King Kong Theory

by Virginie Despentes;Stephanie Benson

  We want to be respectable women. We suppress any fantasies that seem dirty, disturbing, or contemptible. We are perfect little girls, domestic goddesses, good mothers, created for the well-being of others rather than to probe our own depths. We are programmed to avoid contact with our own wildness. Above and beyond all we must be agreeable, and satisfy our male partner. Too bad for all the rest that must be silenced within. Our sexualities are dangerous for us-getting to know them might mean acting them out, and all sexual experimentation by a woman leads to her exclusion from the group.

  Until the i95os, female desire was completely ignored. The early rock concerts were the first time that women came together in great groups to declare, "We desire, we experience powerful, inexplicable urges, our clitorises are like cocks, they need release." The Beatles had to stop playing live because the howls of the female fans were drowning out the music. This was immediately despised as fan hysteria. No one wanted to hear what they'd come out to say-that they were on fire, full of desire. This major phenomenon was minimized. Men didn't want to hear about it. Desire is an exclusively male domain. It's extraordinary that one can despise a young girl screaming her desire when John Lennon strums his guitar, but find it amusing for an old guy to whistle at a teenager wearing a mini-skirt. There is on the one hand healthy desire-approved by society, encouraged, looked on with benevolence and understanding-and on the other a necessarily grotesque, monstrous, laughable appetite which must be suppressed.

  A well-known example of this belittling is the classic psychological explanation concerning nymphomaniac women-that they multiply sexual encounters because they can't experience sexual satisfaction. This spreads the notion that a woman sleeping with lots of people is obviously sexually frustrated. In fact, this theory might better apply to men, frustrated by the poverty of their sexuality and their orgasm. It is men who put the female body on a ridiculous pedestal and then, when they fail to derive the dreamed- of pleasure from it, sleep with more and more girls in the hope of one day experiencing some kind of "real" orgasm. Yet again, what is actually true for men has been deflected to stigmatize female sexuality.

  When Paris Hilton overstepped the bounds of morality by filming herself doing it doggy style, and then took advantage of the film being posted all over the internet to become an international phenomenon, her social class was more important to her identity than her gender. Witness an interesting scene on the set of a prime time TV show, when the young and hugely popular French comic Jamel Debouze tried to put Paris Hilton back in her place as a fallen woman, "I know you, I've seen you, I've seen you on the internet." He was talking on behalf of his gender, counting on his intrinsic superiority to put her in a vulnerable position. But Paris Hilton isn't your local porn actress-over and above being a woman whose pussy has been seen worldwide, she is the heiress of the Hilton hotels. For her, it is inconceivable that a man from a lower social class like Jamel Debouze should make her vulnerable, even for a moment. She doesn't blink, she barely looks at him. Not in the least bothered. And this has nothing to do with her particular personality. She is letting us all know that she can afford to fuck in public. She belongs to the historical class that has always had the right to create scandal, the right not to conform to the rules that govern the masses. Over and above being a woman, subject to the male gaze, she is a socialite queen, and as such able to deflect the judgement of the less privileged.

  This indicates that the only way of getting rid of the sacrificial ritual of porn would be to bring in high-society girls. When the censorship imposed by society's leaders is destroyed, what collapses is the moral order built on the exploitation of the masses. Family, warlike virility, modesty-all the traditional moral values are intended to keep the genders in their assigned role. Men as soldiers for the state, women as the slaves of men. In the end we are all enslaved, our sexualities confiscated, policed, and normalized. There is always a social class which has an interest in maintaining things as they are, and which does not tell the truth about its deeper motives.

  Man today represents the positive and the neutral-that is to say, the male and the human being-whereas woman is only the negative, the female. Whenever she behaves as a human being, she is declared to be identifying herself with the male. Her activities in sports, politics, and intellectual matters, her sexual desire for other women, are all interpreted as a "masculine protest"; the common refusal to take account of the values towards which she aims, or transcends herself, evidently leads to the conclusion that she is, as subject, making an inauthentic choice. The chief misunderstanding underlying this line of interpretation is that it is natural for the female human being to make herself a feminine woman: it is not enough to be a heterosexual, even a mother, to realize this ideal; the "true woman" is an artificial product that civilization makes, as formerly eunuchs were made. Her presumed "instincts" for coquetry, docility, are indoctrinated, as is phallic pride in man. Man, as a matter of fact, does not always accept his virile vocation; and woman has good reasons for accepting with even less docility the one assigned to her.

