Review: “Sorry Virginie, but I don’t really like Cher Connard”

I don’t know Virginie Despentes, but I know she is a good girl. For having browsed through the interviews of La Poudre, France Culture, France Inter and company, that’s always what emerges. He patiently answers journalists’ questions, even the laziest ones. Show true sisterhood, privately support those experiencing waves of cyber harassment, as Rebecca does with Zoé Katana in Dear asshole.

Besides, Virginie Despentes is an icon. One of the few feminists in her fifties who encourages new generations of feminists instead of judging them. You opened the way for them with the manifesto King Kong theory (2006). So who am I to come piss off the great Virginie Despentes?

A middle-class girl who grew up in the provinces, in the 90s, where feminism was in turmoil. It was a time when you read in high school The words by Jean-Paul Sartre o If the wheat doesn’t dieby André Gide, but never Memories of a neat girl by Simone de Beauvoir. I liked reading, it’s a good way to escape from a too violent society. And precisely I took this society in the face that asked me, at 14, to be thin, sexy and heterosexual. Keep silent before the patriarchal authority. I was going through what is commonly called a teenage crisis. Atmospheric eating disorders, escape, cooked à la Manzana. Flights. Among my thefts, the paperback edition of the novel The beautiful thingsby Despentes.

At one time, the name of Virginie Despentes made people shiver in the cottages

This is the story of twin sisters, Pauline and Claudine, who grew up under the watchful eye of a toxic father and who try to find a place for themselves in the music industry. There was something in this book that spoke to me. An adolescent anger at the injustice of this disgusting society that is imposed on us. The desire to eat the world and spit. And a vulnerability: these two boys, so violent towards themselves, they just needed love. At that time, only the name of Virginie Despentes made the cottages shiver.. Reading it was a bit dangerous. The adults around me were saying bad things about her, she was one of those horrible “badly fucked” feminists. And she hypothesized it, this image of a “dirty woman”. In 1998, facing Bernard Pivot in “Bouillon de culture”, she lights up:

“Yes, there is enormous anger. […] It’s a world of men and profit, so the role of women is basically to play whores. I’m inside. […] The role of women is to entertain. And then, maybe we’ll take power somewhere, we’ll see later. I want the power now. As a woman and as a person who was not born in the right neighborhoods. ”

The icing on the cake was in 2000 with the release of the film fuck me. Adapting her novel of the same name with Coralie Trinh Thi, Virginie Despentes agrees against her: feminists, right and left, consider her work too violent and pornographic. The censorship, the real one, falls on her. Twenty years later, Dear asshole leads to a procession of opposite reactions. From now on, everyone loves Virginie Despentes (except reactionaries).

Male characters too present

What happened ? From Vernon Subutex, his male characters take up more and more space. His novels use multiple perspectives, but you see him anyway. And then Virginie Despentes comes from the margin, but she no longer talks about the margin. After her already cult editorial “We get up and cheat” (written to celebrate Adèle Haenel’s gesture at César 2020), I was waiting for her next literary uppercut, witness to the fire that animated us. But it didn’t happen. Virginie Despentes did not get up and did not leave. And instead we had two years of Covid.

Dear asshole, which chronicles the unlikely friendship between a 40-year-old writer accused of sexual harassment and an actress in her 50s, sounds like an invitation to a great post-Me Too reconciliation between women and men. Actually, Oscar and Rebecca have tired me out. I felt like I surprised Frédéric Beigbeder and Monica Bellucci in the middle of a conversation. And neither of them particularly interests me.

The dear asshole is as drunk as whey

Nevertheless, Dear asshole drink like whey. Thanks to the writing of Virginie Despentes, incisive. Very incisive passages on femicides, addictions or cinema. It’s cool, but we spend too much time in Oscar’s head. The world needs to learn to empathize more with the dominated, not the dominators. I want to see grunge, queer, racialized characters take up all the space in Despentes’s books, not the same ones who already monopolize all of contemporary culture, white actresses and writers, for whom the party is over because they’re getting old and we need to quit coke there.

In any case, typing this hegemonic representation pays off. The unanimous praise is finally there to heal the wounds of the years she has taken so much, and that makes me happy for her. This power that she demanded when she was 30, she now has it. But isn’t this ongoing deification a trap set for him? I may be too young to understand the benefits of consent. But I imagined Virginie Despentes aging like Madonna: continuing to piss off the patriarchy and theinstitution how come. I’ve seen her come out of the box, not behave like a girl who has achieved feminist wisdom and doesn’t say a word the wrong way. This is what’s terrible about success and power: once you have it, you are so afraid of losing it. So, we get in line.

Front page view: Youtube screenshot – La Grande Librairie “Virginie Despentes faces her violence ”