Virginie Despentes

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portrait and making of bye bye blondie
photographed by GIL LESAGE
interview by OLIVIER ZAHM

Ever since I read her first book, Baise-Moi, in 1993, I wanted to interview Virgine Despentes. She’s one of my favorite French writers from of generation. Despentes began working as a teenager in Lyon, as a record seller, rock music journalist, part-time prostitute, and porn-movie reviewer. After falling in love with a woman for the first time, she left Paris to live with her in Barcelona. While there Despentes finished her book-length essay, King Kong Théorie (2006), which blends autobiography and feminist theory in a style accessible to teenage girls. Now she’s back in Paris editing her second feature film, based on her novel, Bye Bye Blondie.

OLIVIER ZAHM — You’re back living in Paris after living in Spain. Why did you go away and what brought you back?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I wanted to live in another country, for the first time in my life. I chose Spain because I fell in love with a Spanish author and ended up in Barcelona, where I spent three years. I left Paris because there was a sort of collective depression in France at the time — not that the situation is really that different now. I came back to do my second feature lengh film based on my novel Bye Bye Blondie. But I’ve always worked in France. I write here and I’m published here. In any event, I’m back.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Can you define the French depression you mentioned?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — We French people hide inside our depression, wallowing in misery, suffering visibly, because we’re so sad and confused. Like everyone, we live in chaos, but the feeling of loss and sadness seems stronger here. That’s how it felt to me — like losing something, but not knowing exactly what. I felt an immense relief when I left Paris and went to Spain. In Spain people deal with the same problem we do in France. In fact, it’s worse, but pain and anger are dealt with more openly in Spain.

Emmanuelle Béart as Frances the TV star and her companion Claude played by Pascal Gregory, Bye Bye Blondie

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is there a different sensation of language in Spain? Did it affect your writing in French?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Learning to speak and read in Spanish made me more attentive to language. I’m mostly instinctive in French. I know almost nothing about grammar. Learning a foreign language that is fairly close to French made me more aware of how my own language works, what’s specific to it, how it’s written. Hearing Spanish all the time made me more attached to my own language, because I’m most comfortable in French.
It’s thrilling to come back to a language you speak fluently.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Can you write in English?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I can read in English, but I don’t write it very well, except for e-mails and interviews.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But you’ve translated works from English to French.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes, for Lydia Lunch and Dee Dee Ramone. I’m very fond of music and films that are in English. But, like a lot of people, I hit a saturation point, especially with American English. I loved America a lot — it was like I was living in an American suburb — but that’s changing. America isn’t so familiar to me any more. So I enjoyed discovering Spain, and then Latin America.

OLIVIER ZAHM — What do you mean when you say that America is changing?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — That we’re beginning to see its limits and its excesses. Of course, there are still some people, like Lady Gaga, who manage to produce things that please and surprise. But people seem to be tiring of America, especially of its cinema.

OLIVIER ZAHM — You tend to adapt your own novels to film, such as Baise-moi [Fuck Me] and Bye Bye Blondie. Is it because working from other writers’ novels doesn’t interest you?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I would love to work with stories from other authors. I was thinking about doing contemporary adaptations of Maupassant’s Bel ami and Zola’s Nana. I was also interested in one of Thomas Mann’s novellas. But producers are less interested in that kind of work. The two times I was asked to work on films were for Baise-moi and Bye Bye Blondie. I guess I need to show producers more of other writers’ material.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Do you write the screenplays for your films yourself?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Isn’t it difficult to cut out so much of your novels — three quarters of them, perhaps — for a screenplay?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Usually it’s even more than that. A page of a screenplay represents about a minute of film. It’s nothing, compared to a book. You keep maybe a twentieth of the dialogue, if that much.

OLIVIER ZAHM — A film can take a minute to show a change in a facial expression or an atmosphere.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I work a little faster than that. I like action.

