Some catastrophes have their own architecture

I'm fed up with sincerity. All I want is to be a complete asshole. To be negative about everything. To hate people. To feel contempt for them. To pretend they're to blame for all my problems. I'm reminded of something I heard at a meeting: "A relapse is something you construct." Some catastrophes have their own architecture.

Dear Dickhead, by Virginie Despentes, is a catastrophe: poor characterization and muddled philosophizing make for a boring novel that brings nothing new to #MeToo feminism. Also, everyone is a complete asshole.

An established, middle-aged author (Oscar), who is also a recovering alcoholic and party guy, is accused of past sexual transgressions by his young publicist (Zoe), who as a result of his behaviour felt compelled to leave her career in publishing and is now a social media influencer. For some obscure reason he takes up a correspondence with a childhood acquaintance, his older sister's best friend (Rebecca), who grew up to be a famous, drop-dead-gorgeous film star now facing ageism (but it doesn't really help that she's a junkie and a selfish bitch). 

As an epistolary novel, it's a complete failure. Featuring email exchanges between Oscar and Rebecca, and then missives (blog posts?) from Zoe, their voices are indistinguishable — they all embody a similar kind of anger, victimhood, entitlement, righteousness, moral ambiguity. A good character doesn't have to likeable; I appreciate a provocative stance, but they should show some distinct personality if they hope to leave a mark.  

Rebecca is rightfully skeptical of Oscar's past behaviour and current motivations.

I don't believe that every victim's word is sacrosanct. Obviously, women sometimes lie. Either because they have no principles or because they think it's fair game. But the number of pathological liars among victims is infinitesimal, whereas the percentage of rapists among the male population speaks volumes about the state of male heterosexuality. Yet I suspect you're far more shocked by the possibility of an unfounded accusation than you are by the fact that some of your friends are rapists. On this basis — how can I put this delicately? — even with a supersize dose of compassion, it's hard to feel sorry for you.

While there is a resolution of sorts of the main plot point, there is not much character growth to speak of, beyond Oscar's and Rebecca's progress in beating addiction, and an inkling of an awareness that the world is bigger than themselves — they still have a very long way to go. 

Heroin is to crack what great literature is to Twitter — a whole different story. I say that because it sounds good. Deep down, real junkies take drugs because they know they're worthless. Whether you're shooting dope or smoking crack, what you're really doing is reminding yourself that you're shit. When you become a junkie, you're saying to the world, you really think you're saying to the world, you really think you're better than me? You're deluded. Shooting up and fucking up is our way of telling other people how much we despise them. Their pathetic efforts to stand on their own two feet. I'd rather die than do yoga.

I don't understand the praise for this book. There are cuss words and sex and drugs — does this pass as transgressive? It bored me. I often couldn't tell who was speaking, to ascertain whose past (or gender, or profession) was formative in shaping the arguments put forth. Their logic was convoluted. Clearly Despentes has (more) things to say about sexism and feminism and #MeToo and ageism and the effects of Covid isolation and refugees in France, but these epistolary explosions don't merit the label of "novel" — a book of incendiary essays would've had bigger impact.

My generation of women are famous for our ability to put up with shit. We were told, "No feminism, it turns men off," and we said, "Don't worry, Daddy, I won't bother anyone with my little problems." But all around me, I saw women being broken. That it all happened in a dignified silence didn't help anyone.

Excerpt.

It had nothing to do with sex

Vernon Subutex, by Virginie Despentes, is a chaotic canvas of characters all falling into orbit around a new messiah. Convoluted as life itself.

"Don't worry, I don't want to be a burden, honestly, it doesn't bother me sleeping outdoors." They look at him as though he were insane. Normal. He would have done the same in their shoes. The real truth was that, physically, he could no longer bear to be enclosed by walls and ceilings, he found it difficult to breathe, every object was hostile, and he was plagued by a noxious vibration. The worst thing was having people around him. He could feel their misery, their pain, their fear of not being good enough, of being unmasked, being punished, wasting their lives: he felt it was like pollen, it insinuated its way into every orifice and made it impossible to breath. Which meant that no, he really, truly had absolutely no desire to move in with any of them. These days he needed space. Solitude. 

