Virginie Despentes

People fuck up their lives. All you can do is go along with it. Or stop choosing friends from among the dysfunctional. It’s not the lost souls, the people no one cares about, who fuck themselves up. No, it’s people who are loved. It’s a way for them to say to those around them: you’re useless. Look, you can’t even help me. I always side with the nonaligned. What can you do for friends for whom you fear the worst? Nothing. All you can do is send messages saying let’s play ping-pong, let’s meet at a café. All we can do is think: I hope it will pass. And be there afterward. Praying that there will still be something left of the friend you had. And then let it go. Much love.

hatever 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.

hese days, we hear men bitching that women’s liberation is emasculating them. They yearn for a status quo ante, when their power was rooted in the oppression of women. They forget that the political advantages they enjoyed always came at a cost: women’s bodies belonged to men only inasmuch as men’s bodies belonged to the means of production in peacetime, and to the state in time of war. The expropriation of the female body coincided with the expropriation of the male body.

Men vehemently denounce social or racial injustices, but are tolerant and understanding when it comes to macho bigotry. Many of them feel obliged to explain that the feminist struggle is secondary, a hobby for the rich, that is neither significant nor urgent. You’d have to be a complete fuckwit, or deeply dishonest, to consider one form of oppression intolerable and another deeply poetic.

when the day comes that men are afraid of having their dicks hacked off with a box-cutter if they force themselves on a woman, they’ll learn pretty quickly to control their ‘manly’ urges, and understand the meaning of the word ‘no’

Honestly, I’m really happy for all those women who’re resigned to the way the world works.

uite 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

Obviously, I wouldn’t write what I write if I was beautiful, beautiful enough to turn the head of every man I meet

It’s the same when it comes to being a woman: I don’t feel remotely ashamed at not being some super-hot 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.

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