A Review by Jocelyn Crawley

An ad placed in The Village Voice by Valerie Solanas on April 27, 1967. Solanas charged men more than twice as much for her book than women.

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto is a shocking title and text; yet it begins developing epistemological and material frameworks that resist and destroy patriarchy, which is why I can bear the harsh language. Some of the problems within the text include Solanas’s call for the extinction of the male sex, her hypersimplifications and generalizations regarding male behavior and the innate condition of men, and call  to overthrow the government without developing a thorough, clear strategic plan which would enable us to do this. Despite a plethora of ideological and ethical problems that compromise the integrity of the work, SCUM Manifesto provides radical feminist thinkers with multiple frameworks through which to recognize and reject male supremacy while working towards the establishment and normalization of a definitively woman-centered world.

SCUM Manifesto begins with a publisher’s preface in which the writer, Maurice Girodias, characterizes Valerie Solanas as having an “iconoclastic disposition” which is confluent with her play’s title: Up Your Ass. The coarse, aggressive tone of the play’s title might lead the reader to associate Solanas with the toxic masculinity that often manifests in context of pushy, perverse rhetoric; yet the publisher’s preface characterizes her in terms of preaching an “anti-masculine doctrine” (viii). As the preface unfolds, the publisher notes some surprise at realizing that they agree with some of the ideas presented by Valerie Solanas, including the notion that our world is a mundane realm due to the following life-killing activities of men: developing a sex/gender system which confines women to the cult of domesticity, conflating love and sex, and refusal to seek understanding regarding what womanhood might be within contexts that lead to female liberation (viii). While supportive of these aspects of Solanas’s theoretical framework of patriarchy and its failures, the publisher notes that one significant shortcoming of the text is that the writer does not offer any solutions to the problems that she discusses (viii). 

Following the publisher’s preface, the reader is exposed to the introduction to the text. Much meaningful information is found herein. Written by Vivian Gornick, this element of the text includes many meaningful musings regarding both Valerie Solanas specifically and the Women’s Rights Movement generally. At one point, she notes: 

When the Women’s Liberation Movement began gathering steam a few years ago everyone in the movement, feeling the sting of middle class scorn and ridicule, hastened to disown Valerie Solanas and all the other “extremists” who spoke a language similar to hers. Solanas was, it was generally agreed in reformist circles, one of those mad, “unnatural” women with whom the Movement was, unfortunately, being identified. Her words of fierce and annihilating hatred were certainly not typical of what the Liberationists wanted, which was mainly equal pay for equal work, day care centers, the right to an equal education, and a whole lot of other damnfool respectable things. “We do not hate men,” the women of N.O.W. announced vigorously (xxiv, xxv).

Herein lies an important assessment which enables the reader to grasp the ideological divide that exists between liberals and radicals. Frequently, liberals seek to silence radicals whose expressions of discontent with the existing regime of patriarchy include statements that are deemed hateful. Interestingly, women who speak with intense, unalloyed passion about the horrors of male supremacy are oftentimes accused of hating men irrespective of whether they actually assert that they do or not. In Solanas’s case, however, the assessment of hatred was unapologetically articulated, making her a threat to less radical organizations who predicated their political platforms on assimilating with, rather than repudiating, members of the oppressor class (men). 

Following the text’s preface and introduction, the reader is introduced to Solanas’s radical thought. To begin, Solanas asserts that “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” (3). Here, the radical rhetoric of rejecting assimilation into patriarchy and embracing the annihilation of the male sex becomes evident. As the text progresses, Solanas details what is wrong with men. Her analysis of male inefficacy is extensive, but much of what she deems wrong with men can be seen in the following quotation: “Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive” (5). Much of what Solanas states regarding male inefficacy, including their tendency to be narcissistic, has been acknowledged as accurate by many if not most people. Indeed, both men and women of right-leaning, centrist, and leftist ideological camps agree that male ways of being and knowing are guided by a tendency towards an insistence on self-sovereign thinking and self-interested acting. 

