Virginie Despentes: ‘What is going on in men’s heads when women’s pleasure has become a problem?’

The wild child author of Baise-Moi and former sex worker has completed a trilogy, Vernon Subutex, which has secured her renown as a ‘rock’n’roll Zola’

In her living room in northern Paris, Virginie Despentes, a former punk and wild child of French literature, sits on her sofa with coffee in a Motörhead mug, rolling a cigarette and reflecting on the passing of time. “I’ve changed a lot as a person – the anger and anxiety isn’t the same,” she says.

It is almost 25 years since Despentes burst on to the French literary scene with her debut novel Baise-Moi, a rape revenge story that she began writing aged 23 while she was also occasionally a sex worker. In 2000, when she directed the film version, working with female pornography actors, it was banned in France for a time, and became a cult hit across Europe. Despentes, who took her pen name from the area in Lyon where she was a sex worker, was branded crude, outrageous and refreshing – the working-class daughter of postal workers from Nancy in north-eastern France became literature’s “voice of the marginalised”. Since then she has written 10 more books, won literary awards and redefined French feminism in her 2006 manifesto King Kong Theory, in which she detailed being raped at 17 while hitchhiking with a friend, when they were attacked and threatened with a rifle by three young men.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PUQYDQ