After Vernon's record shop shut down, it wasn't long before he ran out of money. He gives up his worldly possessions (or he stops caring about them), and starts relying on the kindness of strangers and old friends. He has charm, charisma, and good looks, and he spins a mean set of tunes. Overlaid with the aural experiments of a rock star friend recently deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances, the sound waves act like a drug on the masses.

The center of the room was filled with people — the silhouettes had converged and were moving, some slowly, others still entwined, or tracing circles around each other. And then she saw — not with the clarity of a hallucination brought on by acid or shrooms, but even so she saw, and could not claim it was a dream since the illusion lasted long enough for her to be entirely aware of it — light waves surrounding the bodies and she could perceive ribbons of energy, writhing and moving between people. She is a rational person. Unless on drugs, she did not expect to see colored streamers connecting people.

She doesn't like it when people read her cards, she doesn't believe in the supernatural, she's got no time for spells and curses. But here, in the darkness, she could see things that did not exist. And the most unsettling thing is that she did not deliberate, did not decide to get up — she simply found herself on her feet, hands in the air, an idiot smile plastered to her face. She was dancing. And although she was not touching anyone, not brushing up against another body, she recognized the feeling — she was orgasming. It had nothing to do with sex and yet this was the most incredible fuck she'd ever had in her life.

These are the ultimate raves, by invitation only, so the inner circle can control the vibe. The hangers on  include former musicians, a screenwriter, porn stars, a stock market trader, a rock critic, a tattoo artist, their wives and lovers, the homeless and the wealthy, Muslims and atheists. It's a panorama of Charlie Hebdo's Paris, where people are contradictions and sometimes even hypocrites.

Over three volumes clocking in at nearly 1,000 pages, this was an engrossing read. Despentes is often compared to bad boy Michel Houellebecq; maybe I'm inured to provocation on the grounds of that holy trifecta of sex, religion and politics, but I don't see it. Despentes's characters are messy and offbeat, but they feel real. I'm not sure if there needs to be a social commentary underlying this thick slab of life; it's simply exuberant.

I just read and kept reading, way past my bedtime.

The brain of a person with irrational goals has greater depth of field than one that functions normally, it's always several steps ahead, it anticipates everything. It's the same thing with alcohol. Even when Véro wants to stop drinking, she knows that her brain will manage to get her into situations that leave her no option, and generally this happens unbeknownst to her own free will — in other words, she does not decide to drink, she remembers she needs to call an old friend going through a hard time, and once she is at his place, she realizes that what she really comes for is a dozen shots of pastis. The brain is devious: it plays tricks on your consciousness, it does things on the sly, that way you get exactly what you wanted while pretending you were thinking about something else entirely.

While Vernon Subutex is no lyrical masterpiece (neither is War and Peace), it holds both beauty ("She is resilient and fragile, and there is something about the tension between these things that makes her overwhelming.") and truth ("You don't batter the mother of your kids because she did something wrong. You do it because you're violent.").

Check out Jennifer Croft's take on Volume 1 with a particular eye on the quality of the translation (Croft translates Olga Tokarczuk):

Part of what makes this book so exciting to read is Despentes's ability to broach so many topics, toggling between them in seamless, almost superhuman fashion. Deftly she tackles sex, materialism, the technologies that are hastening society’s collapse, capitalism, racism, gender fluidity, wounded masculinity, wounded femininity, domestic violence, homelessness, porn, the hypocrisy of the left, and the virulence of the right. Vernon Subutex 1 is about all these things, but it is also about Paris — the people living in the city today, and in particular, those who don’t change when society changes around them.

Excerpts
from Volume 1
from Volume 2 
from Volume 3 

He does not say what he is thinking. He is thinking that no one is solid. Nothing. No group. That it is the hardest thing to learn. That we are tenants of a situation, not landlords.

Everyone is like a bombed-out city

It is not difficult to fall in love. First her eyes staring at him last night, her youth and that faint impudence — nothing vulgar, just enough to pique his curiosity. Then there is the way she carries herself, the urge to stroke her back, to press his lips against her inner thighs; there is the tone of her voice, the mischievous gleam when she talks to him, something just a little rushed about her delivery — but not enough to get on his nerves. And that unconscious ease that comes of being so young — still oblivious to the blows that will destroy parts of her. Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed-out city. He falls in love when she bursts out laughing — desire mingled with a promise of happiness, a utopia of perfectly matched tranquilities — she only has to turn her face to his, to let him kiss her, and he will enter a different world. Vernon knows the difference: arousal is a pulsating in the groin, love is a weakening in the knees. A part of his soul falls away — and the floating sensation is both delicious and disquieting: if the other person refuses to catch the body tumbling toward it, the fall will be all the more painful, since he is no longer a young man. With age we suffer more and more, as though our emotional skin, more delicate, more fragile, can longer bear the slightest blow.

