Virginie Despentes

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’