What is different and definitively radical about Solanas (and many other like-minded women) making this assessment is that it functions as a rational precursor to no longer viewing men as potential romantic partners, friends, political comrades, etc. In other words, due to their biological, cognitive, and social defects, men cannot be any type of companion to women and rather must be eliminated as a sex in order for women to lead viable, meaningful lives. Thus while individuals from a plethora of backgrounds would likely agree with assertions of Solanas’s like “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” (9), the recognition of this reality as common to men does not translate into viewing men as people whom women need to leave alone entirely and eliminate from the realm of existence. While some individuals, such as Solanas, conclude that male depravity leaves women with no option but to eliminate men, other people argue for less radical, more assimilationist approaches to dealing with men and the violences they produce perpetually. 

As the text continues to unfold, Solanas outlines several reasons which prove that men are unfit to rule the world. One of those reasons is their perpetuation of the money-work system. Solanas argues that there are many reasons that males want to maintain this system despite its inefficacy, and one of the reasons is sexual access to women. In noting this, Solanas explains that “females, unless very young or very sick, must be coerced or bribed into male company” (8). The reader can then infer that the male-created and male-controlled money-work system ensures that men can utilize their capital to coerce women into socializing with and having sex with them. Interestingly, Solanas’s strategic plan to eliminate the male sex is only the operative mode of resistance until the money system is eliminated. Specifically, she notes that “After the elimination of money there will be no further need to kill men; they will be stripped of the only power they have over psychologically independent females” (50). This assertion is very telling because it, along with the analysis of patriarchy which many radical feminists have engaged in, reveals the intersection of male supremacy and capitalism. One, apparently, cannot exist without the other.

In addition to identifying the male maintenance of the money-work system as evidence that men cannot remain the rulers of the world, Solanas identifies their inclination towards creating wars as proof that their patriarchal patterns must be eliminated. Specifically, Solanas notes the following regarding war: “The male’s normal method of 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”” (7). This assessment is important for many reasons, including the fact that it demonstrates Solanas’s assent to the widely shared radical feminist claim that, in a patriarchal culture such as ours, manhood is proven through engagement in violent activity. In this case, the horror of the requirement that men make their maleness known by being violent is that it entails mass death. The war-induced mass deaths are distinct from the femicides that transpire when men prove that they are men by killing female partners and girl children, but it is similar to the femicidal process in that it firmly roots male identity in a praxis of violence. 

In elaborating on the male tendency to embrace war as an acceptable way of being in the world, Solanas notes that “Since he has no compassion or ability to empathize or identify, proving his manhood is worth an endless number of lives, including his own—his own life being worthless, he would rather go out in a blaze of glory than plod grimly on for fifty more years” (7). Herein lies Solanas’s assent to another widely accepted radical feminist view of men and patriarchy: male supremacy is predicated upon assent to deadly activity which involves or culminates in the cessation of life. This assessment is rooted in logic, with innumerable statistics pointing towards the male proclivity towards violent activity. Yet what is problematic about Solanas’s assertions in context of the male inclination towards war is that she coincides her awareness of this proclivity with a generalization regarding male compassionlessness. The generalization is problematic given ongoing evidence which indicates that compassion is innate and instinctual amongst both sexes. Thus while it would be rational to argue that male socialization leads to the diminishing of compassion given the contextualization of violent acts as integral to the establishment of manhood, it would be problematic to assert, as Solanas does, that men have no compassion. 

Going on, readers can locate the perpetuity of a central and glaring problem in what is otherwise a very passionate and engaging denunciation of patriarchy. Specifically, in outlining the numerous harms that men have committed in terms of both the way they have developed societal structures (such as the economic system and war) and socialization processes between men and women, Solanas denounces men in dehumanizing ways that are eerily similar to the patriarchal praxis of dehumanizing women. For example, Solanas notes that, in the process of oppressing women, men

define everyone in terms of his or her function or use, assigning to himself, of course, the most important functions—doctor, president, scientist—thereby providing himself with an identity, if not individuality, and tries to convince himself and women (he’s succeeded best at convincing women) that the female function is to bear and raise children and to relax, comfort and boost the ego of the male; that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks (16).