OLIVIER ZAHM — What was the basis for Bye Bye Blondie? What were your priorities?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I kept all the stuff from the ’80s. I telescoped and tightened what I could, but the heart of the story remains the same. I changed a heterosexual couple to one with two women, which required a lot of rewriting.

Soko as Gloria in Bye Bye Blondie

OLIVIER ZAHM — Where did the idea of changing a straight couple to a lesbian one come from?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I found my female lead, Béatrice Dalle, but I didn’t have a leading man. Béatrice suggested replacing the man with a woman. I thought of coupling Béatrice with Emmanuelle Béart and the story just took off. As soon as we changed the man-woman couple to a woman-woman one, the story just spilled out of me.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Why did you choose Béatrice Dalle?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — We’re about the same age. I didn’t know her at all, but after spending an hour with her, I felt like I’d known her for a very long time, like she was my soul mate. There’s a kind of brutality, humor, and power in the films she’s chosen to do, and how she does them. It’s the same thing for her public appearances and the people with whom she spends her life. In the beginning I didn’t want to do the film with her, because she seemed like too obvious a choice, but when I met her I knew she was right for the role.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Emmanuelle Béart is a less obvious choice. She has a more classical sensuality and womanliness.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Emmanuelle is more classical, but at the same time, she’s a rare find. She’s got an animism you don’t see every day. Emmanuelle is an animal. When
I was looking for someone for the ’80s scenes, I thought of films from that era, like Manon des sources with Emmanuelle and Betty Blue with Béatrice — what incredible women they were. Emmanuelle Béart was just so clear in my head. And I remembered her crusade for les sans papiers, the somewhat unpopular support of illegal aliens, which created hostility against her. So she was a very obvious choice. And Béatrice Dalle isn’t just another one of those women with giant breasts — there’s already enough of those up on the big screen.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Emmanuelle Béart didn’t hesitate to pose nude for the covers of Elle.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — No, Emmanuelle Béart is willing to get naked, and the images are immensely powerful. We’ve seen all these actresses naked. In La Belle Noiseuse, Manon, and the Téchiné films Emmanuelle’s body is incredible, so animal-like…

OLIVIER ZAHM — There aren’t many writers, specifically women writers — sorry for the classification — who work in film. There’s Duras on the women’s side, and Pasolini on the men’s side — he had a unique approach to filmmaking. Have other artists encouraged you to do it, or is it instinctive?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Jean Cocteau also had a unique approach to film. But it’s more the opportunity which let me become a filmmaker. It isn’t easy, though! Writing and filmmaking are exactly opposite activities, but both are exciting to me. So you make a decision. I know a writer who writes in the morning and works on his films later in the day. I’m incapable of making that much effort, of splitting my concentration between two things. A novel takes as much energy as a film. On the other hand, it’s interesting what cinema can reveal to you about writing, and how writing can inform cinema. The return is quite rewarding, because you truly understand what writing is when you have to make a film, and vice-versa.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Because it wipes you out?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes, and you go crazy being alone and writing.

Decor of the Bye Bye Blondie set

OLIVIER ZAHM — Writing a novel is a personal process, not a production process. It seems that when you don’t have something to do, you write a novel, an article, or a song.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Writing is the way I can relate to the world.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is filmmaking a continuation of writing?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — The two things have a lot in common. Every time I do something new I find in it common elements with other things I’ve done. I might do a play, because it’s a kind of writing that interests me.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Isn’t this literary component a new twist for French cinema? Coming out of the Nouvelle Vague, which retained strong elements of writing and stories in the written sense. In Éric Rohmer’s films, for example, you can almost hear the story being told. Even for Godard, words and sound were important. Is it the same for you, or is the literary component unconsciously injected into your films?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — You can listen to Bye Bye Blondie all the way through. I understand what actors can do with a text, especially when they’re talented. Whether it’s spoken or acted out, it’s the text that gets me. But lately I’ve gotten the feeling that we’re abandoning the idea of writing good scripts. These days they’re less well written.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Do your actors strictly follow a text, or can they interpret it and improvise?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Well, I really didn’t have the time to wander about shooting spontaneous scenes. You have only time to shoot the three shots you’ll absolutly need in the editing room. It’s a little frustrating. When you don’t do a lot of films you realize it’s the production structure that holds you down and doesn’t let you stray. I hope that one day I will do other films, and I hope it won’t be like that every time.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Can’t you make films in the margins, so to speak?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Sure, but you have to take the time to figure out how to do it and then get your entire crew on board. If you work as I do, with a team of professionals, you step into the world of “This is how we make films.” Once you’re inside it, you try to work things out quickly. Cinema is all about power. There’s an obsession with ritual and tradition. Going against that is a battle, one that’s hard to win.

