled before. Whole territories have been brutally made available, horizons unfurled, and it's as if they had always been that way.

  Okay, so today's world is a long way from the Promised Land for all of us. Neither women nor men are happy here. And this has nothing to do with the respect of gender traditions. Women going back to the kitchen, putting on aprons and producing kids every time they fuck would have no impact at all on the failures of work, free enterprise, Christianity, or environmental sustainability.

  The women I know earn less money than men, hold less senior posts, and are used to not being acknowl edged. There is a slave's pride in having to struggle through life shackled, as if it were in some way useful, pleasant, or sexy, the servile delight in being used as a stepping stone. We are embarrassed by our strength. Constantly policed, by men who are still poking their noses in our business and pointing out what is good and bad for us, and especially by other women, through the family, women's magazines, and the prevailing public discourse. A woman's power must be played down, never celebrated: "competent" still means "masculine."

  In 1927 the early twentieth-century psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote Womanliness as a Masquerade. She explores the case of an "intermediate" woman-heterosexual but masculine-who suffers from the fact that every time she speaks in public she is overcome by a terrible fear which completely unsettles her and results in an obsessive and humiliating need to attract male attention:

  "Analysis revealed that the explanation of her compulsive winking and simmering ... was as follows: it was an unconscious attempt to ward off the anxiety which would ensue on account of the anticipated reprisals the father figures would lavish on her intellectual performance. The public exhibition of her intellectual proficiency, in itself a success, signified an exhibition of herself in possession of the father's penis, having cas trated him. The display once over, she was seized by horrible dread of the retribution the father would then exact. Obviously it was a step toward propitiating the avenger in endeavoring to offer herself to him sexually."

  This analysis helps to understand the flood of "hookerchic" in contemporary popular culture. Whether walking around town, watching MTV or a talk show, or flicking through a women's magazine, you will be struck by the explosion of the outer-limits slut look-and very attractive it is too-cultivated by lots of young girls. It's a way of apologizing, of reassuring men. These kids in G-strings seem to be proclaiming, "Look what a hot girl I am, in spite of my independence, my culture, my intelligence, all I care about is pleasing you. I can do anything I want, but I choose to alienate myself through these efficient seduction strategies." We may feel astonished, at first, that these girls so enthusiastically adopt the attributes of woman-as-object, that members of this young generation mutilate and flaunt their bodies while buying into the notion of the "respectable woman," which is to say, distant from sex as lust. But in fact there is no contradiction. Women are sending men a reassuring message, "Don't be afraid of us." It's worthwhile wearing uncomfortable clothes, and shoes you can't walk in, worth having a nose job and your boobs inflated, worth starving yourself. Never before has society demanded as much proof of submission to an aesthetic ideal, or as much body modification, to achieve physical femininity. At the same time, never before has society allowed women so much physical and intellectual freedom. The overbranding of femininity is an apology for the loss of the masculine prerogative, a way of reassuring ourselves by reassuring them. "Let's be free, but not too free. We're happy to play the game, we are not after your male phallic power, we don't want to scare anyone." Women spontaneously put themselves down, hide what they have recently acquired, play the seductress, fit back into their role all the more blatantly since they know, deep down, that the whole thing has become a sham. Access to traditional male power brings with it fear of reprisal. Since time immemorial, leaving the cage has been brutally punished.

  It is not so much the notion of our own inferiority that we have internalized-however ferocious the attempted control-everyday life has shown us that men are by nature neither superior to nor even that different from women. What has seeped into our very bones is the idea that our independence is harmful. This message is passed on relentlessly by the media: just think how many articles have been written over the last twenty years, about women who terrify men or who remain single, as punishment for their ambition, or eccentricity. As if being widowed, abandoned, alone in time of war or suf fering from violence were recent inventions. We have always had to manage by ourselves. Pretending that men and women got on better before the i97os is a historical lie. We just saw less of each other.

  In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others. Giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which paid work is a condition of social survival but is guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight, and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, the internet, and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. It is essential that women feel like failures-that they be made to feel as if they've made the wrong choice. We are held responsible for a failure that is in fact collective and cross-gender. The weapons used against our gender are specific, but the method can be applied to men too. A good consumer is an insecure consumer.

  A striking, and depressingly revealing fact: the feminist revolution of the i97os did not create any substantial reorganization of childcare. Nor of the domestic space. Voluntary work, therefore female. Politically as well as economically we have not moved into the public domain, we have not taken it over. We have not created the babysitting or childcare facilities we need, nor have we created the industrialized systems for housework that would have emancipated us. We didn't invest in these economically profitable sectors, either to become rich or to serve our own communities. Why didn't anyone invent the equivalent of Ikea for childcare or Mac for housework? The public domain has re
mained masculine. We lack confidence in our right to take over politics-it's the least of our worries, given the physical and moral terror to which our gender is subject. As if others will take better care of our problems, and as if our specific concerns and preoccupations weren't that important. Wrong. While power clearly has just as corrupting and filthy an effect upon women as it does on men, it is undeniable that certain areas of concern are specifically feminine. Neglecting the political arena as we have done indicates our ambivalence concerning emancipation. It is true that to fight and succeed in politics one has to be prepared to sacrifice one's femininity, ready to pull punches, to triumph, to show one's power. One has to forget about being sweet, pleasant, and helpful; one has to give oneself permission to publicly dominate the other. One has to man age without the other's approval and to use one's power head-on, without simpering or apologizing, because opponents who congratulate you on beating them are few and far between.

  Motherhood has become the most glorified aspect of the female condition. In the West, it is also the area in which women's power has increased the most. The mother has long wielded total influence over her daughters; she now has it over her sons as well. We are told in every possible way that Mommy knows what's right for her child, as if she were automatically gifted with that stupendous natural ability. This is the domestic parallel to what is happening in public life. The increasingly watchful state knows better than us what we should be eating, drinking, smoking, ingesting; what is suitable for us to read, watch, understand; how we should travel, spend our money, and entertain ourselves. When President Sarkozy demands a police presence in schools or Segolene Royal instructs the army to patrol certain areas of major cities, they are not showing children a virile embodiment of the law but the extension of the mother's absolute power. She alone knows how to punish, to control, to keep children in a state of extended babyhood. A state that conceives of itself as an all-powerful mother is a fascistic state. In a dictatorship, citizens regress to infancy: they are swaddled, fed, and kept in the cradle by an omnipresent power that knows everything, can do anything and has utter sway over them, for their own good. Individuals are relieved of their autonomy, their freedom to make mistakes, or to get into danger. This is where our society is headed; perhaps because our era of greatness is already far behind us we are regressing toward models of collective organization that infantilize the individual. Traditionally, masculine values are those of experimentation, taking risks, breaking with the family home. And men would be foolish to delight in or feel protected by the fact that all manifestations of virility in women are now despised, fettered, and perceived as harmful. It's their autonomy just as much as ours that is questioned. In a free-market surveillance state, men are consumers like everyone else, and they should not have much more power than women.