BAD LIEUTENANTS
I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh. And if I’m starting here it’s because I want to be crystal clear: I’m not here to make excuses, I’m not here to bitch. I wouldn’t swap places with anyone because being Virginie Despentes seems to me a more interesting gig than anything else out there.
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I think it’s amazing that there are also women out there who love to seduce, who know how to turn someone on, women determined to get hitched, women who smell of sex, and others who smell of cakes freshly baked for their kids’ after-school snacks. Awesome that there are women who are very gentle, others who are comfortable in their skin, young women, pretty women, women who are kittenish and radiant. Honestly, I’m really happy for all those women who’re resigned to the way the world works. I say this without a hint of irony. It just so happens that I’m not one of them. Obviously, I wouldn’t write what I write if I was beautiful, beautiful enough to turn the head of every man I met. It’s as a prole of the feminine underclass that I speak, that I spoke yesterday, that I carry on speaking today. When I was unemployed, I didn’t feel shame at being excluded, all I felt was rage. It’s the same when it comes to being a woman: I don’t feel remotely ashamed at not being some superhot babe. What I do feel, on the other hand, is fucking furious that as a woman that men don’t really find attractive, I’m constantly made to feel that I shouldn’t even exist. We have always existed. Even if there was no mention of us in novels written by men, who are only able to imagine women they want to fuck. We’ve always existed. We’ve never spoken up. Even now that women publish lots of novels, it’s rare to come across female characters who are physically unattractive or plain, incapable of loving men or of being loved by them. Quite the reverse, contemporary heroines love men, have no trouble meeting them, sleep with them within a couple of chapters, have a shattering orgasm in the space of four lines, and they all love sex. The figure of the loser in the femininity contest is not just one I find sympathetic—she is crucial to me. The same goes for social, economic, or political losers. I prefer people who don’t make the grade, for the simple reason that I don’t really make it either. And because, for the most part, we’ve got humor and creativity on our side. People who haven’t got what it takes to swagger around are often more creative. As women go, I’m more King Kong than Kate Moss. I’m the sort of woman you don’t marry, you don’t have kids with; I speak as a woman who is always too much of everything she is: too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish, so they tell me. But it’s precisely my masculine qualities that mean I’m more than just another social outcast. All the things that I love about my life, all the things that have saved me, I owe to my virility. And so I am writing this as a woman unable to attract men’s attention, to satisfy men’s desires, or to be satisfied with a place in the shadows. This, then, is the place from which I write, as a woman who’s not seductive, but is ambitious, drawn to the money I earn for myself, drawn to the power to act and to refuse, more attracted by the city than the home, eager for experiences, and incapable of settling for other people’s accounts of them. I don’t give a shit about giving hard-ons to guys who don’t do it for me. It’s never seemed particularly obvious to me that hot girls are having such a great time. I’ve always felt ugly, I’ve found it all the easier to deal with since it’s spared me from some shitty life putting up with nice guys who’d never have taken me beyond the blue horizon. I’m happy with myself as I am, more desiring than desirable. I write from here, from the warehouse of unsold women, the psychos, the skinheads, those who don’t know how to accessorize, those who are scared they stink, those with rotting teeth, those who have no clue, those that guys don’t make things easy for, those who’d fuck anyone who’s prepared to have them, the massive sluts, the scrawny skanks, the dried-up cunts, those with potbellies, those who wish they were men, those who think they are men, those who dream of being porn stars, those who don’t give a flying fuck about guys but have a thing for their girlfriends, those with fat asses, those who have dark bushy pubes and aren’t about to get a Brazilian, the women who are loud and pushy, those who smash everything in their path, those who hate perfume counters, who wear red lipstick that’s too red, those who’d die to dress like horny sluts but haven’t got the body, those who want to wear men’s clothes and beards in the street, those who want to let it all hang out, those who are prissy because they’re hung up, those who don’t know how to say no, those who are locked up so they can be controlled, those who inspire fear, those who are pathetic, those who don’t spark desire, those who are flabby, who have faces scarred with wrinkles, the ones who dream of having a face-lift, or liposuction, or having their nose broken so it can be reshaped but don’t have the money, those who are a hot mess, those who have only themselves to rely on for protection, those who don’t know how to be reassuring, those who don’t give a fuck about their kids, those who like to drink until they’re sprawled on the floor of a bar, those who don’t know how to behave; and, while I’m at it, I’m also writing for the guys who don’t want to be protectors, those who want to be but don’t know how, those who don’t know how to fight, those who cry easily, those who aren’t ambitious, or competitive, or well-hung, or aggressive, those who are timid, shy, vulnerable, those who’d rather look after the house than go out to work, those who are weak, bald, too poor to be appealing, those who long to be fucked, those who don’t want to be dependable, those who are scared on their own every night.
