For starters, S.C.U.M. stands for Society for Cutting Up Men, which is exactly what this text was about. The author, Valerie Solanas, begins the text by introducing the idea of an all-female society. She then goes on to blatantly insult the entire male species, calling them emotional cripples who are egocentric and incapable of empathy, love, and even friendship. She says men have it worse off than apes, only because they have the capability of feeling negative emotions such as jealousy, shame, and guilt. Furthermore, she goes on to discuss the idea of male sexuality, calling men walking dildos and saying the only reason they try so hard to get off using women is to prove their “manliness.”
Solanas then states that all men want to be women, and want to make women men. They try to claim female qualities such as emotional strength and assertiveness while pushing male qualities such as vanity and frivolity onto women. The very idea that men want to screw women all the time is brought about by the attempt to hide their desire to be female. She states that drag queens are the closest to being female, as they accept the feminine parts of themselves, but they are still lacking things that make them female. And on an even stranger note, she shifts her attention to the current economic status of the world and criticizes capitalism before she gets back into criticizing men.
The rest of the text is broken up into certain aspects of life and how men negatively impact said aspects, such as individuality and privacy. At the end of her text, she discusses how S.C.U.M. is actually a movement and a group of people, dedicated to eradicating the male race. It feels almost like a call to action, imploring readers to take her words as truth and to turn against men completely. Overall, I felt a sense of intrigue while reading. The text itself seems almost like a satire with how extreme her ideas are and how exaggerated the impact of men on the world is. However, it does seem like her words come from a place of truth. Looking deeper into the text, it could almost be a criticism of the patriarchy as a whole, and the fact that societal “norms” have been coined that way due to the ideals of men.
Personally, I found the text an interesting read if nothing else. I agree with her criticism of men to an extent; however, I don’t think we should eradicate men from the world entirely. I do feel that the patriarchy has a more negative impact than it does good, and that we need to reevaluate the worth of women in the world, especially as conservative ideals seem to be becoming popular in mass media, and the idea of being a traditional housewife is being pushed more than it has been in recent years.