  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949 (translated by H. M. Parshley)

  PETER JACKSON'S 2005 VERSION OF KING KONG OPENS AT THE beginning of the twentieth century. As modern, industrial America is built, people start giving up the old social rituals, such as burlesque theatre and touring companies, and welcoming the new forms of entertainment and control that are cinema, and porn.

  King Kong tells the story of a lying, megalomaniac film director, a cinema man who loads a blonde woman onto a boat. She is the only woman on board. The place they are headed for is called Skull Island. It doesn't feature on the map because no one has ever come back from there alive. Primitive population, fetal creatures, little girls with tangled black hair, terrifying, toothless old women, all screaming in the torrential rain.

  The population kidnaps the blonde woman, as a sacrifice to King Kong. They tie her up and an old woman puts a necklace round her neck before handing her over to the enormous gorilla. The previous humans bedecked with this necklace have all been munched like appetizers. King Kong has neither cock, nor balls, nor boobs. The viewer is never able to ascribe a gender to it. It is neither male nor female. It is merely hairy and black. This thoughtful, herbivorous creature has a sense of humor and a taste for displaying strength. There is no erotic seduction scene between Kong and the blonde. Beauty and the beast tame and protect each other, and are sensual and loving with each other. But in an asexual manner.

  The island is crawling with creatures that are neither male nor female: monstrous caterpillars with slimy, penetrating tentacles, but moist and pink, like cunts, grubs that look like cocks that then open and become toothed vaginas to behead the crew. Others come closer to the iconography of gender, but within the domain of polymorphous sexuality: hairy spiders, and masses of identical grey brontosauruses, resembling a horde of clumsy spermatozoids.

  In this film, King Kong becomes a metaphor for sexuality before the separation of the genders politically imposed at the end of the nineteenth century. King Kong is beyond male and beyond female. It is hooked on the link between man and beast, adult and child, good and bad, primitive and civilized, black and white. It is hybrid, before the imposition of the binary. The island in the film becomes the potential for ultra-powerful, polymorphous sexuality. Just what cinema wishes to capture, display, distort, and in the end destroy.

  When the man comes to rescue her, the woman is reluctant to go. He wants to save her, to take her back to the city and to normalized heterosexuality. Beauty knows that she is safe with King Kong. But she also knows that she will have to leave its big, reassuring palm, go and live in the land of men and manage there alone. She decides to go with the man who has come to find her-rescue her from this safety-in order to return her to the city where she will once again be under constant threat. Slow motion close-up on the eyes of the blonde, as she realizes that she has been used. She was only bait to capture the animal. The animality. Her choice of hetero
sexuality, and life in the city, is the decision to betray her ally, her protector. With whom she shared a number of things. To sacrifice all that is wild and powerful within herself, the part of her that laughs and bangs its chest. That which reigns on the island. Something had to be offered as sacrifice.

  King Kong is put in chains and displayed in New York. It must terrify the crowds while remaining securely tethered, so that the masses can in turn be subdued, just as by pornography. We want to touch the bestial, to get up close and tremble, but we don't want any collateral damage. There will inevitably be damage, because the beast will escape from his handler, as in the show. These days it is not so much the utilization of sex and violence to other ends that presents a problem, but rather the fact that the ideas shown in the film cannot be recuperated: violence and sex cannot be tamed through representation.

  In the city, King Kong crushes everything in its path. The civilization being built at the beginning of the film is destroyed in no time at all. The force that was not tamed, respected, or left where it was, is too great for the city, which it crushes just by walking. With absolute calm. The beast looking for its blonde. In a scene that is more childlike than erotic: I will hold you in my hand and we'll skate around together, as in a waltz. You'll laugh like a child on a magical merry-go-round. There is no erotic seduction here. But a clearly sensual relationship, a playful one, where physical strength is not linked with domination. King Kong, or chaos before the gender split.

