valerie solanas and the scum manifesto [Archive]

consuming negativity

24th November 2014, 06:30

Hello, Revleft. I've recently become a bit fascinated with the character Valerie Solanas. I say it like that because it is not just her work that interests me, or her unfortunate attempted murder of Andy Warhol, but her herself and the life and experiences that made her who she was. But this thread isn't really about that: I've been reading through the SCUM Manifesto (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/rants/scum.html), which could be described as brilliant, ridiculous, satirical, or evidence of the paranoid schizophrenia that she was later diagnosed with. But I'm not interested in judging her, I'm just interested in seeing if anybody has actually read this and hearing the opinions of someone other than Wikipedia on it. I'm not sure if I think it is satirical, and Valerie herself was quoted on the Wiki page as having said that she was being "serious" with her writing, although obviously satire is serious. But some parts of it actually straight up sound completely true. For example:

A true community consists of individuals -- not mere species members, not couples -- respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally -- free spirits in free relation to each other -- and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of `society' is the family; `hippies' say the tribe; no one says the individual.

Some parts I'm not sure about but seem at least partially true, such as:

For the kid to want Daddy's approval it must respect Daddy, and being garbage, Daddy can make sure that he is respected only by remaining aloof, by distantness, by acting on the precept of `familiarity breeds contempt', which is, of course, true, if one is contemptible. By being distant and aloof, he is able to remain unknown, mysterious, and thereby, to inspire fear (`respect').

Some parts are fucking hilarious, such as:

It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

And some parts seem obviously satirical, such as:

Although completely physical, the male is unfit even for stud service. Even assuming mechanical proficiency, which few men have, he is, first of all, incapable of zestfully, lustfully, tearing off a piece, but instead is eaten up with guilt, shame, fear and insecurity, feelings rooted in male nature, which the most enlightened training can only minimize; second, the physical feeling he attains is next to nothing; and third, he is not empathizing with his partner, but is obsessed with how he's doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good plumbing job. To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo. It's often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure.

Those are just a few random paragraphs from not-very-far-in that I've quoted. I really am not sure what to make of this, but it's very entertaining and she writes with a certain passion and genuine-ness that I like and respect.

consuming negativity

26th November 2014, 04:20

Alright, so I went and read the thread that Noa Rodman linked, and then I went and read the entire Manifesto this time, but starting from the beginning.

Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through an fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics -- emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc -- and projecting onto women all male traits -- vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female -- public relations. (He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men). The male claim that females find fulfillment through motherhood and sexuality reflects what males think they'd find fulfilling if they were female.

Women, in other words, don't have penis envy; men have pussy envy. When the male accepts his passivity, defines himself as a woman (males as well as females think men are women and women are men), and becomes a transvestite he loses his desire to screw (or to do anything else, for that matter; he fulfills himself as a drag queen) and gets his dick chopped off. He then achieves a continuous diffuse sexual feeling from `being a woman'. Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female. He is responsible for:

War: The male's normal compensation for not being female, namely, getting his Big Gun off, is grossly inadequate, as he can get it off only a very limited number of times; so he gets it off on a really massive scale, and proves to the entire world that he's a `Man'. Since he has no compassion or ability to empathize or identify, proving his manhood is worth an endless amount of mutilation and suffering and an endless number of lives, including his own -- his own life being worthless, he would rather go out in a blaze of glory than to plod grimly on for fifty more years.

...

6. Provide the basis for the male's major opportunity to control and manipulate -- fatherhood.

Fatherhood and Mental Illness (fear, cowardice, timidity, humility, insecurity, passivity): Mother wants what's best for her kids; Daddy only wants what's best for Daddy, that is peace and quiet, pandering to his delusion of dignity (`respect'), a good reflection on himself (status) and the opportunity to control and manipulate, or, if he's an `enlightened' father, to `give guidance'.

...

The effect of fatherhood on females is to make them male -- dependent, passive, domestic, animalistic, insecure, approval and security seekers, cowardly, humble, `respectful' of authorities and men, closed, not fully responsive, half-dead, trivial, dull, conventional, flattened-out and thoroughly contemptible. Daddy's Girl, always tense and fearful, uncool, unanalytical, lacking objectivity, appraises Daddy, and thereafter, other men, against a background of fear (`respect') and is not only unable to see the empty shell behind the facade, but accepts the male definition of himself as superior, as a female, and of herself, as inferior, as a male, which, thanks to Daddy, she really is.

All of the above seems to be, as TFAE commented, a play on Freud's concept of "penis envy" and other sexist concepts that I've heard before, but tilted backwards (a la satire). Women are not hysterical - men are without emotion. Women are not weak - their weakness is projected onto them by the weak men, whereas all of the "good" traits normally ascribed to men are given to women. Mothers don't make their boys "soft" by babying them - au contraire, it is the men here who "turn everything to shit" when they touch it, in this case reversed but for the male parent and female child.

