SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
Help, I'm reading deranged feminist theory again!!!
Hi y’all—
Very short email1 for y’all today, coming straight from cloudy California! I’m here to hang out with my family, but right now I’m staying with my erstwhile roommates, Mathilde and Tyler, in Manhattan Beach. Not gonna lie y’all, I know I’m on the record as hating the West Coast, but living life at 70 degrees with a giant backyard ten minutes from the beach is pretty sweet. Like, not sweet enough for me to fall victim to the New York City-to-Los Angeles pipeline, but enough that must admit that I’ve been unjustly critical of California.
I don’t think I could ever live here though. As much as I love to LARP as a sorority bitch, I’m not cool enough for California, and my recent reading list—made up almost entirely of deranged feminist literature and theory—is proof enough of that.
It’s funny writing about books like Blood and Guts in High School and SCUM Manifesto here on Book Notes, where I’m otherwise, like, plodding along like a good little Instagram Influencer, thinking about my follower count, glumly admitting to myself that the posts that get the most “likes” usually include a picture of me or another hot gal pall. The authors I’m reading would be disgusted by all this self-surveillance, by the way I’ve turned my favorite things to do (reading and writing) into some sort of weird marketing exercise. Idk, it’s lame and kinda embarrassing, and moving to Substack isn’t really abating that feeling, so much as displacing it.
Whatever, enough bitching and moaning. If I really wanted to be offline, I would be. And Solanas actually predicted social media decades before it occurred, but conceived of it as a liberating mechanism …though it’s pretty hard to come up with a decent argument for Instagram’s revolutionary potential now (check out your automatic sensitive content control if you think otherwise lol).
Perfect time for a Subscribe button, am I right?
Anyway, feminist writing has been pretty joyless, toothless, and boring for the last few years (with a few notable exceptions!), so reading a the writing of a bunch of transgressive weirdos from the 60s and 70s has been a total blast. Like, I don’t agree with them at all politically, but I admire the devastating urgency, fearlessness, and confidence of the writing. These women don’t pull punches. Naturally, I had to round this foray off with Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto.
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.
The first sentence of SCUM Manifesto could definitely be used to teach high schoolers about “thesis statements.”
When I bought Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, the bookseller ringing me up laughed. “Acker?” he said, glancing at the cover. “She’s wild. Not as wild as Valerie Solanas though.” I knew the outline of Solanas’ life and work from reading Andrea Long Chu’s Females, which draws inspiration from Solanas’ play Up Your Ass. The bookseller’s statement sounded like a challenge, and two weeks later, here I am.
Solanas was a writer and radical feminist, best known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 (he lived). SCUM is Solanas’s “Society for the Cutting Up of Men.” The name pretty aptly describes the the conclusion of the manifesto—men are pathetic, uninteresting, and lower life forms who prevent women from reaching their full potential, and it’s okay to kill ‘em. But ladies, the good news is we don’t need to: if we just overthrow capitalism, men will be reduced to nothing and forced to leave women alone, allowing us time to train as scientists, cure all disease and aging, live forever, and reproduce girl children asexually—thus allowing men to die out naturally, rather than dealing with war (which is for men). After all, the real enemy to fear is the only one capable of true bravery, strength, and intelligence: other women. Specifically those women who cater to men.
SCUM Manifesto is angry, vibrant, and violent. It’s also funny, but it’s hard for me to locate why—is it funny because it’s absurd, because it’s true, or because it’s vicious? I would say more or less, it’s all of the above. Or maybe I’m just laughing because I’ve never seen the word “groovy” used earnestly so many times in a text. But there’s a joyful quality to SCUM, which I know sounds strange. For every long, hyperbolic passage calling men stupid worms, there’s an equally long, hyperbolic passage extolling the valor of women. These sections about women are tender, but not soft—after all, Solanas values “arrogant, out-going, proud, tough-minded” women.
