Articles Available Online

In King-Kong Theory (2006), her autobiography and feminist manifesto, Virginie Despentes describes a job she’d held almost two decades earlier In 1989, aged twenty, Despentes was employed by Minitel, France’s precursor to the World Wide Web She was a moderator on one of its servers, overseeing a message board where she was paid to disconnect anyone who used offensive language Offenders included racists, anti-semites, paedophiles and, finally, sex workers   ‘One had to be sure that the service wasn’t being used by women who wanted to freely choose to use their bodies to make money,’ Despentes writes jokingly, aware that her efforts did little to stop the rise of the text sex services known as the ‘Minitel rose’ Despentes was paid to censor, but she was also paid to watch She writes, in King-Kong Theory, that ‘all modern communication methods are first and foremost used for selling sex’, going on to describe how her experiences with Minitel later inspired her to go into sex work herself, using the service to find occasional clients over a period of two years   It’s the image of Despentes as a forum moderator that remains with me: an all-seeing figure, perhaps a little disgusted, and almost certainly amused, watching through a dark glass as society unfolds in all its exhilarating complexity in front of her   In her novels, Despentes takes on a similar role Her latest, the Vernon Subutex series follows a diverse cast of Parisians, some young, some older, but most of them Generation X They’re ageing messily, clinging to the ideals and affectations of their youth, and preserving a worn-in sense of mutiny which has only complicated their middle age The books are a satire on fading punk politics, but they also give us Despentes at her most compassionate, and hopeful   The first two Vernon books have been translated into English by Frank Wynne and were published in the UK last year – a third has yet to arrive – and a TV adaptation is in the works starring Romain Duris Vernon Subutex 1 begins with the death of Alex Bleach, a self-destructive rock star who has