King Kong-Theory & The Queer Art of Failure favorite quotes

Read these quotes - they are brilliant every single one of them! They just might change your life =)

 "King Kong Theory" by Virginie Despentes is the most inspiring piece of non-fic‎tion I've read in ages, and "The Queer Art of Failure" by Judith Jack Halberstam, which also is utterly fantastic. LET'S GET OUT THERE AND START A REVOLUTION NOW!

  King Kong Theory

 To begin with about the book:

‎"A must read for every sex worker, tranny, punk, queer, john, academic, pornographer-and for all those people who dislike them too" - Annie Sprinkle

"King Kong Theory brings to mind Solanas's Scum Manifesto, Muscio's Cunt and Plath's The Bell Jar-Feminist eloquence without restraint" - Susie Bright

And now to the book itself:

"I am more King Kong than Kate Moss. I'm the kind of girl you don't get married to, the kind you don't have babies with. I am writing as a woman who is always too much of everything-too aggressive, too noisy, too fat, too rough, too hairy, too masculine, I am told.... I am writing as an ugly one FOR the ugly ones,the old hags, the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckables, the neurotics, the psychos, for all those girls who don't get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick"

"I'm not into giving a hard-on to men that don't make me dream. It has never seemed obvious to me that good-lookers are having all that great a time. I have always felt ugly. I put up with it and now I'm starting to appreciate it for having saved me from a crap life in the company of nice, dull, small-town guys who would have taken me nowhere fast. I like myself as I am, more desiring than desirable"

"So I am writing from here as one of the left-overs, one of those weirdos, the ones who shave their heads, those who don't know how to dress, those who don't worry about if they stink, those who have rotten teeth, those who don't know how to go about things, are never given presents by men, those who will fuck anyone who'll have them, the fat tarts, the skinny sluts, those who cunts are always dry, those who have big bellies, those who would rather be men, those who behave as if they were men, those who think they're porn queens, those who don't give a damn about guys but are interested in their girlfriends, the ones with big asses and thick dark body hair they don't wax, brutish, noisy women, who destroy everything that gets in their way, those who don't like perfume shops, whose red lipstick is too red, who haven't got the figure to dress like whores yet still do, women who want to wear men's clothes and a beard on the street, women who don't turn men on, those with flabby skin and a face full of wrinkles, women who look like the bakc of a bus, those who can only rely on themselves for protection, who don't know how to comfort others, who couldn't care less about her kids, those who like to get drunk in bars and collapse on the floor, women who don't behave"

"Because this ideal of the attractive but not whorish white woman, in a good marriage but not self-effacing, with a nice job, but not so successful she outshines her man, slim but not neurotic over food, who manages her home beautiful without becoming a slave to housework, who knows a thing or two but less than a man etc. etc. - I for one have never met her, not anywhere, my hunch is that she doesn't exist"

"Never before has society demanded as much proof of submission to an aesthetic ideal, or as much body modification, to achieve physical femininity. At the same time, never before has society allowed women so much physical and intellectual freedom"

"Rape is a minefield where no one dares to enter other than to say "how awful" or "poor girls". For the first time someone was valuing the ability to get over it, instead of lying down obligingly in the anthology of trauma. Someone was devaluing rape, its impact and consequences. This did not invalidate any part of what happened, or efface anything that I learned from being raped"

"Instead of being ashamed of being alive, we could choose to get back on our feet and get over it as best we could...Camille Paglia was the first to represent rape as something other than absolute, unspeakable horror, that which must never happen"

"Why should we not be allowed to go out at night when the boys can?" and they explained "Because the world is dangerous and you might get raped", and we replied, "Well, we want the right to risk being raped". One of many reactions to my story has been. "And you carried on hitchhiking after that?" And yes, I did hitchhike again. Less dressed up, less attractive, but yes, I did it".

"I am absolutely furious with a society that has educated me without ever teaching me to injure a man if he pulls my thighs apart against my will, when that same society has taught me that it is a crime from which I will never recover".

"It wasn't the penetration that was terrifying me, but the thought that they are going to kill us".

"(Being raped) is both that which disfigures me, and that which makes me"

"I particularly enjoy listening to men holding forth about the stupidity of women who love power, money, or celebrity, as if that were more idiotic than loving fishnet stockings"

"In my case prostitution was a crucial step in rebuilding myself after the rape. A business of dollar-by-dollar compensation for what had been taken from me by brute force" (=this was also my experience working as a stripper, also the parts of it that were equivalent to selling sexual services)

"People say prostitution must be banned and they never speak about how working environments for prostitutes can be improved - usually because they have no idea what they are talking about to begin with"

"From unacceptable images of prostitution worked in slavery conditions, they draw conclusions on paid sex in general. This is about as relevant as exploring work conditions in the textile industry purely through images of children working in black-market sweatshops. But it doesn't matter, because the important thing is to put across the idea that no woman may profit from her sexual services outside marriage. In no case is she adult enough to make a business of her charms... Because the notion is that for women, sex without love is always degrading"

"I am not trying to argue that in any conditions and for any woman, this kind of work is innocuous. But with the modern-day economic world being what it is-cold and pitiless warfare-banning the practice of prostitution within an appropriate legal framework is actively preventing the female class from making a decent living and turning a profit from its very stigmatization"

"The answer to bad porn is not no porn, but to make better porn - Annie Sprinkle"

"Porn is too often expected to mirror the Real. As if it weren't cinema."

