“The love-hate relationship towards the body permeates all of modern civilization. The body is mocked and rejected as the lower and enslaved part of humanity and at the same time, it is an object of desire as something that is forbidden, reified, alienated,” asserted philosophers and sociologists Horkheimer and Adorno in 1947 in their reflection on “the dialectic of reason.” In an era of gratuitous violence and in a world where the omnipotence of the image reigns supreme, this ambivalence assumes the dimensions of an anthropological catastrophe, with the female body becoming the symptomatic carrier. If they splendidly illustrate the aforementioned quote, the two authors in question here, Olivier Bardolle and Virginie Despentes, approach the theme of the female body in a provocatively singular manner. The former employs a gentle tyranny, with suave images. The latter prefers violent denunciation and crude terms. With nuances that the divine Marquis would not deny, one revisits the philosophy in the boudoir to develop a version more suited to contemporary women. The other, as both a consenting and expiatory victim, endures all its enactments. Theory followed by practice, so to speak. Yet, both authors arrive at the same conclusion, meeting at the same point: vilified, betrayed, tortured but equally adored and sought after, this female body presents itself, speaks up, and arouses fervent desire as well as anxiety in those seeking to possess it.
To all those who spend more time on their scales or in front of their mirrors, who watch for any slight roundness or panic at the appearance of a few hundred grams, Olivier Bardolle dedicates his “Ode to Fat.” As a nostalgic connoisseur of voluptuous past beauties and other libidinous creatures of a bygone century, he expresses his clear penchant for the “erotic and sensual unctuous substance,” which makes “everything pass” and “smooths out the edges.” Fat, he asserts in women, “welcomes as much as it reassures.” But the species is disappearing. A “social imposture” threatens it, yet this has nothing to do with the old phantasmatic fear of a man seeing his virility dissolve in the folds and crevices of such an excess of flesh. The culprit? The “hyper-competitive market” on which female beauty operates, which the author compares to the career of an athlete, inevitably short. Under the dual mental and social injunction of aesthetic standards aimed at capturing the legendary male, a woman must maintain the image of the “pure and virgin” young girl for as long as possible, be engaged in modern active life, “be known” rather than be happy, and practice sex as a high-technical-value gymnastics. Without pleasure. A perfect hystericization of modernity, occasionally advised by a mother who gains maximum benefit by staying in the “youth circuit” of her offspring. This “hyper-young girl” with “perfect beauty” agrees to take all risks in order not to exceed the fateful size 36. And Olivier Bardolle lists the endless obligations she imposes on herself: “miserable existence,” “abominable physical constraints,” “psycho-affective anxieties.” “A chocolate éclair,” writes one of them, “is five minutes in the mouth but five years in the buttocks!” And even though French women are not yet like Americans—who apparently one out of two “panics when passing by a bakery”—the segregation of hip sizes created by women’s clothing brands and the obsessive dread of the “damned mirror” have invaded our plains and will soon strangle our companions! To all these women, the author indeed gives voice at the end of his reflection. “Screamingly truthful,” these anonymous confessions enter a debate that quickly takes on the appearance of revealing a public mental health issue.
These testimonies, as authentic as they are enlightening, however, do not carry the same weight as that delivered by Virginie Despentes, the author of “Fuck Me,” a book followed by the scandalous film of the same name that brought her out of anonymity. If “Ode to Fat” is primarily addressed to those terrified of leanness, “King Kong Theory” is written for the “ugly, frigid, and poorly f*cked.” One cannot be clearer. Contrary to these women who endeavor to weaken themselves to seduce, Virginie Despentes prefers to attack: “everything that saved me, I owe to my masculinity.” The social maltreatment of becoming a woman, the torture inflicted on flesh, the author knows it well. On the pill at 14, young Virginie is raped at 17. “Initiatory rape that makes the best whores,” she states in a phrase whose brutality is primarily aimed at denouncing the shortcomings of a social education that inhibits a woman’s defenses against the recurrence of male aggression. This kind of wound, it is known, never heals. Uselessly, for the author, to seek possible salvation and oblivion in work. For an extraordinary evil, an exceptional remedy. It will be “occasional prostitution.” The account of her two years, about fifty men met in total, offers us a psychological elaboration as subtle as it is personal. What was most “masculine in me,” the author explains further, once the “attire was donned,” became attributes of hyper-femininity. The very one that forces clients to respect and “makes men amiable.” In a passage with undeniable psychoanalytic filiation, she puts herself in the place of her clients: men readily imagine that “women love above all to seduce and disturb them.” Pure homosexual projection, she concludes because men reassure themselves about their virility when, on the contrary, women insist in front of them on the place given to feminine accessories. After attempts as numerous as they were unsuccessful to extract from herself a pain that men had “incorporated” into her by force, she finds in writing, the salvational therapy. The almost uninterrupted succession of publications since 1998 nevertheless reminds us of a wound that suppurates abundantly. And yet. The last scratch, perhaps, before personal redemption as a negative transfer announces the end of the analysis, the author assimilates publishing to a form of prostitution. Almost, her loyalty to Éditions Grasset would provoke suspicion.
Far from feminist reformism, free from the soothing and socially reassuring handling of the problem by male-dominated Politics, Virginie Despentes, like the heroine of King Kong, understands but too late that she was manipulated. She advocates a true revolution. Of mentalities. And masculine this time because, according to her, the resistances of virility have obfuscated, if not reduced to almost nothing, the advances of the feminist cause.
Olivier Bardolle, Eloge de la graisse, Editions Jean-Claude Gawsevitch, 2006, 192 p., 16.90 Euros.
Virginie Despentes, King Kong Théorie, Editions Grasset, 2006, 156 p., 13.90 Euros.
jlvannier@free.fr
