KING KONG THEORY by Virginie Despentes

This book is one woman’s story and thoughts on how her life and her ideas on the Female Human Condition, has been shaped by her experiences of sex, rape, prostitution and working in the porn industry. As such, it is a personal story, not an academic treatise for feminist political debate. Although much may be lost in translation from French, reading it to me, felt like sitting down with a woman friend to just simply listen to her talk about her life, the universe and everything, including various side-tracks and tangents. Sometimes nodding along, sometimes frowning, but fully engaged from start to finish.

Virginia Despentes became moderately famous in Europe around 2000, with the release of her rape-revenge fantasy ‘girl-buddy’ film Baise-Moi based on her book of the same name.  It is classic French film noir in its dark-side themes around sexual violence, but also weaves in threads of the heart of female friendship, in its portrayal of the bonding between the two women.

Her book starts with a chapter titled A Gun For Every Girl, and speaking as a girl who grew up in the 70s and came-of-age in the late 80s, from a working-class French background. Virginia as a young woman took many things about women’s lives for granted as she says she grew up with the idea that girls were as clever as boys, and:

Gene Thieves – Misogyny in Sci-Fi

A warning post, in case anyone feminist-minded, is accidentally sucked in to reading this.

The sci-fi thriller ‘Gene Thieves’ by Maria Quinn is being hailed in book reviewer circles, including in the Lawyers Weekly.

I could not get past page 70-something after the surrogate mother is killed, because the woman-hating misogyny was so depressing.  A near-future world where women are still nothing but pornified fucktoys, air-headed bimbos and walking incubators. And of course, all the men are Heros – with a capital H – (especially the lawyers).

My only excuse for picking it up was the blurb synopsis sounded interesting.

Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (aka Daughters of the North)

After months of reading mostly B-grade pulp, it was a fantabulous change to challenging intellectual feminist literature in this novel, which had been sitting for a long time in my To-Be-Read Pile – and I would like to thank atheist woman for encouraging me to get around to reading it!