The back bone of Solano’s manifesto is the idea that men naturally have all the traits that are traditionally assigned to women, and vise-versa. Men are ultimately passive, vain, trivial, weak, and controlled by sex, “completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify.” Women meanwhile, have “emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc.” Men want to be women, so they pretend to embody female characteristics, while also forcing women to embody male characteristics.
The female's individuality, which he is acutely aware of, but which he doesn't comprehend and isn't capable of relating to or grasping emotionally, frightens and upsets him and fills him with envy. So he denies it in her and proceeds to define everyone in terms of his or her function or use, assigning to himself, of course, the most important functions - doctor, president, scientist - therefore providing himself with an identity, if not individuality, and tries to convince himself and women (he's succeeded best at convincing women) that the female function is to bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego if the male; that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.
No one would publish this manifesto when she wrote it in the 60’s, so Solanas self-published and distributed it. By most accounts, Solanas was a total loner, exile, weirdo. She often resorted to prostitution and begging. After shooting Warhol, she spent three years in a psychiatric hospital, and after she left, was often homeless.
And yet, despite her outsider status, her manifesto is based entirely around her conviction that women are the only people who can create and enjoy true community, belonging, and love. I find this perversely charming, and a little sad: in the three essays I read about Solanas over the past few days, the only other woman mentioned was her mother.
Three quick quotes before I sign off:
ONE.
As I mentioned, Solanas pretty accurately predicts social media:
The few remaining men can exist out their puny days dropped out on drugs or strutting around in drag or passively watching the high-powered females in action, fulfilling themselves as spectators… It will be electronically possible for men to tune into any specific female they want to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this, as it won’t hurt them in the slightest and it is a marvelously kind and humane way to treat their unfortunate, handicapped fellow beings.
Doesn’t this sound like a fairly typical description of incels, simps, and other porn-addled internet addicts? Women are already letting men watch our every move—on Instagram, on OnlyFans, on Twitter—but unlike in Solanas’ feminist utopia, it isn’t from the kindest of our hearts. It’s for money and personal marketing—the two things that Solanas says get in the way of female empowerment.
TWO.
Every man, deep down, knows he’s a worthless piece of shit. Overwhelmed by a sense of animalism and deeply ashamed of it; wanting, not to express himself, but to hide from others his total physicality, total egocentricity, the hate and contempt he feels for other men, and to hide from himself the heat and contempt he suspects other men feel for him; having a crudely constructed nervous system that is easily upset by the least display of emotion or feeling, the male tries to enforce a “social” code that ensures perfect blandness, unsullied by the slightest trace or feeling or upsetting opinion.
This reminded me of the beginning of Flight Club, and every other hyper-masculine fantasy about dudes ditching their office jobs in the 90s.
THREE.
Leisure time horrifies the male, who will have nothing to do but contemplate his grotesque self. Unable to relate or to love, the male must work. Females crave absorbing, emotionally satisfying, meaningful activity, but lacking the opportunity or ability for this, they prefer to idle and waste away their time in ways of their own choosing sleeping, shopping, bowling, shooting pool, playing cards and other games, breeding, reading, walking around, daydreaming, eating, playing with themselves, popping pills, going to the movies, getting analyzed, traveling, raising dogs and cats, lolling about on the beach, swimming, watching TV, listening to music, decorating their houses, gardening, sewing, nightclubbing, dancing, visiting, “improving their minds” (taking courses), and absorbing “culture” (lectures, plays, concerts, “arty” movies). Therefore, many females would, even assuming complete economic equality between the sexes, prefer living with males or peddling their asses on the street, thus having most of their time for themselves, to spending many hours of their days doing boring, stultifying, non-creative work for someone else, functioning as less than animals, as machines, or, at best—if able to get a “good” job—co-managing the shitpile. What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.
