A French Punk Feminist Takes on #MeToo and Addiction

DEAR DICKHEAD, by Virginie Despentes. Translated by Frank Wynne.

For decades, the French author and filmmaker Virginie Despentes has courted aprecious, overlooked constituency: “the old hags, the dykes, the frigid,” as she writes in “King Kong Theory,” her expansive feminist manifesto, “all those girls who don’t get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick.”

People like her, she suggests.

Her characters are institutionalized, filmed during sex, addicts, bigots, cows in the abattoir. In her debut novel, an abjectly shocking book called “Rape Me,” two young women embark on a gleeful violent spree after a sexual assault. (Despentes considers her own gang rape, at 17, the foundation “of who I am as a writer, and as a woman who is no longer quite a woman.”)

She has become a shorthand for a class of rageful punks. The physical vulnerability inherent in being a woman is never far from her writing, where simply existing while female is best understood as a battleground.

Despentes’s latest novel, “Dear Dickhead,” is an epistolary story, built around correspondence between Rebecca, an aging movie star, and Oscar, an author accused of sexual harassment. He is the epithet of the title, though Rebecca displays some preening, bone-headed tendencies herself.

What begins as thoughtless online heckling — Oscar is disgusted to see that Rebecca, his former object of desire, has become “fat, scruffy, with repulsive skin,” and says so on Instagram — turns into a tender, almost familial relationship. Rebecca is understandably hostile at the outset, flinging back insults that are unprintable in this newspaper. An obsequious apology (he never dreamed she’d see his post) counts for little. But Rebecca replies almost in spite of herself; perversely, she admits that Oscar’s audacity to slag and then flatter her “commands a certain respect.”

The scope of their conversation dilates quickly, from screw-yous to Marguerite Duras, the heinous cult of Pilates, language’s inability to capture the nuance of violence. (“We have 45 words to describe shades of blue and only one to describe rape.”) Their exchanges are intercut with dispatches from Zoé, a young feminist blogger who is Oscar’s accuser and becomes deeply implicated in both their lives. But the volleys between Oscar and Rebecca power the book, and once the pandemic shuts down Paris, their intimacy flourishes.