Scum Manifesto

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The focus of this edition is not on the nostalgic appeal of SCUM. Rather, in a characteristically brilliant and erudite introduction, renowned scholar Avita Ronell reconsiders Solanas's infamous text in light of the social milieu in which it was written, and reinterprets its status as a cult classic. Jill Godmilow, Joanna Krakowska and Magda Mosiewicz pay homage to the original SCUM Manifesto, a French film made in 1976 by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig that was inspired by Valerie Solanas's infamous text of the same name.

The apply, with the following changes in this subreddit:.direct responses to the OP (, that answer directly to the OP and not to another comment) should always be given by feminists and must reflect a feminist perspective.all comments are open to challenge/debate, regardless of who initiates the challenge, or their ideological orientation.Related subreddits:Please direct meta-discussions regarding this subreddit to. Let me just start off by saying: long time feminist, big fan.I got into an argument with a friend of mine over. The last time I read it was about 10 years ago and after reading it again my opinion hasn't changed much.Her argument was that the text contains a lot of under-the-surface observations of how male dominated culture will take traits it finds inferior and label them as feminine. I think that's a valuable and true observation (throw like a girl).

Most directly, as far as I can find, it's stated in SCUM Manifesto as:'The male needs scapegoats onto whom he can project his failings and inadequacies and upon whom he can vent his frustration at not being female. And the vicarious discriminations have the practical advantage of substantially increasing the pussy pool available to the men on top.' For comparison, here's Andrea Dworkin stating something similar, 'The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.' But, SCUM Mainfesto also contains passages like:'Love is not dependency or sex, but friendship, and therefore, love can't exist between two males, between a male and a female, or between two females, one or both of whom is a mindless, insecure, pandering male.' Virtual city playground pc.

'Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male 'culture', in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our 'society' are raving sex maniacs.' And later'Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men.

The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.' 'But SCUM is too impatient to wait for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes. Miles and km conversion calculator. Why should the swinging females continue to plod dismally along with the dull male ones? Why should the fates of the groovy and the creepy be intertwined? Why should the active and imaginative consult the passive and dull on social policy? Why should the independent be confined to the sewer along with the dependent who need Daddy to cling to? A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder:'You can hardly get through a paragraph without running into something similar.I don't know how to reckon that.I understand that there's some insight wrapped up in there, but isn't 'insight wrapped in hard talk' the same argument that Red Pill apologists make about their biotruths?

Isn't Paul Elam the guy that's championing over the top generalizations as a legitimate strategy? Or am I missing something?Solanas apparently claimed, on more than one occasion, that she was.I think that the SCUM manifesto may have value as a historical document, but I find it intensely problematic and I don't understand why my friend believes it to be '.quite frankly, the most riveting, prescient description of how men oppress women (in the 20th century)' not trying to strawman there, that's just literally what she wrote to me.lil help?. I don't think it's a very valuable work. It speaks to the media's priorities that this manifesto is considered a 'feminist work' worthy of consideration, but, for example, Industrial Society and its Future by the Unabomber is never republished because considered to be the ramblings of a mentally ill murderer. Both Ted Kaczynski and Valerie Solanas are mentally ill murderers; it's a ridiculous strawman to hold up the SCUM Manifesto and call it feminism, just as it is to hold up Kaczynski's essay and call it libertarianism. I find this question as odd as someone asking if there is 'some value' in Mein Kampf.

I really wouldn't know if Hitler had any good points in there or not about some historical geopolitical matter, but the whole blantant racism and antisemitism makes me disinclined to view the work with any amount of approbation. If Mein Kampf is to be studied, it's to be studied for the context, not the content.There is of course a nonignorable difference between Mein Kampf and SCUM, of course.Hitler was speaking for the power majority and could (and did) use his rhetoric to commit huge atrocities against entire groups of people. Solanas was, of course, not in a position to do this.she had an extremely fringe philosophy as a member of the lower sex.But.but.It makes no difference to those who oppose feminism, or are on the fence.She said point blank that men are genetically inferior, and men are entirely responsible for all the ills in society, as though disease, poverty, and war wouldn't exist if women were in charge-I mean it may be possible that some of these things would be different, sure-but outright nonexistence? That's a utopian sexist fantasy.

She then proposed killing all men.Why would anyone give her views any positive creedence at all? Why is anyone studying this bullshit in a positive light?I mean some people think it could be satire of sorts, but if it is, it isn't particularly obvious. Perhaps I'm old fashioned in thinking people should be honest in their manifestos. I do not believe that Machiavelli or de Sade were writing satire, nor do I think it makes any difference, since it has the same net effect.

Taking Solanas seriously only hurts feminism and the social justice movement.If she hadn't shot Andy Warhol, her manifesto wouldn't be studied at all.she wasn't any sort of feminist academic and I don't see why she would have any special insight. It's just as soon as you do something infamous (shooting people), any manifesto you write is immediately endowed with the notion that whoever wrote it was crazy with a special knowledge we could learn from. Fuck Solanas, fuck Kasinski, fuck Rodger, and fuck anyone else who writes a manifesto.Of course she was transphobic. She thought men were genetically inferior. She is no friend to LGBT at all. Oh, my time to shine!I was actually introduced to feminist thought via the SCUM manifesto. It was the first 'feminist text' I've read, yet to date I have never read the whole thing in one sitting.What we did back then is read it as a group, over several sittings, and we read it as an allegory.