Pascal Gregory as the writer Claude in Bye Bye Blondie

OLIVIER ZAHM — Are you afraid of falling into a cinematographic standard or cliché?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — No, not at all. In any case, shooting a story about two girls, two punkettes, isn’t done very often. The themes in this project are sufficient. It’s a rather classical form with some slight deviations from, and discrepancies with, what one normally sees. That was the idea.

OLIVIER ZAHM — You wrote a brillant and simple feminist essay, King Kong Théorie.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes, five years ago already! It’s been translated into English and has been very well received in the US. It found an audience there with feminists, gay people, gender studies students, artists, and others. But it does have a marginal audience, of course.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Was it biographical — about your experience with prostitution?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — It tells a lot about me, but it came out of Baise-moi and the discussions we had with the press after the film was made, when we were able to polish the words. It also came from watching my 13-year-old stepdaughter, Coralie, sitting in front of the television and her computer all day. I realized that no one would ever talk to her about feminism. She spends her entire day watching whatever she wants about sex and gender, but no one ever talks about feminism with her. That’s why I decided to write a book about feminism, one that a 15-year-old girl could read.

OLIVIER ZAHM — With your feminist point of departure, were you trying to erase the distinction between the genders?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — At least to create a flow between them. When you see Marc Jacobs in a skirt, you know it’s not the norm, just as it’s unusual for a man to wear make-up. The distinction between masculine and feminine is so fixed, so overpowering. Our appearances, and the things that go with them, including sexuality, need to be more fluid to my point of view. From time to time we should be able to change, to detach ourselves from the idea of gender, to be more playful. Looks, attitudes, and declarations of intention could change. I could be a sexy slut today and a powerful businesswoman tomorrow. I have the feeling that this is actually happening, but just when I think we’re on the right track, an event like a war or a disaster drags us back. Take Berlin in the ’30s. It was only the very rich who were amused. For them, hetero, homo, cross-dressers, and transsexuals went full out. Then the war blasted everything back to zero. Does that mean we’re just going through a stage? Is what we are doing going to be pulled back by some horrible collective catastrophe? We’ll have to wait and see, I guess. But if there isn’t a horrible collective catastrophe, at some point we won’t be able to stop girls from being boys and bringing other girls home. That’s what I mean by being more fluid.

OLIVIER ZAHM — If we’re looking for mutual benefits, what do girls achieve by playing at being boys? Do they become more virile? What about boys playing at being girls?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — It’s about finding out what it’s like to be in another person’s shoes. If you’re a girl, it’s about being able to experience having authority. If you’re a man, it’s about being able to experience a certain sensuality and artificial seduction — because there are things you can’t really do if you’re a guy, like experiencing fragility or bitchiness or even the sluttiness women use in certain kinds of seduction. If you’re a man it might be interesting to provoke masculine arousal by seducing other men using feminine means, instead the established codes of virility. Of course, a girl can gain a lot by experiencing masculine power and authority, by disregarding the judgment of others, to feel what it’s like to be recognized, and in the same vein, how it feels to arouse a woman.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Didn’t you go through it yourself, with your own sexuality, when you became a lesbian.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes, and it was extremely interesting.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But how did it happen? Because of love?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes, I fell in love with a woman for the first time in my life — with Béatriz Preciado. It was a very important encounter. It’s been more than six years now. She brings me so much, intellectually and emotionally. And she’s so funny. She’s someone with whom I can really laugh.

