King Kong Theory

With humor, rage, & confessional detail, Virginie Despentes—in her own words “more King Kong than Kate Moss”—delivers a highly charged account of women’s lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex & gender, & shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experiences of rape, prostitution, & working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she creates a new space for all those who can’t or won’t obey the rules.

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Powerful, provocative, & personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of Baise-Moi & Vernon Subutex came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about rape & prostitution, & explodes common attitudes about sex & gender.

An autobiography, a call for revolt, a manifesto for a new punk feminism, King Kong Theory is Despentes’s most beloved & reviled work, & is here made available again in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.

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Virginie Despentes is a writer & filmmaker. She worked in an independent record store in the early ’90s, was a sex worker, & published her first novel, Baise Moi, when she was twenty-three. She adapted the novel for the screen in 2000, codirecting with the porn star Coralie Trinh Thi. Upon release, it became the first film to be banned in France in twenty-eight years. Despentes is the author of more than fifteen other works, including the Vernon Subutex Trilogy, Apocalypse Baby, Bye Bye Blondie, Pretty Things, & the essay collection King Kong Theory.