  Then the men in uniform, the world of politics, of the state, intervene to kill the beast. Scaling buildings, fighting with mosquito-like airplanes. Only the sheer number of them allows them to kill the beast. And to leave the blonde single and ready to marry the hero. The director, wide-eyed next to the animal's body, photographed as a trophy, says, "It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beautywho killedthe beast." Typical lyingfilm-director's speech. Beauty didn't choose to kill the beast. Beauty refused to take part in the show, she rushed to find King Kong as soon as she found out it had escaped, she had fun in its hand as they skated over the park's frozen lakes, she followed it into the mountains where it was assassinated. Only then did Beauty follow her hero. She wasn't able to stop the men either from bringing the beast back, or from killing it. She puts herself under the protection of the most desiring, the strongest, the best adapted. She is cut off from her own essential power. That's our modern world.

  When I arrived in Paris in 1993, my femininity was restricted to a few accessories for professional use. As soon as I stopped turning tricks, I was back in jeans, anorak, flat shoes, and minimal makeup. Punk rock is an attempt to destroy established codes, especially with regard to gender. Because even just physically, we avoid traditional notions of beauty. When I was hospitalized at the age of fifteen, the psychiatrist asked me why I had made myself so ugly. I thought he had nerve asking me that, since I thought I looked pretty damn cool with red spiky hair, black lips, white lace tights, and outsize army boots. He insisted, was I afraid of being pretty? He said that I had such lovely eyes. I didn't understand a thing he was talking about. Did he think he looked sexy, in that crappy suit with his few remaining strands of hair combed over his head? As punk rockers, we had to reinvent femininity because it went with hanging around in the street, begging for money, puking up beer, sniffing glue till you passed out, getting ripped off, pogoing, being able to hold your drink, taking up the guitar, shaving your head, coming home wasted every night, jumping around during concerts, yelling ultramale songs in speeding cars with the windows down, taking a proper interest in soccer, going on demos in balaclavas, looking for fights ... and everyone leaves you in peace. There are even lots of guys who love it, who will be your good friends and not try to change you. The whole point of punk is not doing what you're told to do. With the police it was the same as with the psychiatrist-in custody, a kindly policeman, I'm prettier than I realize, why do I live like this? I often get that one. Although I'm not even complaining in the first place. Being pretty: what would be the point of that, given that I'm not much good at it, and that my strategies to compensate work better than I could have dreamed? I was friendly to the boys, and they were friendly back, for the most part. In Lyon I cut my hair really short, and people called me "boy" in bakeries and shops. I didn't mind. There were occasional comments-"stop smoking your cigarette like a guy"-but for the most part, in the world apart of underground culture, I was left in peace. It must have been obvious that it suited me. Punk rock. My way. It didn't last forever.

  In 1993, Baise-Moi was published. The first review was in Polar magazine. A guy's review. A three-page indictment. It's not that the guy doesn't think the book is good, according to his criteria. In fact, he doesn't talk about the book at all. His problem is that I'm a girl, representing girls in this way. Without a moment's hesitation-he's a man, so of course he has the right to tell me what I can do, according to the laws of propriety as defined by him this stranger tells me, and tells me publicly, I shouldn't do this. He doesn't give a damn about the book. It's my gender that counts. He doesn't give a damn about who I am, where I come from, what is important to me, who will read me, or punk-rock culture. Granddad is on the case, scissors at the ready, he will sort me out, deal with this cocksure attitude, deal with girls like me. Quoting Truffaut, "Films should be made with pretty women doing pretty things" which at least gave me an idea for a title. To start with I found this reaction so ridiculous I laughed. But I soon changed my attitude, when I realized I was being besieged from all sides on this issue alone: you're a girl, a girl, a girl. My pussy seemed to get in the way of my mouth. At that point I hadn't had much to do with the adult world, much less mainstream adults, and I was surprised for a while at the sheer number of them telling me what should or should not be done by a girl about town.

