Read Online SCUM Manifesto Author Valerie Solanas Displayed In Digital
assertion by its author of the inherent superiority of women over men, and whose book opens with ", . men are a biological accident, . " and puts forth that argument in a rollercoaster debate, you know you are definitely in for a hell of a ride, Thus is Valerie Solanas' magnum opus SCUM Society for Cutting Up Men Manifesto a feminist classic from the revolutionary change of the 's, in which she penned her edgy, radical, brilliant thoughts and ideas, namely the purging from the earth the scourge of all of the world's and society's ills M E N! SCUM Manifesto is a one woman battle cry that roars LOUDLY in its beliefs and sheer audaciousness in what should be done to reinstute women to their rightful place in the hierarchy of society.
Her passage on men who set out on a mission to get a "piece" is painfully and truthfully hilarious! I came across this work of literary genius some would argue madness after watching Mary Harron's "I Shot Andy Warhol", which centered on the factual incident in which Solanas shot, and nearly killed, 's pop artist Andy Warhol.
Overall, I found "SCUM" to be a raucously thrilling read, Not sure if this is serious or not, If serious, its one of the worst books ever written, If an elaborate satire, then very effective, Object of the satire could be misogynist discourse i, e. , applying the same barbarities to men that are routinely applied to women, or feminist discourse i, e. , taking certain feminist principles and exaggerating them to irrational ends, or the discourse of masculinity i, e. , suggesting that masculinist doctrine sets up an ideal that needs to be cut up analyzed destroyed dissected vivisected,
some comedy throughout, such as:
“Women, in other words, don't have penis envy men have pussy envy, ”
“Despising his highly inadequate self, overcome with intense anxiety and a deep, profound loneliness when by his empty self, desperate to attach himself to any female in dim hopes of completing himself, in the mystical belief that by touching gold he'll turn to gold, the male craves the continuous companionship of women.
” femaleness as derridean supplement to maleness maleness as always already absent presence
“The most important activity of the commune, the one upon which it is based, is gangbanging.
The hippy' is enticed to the commune mainly by the prospect for free pussy the main commodity to be shared, to be had just for the asking, ”
“Men cannot cooperate to achieve a common end, because each man's end is all the pussy for himself, The commune, therefore, is doomed to failure, ”
“The male has a negative Midas Touch everything he touches turns to shit, ”
Ultimate object is apparently a state wherein “automation is completely instituted” in the production process, Very science fiction!
Recommended for those who have stripped the world of conversation, friendship and love readers for whom screwing is a defense against a desire to be female and wellbehaved heterosexual dullards.
SCUM Manifesto was considered one of the most outrageous, violent and certifiably crazy tracts when it first appeared in, Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, selfpublished this work just before her rampage against the king of Pop Art made her a household name and resulted in her confinement to a mental institution.
But the Manifesto, for all its vitriol, is impossible to dismiss as just the rantings of a lesbian lunatic, In fact, the work has indisputable prescience, not only as a radical feminist analysis lightyears ahead of its timepredicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the artsbut also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman.
The focus of this edition is not on the nostalgic appeal of the work, but on Avital Ronells incisive introduction, “Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas, ” Here is a reconsideration of Solanass infamous text in light of her social milieu, Derridas “The Ends of Man” written in the same year, Judith Butlers Excitable Speech, Nietzsches Ubermensch and notorious feminist icons from Medusa, Medea and Antigone, to Lizzie Borden, Lorenna Bobbit and Aileen Wournos, illuminating the evocative exuberance of Solanass dark tract.
Gotta love this book. It's so right on and so way off, It's beautiful in theory and tragic in reality, SCUM Manifesto was written by Valerie Solanas, the woman who attempted to murder Andy Warhol, This short book is essentially a manifesto explaining why the world would be better without men,
About half of this book is an introduction by Avital Ronell, While figuring out if she's Israeli or not as Avital is an Israeli name, I learned that she sexually harassed a graduate student reading some of the emails she sent him is pretty upsetting.