This is most certainly not the way Solanas intended for it to be read. But, at least as I see it, the author's intention is separate from the text itself and doesn't necessarily have any bearings on it.So what does it say if you read it allegorically? The text basically takes the patriarchy and turns it upon its head. It uses the same logic, the same arguments the patriarchy uses to frame women, only to frame men.Women, in other words, don't have penis envy; men have pussy envy.This reading does not necessarily work with the whole text, but it works with many passages.

It works by showing how extremist a patriarchal society is and how ultimately hollow the arguments for its existence are.So I would never classify the SCUM Manifesto as a central feminist text, but you can still find some feminist value in it. You'll need a pretty liberal relationship to text though and you'll have to ignore some of the truly awful parts.

'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 thing 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.' Do you find that passage to be in any way transphobic or problematic, though? It's at least insensitive to trans folks, no?.

Yes it's incredibly problematic, insensitive doesn't even begin to cover it.To explicitly restate this again: you will have to read the SCUM Manifesto very selectively and in a specific light to get anything positive out of it.Nonetheless, simply from personal experience, I have to argue that it does function as a pretty effective allegory on the patriarchy. Especially because Solanas is this extremist and makes these outrageous claims, patriarchal claims that run parallel to them can be understood as equally ludicrous.I am not arguing that the SCUM Manifesto has any feminist value per se. I wouldn't even argue that it's really a very feminist text, in most current feminist contexts.

The only thing I would argue is, that you can find some feminist value in the text, if used in a very specific way. The most recent edition of the SCUM Manifesto notes in the intro that Solanas was friends with and living with trans women at the time she wrote that. I'm not sure that this actually excuses the things she wrote (hello genetic fallacy); however, it does indicate that we should interpret her words charitably, rather than assume a general hatred of trans women qua trans women.After all, the description she gives about diffuse sexual feeling was apparently the leading psychological explanation for trans womanhood in the 1960s (IIRC, from Julia Serano's potted history of psych/medical approaches to trans issues in Whipping Girl). That is, if she was transphobic - and it is hard to argue that she was not - she was transphobic in a way that was of her time, and seemingly considerably less so than others of her time.

None of which does (or should!) make her words any more palatable to us today, but if these passages are the only reason you have for disliking the SCUM Manifesto, then biographical info about Solanas may provide enough of a grain of salt to let them go. The SCUM Manifesto is a rant.

It's obviously not really a 'manifesto' in the traditional sense. It's hard to even call it a polemic, as I don't think it coheres well enough. It's a loud, hilarious, raging HOWL against the violent domination of patriarchy - and I think it does that astonishingly well. I obviously can't know for certain, but I'd hazard a guess that the only person ever to have attempted murder based on the feelings expressed in the SCUM Manifesto was Valerie Solanas herself. You can say that it's inconsistent to condone violent rhetoric while condemning violent action, and that's a perfectly reasonable perspective to have (although I disagree).However, I just can't countenance this idea that a text ought to be condemned because it might be 'alienating' to the empowered class (in this case, men). Like, so the fuck what? Are women not allowed anger?

Are women not allowed autonomous organising? Who really fucking cares if men get alienated before they can see the legitimate points in the SCUM Manifesto?

It's not for them. It's for women. It's for women who've been hurt, raped, beaten down physically and psychologically, told by their societies that they are weaker, lesser, that they deserve their lowliness, that their minds are feeble, their ideas worth nothing, their feelings flighty and irrelevant. They are the intended audience.

They will be able to see the 'legitimate' points amongst the violent rhetoric. And if others can't, or won't, it's not their fucking problem. Okay, first of all, I didn't say only men, there are women in this thread and all over that shitty tumblr expressing feelings of alienation stemming from this. And I didn't say women are not allowed anything.I just feel like part of what can make feminism successful is men listening and changing their behavior, and saying they should all go die kind of gives them ammunition to be dumbasses and jump to discounting feminism at large.

And when feminists tell them all feminists aren't like that, they'll mockingly shout '#NOTALLFEMINISTS.' I'm not saying they should be coddled and I'm not saying it's anyone's job to educate them. I'm just saying.But if it was only written as a parodic, cathartic device for women like the ones you described then that's obviously fine and never mind. I legitimately did not know that. Okay, first of all, I didn't say only men, there are women in this thread and all over that shitty tumblr expressing feelings of alienation stemming from this.Yeah, fair.I just think, as a general point, that you have to make a place for cathartic expressions of anger in any liberation movement, without resorting to denunciation and divisiveness like saying #notallfeminists (which I know you've put in the mouths of opponents, but in response to a genuine phenomenon). And, while you may not condone actual violence, I think it is important to understand that it comes from a place of self-defense, and is fundamentally different from violence directed towards the weaker groups of society.

Power matters, in other words.FWIW, I think it's a mistake to categorize SCUM as a parody (although certainly, its strongest threads are a direct parody of the patriarchy). It's not really satire, either. Solanas means quite a lot of what she says, but so OTT hyperbolically that she (even she) probably did not mean it literally.

“Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he's lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and, further, pay for the opportunity. Relieving physical tension isn't the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain screwing corpses and babies.”―Valerie Solanas.