Soko as Gloria in Bye Bye Blondie

OLIVIER ZAHM — How did you meet Beatriz, who is a Spanish lesbian philosopher who works on gender studies?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — We met because of Baise-moi, and then we ran into each other at a Lydia Lunch concert. I had just begun writing King Kong Théorie.

OLIVIER ZAHM — What did she bring to you?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Not too much for my writing of King Kong Théorie — we had just met — but she helps me a lot in what I’m doing now. We talk about what we read, what we do, and about writing.

OLIVIER ZAHM — You said that becoming a lesbian put you in contact with your feminine power? What is the power you are speaking about?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I don’t think, for example, that I would have written King Kong Théorie if I hadn’t been with a woman, because, without my realizing it, there was a part of me that was worried I would displease people. It got to the point where I would avoid seducing men. I was afraid I would scare them with my ideas, with what I really thought and wrote.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is it really possible to leave heterosexuality behind, as you’ve written? When you’re with a woman, don’t you reproduce some of the heterosexual patterns?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes, you can fall back into the same patterns of domination, habit, and fidelity. These patterns happen within couples. But when I speak of leaving heterosexuality, it was the moment of realization that all those articles in Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Grazia had nothing at all to do with me. Something you once had is gone. In the worst-case scenario, you leave behind a hugely important piece of what it is to be a woman or a girl — in my case, a woman. And in the best-case scenario, there are thousands of little conversations. You become aware of the time you’ve wasted. You find you have so much more space for the interesting stuff.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Did you leave behind a pattern of seduction?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Seduction, yes, but also control. Now no one in my house is busting my balls and telling me what to do. I’ve never been with a controling man — it was more of an internal, interiorized regulation. We all have an idea of how women should act with men, but this information is always collectively relayed, under strict surveillance. Women auto-censor themselves when it comes to power, because men do not find powerful women seductive. A heterosexual woman knows full well that her success will almost always be followed by divorce. Nine times out of ten, really big success for a female director or writer will be directly followed by separation or divorce. This isn’t the case for a man. For a man, success just means more mistresses. Leaving all that behind was a huge relief.

OLIVIER ZAHM — What changed in your everyday life, to make you become a lesbian and forget about men?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — It’s another way of seeing yourself. It’s difficult for a girl to imagine doing it. After I published Baise-moi, one of the first people I met in Paris was the French bisexual novelist, Ann Scott. I started hanging out with dykes but I didn’t get it, even being with them all the time. When they talked to me about it, I thought they were coming down a little too hard. I was straight, hetero down the line — maybe even a little bit too much so. But something happened that I wasn’t aware of. Maybe it was denial — because you can’t keep hanging out with all these leabian women and keep on sleeping with just men. There comes a moment of decision — or you’re just blocking it out.

OLIVIER ZAHM — How did you unblock yourself?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I don’t know. Maybe it was my hitting 35. Maybe it was other personal stuff having to do with my parents’ divorce. But it was a tremendous relief. When I realized that my father was no longer the ideal man, I was able deceive him and become a lesbian — or something like that. Because when you do something like Baise-moi, you tell yourself, weirdly enough, that you’re not going to put your parents through any more stuff, and you’re not going to drag them further down. But then a moment comes when you couldn’t care less.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But your parents must be proud of your success.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — It’s unlikely.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So you acquired a new sense of power as a woman and experimented with it in a new way, through this new sexuality. Before that you were celebrating the phallic woman, the strong woman. Which informed your fascination with porn actresses and other women who are, paradoxically, objects and sexual fetishes for the man and able to reverse the situation with their ability to bring the man to orgasm. They know the ins and outs of male sexuality and can totally manipulate it. It’s paradoxical and confusing. How do you explain your fascination with porn actresses, who represent the ultimate submission to the male?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — The ultimate submission to the male is the woman as homemaker and mother at home. A female porn star may have to deal with submission, but she has power. It’s the same mechanism with prostitutes: there’s submission but you don’t see men bragging about it.

