No genuine social revolution can be accomplished by the male, as the male on top wants the same status quo, and all the male on the bottom wants is to be the male on top.
- SCUM Manifesto
A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.
- SCUM Manifesto
When Valerie Solanas rode up the elevator to The Factory to shoot Andy Warhol in the chest she never intended the act to be associated with her angry and transgressive text, SCUM Manifesto. Her publisher (and original target, who was not in his office), Maurice Girodias, released a new version of SCUM after her arrest, with a newspaper clipping of the shooting on the back cover. SCUM has been read by generations of feminists with amusement, admiration, identification, and horror. Her misandrist text has often been dismissed as the ranting of a madwoman, the assumption being that because Solanas lived with a mental illness, the extreme language and ideas of the manifesto are a result of that illness, rather than a deliberate exercise in parody, humour and argument.
SCUM Manifesto is smouldering with rage. It is impossible to know the exact meaning of the text because it veers from concise analysis of the patriarchal system and how to overthrow it to extreme and biting satire, often in the same paragraph, even the same sentence. The text opens with, “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.”
Solanas’ shooting of Andy Warhol has meant many have interpreted “destroy the male sex” literally. I think there are clues in the text and in Solanas’ statements elsewhere that “destroy” means to dismantle male privilege, to annihilate contemporary notions of what a man is. SCUM says that “maleness is a deficiency disease” and man is “a machine, a walking dildo.” Men have “pussy envy” – he has transferred his weaknesses onto women and while he oppresses others, his existence is one of self hatred. “Every man, deep down, knows he’s a worthless piece of shit.”
It has long been believed that SCUM stands for Society for Cutting Up Men, however, Solanas refuted this in a never published 1975 interview with Jane Caputi. According to Caputi, Solanas declared that the acronym was made up by her publisher, Girodias. A couple of years later Solanas said, “It’s just a literary device. There’s no organisation called SCUM… I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who think a certain way are in SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in the men’s auxiliary of SCUM.”
Part of the thrill of reading SCUM is that one can never know for sure if Valerie was being literal – this gives the text an energy, a charge – and power. This, coming from a woman with little power. She grew up Catholic, working class, was sexually abused by her father, and put herself through college with prostitution. In 1950s USA she was an open lesbian and had a mental illness. She was off centre, never belonging, intense and wickedly funny. Her humour meant taking an idea as far as it would go. In her dystopia masquerading as a utopia, after the men not in the auxiliary are dead, she writes, “it doesn’t follow that because the male, like disease, has always existed among us that he should continue to exist.” In fact, she asks why we should reproduce females, either. “Eventually the natural course of events, of social evolution, will lead to total female control of the world and, subsequently, to the cessation of the production of males and, ultimately, to the cessation of the production of females.”
Men have little understanding of how funny SCUM Manifesto is to radicalised womyn. Womyn, who have been told all their lives that they, not being men, are not fully humyn; womyn, who have been objectified, sexualised in non sexual situations, whether through advertising, the male gaze, the male assumption of womyn’s sexual availability to them by virtue of their possession of a penis; womyn, who have been made to feel like shit and to eat it, read: “SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: “I am a turd, a lowly abject turd,” and then proceed to list all the ways in which he is,” – and they laugh. Men hate womyn’s laughter because it undermines male power. Womyn’s laughter slices through the illusion of men being better than womyn; womyn’s laughter is cutting.
SCUM Manifesto refuses to shield men from womyn’s laughter, to soothe hurt feelings. Solanas reveals the contempt womyn feel for men, the frustration, the anger, the rage. Womyn, away from men, reveal their love for SCUM Manifesto, the thrill of reading that men are “an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage,” that is, the Y chromosome is an incomplete X chromosome, and men “are a biological accident.” The delight at secret, abandoned thoughts revealed on the printed page and the feeling of strength it stirs means that SCUM is a gift to every womyn creating a liberated world. Solanas reminds us, too, that a womyn “knows instinctively that the only wrong is to hurt others, and that the meaning of life is love.”
The real agenda of SCUM is a world of “conversation, friendship and love.” Solanas wrote: “Even amongst groovy females deep friendships seldom occur in adulthood, as almost all of them are either tied up with men in order to survive economically, or bogged down in hacking their way through the jungle and in trying to keep their heads about the amorphous mass. Love can’t flourish in a society based upon money and meaningless work: it requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship. Our “society” provides practically no opportunity to engage in such activities.”
Solanas was a forerunner of womyn’s criticisms of reformist or liberal feminism: “What will liberate women… from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it.” She despised hippy chic: “Dropping out is not the answer; fucking up is. Most women are already dropped out; they were never in.”
After college, Valerie Solanas moved to New York, selling her body and panhandling to save up for a room every now and again in which to write. When she couldn’t afford a room she slept on rooftops with her secondhand typewriter. In 1965, before SCUM Manifesto, Solanas wrote Up Your Ass, a play she hoped Andy Warhol would film. The protagonist of Up Your Ass is the queer prostitute Bongi Perez, who declares, “I’m so female, I’m subversive.” This political satire foreshadows the extreme style of SCUM Manifesto. In one scene of the play, shit is served at a dinner party, with a wife commenting, “everyone knows men have so much more respect for women who are good at eating up shit.”
Solanas gave the manuscript to Andy Warhol, who patronisingly commented, “You typed this yourself? Why don’t you work for us as a receptionist?” He then lost only one of two copies of the play. Solanas didn’t believe him. She thought he’d stolen her manuscript.
Her paranoia was directed at her publisher too – she feared he owned all her writing. On June 4th in 1968, she walked the streets of New York with her .32 in a paper bag. She couldn’t find Girodias so she went to The Factory, the walls covered in the silver linings of cigarette boxes. She shot Andy Warhol, then another man, a critic, who was also in the room. She considered shooting a third man who was present, but got on the elevator instead. She turned herself in to the police, telling them she shot Warhol because he had “too much control of my life.” She told the judge, “It’s not often that I shoot somebody. I didn’t do it for nothing. Warhol had me tied up, lock, stock, and barrel. He was going to do something to me which would have ruined me.” She received a three year sentence. Andy Warhol refused to testify against her.
The rest of Solanas’ life was spent sleeping on park benches, prostituting herself in a silver lamé dress, occasionally renting a room, or staying in psychiatric wards. Her mental illness worsened and she couldn’t write without medication. She couldn’t write with medication, either, because of its mind deadening effects.
Valerie Solanas was somehow managing to write in the months before she died in 1988 of bronchopneumonia. On April 25th her body was discovered. It was covered in maggots.
Her mother destroyed Solanas’ personal items, including her writing. After both she and Warhol were dead (she survived him by a year) the manuscript of Up Your Ass was discovered at The Factory, in a box, shoved under some film lighting equipment. For a number of years the play was displayed in a glass case in the Warhol Museum. In 2001 Up Your Ass was performed for the first time, 36 years after it was written. A line from the play reads, “I’ve tried relating to emptiness but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t relate back.” Valerie Solanas was always trying to relate, to connect, and SCUM Manifesto, across time and space, connects us with a remarkable woman. We carry on the conversation, the friendship, the love.
Copyright 2006 Jaki Leigh
No comments:
Post a Comment