— from Vernon Subutex 1, by Virginie Despentes.

Fraught with humanity, with frailty, with despair

Meanwhile, I'd taken my courage in both hands, turned my first trick, at home, a chubby little guy, about sixty, who chain-smoked untipped cigarettes and talked a lot during sex. He seemed lonely, and I found him surprisingly sweet. I don't know whether I come across as gauche and gentle or seriously intimidating, or whether I was just lucky, but as time went by, it became clear: with me, clients tended to be warm, attentive, gentle. If memory serves, and I think it does, it was not their aggressiveness or their contempt I found difficult to deal with, nor any of the things they were into, but their loneliness, their sadness, their pallid skin, their wretched shyness, the flaws they couldn't conceal, the weaknesses they showed. Their age, their need to feel young flesh against their wizened bodies. Their paunches, their micro-dicks, their flabby arses, their yellow teeth. It was their vulnerability that complicated the whole thing. In the end, the johns you could hate or despise were the ones you could do while remaining completely indifferent. Maximum cash, minimum time, and afterwards never think about them again. But in my limited experience, most clients were fraught with humanity, with frailty, with despair. And it lingered afterwards, clinging to me like remorse.

— from King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes.

I have come to know this truth: there's a profound intimacy in sex founded in loneliness and pity. Too fat, too thin, or just plain ugly. It's a deeply vulnerable exposure. We all just want release from our bodies. Sex is a kindness, we can choose to be kind to one another. 

What do you know about yourself?

In a man, not liking women is a pose. In a woman, not liking men is a pathology.

Sounds a little like Atwood's, "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." This is Virginie Despentes. But her statement is not about how men and women behave, it's about how society perceives them. Imagine, Despentes prompts us, if a woman wrote about men the way Houellebecq writes about women.

This is not an easy book. King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes, is ferocious. Like any good manifesto, it sucks you into its worldview without giving you space to breathe or time to think. 

So I read along, yes, yes, yes! 

Little girls are bought up learning never to hurt men, and whenever a woman flouts that rule, she is quickly put back in her place. No-one wants to know that they are cowardly. No-one wants to feel that in their own flesh. I'm not angry with myself for not daring to kill one of them, I'm angry at a society that educated me without teaching me to wound a man if he tries to fuck me against my will, especially when this same society has drummed into me the idea that it is a crime I should never get over. And mostly I am fucking furious at the fact that, having been faced with three guys and a gun in the middle of a forest with nowhere to run, I still feel guilty that I didn't have the courage to defend us with a little knife.

This is the kind of feminist the world needs! Or is she? Though I was swept up in her diatribe, when I stepped back to unravel what I'd read I found myself not always wholeheartedly agreeing. For example, she defends prostitution for the agency it lets women claim over their bodies. To which I can only say, yyesss but that's nnnott exactly the whole story.

Despentes is angry. In this series of essays, she tackles rape, porn, and prostitution. Capitalism, the beauty industry, the marriage contract.

If we do not push on towards the unknown that is the gender revolution, we know exactly what we will be slipping back towards. An all-powerful state that infantilizes us, meddles in our every decision, for our own good — keeping us in a state of childhood, of ignorance, fearful of punishment, of exclusion. The special treatment so far reserved for women, using shame as the primary tool to enforce their isolation, their docility, their inability to act, could be extended to everyone. To understand the mechanics of how we, as women, have been made to feel inferior, and been trained to become a crack team that polices itself, is to understand the mechanics of control of the population as a whole. Capitalism is an equal-opportunities religion in the sense that it subjugates us all, and leads each of us to feel trapped, as all women are.

Several of her arguments are simply uncomfortable, not because I disagree with them but because I haven't formulated a stance on my own, and I'm not sure I always need to (my personal relationship with porn is near nonexistent and I don't feel compelled to change that). Despentes writes that "the true history of porn, what creates and defines it, is censorship." Clearly, society's relationship to porn is convoluted at best — to be expected of an industry that we demand reflect reality while embodying pure fantasy — and it's hard not to agree on the necessity to smash the stigmatization of porn. It's just hard to keep up with her — for example, in a paragraph on female nymphomania, she concludes that it's men "who rack up conquests in the hope of one day experiencing something approaching a real orgasm." Which, OK, yeah, but then she just moves on to Paris Hilton and how her social status trumps her gender. 

