On March 1, 2020, roughly two weeks before the COVID lockdown began in France, the French writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes published an essay in the left-leaning paper Libération. The essay, whose headline read “On se leve et on se casse” (roughly, “Time to Get Up and Get Out”), celebrated a small protest that had taken place days earlier at that year’s Césars, the French Academy Awards, when Roman Polanski was named best director for his film “J’accuse.” Since the late nineteen-seventies, Polanski has been a fugitive from the United States, where he was charged with the rape of Samantha Gailey (now Geimer), who accused him of drugging her and forcing oral, vaginal, and anal sex on her when she was thirteen and Polanski forty-three. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, but fled the country before his sentencing. In an interview with Martin Amis published in 1979, Polanski had this to say about the case: “If I have killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But . . . fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls—everyone wants to fuck young girls!”
When Polanski was announced as that year’s meilleur réalisateur, a few attendees, including the director Céline Sciamma and the actress Adèle Haenel, stood and walked out of the auditorium, with Haenel shouting “La honte!” (“Shame!”) as she made her way to the aisle. It is in praise of this gesture that Despentes’s essay is written. The actress sent a message to the French film industry’s élite, translated by Despentes into her own distinctive punk-feminist prose: “We’re not going to spare an ounce of respect for your farcical respectability. . . . You are a bunch of toxic morons. The world you have created so you can reign over it like losers is stifling. We get up and we walk out. It’s over. We get up. We walk out. We scream. Fuck you.”
Despentes has always been open about her experiences with sexual violence. Her 1993 novel, “Baise-Moi” (“Fuck Me”), draws on her gang rape at the age of seventeen, when she and a friend were held at gunpoint by three men and brutally assaulted. It’s an event that she’s called “a foundation stone” of her identity and the basis of the work that made her famous: the novel’s 2000 film adaptation, co-directed by Despentes and the former porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi. Effectively banned in France, “Baise-Moi” follows its two leads, Manu and Nadine, as they go on a killing spree after being raped by a trio of men in a garage. It is an extraordinarily violent movie, ending with one of its protagonists dead and the other under arrest, probably destined for life in prison.
Twenty-four years later, Despentes hasn’t exactly mellowed, but her interest has shifted from revenge on the patriarchy to recovery from its harms. Her latest novel, “Dear Dickhead,” (in French, “Cher Connard”) is about what happens after a young woman accuses an older man of sexual harassment, joining “the army of abused women stepping out of that silence.” It is set in the messy aftermath of this public reckoning but before the characters have achieved any kind of resolution, leaving both perpetrator and victim to figure out who they are and who they want to be in the wake of what they have done and what has been done to them.
Despentes’s titular dickhead is a middle-aged novelist named Oscar Jayack, who finds himself on the wrong end of the #MeToo movement—in France, #BalanceTonPorc, or “squeal on your pig”—when his former publicist, Zoé Katana, outs him as a harasser on her blog. The details are vague but damning. Zoé recalls gritting her teeth when he groped her and fielding late-night phone calls and knocks on the door of her hotel room. She also claims that she was fired by Oscar’s publishing house when “the situation deteriorated and he started to complain.” “There could be no question of losing the great writer,” Zoé writes sneeringly, but “I never got another job.” Unemployed, isolated, angry, and very online, she decides to turn her blog against the whole rotten system of predators and enablers. “Not everybody hunts,” she writes. “But they all stand aside to let the hunter pass.”
Zoé’s blog posts have titles like “Chronicle of my fist in your face.” They consist of blistering polemics that are ferocious, provocative, and often intensely funny. In other words, they read like Despentes’s own writing, even echoing her piece on the Césars. “I’ve told others,” Zoé says, “if it ever happens to you, get out. Get out as fast as you can.” Her insistence on female pleasure echoes Despentes’s insistence on taking the side of sex against its disfigurement by abusers and its discrediting by prudes. “We need to teach our daughters to be proud of their fellatio,” Zoé exhorts her audience, adding that “teenage boys should venerate girls who give good blowjobs.”