Because the archetypal white woman, sexy but not slutty, married but not meek, with a good job but not so successful she upstages her husband, slim but not hung up about food, eternally youthful without needing to be hacked at by plastic surgeons, fulfilled as a mother but not overburdened by diapers and homework, a talented hostess but not some retro housewife, intelligent but less intelligent than a man, this blissful white woman constantly being waved under our noses, this woman we’re supposed to strive to be like—though she seems to slog her guts out and gets squat in return—is someone I’ve never encountered, anywhere. I suspect she doesn’t exist.
Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
WHO’S TAKING IT UP THE ASS, YOU OR ME?
For some time now, in France, we’ve been getting shit about the 1970s. How we took the wrong turn, how we fucked things up with the sexual revolution, do we think we’re men or what, and with all our PC bullshit you have to wonder what the hell’s happened to the good old-fashioned masculinity of Dad and Granddad, who knew how to die on a battlefield and run a household with wholesome discipline. And with the law to back them up. We’re getting shit because men are scared. As though this is somehow our fault. It’s pretty amazing, and a very modern take, to say the least, for Dom to go bitching that the Sub isn’t pulling her weight … Is the white man really laying into women, or is he just trying to express his surprise at the downturn in his stock around the world? One way or the other, the way we’re being skewered, called to order, and controlled is beyond belief. One minute, we’re accused of constantly playing the victim, the next we’re told we’re fucking the wrong way, too slutty or too lovey-dovey, whatever we’re doing, we’re getting it wrong, too hard-core or not sensual enough … Obviously, this whole sexual revolution was just pearls before bimbos. Whatever we do, there’ll always be someone who’ll take the trouble to tell us it’s crap. Essentially: things were better before. Oh, really?
I was born in ’69. I went to a co-ed school. From my first year in primary school I knew that girls and boys were no different in terms of intelligence. I wore short skirts and no one in my family worried about what the neighbors would think. I was on the pill at fourteen, and it was no big deal. I was fucking as soon as I got the chance, I really enjoyed it at the time, and twenty years later the only thing I can think to say is “bully for me.” I left home at seventeen and I had the right to live on my own, no one could criticize me for it. I always knew I’d work, that I’d never put up with some guy just so he’d pay the rent. I opened a bank account in my own name, completely unaware that I was part of the first generation of women to be able to do so without a father or a husband as guarantor. I was a late starter when it came to masturbation, though I knew the word, having read it in books that were completely clear on the subject: I wasn’t some antisocial monster because I played with myself, in fact what I did with my pussy was nobody’s business but mine. I slept with hundreds of guys without ever getting pregnant, in any case, I knew where to get an abortion without anyone’s permission and without risking my life. I became a whore, I strutted the streets in high-heeled shoes and low-cut tops, without having to account to anyone—every cent I earned I kept and I spent. I went hitchhiking, I was raped, I went hitchhiking again. I wrote a first novel, signed it with my own name, a girl’s name, without ever worrying that, when it was published, I’d have people reading me the riot act about the lines I shouldn’t cross. Women my age are the first to be able to live life without sex, without having to go straight to a nunnery. Forced marriage has become shocking. Conjugal rights are no longer a given. For years, I was a million miles from feminism, not out of a lack of solidarity or awareness, but because, for a long time, my gender didn’t really stop me from doing much of anything. Since I wanted a man’s life, I lived a man’s life. So the feminist revolution really did take place. People need to quit telling us that we were more fulfilled before. Horizons unfurled, vast territories were brutally opened up, as though it had always been this way.
