The Daring Compassion of ‘Expensive Dickhead’

“In literature written by ladies, examples of insolence or hostility towards males are extraordinarily uncommon,” wrote the French novelist Virginie Despentes in a 2021 essay for Literary Hub. “At the same time as a member of that intercourse, I’m not allowed to be indignant about this. Colette, Duras, Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Sagan, a complete canon of feminine authors anxious to show their credentials, to reassure the lads, to apologize for writing by endlessly repeating how a lot they love, respect, and cherish males, and the way they haven’t any want—no matter they may write—to fuck them over.“

In 1993, Despentes, then 23, got down to redress that silence together with her best-selling debut novel, Baise-Moi, or “Fuck Me,” wherein the writer, the sufferer of a brutal gang rape as an adolescent, borrowed parts of her backstory for her heroes, Manu and Nadine, a rape sufferer and a intercourse employee, who embark on a scorched-earth joyride, robbing ATMs and killing johns apres l’amour within the identify of non-public freeedom. Baise-Moi was a shock to the system, a feminist novel about ladies who watch porn and ingest laborious medicine and booze at a prodigious clip. Consider Thelma & Louise crossed with Pure Born Killers (Despentes tailored Baise-Moi into a movie in 2000). Spare her the niceties of tasteful literary fiction; Despentes is a social observer as indecorous as she is eager, and he or she writes with out mercy.

Vernon Subutex, a later Despentes challenge, expanded her scope with out watering down her pitiless mission. It was a big ensemble piece, a sweeping trilogy that dissected 2010s Paris, which was riven by financial uncertainty and the far proper’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. The title character, a former record-store proprietor, is now a discarded anachronism who hops frantically from sofa to sofa and ultimately winds up on the road. Despentes provides no quarter to her titular hero, whose darkish wit and casually racist rants come on the reader in a mad rush of metaphors and aphorisms, Despentes’s gutter vernacular of the underclass.

After studying that Despentes’s new novel would cowl social media, #MeToo, and COVID, I used to be prepared for a full-throttle garroting of the digital world and its position in fueling misogyny and senseless hate. As an alternative, Expensive Dickhead, which was first revealed in France in 2022, is a extra nuanced and redemptive novel than followers would possibly anticipate from this poète maudit of the marginalized. Nestled inside her evisceration of the on-line manosphere is a plea for connection in a world turned the wrong way up. At a time when reflexive rage is the go-to mode throughout the ideological spectrum, Despentes has grabbed the mic to supply a sort of counterprotest to the social-media backlash. Expensive Dickhead harks again to the unique promise of the web as a binding agent reasonably than a mental-health scourge, suggesting {that a} truce within the gender wars is perhaps secured by sliding into each other’s DMs with a dose of empathy.

Most of Expensive Dickhead transpires through the world lockdown in 2020, when on a regular basis life was effaced and other people have been instantly obsessive about bathroom paper and singing “Pleased Birthday” whereas washing their arms. Among the many many who’ve gone on-line for photographs of dopamine is Oscar Jayack, a literary novelist and Despentes’s titular “dickhead.” The ebook, which consists fully of web communications, begins when Oscar tears into Rebecca Latté, a film star, in a social-media publish laced with the key phrases of the entitled sexist: “This chic girl … now a wrinkled toad. Not simply outdated. However fats, scruffy, with repulsive pores and skin …” Rebecca instantly rises to the bait: “You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap previous … Waah, waah, waah, I’m a pissy little pantywaist … so I whimper like a Chihuahua within the hope somebody will discover me.”

That is often the purpose at which the writer presses laborious on the gasoline, however what begins as a flame-fest shades by increments right into a confessional. After Oscar has been dressed down by Rebecca, we study that his nasty publish was a bid to get her consideration and gauge her curiosity in a movie challenge. Because it seems, Oscar isn’t a rank stranger; his sister Corinne is an outdated buddy of Rebecca’s, which stokes Rebecca’s ire: “Screw your apologies, screw your monologue … I don’t give a fuck about your collected literary works … I don’t give a shit about you. All my like to your sister, she was an exquisite buddy.”

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Because the messages volley forwards and backwards, a tenuous bond is cast. Oscar tells Rebecca that he was envious of his sister’s braveness in popping out and residing proudly as a lesbian, and this jostles one thing unfastened in Rebecca. She provides up her personal story: She leveraged her magnificence into movie stardom, solely to now discover herself a used-up commodity in early center age, her intercourse enchantment shedding amplitude alongside together with her profession. She is the novel’s Vernon Subutex, a sufferer of Hollywood’s youth cult and the decline of larger-than-life film stars within the age of bite-size, user-generated content material. She is huge; it’s the photographs that received small.

After Oscar reveals that he has “been MeToo’ed,” Despentes hard-cuts to a weblog written by Zoé Katana, a ebook publicist who has accused Oscar of sexual harassment, and who vents with nice rhetorical aptitude: “We are able to determine with the bull within the bullring,” she writes. “Now we have been reared and nurtured for the only real function of being put to demise in an area the place we stand no probability.” She turns into a well-liked feminist tradition warrior, whereas Oscar turns into catatonic—he drinks to extra and endlessly fiddles on his telephone. Rebecca scoffs—ugly on-line insults from strangers are nothing new to her—however she tells him that she can also be self-medicating with medicine hand-delivered by her seller.

Oscar and Rebecca discover widespread floor—tentatively at first, then with nice curiosity—over their addictions, their shared want to negate themselves. Oscar attends Narcotics Nameless conferences on Zoom. Rebecca surreptitiously logs on, then attends a gathering in particular person. “The superb factor about this alliance of misfits and maladjusted freaks,” she writes to Oscar, “is that no one offers you a tough time.” Rebecca has discovered the one social discussion board that doesn’t chew again, that subordinates judgment to context and compassion.

When Rebecca complicates their rapprochement by befriending Zoé, Oscar fulminates and doubles down on his sense of victimhood. At this level, we’re prepared for Rebecca to relegate Oscar to the same old destiny of a male Despentes villain. As an alternative, Rebecca sympathizes. Feeling invested in Oscar, she is intent on altering his thoughts. At her suggestion, he reads Zoé’s weblog, and he begins to reexamine his assumptions; he berates himself for by no means publicly acknowledging the feminine writers who’ve influenced him “as a result of I do know that, if you’re a man, different guys are suspicious of your relationships with ladies.”

Has Despentes gone delicate and gooey on us? Not fairly. Expensive Dickhead ends with a vicious social-media pile-on, the gorgon of Instagram rearing its head. Nonetheless, that is probably the most optimistic novel of Despentes’s profession. It additionally stands out as the most subversive—a fictional riposte to doomsday finest sellers, comparable to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Technology, that blame the web for nearly all the things ostensibly mistaken on the earth. If social media has triggered a world mental-health epidemic, that comes all the way down to decisions made by tech companies and by us, the customers, cloaked in our alternate identities, our base want for consideration and respect pushed to the foreground. By providing one another their true self, Oscar and Rebecca use digital discourse to spark a real friendship based mostly on transparency and honesty. France’s most unforgiving dispenser of fictional vengeance upon male oppressors has maintained her cultural edge by meting out grace as a substitute.