SCUM Manifesto
TLDR: “Only valuable as a look into the mind of a very disturbed person”
This is a short manifesto from the late 60s in which the (female) author proposes killing or sterilizing every male human in the world, because men are the source of everything bad.
…that’s it. That’s the point.
Historically, the biggest debate about the book seems to be whether or not the author intended it as a joke, or was serious.
Honestly, I think it’s a mixture of both. The author was quite clearly mentally ill, as a biography at the end indicates.
Her biggest claim to fame was trying to murder Andy Warhol. She had given him a script for a play she wanted him to produce. He claims to have lost the script, but she seemed convinced he was trying to steal it. She shot at him three times, hitting him once, and injured someone else in his studio in 1968. After some debate about her sanity, she was convicted, and went to prison for two years.
After she was released, she continued harassing Warhol. It seems he demands got more and more demented later in life, as she struggled with addiction. She died in the late 80s.
This “book” is her most notable publication. In it, she rails against men – she hates them, claims they are utterly worthless, and that they all really want to be women. “SCUM” stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men,” and it’s fitting, because she outright promotes murdering all the men in the world, at one point.
It’s pretty unhinged. A sample:
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.
That’s pretty representative. Solanas desires for all fetuses to be conceived in-vitro, and for women to be artificially inseminated. I supposed with a sufficient supply of frozen sperm, the human race could survive with just women?
The introduction is from Michelle Tea, and it’s quite visceral. She doesn’t promote murdering men, but she’s clearly had her fill of them too, and she sees a side of Solanas that’s not apparent from the main text.
After the manifesto itself – which runs maybe 50 short pages – there’s a few pages of biography of Solanas, which is quite sad. She had a very hard life, and was clearly suffering from some type of psychosis.
I can’t remember why I ordered this (the entire text is available for free online (PDF)), but I’m glad I read it. I agree with virtually nothing and cannot relate to the author even slightly, but it’s a different perspective, and those are never unhelpful.
Postscript
Added on
In an unrelated article, a writer described Valarie Solanas’s life and death:
I thought Valerie’s was the worst, because Valerie’s life was the hardest. She had periods of lucidity and charm before she shot Warhol, but imprisonment and a long stay in the famously abusive Matteawan mental hospital ended that. She became convinced that the government was tracking her through a chip implanted in her uterus. (Matteawan was known for performing involuntary sterilizations on patients, so she may have been reacting to a real surgery.) She alienated all the feminists who tried to take her side, spitting on them and screaming at them and, at one point, threatening to shoot a woman who wouldn’t let her stay rent-free in her house.
Valerie wound up in a run-down hotel, patronized mostly by drug addicts; it was a step up from living on the street, which she also did for much of her life, but it wasn’t good. She went into her room and did not come out, and eventually, management realized her bills hadn’t been paid, and went looking for her. She was kneeling by the side of her bed, where she had fallen, the lower half of her body eaten by maggots.
Book Info
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A softcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.