Virginie Despentes, _King Kong Theory_, trans. Frank Wynne

I READ THIS last month, and am reading Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism this month, so I am thinking, my god, critical theoretical discourse has gotten a lot more entertaining to read these days--personal, slanging, taking no prisoners, marching through Georgia and scorching the landscape without explanation or apology.

King Kong Theory has actually been around for quite a while; it came out in French in 2006 and was first published in English in 2010. This English translation appeared relatively recently, in 2020. The book is not readily comparable to anything I can think of in American letters. It could imaginably occupy a space on a shelf within heckling distance of books by Camille Paglia, Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, and Maggie Nelson given its promiscuous blending of memoir, fiction, critical theory, and polemic. Despentes seems to give even less of a rat's ass what the tenure and promotion committee thinks than those writers do, however, and is even happier to give enlightened feminist consensus the middle finger than Paglia is. 

Opening sentence: "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 we accelerate from there.

Chapters are devoted to rape, sex work, pornography, with punk rock and authorship as unifying motifs. What does King Kong have to do with it? 

As women go, I'm more King Kong than Kate Moss [who had the Fay Wray/Jessica Lange role in the most recent film about the giant gorilla]. I'm the sort of woman you don't marry, you don't have kids with; I speak as a woman who is always too much of everything she is: too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish, so they tell me.

But she is both the exception and the rule--for is any woman actually like the woman Kate/Faye/Jessica represent, "sexy but not slutty, married but not meek, with a good job but not so successful she upstages her husband, slim but not hung up about food," and so on? "I suspect she doesn't exist," writes Despentes. King Kong Theory takes a gleeful stick to this particular piñata for 139 pages, and it is one adrenalized read.