2. Supply the non-relating male with the delusion of usefulness, and enable him to try to justify his existence by digging holes and then filling them up. 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 time, she does the same thing as before, but she takes it even further: all activities, stereotypically male or female, are ascribed to what women would like to do. In other words, she's saying that women are human but do not have the ability to be human. Why? They're too busy doing housework; in her own words, "to spending many hours of their days doing boring, stultifying, non-creative work for someone else, functioning as less than animals, as machines". And then she goes on to say that what will liberate women from what appears to me to be Karl Marx's concepts of alienation and commodification is the same thing Marx said -- socialism -- but with the caveat that men are excluded. Why? Because what she's recognizing here is that the "traditional" role of women in capitalism - their unpaid household labor - is considered completely separate from the waged labor of the men even though it is the same thing but without even being entitled to the wages. I came across this concept recently too in another book I was reading by Silvia Federici in which she argues the same exact point, so this really stood out to me as pretty fucking brilliant if I'm honest, considering Silvia is writing decades in the future and with a Ph.D and over 30 years of research on the subject, and our author here has been completely written off as an "extreme feminist" with mental illness.

Conformity: Although he wants to be an individual, the male is scared of anything in himself that is the slightest bit different from other men, it causes him to suspect that he's not really a `Man', that he's passive and totally sexual, a highly upsetting suspicion. If other men are "A" and he's not, he must not be a man; he must be a fag. So he tries to affirm his `Manhood' by being like all the other men. Differentness in other men, as well as himself, threatens him; it means they're fags whom he must at all costs avoid, so he tries to make sure that all other men conform.

The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the drag queen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all the other drag queens like the functionalist, he has an identity -- he is female. He tries to define all his troubles away -- but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he's a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.

To be sure he's a `Man', the male must see to it that the female be clearly a `Woman', the opposite of a `Man', that is, the female must act like a faggot. And Daddy's Girl, all of whose female instincts were wrenched out of her when little, easily and obligingly adapts herself to the role.

This seems like a direct assault on homophobia, which seems sort of ridiculous when you consider that she uses the word "faggot" in it, but what she's doing is using the language that we actually still use decades later. When a man acts effeminate, he is accused of homosexuality which is simultaneously making him "less of a man" because he is effeminate, he is homosexual, or both. She is attacking our fucked up masculinity and our degredation of male homosexuality in one swoop, really, and she pretty much hits the nail on the head in regard to how society tries to deprive these men of their gender either for actually being homosexuals or simply for being anything that is not in the "man box" that is exactly like every other man who does "manly" things all the time.

Authority and Government: Having no sense of right and wrong, no conscience, which can only stem from having an ability to empathize with others... having no faith in his non-existent self, being unnecessarily competitive, and by nature, unable to co-operate, the male feels a need for external guidance and control. So he created authorities -- priests, experts, bosses, leaders, etc -- and government. Wanting the female (Mama) to guide him, but unable to accept this fact (he is, after all, a MAN), wanting to play Woman, to usurp her function as Guider and Protector, he sees to it that all authorities are male.

There's no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other, complete and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws or leaders.

This sounds like something straight out of an anarchist text...

Competition, Prestige, Status, Formal Education, Ignorance and Social and Economic Classes: Having an obsessive desire to be admired by women, but no intrinsic worth, the make constructs a highly artificial society enabling him to appropriate the appearance of worth through money, prestige, `high' social class, degrees, professional position and knowledge and, by pushing as many other men as possible down professionally, socially, economically, and educationally.

...and this sounds like it is nearly straight out of a sociology textbook.

The conflict, therefore, is not between females and males, but between SCUM -- dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to rule the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of this `society' and are ready to wheel on to something far beyond what it has to offer -- and nice, passive, accepting `cultivated', polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy's Girls, who can't cope with the unknown, who want to hang back with the apes, who feel secure only with Big Daddy standing by, with a big strong man to lean on and with a fat, hairy face in the White House, who are too cowardly to face up to the hideous reality of what a man is, what Daddy is, who have cast their lot with the swine, who have adapted themselves to animalism, feel superficially comfortable with it and know no other way of `life', who have reduced their minds, thoughts and sights to the male level, who, lacking sense, imagination and wit can have value only in a male `society', who can have a place in the sun, or, rather, in the slime, only as soothers, ego boosters, relaxers and breeders, who are dismissed as inconsequents by other females, who project their deficiencies, their maleness, onto all females and see the female as worm.

Now this. This is the golden nugget right here. If you read this and see anything other than a direct flip of our current stereotypes and "gender roles", etc. then I'm not sure what would convince you. First and foremost, she calls the women on her side SCUM and then describes them using all of the bad traits that we ascribe to "too much" of the masculine traits... violence, selfishness, arrogance... right along with the better traits. She is describing traits ascribed to men, in other words. But then look at how she describes the "daddy's girls" who are influenced by men... "cultivated, polite, scared, insecure, approval-seeking"... these are the traits stereotypically-ascribed to women. Again. She's done this twice now. And she goes on describe "daddy's girls" as "[only able to] have a place in the sun, or rather, in the slime, only as soothers, ego boosters, relaxers, and breeders, who are dismissed as inconsequents by other females". Which, to me, is exactly the treatment that women are supposed to receive/do receive from "traditional" men - they are seen as inconsequential and suitable for raising children, boosting the ego, and clearing the mind with sex after work. It's a direct fucking translation.

And then she goes on to sort of intellectually march to victory, describing revolutionary tactics to overthrow society and implement a society that sounds a lot like a technological communism. The "man" becomes a metaphor for the reactionary, whereas the "woman" takes on the status of the revolutionary, installing voting machines in every home for direct democracy, working together as a globe after destroying the reactionaries to build a better future, and allowing the survivors to live out the rest of their days watching the "high-powered female" run around and wishing for the days in which they could "impose themselves [on anything but] doormats". "Men who are rational, however, won't kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise."