Review: 'King Kong theory' by Virginie Despentes

Title: King kong theory

Writer: Virginie Despentes

Publisher: Feminist press

Pages: 143

IBSN-13: 978-1558616578

Price: 15,99€ (Amazon)

Mark: 8/10

SYNOPSIS

With humor, rage, and confessional detail, Virginie Despentes—in her own words “more King Kong than Kate Moss”—delivers a highly charged account of women’s lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex and gender, and shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experiences of rape, prostitution, and working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she creates a new space for all those who can’t or won’t obey the rules.

PERSONAL ASSESSMENT

JUSTIFICATION

King Kong theory is a book that should be (and it is) in every list of feminist books, that’s why I decided to read it. Besides, I have read very good critics of Virginie Despentes, but what interested me the most it was her life, so when I see it in a stand of the book fair of Santander, with a 10% discount, I didn’t think twice and bought it and I read it, or devoured it.

PLOT:

The book is a collection of essays (one per chapter) sometimes ones are linked to other, with a common topic, about the society’s treatment against women. It talks about prostitution, rape and porn, mixing data and her opinion with her personal anecdotes (if we can call it by that name, because for me it has positive connotations), because she was raped, and she worked as a prostitute.

WRITING STYLE

This is probably the most attractive part of Virginie’s literature. She has a language crude, sarcastic, ordinary. She didn’t worry if a word is coarse or not so formal. Her writing style reflects her life, crazy, frenzied, politically incorrect. It is like a woman-Bukowski, although Despentes is far better than him, in the end, Bukowski was a bit machist.

GENERAL COMMENT

I declare myself a Virginie’s fan. Because of all I have said before. But there is a problem, and that’s why she didn’t get the 10. She has a very ambiguous position about the porn and the prostitution. And it has nothing to do with her being a prostitute. For me, the porn and prostitution are nothing but two machist instruments to enslave women and commercialize with her body and, against all of that Amarna Miller said, porn can’t be feminist. Both relations are unilateral, the woman is just an object in man’s hands. I agree with her when she says that porn watchers are not guilty that certain group of men cannot differentiate about porn and reality, but porn, with its violence, its turning of a woman into an object, represents the sexual education of a lot of kids, and of course is not our fault, but we are teaching boys that sexual relations must be thus.

Virgine has an ambiguous position because she gives some statements in favour and in the next paragraph she is giving statements against it.

I suppose that it is the magic of Virginie and her life, she is so intense that she does not follow any script. And that is wonderful.

-Saru