Even worse, she didn't even lose her job teaching at NYU, Moreover, people like Judith Butler actually supported her and suggested her academic merit should protect her from these accusations, that she's just eccentric, This is very enraging, considering these are highly regarded academics,
Anyway, Avital Ronell compares Solanas' work to thinkers like Derrida and Nietzsche, Ronell can deconstruct Solanas' work as much as she'd like but in all honesty, there's only one body of work that I think Solanas' work can be compared to and that is Elliot Rodger's manifesto.
Both manifestos talk about the other gender and blame it for all of their problems, Both are convinced the other gender has wronged them and society in general, Both of them have been described as mentally ill and both of them have ended up committing a violent act, The similarities are really endless,
Which leads me to my point here, Elliot Rodger murdered six people and obviously, his manifesto is not seen as an academic achievement, Valerie Solanas had attempted to kill Andy Warhol but because somehow, her manifesto has people like Germaine Greer and other prominent feminists defending or even acknowledging it, Heck, SCUM Manifesto has a Wikipedia page while My Twisted World does not,
Of course, we could argue that this comes down to Andy Warhol is/was a symbol of everything that went wrong in America while random university students are hardly a symbolic target.
There's room to wonder if Solanas would have gotten this attention if she had succeeded in murdering Andy Warhol and I'd like to think that the answer is no,
It's easy to say that the difference is the oppression that women face, Solanas does have a case while Rodger was a guy who refused to see that women are people, Men really have been in power and therefore, there is room to blame them for the struggles that we collectively face, For example, there are some voices discussing the way womenled countries Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, etc are doing better at fighting the coronavirus in comparison to manled countries notably America, Brazil, Iran, Sweden and the UK.
There are theories suggesting women might be more open to listening to experts which is helpful in order to protect citizens against a pandemic, I'm sure this would make Solanas happy and let's all collectively ignore Belgium and South Korea who are the exact opposite of this theory,
And somehow, that makes me wonder if being oppressed gives you "permission" to be more hateful, When Elliot Rodger says that he thinks all women should be starved to death, that's messed up but when Solanas suggests all men be killed for the greater good, that's something that academic feminists feel that they can ponder about, like if you use enough fancy philosophical words, everything can become meaningful is it that obvious that I'm angry with the Department of Philosophy and broadly speaking, the entire field.
Solanas' manifesto is very unqueer in the sense that it doesn't really ever critically ask what makes people men or women, Where do trans people fit into this scheme exactly Could men unlearn their violent behavior What makes women better Her comments about gay men are fairly gross and she never really engages with any type of question about gender/ sexuality.
This body of work is interesting in its future predictions, Like, withvision, the idea of automating every single job strikes me as unlikely, We're seeing that AI does have limits, that when one job closes, another opens and that technology ultimately reflects the biases of those creating it,
Now, I could have accepted the idea that the future is in soft skills which is perhaps something women might be better at than men, I mean, we're living in an age where listening skills are more useful than lumbering skills, for the most part, However, from that to saying all jobs will be gone is such an overstatement, What will we all do without jobs Surely that's also a problem if everything that should be done is being done already
Honestly, attempting to engage with this piece of writing seriously is somewhat of a waste of time.
It's not unlikely that this is just a way for me to procrastinate, In conclusion, I'm way too nonbinary for all of this, Like, I can't get how someone can truly believe the sex or gender of a person reflect so much about who they are,
What I'm Taking With Me
To be fair, I, too, would be furious if someone lost my plays but murdering them wouldn't solve the problem.
Solanas claims that immortality is a few weeks of research away and that we don't have it yet because men are dead inside so death appeals to them, I couldn't make this up if I wanted to,
Do we embrace violence more when a woman does it Or do we just take it less
seriously I'm reading this, as a man of course, and cheering on Solanas' badass, hilarious, bluntforcetrauma, withering, genocidal rant against men.
If I might make a crude equation, my irrational response might correlate to a Jew cheering on Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies, Yes, it is a crude equation I'm not in danger but you get my drift,
But seriously, this manifesto a fuckload more fun than Marx's "Communist Manifesto" half makes me want to march into the mountain to my demise like the rat I am being male, led by the Pied Piper's sirensong of pussy.