This made me laugh—but it’s also a really nice example of the joy in SCUM. That list of what women enjoy doing is so evocative, syntactically fun to read aloud, and absolutely accurate. For a text that really is only interested in the gender binary, I like how Solanas folds in traditionally masculine pastimes with feminine, as well as activities from both “high” and “low” culture. If only we could get rid of the money-work system! I’ll keep men though.
My friends (and parents) prolly think I’ve really gone off a cliff with my recent reading, and like, maybe. I was talking to Mathilde about the text, asking if she thought I needed to add any disclaimers, like, “I don’t believe you should cut up, shoot, or otherwise maim men” or “Men can obviously feel empathy too” or whatever—and I felt stupid even saying it aloud. It doesn’t need to be said. Especially since I fall more in line with the type of woman who Solanas disparagingly calls a “Daddy’s Girl” :
Trained from an early childhood in niceness, politeness and “dignity,” in pandering to the male need to disguise his animalism, she obligingly reduces her own “conversation” to small talk, a bland, insipid avoidance of any topic beyond the utterly trivial—or is “educated,” to “intellectual” discussion, that is, impersonal discoursing on irrelevant distractions—the Gross National Product, the Common Market, the influence of Rimbaud on symbolist painting. So adept at pandering that it eventually becomes second nature and she continues to pander to men even when in the company of females only.
Apart from pandering, her “conversation” is further limited by her insecurity about expressing deviant, original opinions and the self-absorption based on insecurity and that prevents her conversation from being charming. Niceness, politeness, “dignity,” insecurity and self-absorption are hardly conducive to intensity and wit, qualities a conversation must have to be worthy of the name. Such conversation is hardly rampant, as only completely self-confident, arrogant, outgoing, proud, tough-minded females are capable of intense, bitchy, witty conversation.
Ooof. I’m not ashamed: like most of us are Tiqqun’s “Young Girl,” we’re also probably all Solanas’ “Daddy’s Girls” as well.2
So while many of her ideas are indefensible, I don’t want to disavow someone like Solanas. Protesting and protecting myself—by saying, “But I don’t hate men,” by adding an asterisk to every quote or idea, by not taking her work seriously, by taking it too seriously—is an insult to the intelligence of everyone involved. SCUM is extreme, transgressive, offensive, violent. It doesn’t just punch up either. Solanas has some pretty nasty things to say about gay men, drag queens, and trans-women, which Andrea Long Chu interrogates and revises in Females in a really tender and moving way. Solanas will never be a feminist role model (…she shot and stalked Andy Warhol…), but nor would she want to be under current capitalist, patriarchal conditions. She described the feminist movement of her contemporaries as a “civil disobedience luncheon club.” She would be equally dismissive of the feminist movement today. After all:
SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it.
Read SCUM if you’re interested in outcasts and deranged feminists, if you care about what’s being written at the margins of society, and if you’re willing to engage with ideas you disagree with.
Here’s an affiliate link to purchase SCUM Manifesto, I’ll make a small commission if you use my link, and Solanas will roll over in her grave (her idea of “un-working” probably means I should disrupt the capitalist system by sending you SCUM as a pdf). All the other books I’ve reviewed and mentioned in this review can be found here.
I wish I could say that next I’ll be reviewing something lighthearted, but I just finished Nico Walker’s Cherry and I loved it. Which like, actually—that’s how I should have proved I don’t hate men. It’s the most stereotypically masculine book I’ve read in a long time. I should have said I love Cherry at the top of this review!
Let me know if you think I should go back to reading sci-fi romances by commenting:
ILY!!!
Book Notes
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This obviously ended up being, uh, not “very” short.
Okay, even though Solanas’ “Daddy’s Girl” and Tiqqun’s “Young Girl” are similar, Solanas would totally object to a lot of Tiqqun, and I sort of think SCUM is the “perfect” antidote to the Young Girl—not because SCUM is at all a cohesive or sensible or morally/ethically sound manifesto, but in it’s spirit and voice and complete outsider address to capitalism, SCUM both compliments and really tears down a lot of Tiqqun’s thesis.