Okay, so contemporary France is not exactly Arcadia for everyone. People aren’t happy here, not women, not men. But it has nothing to do with the traditional ideas of gender. We could all stay home in the kitchen in our aprons squeezing out a baby every time we fuck, but it would do nothing to change the crises of employment, neoliberalism, Christianity, or ecological balance.
The women I know all earn less than the men, they have more junior roles, they think it’s par for the course to be unappreciated when they achieve something. They have a drudge’s pride at having to succeed against the odds, as though it was expedient, enjoyable, or sexy. A servile pleasure at the thought of being used as a doormat. We women are embarrassed by our powers. Constantly policed by men who keep sticking their noses into our business, telling us what’s good for us and bad for us, but especially by other women, through the family, through women’s magazines and public discourse. We are expected to play down our power, a trait that is never prized in women: “competent” still means “masculine.”
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In 1929, Joan Riviere, an early-twentieth-century psychoanalyst, wrote “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” in which she discusses the case of an “intermediate type”—a heterosexual but masculine woman—who suffers from the fact that every time she expresses herself in public, she is overcome by a terrible dread that causes her to lose control and manifests itself as an obsessive, humiliating need to attract the attention of men.
Analysis then revealed that the explanation of her compulsive ogling and coquetting … was as follows: it was an unconscious attempt to ward off the anxiety which would ensue on account of the reprisals she anticipated from the father-figures after her intellectual performance. The exhibition in public of her intellectual proficiency, which was in itself carried through successfully, signified an exhibition of herself in possession of her father’s penis, having castrated him. The display once over, she was seized by horrible dread of the retribution the father would then exact. Obviously, it was a step towards propitiating the avenger to endeavour to offer herself to him sexually.
This analysis offers a key to the tsunami of “slut-chic” in pop culture right now. Anyone walking the streets, watching MTV or some prime-time piece of light entertainment, or leafing through a women’s magazine, will be struck by the rise of the slutty-bitch look—pretty hot as it goes—embraced by a lot of young women. In fact, it is a way of apologizing, of reassuring men: “See how sexy I am?” these girls in G-strings seem to proclaim. “For all my autonomy, my education, my intelligence, my only goal in life is to please you.” I could have a different life, but I’ve settled on alienation via the most effective seduction strategies.
At first glance, it might seem surprising that girls would enthusiastically embrace the traits of woman-as-object, mutilating their bodies and flaunting them outrageously, while at the same time the younger generation venerates “respectable woman,” which is a far cry from party sex. But the paradox is superficial. Women are sending men a message of reassurance: “Don’t be scared of us.” It makes it worth it to wear uncomfortable clothes and shoes you can barely walk in, to have your nose reshaped or your tits pumped up, to starve yourself half to death. No society has ever demanded such complete submission to aesthetic diktats, so many body modifications that purport to feminize the body. Yet at the same time, no society has ever offered women such physical and intellectual freedom of movement. The overmarketing of femininity seems like an apology to men for the loss of their prerogatives, a way of reassuring ourselves by reassuring them. “We want to be liberated, but not too much. We want to play the game, we don’t want the powers associated with the phallus, we don’t want to scare anyone.” Women instinctively put themselves down, conceal the freedoms they’ve only just acquired, play the role of the seductress, take up their former role all the more outrageously since—deep down—they know that these days it’s nothing more than a charade. Access to traditionally male powers is mingled with the fear of punishment. Since the dawn of time, stepping outside the cage has been met with brutal penalties.
It is not so much the notion of our own inferiority that we women have internalized—whatever the brutality of the instruments of control, day-to-day life has shown us that men, by nature, are neither inherently superior, nor particularly different from women. It is the idea that our independence is destructive that has penetrated to the marrow of our bones. And it’s relentlessly repeated in the media: in the past twenty years, how many articles have been published about women who frighten men, about women who find themselves alone, punished for their ambition or their individualism? As though being a widow, being abandoned, abused, or alone in time of war were a recent invention. We’ve always had to muddle through without help. To claim that men and women understood each other better before the 1970s is historical revisionism. We simply spent less time with each other.
