Maris Tiller
FSEM – Forbidden Texts
10/06/2021
The S.C.U.M. Manifesto is a piece of radical feminist literature by Valerie Solanas about how the only true way for women to be liberated is to kill all men and breed them out of existence. Solanas constantly talks about the uselessness of men and how women would be better off without them. It is a very violent text. There is little academic language and more of a focus on Solonas’ righteous anger at the way things are.
What struck me as I read this book was how binary Solonas’ view of gender was. Obviously the conversation around gender has evolved since 1967, but the fact that Solonas’ was unwilling to include anyone in the movement that she deemed “men”, including transwomen, which to me comes off as much more conservative than radical, at least by today’s standards. The restrictive nature of her views on what constitutes a man and what constitutes a woman (she never ventures in between, naturally) hampers her ideas for me. Also the fact that she wants to kill all men, and I’m not exactly on board with that whole thing.
I also read this text as somewhat a response to Freud’s ideas of women and feminity. The line that struck me in particular was, “Women don’t have penis envy, men have pussy envy.” which is more of a direct reference to Freud’s idea of penis envy. In that way perhaps the text could be read as a satire: taking Freud’s ideas and flipping them on their head to minimize men rather than women. Of course, I do think Solanas believes what she is saying, considering she attempted two assassinations after this book’s publication. The text could simply be taken as a parody, the ravings of a madwoman, or a dead serious manifesto. I want to say it’s a mixture of all three, but they contradict each other too much for me to do so.