Wolf's Storm

" King Kong Theory is essential reading!"—Dorothy Allison " King Kong Theory brings to mind Solanas's SCUM Manifesto , Muscio's CUNT , and Plath's The Bell Jar —feminist eloquence without restraint. You will love it."—Susie Bright "Finally someone has done it! The feminist movement needs King Kong Theory now more than ever. A must-read for every sex worker, tranny, punk, queer, john, academic, pornographer—and for all those people who dislike them too."—Annie Sprinkle 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. Virginie Despentes is the writer and co-director of Baise-Moi , the controversial rape-revenge novel that became the basis for a film by the same name. Born in Paris, she now lives in Barcelona. Out of print in the U.S. for far too long, writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes’s autobiographical feminist manifesto is back―in an improved English translation―“blistering with anger, and so precisely phrased that it feels an injustice to summarize it” (Nadja Spiegelman, New York Review of Books). I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh. And if I’m starting here it’s because I want to be crystal clear: I’m not here to make excuses, I’m not here to bitch. I wouldn’t swap places with anyone because being Virginie Despentes seems to me a more interesting gig than anything else out there. Powerful, provocative, and personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of Baise-Moi and Vernon Subutex came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape and prostitution, and explodes common attitudes about sex and gender. An autobiography, a call for revolt, a manifesto for a new punk feminism, King Kong Theory is Despentes’s most beloved and reviled work, and is here made available again in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne. Despentes, author of the controversial 1991 novel Baise-Moi, the feminist provocateur examines key questions of sexuality, male and female roles, and her own awakening to action. Having been raped at 17, and served as unwilling confidante to many women since Baise-Moi's publication, Despentes struggles with a society that taught her, as a woman, not to fight back against a man attempting to rape her "when that same society has taught me that this is a crime from which I will never recover." She also, thankfully, finds some measure of relief; three years after being attacked, she discovered feminist writer Camille Paglia, whose words first inflamed and then emancipated her. Elsewhere in this short book, Despentes discusses sex, pornography, and prostitution. That she spent several years as a prostitute isn't notable, Despentes says; what's notable is that she's willing to speak about it "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."--Publisher's website