Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory: Feminist Theory for the Masses
Despentes’ now canonical collection of essays has made feminist theory accessible to a wide readership
Out of all the humanities fields, women’s, gender and sexuality studies may be the one which searches for renewal the most. Works written merely a decade ago may seem obsolete to people, as terms and attitudes towards gender and sexuality continue to change. Because of this, I came into Virginie Despentes’ much-cited 2006 book King Kong Theory with the expectation that it would be a work firmly anchored in its historical moment. And even though it is,— the frequent Paris Hilton and Nicolas Sarkozy references date it — many of the subjects Despentes covers are still constantly discussed by cultural critics. Unlike plenty of those critics, however, Despentes writes in a prose that is neither inaccessible to readers unfamiliar with feminism nor dumbed down for them. King Kong Theory often feels like a collage of conversations about the state of feminism during the start of the century. Despentes successfully guides her readers through sensitive issues in feminist studies like sexual assault, sex work, and pornography in the hopes of changing certain harmful discourses around them.
Despentes introduces her book by recounting her own experiences with rape and sexual assault. The idea that speaking about her experiences with them is a necessary step to bring awareness and get rid of them is one that many have echoed today, particularly within the somewhat controversial #MeToo movement. Then, while acknowledging that rape has caused significant trauma in her life, Despentes moves on to show other ways in which power and domination make their way into human sexuality. The discussion of her own experience with sex work dispels some misconceptions about it, such as the idea that criminalizing sex work discourages it and is beneficial to sex workers. In reality, the shunning of sex work affects sex workers by pushing them into unsafe working environments and hides the fact that sex work is, like many legal occupations, labor. Despentes could not have foreshadowed the relevancy of these discussions as the explosion of new technology (namely, online platforms that allow people to sell explicit content) is leading to similar reactionary measures against sex work. Lastly, the acknowledgment of pleasure as resistance is important. Sexuality involves pleasure, and pleasure involves liberation. Capitalism and heteropatriarchy therefore benefit from the censoring of any rhetoric of sexuality as pleasurable. Although sex positivity has considerably grown since King Kong Theory, one can’t help but nod along to the idea that imagining things otherwise by longing for pleasure can be indeed revolutionary. Despentes’ now canonical collection of essays is not without flaws (it is hard for any book to get everything right), but for opening up a new set of theories to a wide readership, it deserves much praise.