This magnificently breathless, radical feminist tirade filled with contradictions, sweeping generalizations, antielitism, paranoia and more pretty much rocks! I found myself agreeing with Solanas' assessment of men probably more than I ought to.
But seriously, she does pin down a lot of the insecurities and drives for control that have fucked up the world under the domination of men, It's simplistic, but at the same time has more than a grain of truth,
There are far too many gems here to be pulled for outofcontext quotations, Suffice it to say, according to her, among the men who need to be eliminated are "owners of restaurants that play Muzak, " Talk about a wicked sense of humor, She did not miss. There is a fine line between crazy and inspired, There is also a fine line between crazy and genius but Valerie Solanas was no genius, For that matter, she probably wasn't crazy, At least, not at first, She was a very troubled woman damaged by child molestation and abuse, She appeared to have had volatile relationships with others, letting them in then turning against them when they turned out to be flawed humans, This defense mechanism had tragic consequences for both her and Andy Warhol, who she shot, While not killed, Warhol was left in a condition of severe physical and emotional damage with physical effects that finally killed him, Solanas' SCUM Society for Cutting Up Men Manifesto, which was written before she shot Warhol, is the only other thing for which she shall be remembered, Most of her other writings were either unfinished or lost which brings up the possibility that when she accused Warhol of stealing her play Up Your Ass, she may have not been technically paranoid as this play was found with Warhol's other possessions after his death.
As strange and repulsive this manifesto may be, it does attest to the fact that Solanas was a powerful writer, It is at the same time a vicious sexist rant and a crafty sociopolitical satire, If you are at all open when you read it you will shake your head at the ridiculousness of it but almost thinking, "I can see where this is coming from.
" Personally, as a man, I'm glad no one took this seriously, But I also understand this was written at a time when feminism was striving while the predominantly white male power structure continued to be in control and I can understand Solanas' frustration.
It pretty obvious that Solanas herself didn't take her manifest literally as she would admit to it in her more lucid moments, . .
"It's hypothetical, No, Hypothetical is the wrong word, It's just a literary device, There's no organization called SCUM, . . It's not even me I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind, In other words. women who think a certain way are SCUM, Men who think a certain way are in the men's auxiliary of SCUM,
If the SCUM Manifesto has a lasting philosophy: it is that sometimes things are so unbearable that we can not just "drop out" or ignore, It need to be confronted, Solanas states in the manifesto, "Dropping out is not the answer, Fucking up is. ". The SCUM Manifesto was Solanas' way of fucking up, I suspect the work was a cathartic move for Solanas, But it was not a healing one, Solanas spent most of her time afterward in mental hospitals, dying destitute in a welfare hotel, It's unfortunate we have little else to go on to assess her talent, Her brief improvisatory bit in Warhol's film, I, a Man shows that she had a sharp if roughedged wit, Those who have read or seen her play, Up Your Ass describe it as obscene but impressive, But the SCUM Manifesto remains her most lasting work and an important document of Radical Feminism and overthetop social observation,
Note: I was given a review copy of The SCUM Manifesto that is published by AK Press who, being an anarchist publishing company, may or may not agree with my assessment.
The edition also contains an insightful introduction by Michelle Tea and a concise biography of Valerie Solanas in the afterword, "The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or
identifying with others, or love, friendship, affection of tenderness, He is a completely isolated
unit, incapable of rapport with anyone, "
Rating:/Stars,
I'm at loss of words, . .
I mean, I knew what I was getting into when I bought this but still, there's a difference between knowing something and seeing it through my own glasses.
I didn't know it was possible for me to be unable to critic something because god knows I love to bitch, but Solanas did it, I'm speechless.
I think the quote is selfexplanatory, this book is full of malehate and general sexism toward the masculine gender, doing the exact same thing women have been suffering from since the beginning of times.
That's probably the worst thing for me, It's that a woman, who knows what it feels like to be discriminated against because of one's gender decides to do the same, It shows a complete lack of conscience and humanity,
On a technical standpoint, this essay has no basis whatsoever with real tangible facts, only using biased social misconceptions and stereotypes about the male gender to prove the point that the male gender must be exterminated, which means that even in its form of argumentation, this book doesn't stand a chance against Schopenhauer.
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