Solanas’s assessment regarding how men cultivate male identities which are rooted in making themselves seem individually important while relegating female identity to the sphere of “helper” is accurate. She is also accurate in asserting that the identity men ascribe to women involves a form of deindividuation and roboticism which makes women interchangeable; indeed, the functions of domesticity and nurturing men are those which males want women to engage in with a compliant mindlessness or near mindlessness which requires little to no independent thought and ideation. (This is not to suggest that bearing and rearing children is mindless work; it is not. However, it is to suggest that men want to control these processes and ensure that they are completed within a patriarchal framework in which women mindlessly submit to the tasks they are assigned, with this aspect of constructed compliance making female people interchangeable robots.) 

Although Solanas’s assessments regarding male and female identities contain some significant accuracies, inaccuracies abound. What is not accurate about Solanas’s assessments regarding men and women here is her reduction of men to sperm producers. This diminishing of male humanity appears to be a response to male diminishing of female humanity, but it is not an effective response because it is not an accurate response. It carries with it the rhetorical weight that many arguments rooted in pathos do, but the absence of logos–in this case, our logical awareness that men are complex thinking beings and cannot be reduced to their biological capacities–weakens the efficacy of her argument. (As if one wants to reduce the complexity of feminist theory to the slogan “Boys are stupid; throw rocks at them.” The rhetorical weight is present; the rational rigor is not.)  The radical feminist analysis is effective when it critiques and condemns the harms of patriarchy. When the analysis devolves into dehumanizing men and making gross generalizations about their behavior (as this text repeatedly does), the reader may come to believe that the writer is a demagogue. Indeed, statements like “To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples” (3,4) will likely turn readers off and get them thinking that Solanas hates men. While she is perfectly free to do so, it is safe to say that many if not most people will have a problem taking her seriously if hatred is a core tenet of her philosophy. Unfortunately, I think it is. 

Readers who do not deal well with coarse language and ideas that seem conducive to hatred of an entire people group may find Solanas’s text off-putting, and some may dismiss the entire book upon noting that she refers to the male as a “subhuman animal” (32). Despite the inefficacies of Solanas’s text, including her generalizations regarding men, much of what she says about patriarchy is compelling. The argument I found most captivating is that “No genuine social revolution can be accomplished by the male, as the male on top wants the status quo, and all the male on the bottom wants is to be the male on top” (24). Radicals, anarchists, and revolutionaries who are deeply embedded in the process of strategic resistance to patriarchy need to understand whether they believe that men can have a central or even peripheral role in the struggle against male supremacy. If one’s answer to this question is no, she should be actively gravitating towards female-led feminist organizations, activities, events, and ideological camps. And if one’s answer is yes, she should still be cognizant of the male proclivity to silence, subordinate, and enforce submission on women within revolutionary spaces. 

Irrespective of one’s answer to questions of male humanity/inhumanity and how female people operate within the hell that is patriarchy’s continuous reign as the ruling religion of the planet, it is important to consider the radical thought of thinkers such as Valerie Solanas because doing so precludes the individual from passively eating everything that male supremacy feeds us. These are the meals, after all, which have poisoned us with their ideologies of female passivity, happy housewives, domestic bliss, sexual subordination, liberal feminism and the cultural acceptability of pornography and prostitution. Although flawed, Solanas’s analysis provides us with alternatives to the patriarchal values we are taught to embody, including rejecting the male-led government and male-led money system. Thus rather than engaging the old “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” of liberal feminism and male domination, her text enables us to start thinking about what we can do instead of doing patriarchy.  

Jocelyn is a 40-year-old radical feminist who believes that male violence is the most egregious problem on the planet, particularly concerning manifestations of sexual violence against women and girls. When not writing about radical feminist topics, Jocelyn enjoys yoga and building community with like-minded individuals who are sick of patriarchy precluding us from having nice things.