  As soon as you become a public woman, all sorts of people are on your case, in a very particular way. But you mustn't complain. They don't like that. You have to respond with humor, distance, and take the punches with a good pair of well- attached balls. All those discussions to determine whether I had the right to say what I was saying. A woman. My gender. My body. In every article-and not in an unkind way. A male writer isn't described in the same way. Nobody feels obliged to write that Houellebecq is good-looking. If he were a woman whose books were admired by that many men, they would have written that he was handsome. Or not. But we would have known what they thought, in any case. Nine out of ten articles would have tried to get even with him and to explain, in detail, why this man was so unhappy on a sexual level. He would have been told that it was his fault, that he wasn't going about it the right way, that he had nothing to complain about. They would have taken the piss out of him, while they were at it, have you seen what he looks like? They would have been extraordinarily vicious to him, if as a woman he had said about sex and love with men what he has said as a man about sex and love with women. With the same talent, he wouldn't have received the same treatment. For a man, not loving women is an attitude. For a woman, not loving men is pathological. A not very seductive woman complaining that men are incapable of giving her a good orgasm? We would hear all about her body, and her personal life, her hang-ups and her problems, in the most sordid detail. It's no accident that after a certain age almost all women are, above all, concerned with not drawing too much attention to themselves. And don't try and make out that this is a question of personality or that the sort of person we are doesn't want to be provocative, or that women are happier at home, with the kids. Just take a look at what happens as soon as we say the slightest thing. Even the most way-out hip-hop guy doesn't get as badly treated as a woman. And yet, we know what whites think of blacks. There's nothing worse than being a woman judged by men. All the blows are allowed, starting with the ones under the belt. We are not even foreigners but we are constantly subtitled, because we don't know what we have to say. Or at least not as well as the dominant male, who has for centuries been writing books on the question of femininity and its implications.

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p; It was around this time that I discovered, to my amazement, that any idiot with a prick feels he has the right to speak in the name of all men, of virility, of warriors, lords and rulers, and therefore has the right to lecture me about femininity. No one gives a damn if the guy happens to be five foot six, fatter than he is tall, or to have never displayed any masculine qualities whatsoever. He is one of them. And I was one of the other sex. And it only seemed to be me who was freaked out at being systematically put back in my female line. I was only compared to other women. Marie Darrieussecq, Amelie Nothomb, Lorette Nobecourt, anyone, as long as we were about the same age. And more importantly, the same gender. As a woman I'm entitled to a double ration of amused condescension. Extra humiliation, and tellings off. Who I see. Where I go. What I spend. Where I live. Under surveillance. Of all kinds. A girl.

  And then came the film. Banned. But of course real censorship doesn't come from the courts. It's more like the advice you are given. And they make sure you hear it. So three porn actresses and an ex-hooker must be forbidden from shooting a film about rape. Even a lowbudget, genre film, even a parody. It's important. As if we were threatening state security. There would be no gang rape film where the victims didn't weep runny-nosed on the shoulders of men who would avenge them. None of that. With near-unanimous support from the press that famous right to say no. The three others and I were depicted as only in it for the money. Of course. No need to actually see the film, to know what you should think about it. If women get involved with sex, it must be to steal money from honest men. Sluts. Otherwise, we would obviously have made a film about wide open prairies with doggies cavorting on them, a film about women dedicated to seducing men. In fact, we wouldn't have made a film at all; we would have stayed in line. Sluts, of course. Karen's body on the front page. Typical. Sluts. Anyone has the right to use her belly to sell their newspapers since it was she who decided to show it off to start with. Sluts. And then a Minister of Culture, a woman, from the fashionable, subtle left wing, declares that an artist must take responsibility for his or her work. It's not the men who should feel responsible for ganging up in a threesome to rape one girl. Not the men who should feel responsible for using whores yet vote against laws that would allow them to work in decent conditions. Not society who should feel responsible for the fact that so many films depict women as victims of the most hideous violence. It's women who should feel responsible. For what happens to us, for refusing to die from it, for trying to deal with it. For speaking out. That same, worn-out old tunemaking us feel responsible for everything that happens. Some idiot woman, reviewing another book about rape in Elle magazine-a book completely unrelated to minefeels the need to emphasize the dignity of the writing, in contrast to my "wailing." I am too noisy a victim. This is important to point out in a women's magazine, as advice to the readers: OK, so rape is sad, but please don't wail, ladies. It's not dignified. Well, fuck you. In Paris Match another moronic woman used the same approach to tell Yves Montand's daughter that she would do better to keep quiet; another idiot underlines the classier reaction of Marilyn Monroe who knew how to be a good victim-soft, sexy, silent. Knowing how to keep her mouth shut, when she was made to parade through sordid sex parties on all fours. Women's advice to each other? The golden nugget: conceal your wounds, ladies, lest they upset the torturer. Be a dignified victim. That means one who knows how to keep quiet. Our speech so constantly confiscated. OK, we've got it, it's dangerous. Whose rest does it disturb?