All this to say, this book is loaded with theories sprung from analyses on top of throwaway observations, and I wish some of them had a little more room.

Despentes puts a lot of responsibility on women, which doesn't seem fair, but that's the point. Who else is going to fix things?

I realize that what other women do or don't do with their clitoris is none of my business, but I'm still slightly troubled by their indifference to masturbation: if they don't get themselves off when they're alone, at what point do women connect with their own fantasies? How much do they know about what really turns them on? And if you don't know that, what do you know about yourself? What connection can you have with yourself if even your pussy is systematically controlled by someone else?

Excerpt. 
Author profile.
#fuckthepatriarchy

I write from here, from the warehouse of unsold women

It has begun. The second wave of the pandemic. I keep thinking of it as a sociological phenomenon rather than a biological one, like fifth-wave feminism. And it is. It's second-wave pandemicism — because I wasn't angry enough and lonely and scared enough and tired enough the first time. 

It's been 202 days of German lessons, and more than 6 months of working from home. The order I put in at Ikea early this past summer, the curtains to prettify and the task lighting to enlighten, should finally be delivered next week. 

But the last few days, weeks, have been hard. It's too cool to sit on the balcony in the morning, it's more effort to go for a walk. The rituals that helped summer pass are broken.

I dreamt my period came suddenly and my shirt-tails were soaked red, I put my hand between my legs but couldn't stanch the flow, there was so much blood.

I went for a Thai yoga massage because I needed my body stretched and steamrolled. I learned that I've forgotten how to relax. How difficult to be in the body and to let go. What I like so much about this style of massage is the trust exercise of it, the surrender. And it seems I'm unable, I'm so tightly wound, on alert, ever vigilant, and tired. And when he thumbed my right forearm near my elbow, I started to cry. “The body remembers,” he told me. (And I was remembering you, stroking my arm.)

That was Friday, the day Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. I feel sadness, and hopelessness, and defeated. We are Ruthless. 

Tonight I cut my hair and dyed it blonde. Haircuts (unlike massage) are nonessential. I would do it myself. All pandemic-long, I've wanted pandemic hair. A badge of honour. I would cut my hair in protest, in solidarity, as self-mutilation. It's gorgeous.

Some books arrived today, among them, King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes:

I write from here, from the warehouse of unsold women, the psychos, the skinheads, those who don't know how to accessorize, those who are scared they stink, those with rotting teeth, those who have no clue, those that guys don't make things easy for, those who'd fuck anyone who's prepared to have them, the massive sluts, the scrawny skanks, the dried-up cunts, those with pot bellies, those who wish they were men, those who think they are men, those who dream of being porn stars, those who don't give a flying fuck about guys but have a thing for their girlfriends, those with fat arses, those who have dark bushy pubes and aren't about to get a Brazilian, the women who are loud and pushy, those who smash everything in their path, those who hate perfume counters, who wear red lipstick that's too red, those who'd die to dress like horny sluts but haven't got the body, those who want to wear men's clothes and beards in the street, those who want to let it all hang out, those who are prissy because they're hung-up, those who don't know how to say no, those who are locked up so they can be controlled, those who inspire fear, those who are pathetic, those who don't spark desire, those who are flabby, who have faces scarred with wrinkles, the ones who dream of having a facelift, or liposuction, or having their nose broken so it can be reshaped but don't have the money, those who are a hot mess, those who have only themselves to rely on for protection, those who don't know how to be reassuring, those who don't give a fuck about their kids, those who like to drink until they're sprawled on the floor of a bar, those who don't know how to behave; and, while I'm at it, I'm also writing for the guys who don't want to be protectors, those who want to be but don't know how, those who don't know how to fight, those who cry easily, those who aren't ambitious, or competitive, or well-hung, or aggressive, those who are timid, shy, vulnerable, those who'd rather look after the house than go out to work, those who are weak, bald, too poor to be appealing, those who long to be fucked, those who don't want to be dependable, those who are scared on their own every night. 

Bring it on, second wave. We are already scarred against you.