The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 1/4
I declare, as Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) would want from men: ‘I am a turd, a lowly abject turd’ yet still I like this American radical feminist, maybe because I like crazy people. Or maybe it’s her work, especially, the SCUM Manifesto with its shock value that has literally nothing for me as a man, but then again it tells you a thousand things that a thousand of conformists or a similar number of ladies and gentlemen would never be able to. It could be also her anarchist beliefs that I like her. Incidentally, she was the sole member of the Society for Cutting Up Men!
Love her or hate her, Solanas will always be remembered for her prescience as much as she is infamous for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968.
In my native tongue, Meiteilon, a turd would be a ‘thibot’ (/θeebōtt/). To re-introduce myself, I might be a ‘thibot’ or a ‘biological accident’ nonetheless a human as well, and in contrast to Solanas’ female rage, I consider men and women are the same animal; nobody is above and none below while humanism precedes gender, which is a fact that I don’t need any –ism to clarify it. All of us are animals, first, and humans, second. Orwell’s Snowball and Napoleon would say that all animals are equal and that some animals are more equal than others. But don’t be a pig and don’t be more equal. Solanas made it very clear that ‘to call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo’—I do get a shock as getting it from an electric toy, but that’s a part of the deal we have here today.
An exponent of second-wave feminism, Valerie Solanas self-published the Manifesto in 1967 and released a commercial edition the next year. Historically, she was fortunate to ‘live’ the days of American counterculture: the Beat Generation had laid the foundation a decade earlier, the New Left was born, Civil Rights Movement was the order of the day, there was an exponential rise in the works of feminism, the Hippies ruled with their flower power though she despised them from a gender perspective, the birth of Cell 16, the US-based militant feminist group and so on.
Solanas died at the age of 52. Since then, she has become a subject of numerous books and articles and has been getting a never-ending list of epitaphs; one of my favourites is that she was a misfit among the misfits. No wonder, many people are still offended by this outrageous manifesto.
Love her or hate her, Solanas will always be remembered for her prescience as much as she is infamous for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968.
In my native tongue, Meiteilon, a turd would be a ‘thibot’ (/θeebōtt/). To re-introduce myself, I might be a ‘thibot’ or a ‘biological accident’ nonetheless a human as well, and in contrast to Solanas’ female rage, I consider men and women are the same animal; nobody is above and none below while humanism precedes gender, which is a fact that I don’t need any –ism to clarify it. All of us are animals, first, and humans, second. Orwell’s Snowball and Napoleon would say that all animals are equal and that some animals are more equal than others. But don’t be a pig and don’t be more equal. Solanas made it very clear that ‘to call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo’—I do get a shock as getting it from an electric toy, but that’s a part of the deal we have here today.
An exponent of second-wave feminism, Valerie Solanas self-published the Manifesto in 1967 and released a commercial edition the next year. Historically, she was fortunate to ‘live’ the days of American counterculture: the Beat Generation had laid the foundation a decade earlier, the New Left was born, Civil Rights Movement was the order of the day, there was an exponential rise in the works of feminism, the Hippies ruled with their flower power though she despised them from a gender perspective, the birth of Cell 16, the US-based militant feminist group and so on.
Solanas died at the age of 52. Since then, she has become a subject of numerous books and articles and has been getting a never-ending list of epitaphs; one of my favourites is that she was a misfit among the misfits. No wonder, many people are still offended by this outrageous manifesto.
Full text of the The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas (the Society for Cutting Up Men)": Part One
- The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 1/4
- The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 2/4
- The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 3/4
- The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 4/4
Publication
- 1967 (self-published)
- 1968 (commercial publication)
- The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 1/4
- The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 2/4
- The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 3/4
-
The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas 4/4
The text of the manifesto was collected and edited (with the British spelling style) from an online PDF uploaded by the Kunsthalle Zürich, the art exhibition centre based in Switzerland, on its website: http://kunsthallezurich.ch/de. The copyright of the text belongs to the original publisher.
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