The Society For Cutting Up Men

I'm not sure what to make of the SCUM Manifesto, a notorious pseudo-feminist tract by Valerie Solanas, the "crazed lesbian" who tried to kill pop artist Andy Warhol. First published in 1968, it has been republished many times since, and is also available free on-line.

Personally, I suspect the Manifesto is intended as parody. After all, it reverses all traditional patriarchal arguments against women, turning them against men instead: men are "incomplete women", they are "emotional cripples" suffering from constant neuroses, they are jealous of female genitalia (compare Freud's patriarchal theory that women are jealous of male genitalia), etc. She claims that men are closer to nature than women, being nothing else than apes in costume - a reversal of the argument that women are closer to nature. The Manifesto also seems to parody the mad, male scientist by proposing genetic engineering to get rid of all men.

Solanas constantly claims that men aren't manly enough, that they really want to cling to Mama and her big breasts and that all men secretly want to become transvestites. Did she really believe this? It sounds like deliberately provocative statements, intended to provoke the insecure macho into a frenzy. In other words, Solanas was trolling!

The SCUM Manifesto also contain quite entertaining attacks on hippies and more rambling criticisms of modern art, pop music, advertising and other phenomena not to the author's liking.

The Manifesto becomes less humorous when it calls for terrorist attacks on men, while also arguing that a Men's Auxillary should be set up for men who support the cause of feminism (an unexpected turn in a misandrist document).

Apparently, Valerie Solanas said in an interview nine years after the publication of her manifesto that the whole thing was intended as satire to generate debate. In the event, it mostly generated heat, since Solanas attempted to murder Andy Warhol and a few other people shortly after publishing the tract. She is believed to have had serious mental problems. This has led many people to believe that she intended the SCUM Manifesto quite seriously. After all, SCUM is widely believed to be an acronym for "Society for Cutting Up Men".

Regardless of why Valerie Solanas wrote her pamphlet, one sure wonders why it has become an icon of both modern art, radical feminism and anti-feminism?

Satire or not, had the women's liberation movement been stronger in the United States, the SCUM Manifesto would have been sidelined to the margins pretty quickly. After all, it's not *really* a good text (despite the attacks on the hippies), but a rambling and incoherent piece, filled with sexually explicit language and swearwords.

Perhaps its best approached as...pop art.