OLIVIER ZAHM — A female prostitute or a porn star knows how to fake it and still bring a man pleasure.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — They’re technicians who are able to create an appearance. But pretending is often a big part of women’s sexuality!

OLIVIER ZAHM — But as technicians of sex, don’t they detach themselves from it?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Well, they detach themselves from the traditional role, in which the woman is neither a whore nor a porn star. They know some extremely interesting stuff about men. And, of course, there is the blasphemous aspect they find so compelling.

Two punk girls from Bye Bye Blondie

OLIVIER ZAHM — You mean because of the power it gives the woman?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes. It’s as if these women have access to certain secrets. They know something about male sexuality that women aren’t supposed to know. We’re not supposed to be experts on that stuff because it doesn’t look right. Only witches know that stuff. Which is why in King Kong I spontaneously chose a porn witch, because she has knowledge women aren’t supposed to have. For women in porn, it’s less about sex. When I saw Tabatha Cash [a well-known French porn actress], I realized that she was a perfect metaphor for what it is to work as a performer does, as I do, the way an actress or a singer does. It’s a clear example of what entertainment is. People in porn are entertainment workhorses. Which is what we all are — with slightly different arrangements, of course. The first time I met Tabatha I was getting a lot of publicity, and I thought to myself, she knows what I should do, knows that there’s no need to imagine that there are 50 different ways to be looked at in a restaurant. We’re all of us worker bees in the service of entertainment. It’s what happened to society and to performance. In observing porn stars, we’re seeing the 19th-century coal miner or the blue-collar worker of today.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So you’re still a Marxist, analyzing life in terms of class distinctions, and how the relationship between money and living conditions is primordial. But according to your approach to feminism, one of the things that hasn’t changed — even if in theory women now have the right to hold the same positions as men — is women’s subjugation to domestic tasks and performing bodily services (massage, manicure, nursing, etc), which may not be prostitution, but are of the same nature. Prostitution and domesticity, that is, as reflections of the assignation of the woman and her submission to the male, who restricts the woman, whether she is married, living conjugally, or denigrated by a life of prostitution. What’s really interesting is that you attack the women who do not want to recognize this equivalency — meaning those who would like to see women get out of prostitution, those who do not see that the real battle is freeing women from their traditional domestic role.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — You know, there are plenty of active feminists who’ve never worked a day in their lives. Many were married, and when their husbands left them for younger women they received alimony payments. Their previous work consisted of being good spouses and mothers, which is a terrible domesticity. The worst thing is that there isn’t a male equivalent. Men don’t work at home 20 to 30 hours a week for free. They don’t even do it for their kids for free, which is a real pain for women who have a job. Men don’t put themselves in shitty positions like that. I think that if it were men who gave birth, they’d get a year of paid paternity leave and there would be better day-care centers.
It would all happen very differently. But women give birth, and work while they raise their children, and do the shopping, the cooking, and the cleaning. It’s a form of abuse.