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Similarly, motherhood has become the quintessential female experience, prized above all else: giving life is awesome. Rarely has “pro-motherhood” propaganda been so blatant. It’s complete bullshit, the systematic modern use of the double bind: “Have kids, it’s amazing, you’ll feel more feminine and more fulfilled than ever before,” but do it in a society in utter collapse, in which having a salaried position is a precondition of social survival, but is not guaranteed to anyone, especially not women. Have kids in cities where housing is substandard, where schools have thrown in the towel, where children are subject to the most vicious mental abuse through advertising, TV, the internet, companies hawking junk food and soft drinks. No kids = no fulfillment as a woman, but bringing up kids in half-decent conditions is virtually impossible. One way or another, women must be made to feel like failures. Whatever women do, someone feels obliged to prove that we’ve gone about it the wrong way. There is no correct response, whatever choice we make is necessarily wrong, and we are blamed for a failure that is, in fact, collective and involves both men and women. The weapons used against our gender may be specific, but the method also applies to men. The only good consumer is an anxious consumer.
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A shocking and profoundly revealing fact: the feminist revolution of the seventies didn’t result in any restructuring of childcare arrangements. Nor in dealing with housework. Unpaid work = women’s work. We’re still stuck in the do-it-yourself era. Politically as much as economically, we haven’t occupied the public space, we haven’t taken it over. We haven’t set up the day care centers and the childcare facilities we need; we haven’t created the technological solutions for domestic housework that would emancipate us. We haven’t invested in these financially viable economic sectors either for profit or as a service to our communities. Why has no one come up with an equivalent of Ikea for childcare, an equivalent of Microsoft for housework? The public sphere has remained resolutely male. We worry that we lack the legitimacy to launch ourselves into the political sphere—that’s the least of our problems, given the physical and moral campaign of terror we face because of our gender. As though others are going to deal appropriately with our problems, as though our specific concerns are not terribly important. We are wrong. While it is patently obvious that power corrupts and degrades women just as it does men, it is unarguable that certain considerations are specifically feminine. Relinquishing the political sphere as we have is indicative of our misgivings about emancipation. Granted, to fight and win in politics means being prepared to sacrifice our femininity, because we have to be prepared to brawl, to conquer, to make a show of strength. It means we have to forget about being gentle, sweet, considerate, we have to allow ourselves to publicly dominate the other. To get by without approval, to wield power aggressively, with no simpering, no apologizing, because there aren’t many opponents prepared to congratulate you on thrashing them.
Motherhood has become the most venerated aspect of the female condition. In the West, it is also the sphere in which a woman’s power has increased. The complete power mothers have long wielded over their daughters is now also true of their sons. A mother knows what’s best for her child, we’re constantly told, as though she innately carried this astounding wisdom within her. It is a domestic echo of what is happening in society: the surveillance state knows better than we do what we should eat, drink, smoke, ingest, what’s appropriate for us to watch, to read, to understand, how we should travel, spend our money, entertain ourselves. When Nicolas Sarkozy calls for cops in schools, when Ségolène Royal calls for soldiers on the streets of certain neighborhoods, they’re not presenting children with some macho figure of law and order, but an extension of the mother’s absolute power. She alone knows how to discipline, to train, to take in hand these overgrown babies. A government that sets itself up as an all-powerful mother is a fascistic government. Citizens of a dictatorship revert to being babies: they are fed, changed, and kept in a crib by an ever-present power that knows everything, is capable of anything, and wields complete power over them for their own good. Individuals are stripped of their autonomy, of their right to make mistakes, to put themselves in harm’s way. This is where our society is headed, probably because our glory days are long behind us and we are regressing toward organization models that infantilize the individual. Traditionally, masculine values are those of discovery, of risk-taking, of cutting ties with the family. Men would be wrong to cheer or take comfort when they see any trace of masculinity in women scorned, shackled, and considered toxic. It’s their autonomy as much as ours that’s being called into question. In a capitalist surveillance society, man is just another consumer, and it is disadvantageous for him to have significantly greater powers than a woman.
The collective body functions in the same way as the individual body: if the system is overanxious, it spontaneously gives rise to self-destructive patterns. When the collective unconscious, through the media and the entertainment industry, glorifies motherhood, it is not out of a love for the feminine or a global sense of benevolence. To invest the mother with every virtue is to prepare the collective body for a return to fascism. Powers granted by a sick state are necessarily suspect.
Copyright © 2006 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle