![]() ![]() “Rape was no longer something to deny, something to be crushed by, but something to live with,” she writes. ![]() (She puts “sex work” in quotes, treating it as an American affectation.) She shares with Camille Paglia the view that, as Despentes puts it, rape is an “inevitable risk” for women who want to “go outside and move around freely.” This idea disgusted her at first, but it soon transformed into a source of solace. In the book, which was published in France in 2006, she describes her experience as a survivor of being gang raped when she was a teen-ager, and, later, her work as a prostitute-her preferred term. (That translation fell out of print a new one, by Frank Wynne, is out this month.) In an era of moral panic over thongs and online porn, Despentes was the rare voice to critique the confidence of so-called pro-sex feminism without lapsing into nostalgia for conventional married life. ![]() I first read Virginie Despentes about ten years ago, when an English translation of her book “ King Kong Theory,” a collection of essays on gender and sexuality, started making the rounds among my friends. Photograph by Isabella De Maddalena / LUZ / Redux Virginie Despentes has made of her life a long critical inquiry into gender and sexuality. ![]()
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