OLIVIER ZAHM — But at the same time, men rarely get alimony.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — They don’t get custody of the children, either.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So progress needs to be made there, too.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Women need to ask themselves what it means to live on alimony, what kind of life they’re going to get with that. How they’re going to get by being alone, when for their entire lives they’ve been a daughter, a wife, or a mother — always under the submission of men. What kind of feminism could they possibly espouse? That remains unclear. There are many people who condemn prostitution for being a particular kind of work, something separate. In my opinion, many of these people have never worked, in the most literal sense. Have they worked in a supermarket every day? Have they cleaned hospital rooms every day? Worked in a food factory? What does it mean to work with your body, for so little? I think that the discussion would be different if everyone knew how much prostitutes make, and how many hours they work. If people working at a supermarket or at a McDonald’s knew that, I’m sure that their position on prostitution, that’s it’s so horrible, would change.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Why is prostitution still illegal, still considered as a criminal activity?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — We live in a society that defends marriage and the family, and uses them as a propaganda tool. Prostitution is a danger to that society. Men would no longer need a woman at home if, for the same price, they could afford a housekeeper and a whore. The same goes for women: if they could earn 5,000 or 6,000 euros a month being prostitutes, maybe they wouldn’t want to have three babies. Don’t forget, we always protect the family. Everything in our society happens because of that.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Because all the social stuff begins with a child’s education?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Yes. And if there’s a separation, there’ll be the surveillance of institutions. I read From Witches to Crack Moms, by Susan C. Boyd, which impressed me.
She reveals that drug policies are racial, class-biased, and gender-oriented. And how, by the use of drugs, you and your child can be controlled.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Do you have kids?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — No.

OLIVIER ZAHM — When you don’t have children, you don’t experience the system of social control that surounds the family.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — Of course not — you’re freer. What I also see is that the control system of your family changes: Christmas with the kids, birthdays, grandparents, vacations, etc. That’s why prostitution is such a disruption to the family. Maybe it will change when men begin prostituting themselves. The more they do, the faster it will go. Unfortunately, the best chance for improvement comes from men.

OLIVIER ZAHM — I recently watched a television show in which child-psychoanalysts asked a class of young children to draw whatever they liked. The psychoanalysts said that just by looking at the drawings they could pick out those children who had been abused or violated, and protect them. They said they needed to spend no more than an hour in a classroom to be able to pick out the children who are potentially in danger. There is so little protection for children, but the media goes wild when a child is raped or murdered. Maybe that’s another way of protecting the family system by not really breaking the secrets inside families. And yet it’s inside this sacred space that some of the worst things happen.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — The more closed off a space is, the more it’s likely that something will happen in it. But the family unit’s closeness is something people extol. You can do what you want inside it because it’s a closed domain.

Soko as Gloria and her gang of punks including actor Robinson Delacroix (right), Bye Bye Blondie

OLIVIER ZAHM — It symbolizes private space.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — And we protect private space. We still insist on the right to secrecy.

OLIVIER ZAHM — What do you think of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case? It was scary to see how mistreated he was. Even if he isn’t guilty, the destruction of his life and career is complete. A single accusation became tantamount to punishment.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — It’s something he has in common with Michael Jackson — when Jackson was alive, that is.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Whether Strauss-Kahn is guilty or not, it’s too late for him. The accusation precipitated his fall. The police system anticipates the worst sanctions of the justice system. But 15 years in prison is nothing compared to having your life destroyed. Quite aside from being condemned around the world, DSK is now perceived as being a rapist. What can we draw from this — that politicians shouldn’t wander off with the maid?
VIRGINIE DESPENTES — I think if it turns out that he’s innocent, he won’t have much trouble getting his political career in France going again. If Bertrand Cantat [the lead singer of the band Noir Désir, who was convicted of manslaughter in the death of his actress girlfriend, Marie Trintignant] wanted to make another CD, not many people would protest. William S. Burroughs killed his wife. Louis Althusser strangled his wife. If Strauss-Kahn can prove his innocence, he can return as someone unjustly accused by a whore. We’re open to that. But it has been extremely interesting to hear so many women talking about it. Christine Ockrent, Christine Lagarde, Laurence Parisot — all these powerful women keep talking about it. Women are showing up, saying, “I was raped.” I’ve heard the words sexism, sexual harassment, and feminism used on television more times in the last month than in my entire life. That has also been interesting. Strangely enough, I thought of Julien Assange of WikiLeaks, who was also accused of rape in Sweden. I think there was some kind of manipulation, but it’s not that we believe it less. But apparently Strauss-Kahn is quite randy and excitable. Being aroused isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it can become a problem. Say you’re an actor who consumes four grams of cocaine a day — you can become a problem for your director. It’s the same story for someone who’s really randy.

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