Virginie Despentes

I recently re-read Mars: Stories by Asja Bakić...which I greatly enjoyed (again) and heartily recommend. Mars was published by The Feminist Press at CUNY, and after the text of the book there were some ads for other books by that publisher. One of those books was Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes. It looked interesting, so I checked the Louisville Free Public Library, saw that they had an e-copy, and checked it out and downloaded it to my Kindle. 

Pretty early on, this paragraph caught my attention:

"By now, he knows her little mean-girl schemes. Whether she sleeps with him or not, a man is still her worst enemy. The first time she lands a guy, she’s as nice as a babysitter, all smiles between two blow jobs. Until the day she disappears. She pulls that move almost every time, to make them realize how attached they are. When she comes back, it turns serious, and the guys pay. Until the day it’s no longer enough for Claudine: the gifts, the attention, the acts of love. Then, the final phase, she declares that not only is she seeing someone else, but she fucking loves it. Feigning sincere distress, she lets slip, 'If you knew how hard he makes me come.'”

I was startled by the fact that this naked admission of the mean-spiritedness embodied by this female character had been written by a woman. I've been watching (in small increments) Eileen Atkins' performance of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" essay, and it struck me that the words from Despentes' novel seemed in line with what one of Woolf's angry men would say of women. 

I also had to admit that this kind of naked emotional brutality has appeared in many of the women I've been romantically involved with over the five decades of my life in which I was involved with that kind of relationship. (And yes, that is a tacit admission that I am no longer interested in that kind of relationship.) The one who convinced me to join the army so that we could be married sooner...and then broke up with me when I was in basic training. The older woman who invited me over to make love to her, and after we'd finished and were lying in bed, answered the phone and made a date which she had to get ready for immediately. The one who invited another woman over to the house when I was at work and fucked her in the bed we would share later that night. The one who told me she once felt sorry for me and my "retarded children." (And then took a bulletin board off of the wall and threw it at me.) The one who came to my house holding her old wedding dress and told me that she wanted to put it on and have me beat her until she bled on the dress. The one who told me that the weekend we had spent together was one of the best times of her life...and then cut off all communications with me.

And so on.

And then there are stories I've heard from friends about how they've been treated scurrilously by women. The woman who, after leaving the marriage, came back to the house when her husband was at work and took away every doorknob. The woman who...well, enough's enough, isn't it. No need to make this a chamber of horrors.

It's hard for me not to come to some really negative conclusions about women and what they want from their relationships. And the same might apply to men...in fact, I'm sure that it does. But I haven't had many romantic relationships with men, so I'll leave that part of the map for someone who knows what they're talking about.

Anyway...after her words sank in, I wanted to know something about this Virginie Despentes, so I went Googling. And found that in addition to writing, she had done some work on movies--mostly things based on her own novels:

I checked the usual suspect places, and the only one that had anything available for streaming was Kanopy...which had a documentary Virginie had directed: Mutantes - Punk Porn Feminism (2009). So I started watching that.

And it wasn't long before I had to pause for breath. Violence, exhibitionism, ugliness, elevation of the importance of sex as identity, exploitation of the female, objectification of the male (literally--there are a few glimpses of real penises in the movie, but there are many, many dildos). It was actually sickening. Hard to believe that a movie which features a plethora of scenes of naked breasts, buttocks, vaginas, cunnilingus, and other such things could be so lacking in eroticism, but watching this really made me think, "I never want to have sex again." Seriously. It was all just so desperate and mean-spirited and focused on self-gratification. It was all so ANGRY. I kept thinking I was going to just stop watching it, but I wanted to figure out why a woman who had written so honestly about sex and sexual identity in her novel would put out something like this...which seemed to me completely lacking in honesty. And, of course, I kept hoping that a corner would be turned.

I made it to the end, and I would heartily recommend that you spend the hour and a half required to view it in its entirety doing something more worthwhile...like sitting in a chair and staring at a blank wall. But if it's porn you're looking for, you can do a whole lot better than this, for sure. In other words: there was no turning of that corner.

Ironically, I went back to the novel with trepidations. I started thinking that the novel would turn the corner on the other end of the street: from honesty to anger. But I read on...and it didn't turn that corner. 

"Impossible for Pauline to understand why she did that, all that, with men. It’s like impoverishing yourself, a failure of self-preservation. Gaining nothing, in fact, other than a heap of bad memories that you lug around like a lost soul."

I went on YouTube and found an interview with Despentes. It was entitled "Virginie Despentes on Killing Rapists." Which is apparently central to her first novel, Baise-Moi. (Brief aside: I am definitely okay with killing rapists, so I didn't find this title shocking.) It was a thoughtful, interesting interview. It made me even more interested in Despentes. And I know it's ironic...and I understand that it might be inappropriate...but I have to say that I found Despentes very sexy. 

So yeah, I was ready to finish Pretty Things, and that's what I did in one big gulp. And? It was an excellent novel. It certainly contains anger...but it isn't ruled by anger. It certainly does expose the hypocrisy that many women embody...but it does the same for men. It is a novel in the truest sense of the word: it creates a world and then it examines its crevices.

And now? Well, I just downloaded Vernon Subutex 1: A Novel, and I am going to start reading it as soon as I get out of here. 

BTW...an interesting coincidence. One of the translators Despentes worked with was Siân Reynolds...who did the translations of all three of the Fernand Braudel Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century books I read way back when. 

It's a small 🌎 after all.