"I co-directed Baise-Moi with porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi. Many refused ferociously to believe that she could be capable of anything else"

"The visual representation of sex is placed within well defined ghettos-clearly separated from the rest of the film world, so that porn remains the lumpen proletariat of the film world-it is crucial that porn actresses remain framed in disapproval, shame and stigma. It is not that they are incapable of doing anything else, nor that they don't want to, but that things have to be organized to make sure that they cannot"

"What relationship can you have with yourself if you systematically hand your genitals over to someone else?" (on people who say they don't masturbate)

"When I was hospitalized at the age of 15 the psychiatrist asked me why I had made myself so ugly. I thought he had nerve asking me that, since I thought I looked pretty damn cool with red spiky hair, black lips, white lace tights, and outsize army boots. He insisted, was I afraid of being pretty? He said that I had such lovely eyes. I didn't understand a thing he was talking about"

"Quoting Truffaut, "Films should be made with pretty women doing pretty things".

"(Baise-Moi created an outrage because it was a) gang rape film where the victims didn't weep runny-nosed on the shoulders of men who would avenge them"

"I am too noisy a victim"

"Women's advice for each other? The golden nugget: Conceal your wounds ladies, lest they upset the torturer. Be a dignified victim. That means one who knows how to keep quiet. Our speech is constantly confiscated. OK, we've got it, it's dangerous. Whose rest does it disturb?"

"The thing is that those those of us at the top are those of us who have become allies of the powerful. These are the women most able to keep quiet when betrayed, to stick around when scorned, and to otherwise flatter the male ego. The women most able to accept masculine domination are obviously those given the top jobs because it is till men who admit or exclude women from the corridors of power. The most stylish women, the most charming, the friendliest to men. The women we hear speaking are those who know how to get on with men. Who see feminism as a secondary cause, who aren't going to get too worked up about it. And good-looking to boot, because the most important thing still is for us to be pleasant to behold.. The others-the enraged, the ugly, the strident-are stifled, dismissed and invalidated. Non grata amongst the snobs"

“In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible.”

"Luckily, along came Courtney Love. In particular. And punk rock in general. A taste for conflict. If I didn't come from the world of punk rock I would be ashamed of what I am. But I do come from the world of punk rock, and I am proud of not fitting in".

"Most men really want to fuck other men. They love each other in every other regard, so why are they so afraid of fucking each other?"

"There has been a feminist revolution. Words have been spoken, despite decorum, despite hostility. And continue to be. But for the time being, on masculinity, just about nothing"

"Power is not brutality-there's a big difference"

"There is a type of strength that is neither masculine nor feminine, a strength that impresses, terrifies and reassures. The ability to say no, to impress ones views, to not sidestep... feminism is a revolution, not a rearranged marketing strategy, or some kind of promotion of fellatio or swinging, not just a matter of increasing secondary wages. Feminism is a collective adventure, for women, men and everyone else. A revolution well under way. A worldview. a choice. It's not a matter of contrasting women's small advantages with men's small assets, but of sending the whole lot flying".

The Queer Art of Failure 


"(We learn) that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions...it's far preferable to Americans than recognizing that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales of race, class and gender".

"Failure of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes, capitalism, as Scott Sandage argues in his book "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005), requires that everyone live in a system that equates success with profit and links failure to the inability to accumulate wealth even as profit for some means certain losses for others. As Sandage narrates in his compelling study, losers leave no records, while winners cannot stop talking about it, and so the record of failure is a hidden history of pessimism in a culture of optimism".

"The queer body and queer social worlds become the evidence of failure, while heterosexuality is rooted in a logic of achievement, fulfillment and success(ion)".

"If we want to make the antisocial turn in queer theory we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate".

"Let's leave success and its achievement to the Republicans, to the corporate managers of the world, to the winners of reality TV shows, to married couples, to SUV drivers."

"Empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers - Walter Benjamin"

"So while the nazis position on masculine homosexuality to begin with was tolerant, it was in relation to feminization that they expressed moral outrage. The effeminate homosexual was persecuted in Nazi Germany both for his rejection of the heterosexual family and for his embrace of the feminine. Some masculine german homosexuals also set themselves up in opposition to gender "deviants" and saw the feminine man as someone who disrupted the fraternity of masculine homosexuals"

"There were atleast two strands to the homosexual emancipation movement in germany in the early twentieth century. One, associated with Max Hirschfeld's institute and with theories of intermediate- or third-sexers, is well known, the other strand, homosexual masculinism, is less well known. This strand included men like Hans Blüher and John Henry Mackay, who promoted the Männerbund in the 1930s, as well as Adolf Brand and even the Nazi storm trooper Ernst Roehm. They favored the erotic connection between two conventionally masculine men. This brand of masculinism coincided with a nationalist and conservative emphasis on the superiority of male community and with a racialized rejection of femininity. Indeed among these early homosexual masculinists, male Jews were seen as men who had been made effeminate by their investments in family and home - a realm that should be left to women - and who, like effeminate homosexuals did not live up to their virile duty to remain committed to other masculine men and to a masculinist state and public sphere"

"The erasure of the queer femme smacks of an antifeminist preference for transgressive masculinity over transgressive femininity".

"Talking about your enemies is another form of narcissism".

"Jamaica Kincaid reminds us that happiness and truth are far from always the same thing"

"Perhaps Judith in the movie version of Where the Wild Things Are says it best: "Happiness is not always the best way to be happy."

PS Great song about Vibrators from 1979:

 PS 2 Article on hipster racism.

 PS 3 Even if we want to create a radical change in the world with all our might we can not let our productivity decide our worth. Even if our productivity is utilized for anti-capitalist means, it is still the capitalist story of humanity that we are our productivity. So we must do what we can to effect radical change, but sometimes it is enough to just exist and live.