Death to the Turds!

 “SCUM Manifesto” by Valerie Solanas (1967); Forward by Michelle Tea; Afterword by Freddie Bauer (2013)

This milestone of anarcho-feminism, performance writing, anger and humor has been a steady seller for years.  It is a reflection of a brutalized life of a woman who was subjected to sexual and physical abuse by fathers and step-fathers and left Catholic school at 15.  She lived on the streets, became a prostitute, a lesbian and an asexual, got rejected by Andy Warhol, was incarcerated, spent time in several mental institutions and eventually died of drug addiction complications.  At one point she had attended the University of Minnesota, doing graduate work in psychology!  Some have compared the Manifesto to Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal” for its over-the-top suggestions about how to rein in male chauvinism and men themselves.

First It was a Handout

SCUM stands for 'Society for Cutting Up Men.'  It's not a real organization of course, just a state of mind.  She claimed it wasn’t her, though she attempted to kill 3 men with her semi-auto .32, including Warhol, basically over a contract dispute.  At the time she was a minor cultural celebrity in New York’s Greenwich Village – being interviewed in the Village Voice, by a local TV Talk show, given money by a publisher for her writing, penning several porn novels, performing in two Warhol films and demanding money for a script she wrote, ‘Up Your Ass,’ from Warhol.  He had lost the script and there was no other copy.  Eventually after getting out of prison after the shootings, she demanded $20K and more movie roles from Warhol, and for him to get her on Johnny Carson.  Essentially she was a failed cultural careerist, an attention-seeking individual with a unique niche she tried to exploit.  I say this to put the material foundation of her life in perspective.

You might call her a lumpen-feminist, an extreme lesbian-feminist, but she also had an anarchist side.  She called for an end to the money-work economy, full and instant automation to free women, an end to censorship, multiple work sabotage strategies, the overthrow of the government and a ‘women’s strike’ of sorts separating them from men, as men have turned the world into a ‘shitpile.’  SCUM had a criminal outlook, not a civil disobedience outlook according to her. She especially disliked men who were in advertising, the military, corporate CEOs, ‘great’ artists, politicians, religious leaders, landlords, psychologists and so on.  The ‘feminist’ side of Solanas advocated a ‘SCUM Auxiliary’ for men who agreed with SCUM and would grovel at women’s feet.  She said that suicide centers would be established for men to kill themselves.  She advocated individual terror – to “kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM,” using stealth and silent murder.  Remaining men after the purge would become slaves to women. Later artificial sperm banks would replace men, and only women would be born from then on, while babies and death would also eventually be abolished.    

In the SCUM Manifesto, men were boring, half-dead, sex-crazed incomplete females with ‘pussy envy.’ Yet if you think she liked women, think again.  Against the SCUM women who were “dominant, secure. self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females” who were ‘cool’ and ‘groovy’ were the “Daddy’s Girls” – de-brained female assholes who were passive and insecure.  Her words, not mine.  She hated most women too. 

As is clear, every radical progressive movement also expresses morbid symptoms.  Solanas reflects in her fun-house mirror the women’s strike against war in the play Lysistrata; the right of women’s self-defense against rapists and killers; reversing Freud’s absurd idea of penis envy; anti-capitalism and women’s abused and exploited role in societies across the world.  She even parodied AA sessions.  Instead of saying, “I’m Dave and I’m an alcoholic” she would have self-criticism sessions saying “I’m a man and I am a turd.”  

Yet the real impact of this Manifesto is sadness for almost any reader. You can kinda laugh at the dark humor, but ultimately it’s more a reflection on what sexual abuse and violent trauma can do to a person, especially a young woman.  Certainly in the 1960s male chauvinism was legally well insulated and protected by capitalist society, yet the 1950s ‘male head of household’ ideology was beginning to crumble too. This Manifesto is a weird reflection of that period.

Prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Marxism and Women’s Liberation,” “Feminists and Feminists,” “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Mistaken Identity,” “Really? Rape? Still?” “Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai," “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” and “Red Valkyries” (both by Ghodsee); “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”  “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “Without Apology,” "Patriarchy of the Wage" (Federici), “FGM.” 

 And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 4, 2024