The Bold Compassion of Dear Dickhead
“In literature written by women, examples of insolence or hostility toward men are extremely rare,” wrote the French novelist Virginie Despentes in a 2021 essay for Literary Hub. “Even as a member of that sex, I’m not allowed to be angry about this. Colette, Duras, Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Sagan, a whole canon of female authors anxious to prove their credentials, to reassure the men, to apologize for writing by endlessly repeating how much they love, respect, and cherish men, and how they have no desire—whatever they might write—to fuck them over.“
In 1993, Despentes, then 23, set out to redress that silence with her best-selling debut novel, Baise-Moi, or “Fuck Me,” in which the author, the victim of a brutal gang rape as a teenager, borrowed elements of her backstory for her heroes, Manu and Nadine, a rape victim and a sex worker, who embark on a scorched-earth joyride, robbing ATMs and killing johns apres l’amour in the name of personal freeedom. Baise-Moi was a shock to the system, a feminist novel about women who watch porn and ingest hard drugs and booze at a prodigious clip. Think of Thelma & Louise crossed with Natural Born Killers (Despentes adapted Baise-Moi into a film in 2000). Spare her the niceties of tasteful literary fiction; Despentes is a social observer as indecorous as she is keen, and she writes without mercy.
Vernon Subutex, a later Despentes project, expanded her scope without watering down her pitiless mission. It was a large ensemble piece, a sweeping trilogy that dissected 2010s Paris, which was riven by economic uncertainty and the far right’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. The title character, a former record-store owner, is now a discarded anachronism who hops frantically from couch to couch and eventually winds up on the street. Despentes offers no quarter to her titular hero, whose dark wit and casually racist rants come at the reader in a mad rush of metaphors and aphorisms, Despentes’s gutter vernacular of the underclass.
After reading that Despentes’s new novel would cover social media, #MeToo, and COVID, I was ready for a full-throttle garroting of the digital world and its role in fueling misogyny and mindless hate. Instead, Dear Dickhead, which was first published in France in 2022, is a more nuanced and redemptive novel than fans might expect from this poète maudit of the marginalized. Nestled within her evisceration of the online manosphere is a plea for connection in a world turned upside down. At a time when reflexive rage is the go-to mode across the ideological spectrum, Despentes has grabbed the mic to offer a kind of counterprotest to the social-media backlash. Dear Dickhead harks back to the original promise of the internet as a binding agent rather than a mental-health scourge, suggesting that a truce in the gender wars might be secured by sliding into one another’s DMs with a dose of empathy.
Most of Dear Dickhead transpires during the global lockdown in 2020, when everyday life was effaced and people were suddenly obsessed with toilet paper and singing “Happy Birthday” while washing their hands. Among the many who have gone online for shots of dopamine is Oscar Jayack, a literary novelist and Despentes’s titular “dickhead.” The book, which consists entirely of internet communications, begins when Oscar tears into Rebecca Latté, a movie star, in a social-media post laced with the keywords of the entitled sexist: “This sublime woman … now a wrinkled toad. Not just old. But fat, scruffy, with repulsive skin …” Rebecca immediately rises to the bait: “You’re like a pigeon shitting on my shoulder as you flap past … Waah, waah, waah, I’m a pissy little pantywaist … so I whimper like a Chihuahua in the hope someone will notice me.”
This is usually the point at which the author presses hard on the gas, but what begins as a flame-fest shades by increments into a confessional. After Oscar has been dressed down by Rebecca, we learn that his nasty post was a bid to get her attention and gauge her interest in a film project. As it turns out, Oscar is not a rank stranger; his sister Corinne is an old friend 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 love to your sister, she was a wonderful friend.”
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As the messages volley back and forth, a tenuous bond is forged. Oscar tells Rebecca that he was envious of his sister’s courage in coming out and living proudly as a lesbian, and this jostles something loose in Rebecca. She offers up her own story: She leveraged her beauty into film stardom, only to now find herself a used-up commodity in early middle age, her sex appeal losing amplitude along with her career. She is the novel’s Vernon Subutex, a victim of Hollywood’s youth cult and the decline of larger-than-life movie stars in the age of bite-size, user-generated content. She is big; it’s the pictures that got small.
After Oscar reveals that he has “been MeToo’ed,” Despentes hard-cuts to a blog written by Zoé Katana, a book publicist who has accused Oscar of sexual harassment, and who vents with great rhetorical flair: “We can identify with the bull in the bullring,” she writes. “We have been reared and nurtured for the sole purpose of being put to death in an arena where we stand no chance.” She becomes a popular feminist culture warrior, while Oscar becomes catatonic—he drinks to excess and endlessly fiddles on his phone. Rebecca scoffs—ugly online insults from strangers are nothing new to her—but she tells him that she is also self-medicating with drugs hand-delivered by her dealer.
Oscar and Rebecca find common ground—tentatively at first, then with great interest—over their addictions, their shared desire to negate themselves. Oscar attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings on Zoom. Rebecca surreptitiously logs on, then attends a meeting in person. “The amazing thing about this alliance of misfits and maladjusted freaks,” she writes to Oscar, “is that nobody gives you a hard time.” Rebecca has found the one social forum that doesn’t bite back, 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 point, we are ready for Rebecca to relegate Oscar to the usual fate of a male Despentes villain. Instead, Rebecca sympathizes. Feeling invested in Oscar, she is intent on changing his mind. At her suggestion, he reads Zoé’s blog, and he starts to reexamine his assumptions; he berates himself for never publicly acknowledging the female writers who have influenced him “because I know that, when you’re a guy, other guys are suspicious of your relationships with women.”
Has Despentes gone soft and gooey on us? Not quite. Dear Dickhead ends with a vicious social-media pile-on, the gorgon of Instagram rearing its head. Still, this is the most optimistic novel of Despentes’s career. It also may be the most subversive—a fictional riposte to doomsday best sellers, such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, that blame the internet for just about everything ostensibly wrong in the world. If social media has triggered a global mental-health epidemic, that comes down to choices made by tech corporations and by us, the users, cloaked in our alternate identities, our base need for attention and respect pushed to the foreground. By offering each other their true self, Oscar and Rebecca use digital discourse to spark a genuine friendship based on transparency and honesty. France’s most unforgiving dispenser of fictional vengeance upon male oppressors has maintained her cultural edge by meting out grace instead.