Virginie Despentes' King Kong Theory: Denouncing Female Submission

Extract

[...] the male sexual attribute presenting itself as the symbol of power in a patriarchal society that Virginie Despentes and most feminists aim to denounce. The author thus highlights a new paradox since women show themselves to be all the more seductive as they know that it is a 'simulacrum' (l. 10). The paragraph concludes with a very strong sentence: 'Since always, getting out of the cage has been accompanied by brutal sanctions' (l. 11). The metaphor 'getting out of the cage' to express the idea of freeing oneself from a yoke is very strong, it suggests that women have been put in cages like animals by men who exercised a form of domination over women. [...]

[...] Through a striking and incisive style, provocative, which cuts with the traditional idea of literature. Despentes denounces the diktats of beauty to which women are subjected. Her sociological analysis allows her to denounce with great acuity the domination of women by socially and medially constructed women. With this book, Virginie Despentes presents herself in a way as the figurehead of what is called the neo-feminism, often presented as more 'violent' than the traditional feminism carried by Simone de Beauvoir, for example. [...]

[...] In the book King Kong Theory, the author seeks to denounce the submission of women by men in a striking and incisive style. Reading project: how do sociological analysis and feminist argumentation intersect in this text? The excerpt given to us for study can be divided into two movements. In the first movement, which runs from line 1 to 11, the author explains how young women are divided between the idea of being beautiful and desirable while gaining in freedom. [...]

[...] Virginie Despentes then proposes her sociologically inspired interpretation of this phenomenon. According to her, women must in some way apologize for having taken a little power, while it is clear that this taking of power is entirely legitimate in her view. The author uses a polyptoton 'reassure themselves, by reassuring them' (l. to show the mirror reaction of men and women: women reassure themselves about their femininity, about their ability to be desired by not being too offensive and therefore not being too intimidating. [...]

[...] She contests the idea of a fundamental difference between men and women. The image of woman is socially constructed according to her, echoing the famous quote by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex : « one is not born a woman, one becomes one'. The author denounces the manipulation that women have been subjected to for a long time, she expresses this idea again with striking metaphors: 'the idea that our independence is harmful ( . ) ingrained in us to the bone' (l. [...]