the slippery slope of cancellation

2023-12-24 23:48:00

Virgine Despentes launched Dear shit eater at the right time. With sagacity, lucidity and absolute unprejudice, the French author once again became among the most read in her country with this uncomfortable work that gives voice to a harasser canceled in the midst of feminist demands.

Dear shit eater (Penguin Random House) is a kind of epistolary novel, built on the basis of a back-and-forth of letters between a writer who has just been publicly accused of being a stalker and an actress whose fame begins to decline over the years. In the middle, the posts of the young complainant who encourages women not to keep silent anymore.

The book starts in the best way (or the worst way anything could start) with a comment “hater” by Oscar (the writer), who seeks to attract the attention of the actress through ruthless criticism on networks, the kind that is usually read from “ghost” accounts in which there seems to be no one behind it.

However, Rebbeca responds with dignity, and they slowly begin a friendship in which they are not united by love, but by fear. Drugs, alcohol, fame, class prejudices and feminist slogans are discussed “in the open” in each of these letters. Without the filter of bourgeois “bienpensantism”.

There is no reputation to maintain because they are both disgraced: she, because she is no longer the sex symbol of his youth; and him, because he has been canceled right in the middle of a rising publishing career. She is haughty and he is neurotic.

There, in that swampy terrain, Despentes moves perfectly. And it is surprising how he manages to unravel the psychology of a “wounded male” without placing him in the position of villain. In case it needs to be clarified, he doesn’t claim it either, because there are no reasons to do so.

And it’s rare that that operation works in a world where there are only good guys and bad guys (and you always think you’re in the right place). It could be said that it was not necessary to give a voice to an abuser (historically they have had one), but Despentes cares little about what they will say, rather he uses that operation to untangle the skein of empty slogans, of those gray ones that do not fit into the everything in our mental structures and that, despite being valid, are difficult to raise within activisms.

With these strategies, the novel manages to put the viewer in constant tension with its ideas. It manages to question and at the same time praise, something that is appreciated in these days of linear and often simplistic slogans.

Virginie Despentes in her book “Dear Shit Eater.”