Zoé’s righteous fury is electric, and Despentes compellingly presents her as a casualty of male privilege. As for Oscar, there’s no doubt that his conduct was a textbook case of workplace harassment. And yet, he’s far from “the big macho author” Zoé makes him out to be. Still less is he a Roman Polanski or a Harvey Weinstein, the apex predator of #MeToo. Oscar’s behavior was despicable but not vicious, and he seems more an asshole than an abuser. As Despentes describes him, Oscar is hapless and pathetic—a lonely divorced father of a surly twelve-year-old girl, a moderately successful novelist now suffering from writer’s block, a bumbling beta male who thought he was in love with Zoé, however poorly he showed it. He is also an alcoholic and a drug addict, a little over two weeks into recovery when the book begins.
Despentes’s sympathetic attitude toward Oscar surprised critics when her book came out in France, in 2022. “The core of this novel is the opposite of ‘get up and get out,’ ” Raphaëlle Leyris wrote in Le Monde, calling it “a hymn to friendship.” These aren’t exactly popular sentiments in our current sexual culture, where the threat of cancellation looms as large for prolific malefactors as it does for sad-sack schlemiels and serial playboys. But Despentes’s feminism is heterodox, and she is willing to suffer fools, at least up to a point. Her best-selling “Vernon Subutex” trilogy revolves around an emotionally stunted former record-store owner whose primary way of relating to others is through his favorite pop music. In her 2006 manifesto, “King Kong Theory,” she draws on her experience as a sex worker to argue that patriarchy is bad for men, too. Her clients’ “loneliness, their wretched shyness, the flaws they couldn’t conceal, the weaknesses they showed,” revealed to her “how painful the closed world of male desire is.” This revelation, she says, “calmed my aggressiveness toward men, which, despite what people think, has never been particularly extreme.”
If “Dear Dickhead” were mainly about the relationship between Oscar and Zoé, the harm he’s done, and the absolution she might or might not be prepared to offer, it might sag into a pedantic tale of conflict resolution, an adults-only after-school special masquerading as a novel. Despentes, however, is more interested in the quieter, behind-the-scenes work of personal growth, which doesn’t always happen in a straight line. This might sound like a cliché, and “Dear Dickhead” is, in many ways, a sentimental book, forbearing toward its characters and essentially optimistic about the human capacity to change for the better. In clumsier hands, it could have devolved into an apology for men behaving badly, but Despentes cannily decides to give Oscar a foil in the form of Rebecca Latté, a fifty-year-old actress who serves as his antagonist, his confessor, and eventually his friend.
The friendship has an improbable beginning. Depressed and resentful in the wake of his cancellation, Oscar catches a glimpse of Rebecca, once a major movie star, at a Paris café. This being the second decade of the twenty-first century, he decides to post about it on Instagram:
Rebecca fires back at him via e-mail (“Dear dickhead, I read your post on Insta. You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past”), and Oscar apologizes, shamefaced. Rebecca, he reveals, was friends with his sister at school, and he has hoped for years that they would have a chance to reconnect. “I don’t give a shit about you,” Rebecca replies. The next thing you know, they’re pen pals.
Despite the evident delight Despentes takes in composing Zoé’s incendiary blog posts, her view of the Internet, at least in this novel, is almost entirely negative. As Oscar’s post about Rebecca shows, social media is a place where people say cruel and crazy things mostly without repercussion. Even Zoé, who at first thrills at the praise she gets after exposing Oscar, soon finds herself attacked by men’s-rights activists, incels, and, toward the end of the book, erstwhile supporters as soon as she violates their assumptions about how she ought to behave. Throughout “Dear Dickhead,” the Internet appears as “a grotesque travesty of joy, friendship, and solidarity,” where people act out of a noxious composite of robotic groupthink (“They’ve been told to troll, so they troll,” Zoe observes of her haters) and emotional dysregulation. “This is real suffering,” Zoé says at one point, “this exhibition of the emptiness, the nothingness of these anonymous little foot soldiers.” Zoé is hardly exempt from the online pressure to become a caricature of herself, no matter how far the picture is from what’s really going on. “When you read the stuff she posts online,” Rebecca observes, “she’s a goddess of war and destruction. And when you see her IRL she’s this exhausted kid who’s about to fall apart.”
