The SCUM Manifesto is a work of radical feminist literature written by Valerie Solanas in 1967, and self-published in 1968. This work argues for an extermination of all men, and, as she was a lesbian, has earned her recognition as a of pioneer of queer theory.
Solanas was born in 1939 in Ventnor City, NJ, and seemed to have a rather normal childhood – apart from the fact that she was sexually abused by her father from a young age, a fact that she would reveal later in her life. She started becoming disruptive in Middle School, skipping classes and even assaulting a teacher, and by the age of 15 she had given birth to two children. She was an educated woman, attending college at the University of Maryland to study psychology, and pursuing a master’s in psychology at the University of Minnesota. Her early writing pursuits included a 1966 short story entitled “A Young Girl’s Primer”, which told the story of a woman who sold sex and conversation for the right to creative freedom. The event which made her mainstream was the shooting of Andy Warhol in 1968. She had edged her way into his circle, hoping he would put on her play, “Up Your Ass”. He misplaced the manuscript, and, believing that he was out to steal her Manifesto, Solanas shot him multiple times. She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in 1968, and would end up spending the remainder of her life in mental institutions and prisons, until her death in 1988.
The popularization of her Manifesto polarized many mainstream feminist organizations, such as the National Organization for women, and her defenders ended up framing the foundation of modern radical feminism. When asked if her work should be taken literally, Solanas replied, “I don’t want to kill all men, I think males should be neutered or castrated so they can’t mess up any more women’s lives.”
Content
The tone of the text is set pretty quickly as Solanas introduces the solution to society’s ails.
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.
Solanas, 1
Something I find interesting is her position that men are biological accidents, incomplete females. She states that this is why men are deficient, because a Y chromosome is an incomplete X chromosome, making maleness a ‘deficiency disease’. She elaborates on this idea of men being an incomplete female, using it as an explanation for why they are so obsessed with “screwing”. Men want to disprove any ideas of his passivity and leanings towards being a woman, ending up taking female attributes and creating his own equivalents. This reverse Freudian idea that man is jealous of women defines the rest of the text.
The last 15 pages of this Manifesto lists things men are responsible for in repressing his desire to be a female. I apologize if this is lengthy, this particular text is quite dense.
Money
Solanas details six reasons men want to maintain the money system: paid sexual company, supplying himself with delusions of usefulness, power and control over money, money as a substitute for the love they are unable to give, setting goals for himself, and providing himself with a basis for his biggest opportunity to control and manipulate –
Fatherhood
Immediately upon seeing this, I thought of her relationship with her own father. Even though she was sexually assaulted by him from a young age, Solanas kept in touch with her father throughout her life. This complicated relationship makes me wonder how much of, not only this section, but the work as a whole, was based in the trauma she experienced as a child. One of the points she makes right off the bat is that a father wants his daughter sexually, making me believe that this could be the case.
The tone she uses in this section seems very passive aggressive, referring to parents only as Mommy and Daddy, and to children as “it”. To her, fathers only tolerate their children, adhering to the idea that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. She states that fatherhood is based in and on fear. Make the son into the ideal “well-behaved heterosexual dullard”, and the daughter into a ‘Daddy’s girl’ with all of the qualities of a male – ending up with no mind of her own, accepting men as superior and respecting them just as she respects her father.
The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas Touch — everything he touches turns to shit.
Solanas, 4
Suppression of Individualism
Solanas believes that men lack mental freedom – they are all just “a bunch of conditioned reflexes”. Men never learn that they exist apart from their mothers, they exist as ‘Daddy’s girls’, craving comfort and praise from their mothers. They reduce women to Animals, but act as such themselves. If they allow women to be individuals, they will be forced to face the lack of their own individuality.
Privacy, Isolation, and Conformity
While men insists on their own privacy, they have no regard for anyone else’s. They constantly crave the company of a woman, as that is the closest they will get to becoming one. They fears their women will leave them, so they move to an isolated community where she will not be exposed to any other men. Men desire the ‘hippy’ life. The ability to return to their primitive habitat and engage in non-intellectual, individual matters.
She moves to the point here that, although men desire to be individuals, they fear being set apart from other men – and so they must conform. In doing so, they realize that being different from one man only makes them too similar to another, so, they deprive women of all of their defining characteristics so as to set those apart as ‘Woman’ from them as ‘Man’.
Authority, Philosophy, and Class/Education
She tells us here that men only created authority because they lack morals and cannot empathize with others. This trait makes their lives quite meaningless, so they invented philosophy and religion to give their lives meaning. This also gives them excuses for suppressing their urges and keeping women tied to them.
Having no sense of self worth, men created the class system as a way to garner praise and adoration by putting other men down. Higher education is reserved for higher classes, but knowledge is just a means to an end. They value ignorance above all.
The male changes only when forced to do so by technology, when he has no choice, when ‘society’ reaches the stage where he must change or die. We’re at that stage now; if women don’t get their asses in gear fast, we may very well all die.
Solanas, 8
‘Great Art’
This is a big one for her.
She believes that the male ‘artistic’ aim is not to communicate, but to craft a highly artificial world where obscurity and evasiveness are marks of depth and brilliance. They create ‘culture’ as a way to mask their inability to change, making ugly things beautiful just because they ‘said so’. To her, ‘male artist’ is an oxymoron. To be a true artist requires purpose, emotional depth, and self-confidence, all things that men lack. Men are totally sexual beings that are too focused on Hatred and Death to be proper contributing members of society and harbingers of change.
SCUM
The last part of this Manifesto is dedicated to the ultimate aims and actions of SCUM. She says that they are too impatient to wait for the thriving of future generations or the “de-brainwashing of millions of assholes”, so they will go to work in the current society. They will become unworkers, slowly chipping away at the society that men have created. There will be a Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM dedicated to assisting in the killing of men. There will also be an elite force of killers in SCUM. They are not interested in civil disturbance or protests of any kind. They will always operate on a criminal basis.
If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.
Solanas, 15
They will keep unworking and ‘fucking up’ until man’s money-work system is gone and full automation is implemented. There will be no government, as women have the morals to survive without it. The remaining men can observe women in this new world as they slowly die out.
Conclusion
I have to say, right off the bat – this reminded me way too much of Hitler to be comfortable with it. Solanas has chosen her target and employs every tactic in her arsenal to demean, degrade, and debase them. Even more, she literally says that there will be suicide centers where men can go to be quickly and painfully gassed to death. The parallels between German Nationalism/Anti-semitism and Feminism/Misandry are shocking, and it worries me slightly that people are disillusioned enough to use this as their sort of feminist ‘scripture’. Apart from that, I do have to say, the use of her knowledge of psychology in proving her points was quite was fascinating to analyze.
This text reaches to the furthest extents of radical feminism that it possibly can, and all throughout, I found myself wondering how she could have jumped from a base idea of a world made more for women, to a total extermination of men. This manifesto’s ideas and tactics of employing them feel just as dangerous as that of the Anarchist Cookbook, and I can fully understand why it is so controversial.