A review by lucyjkimee
SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas

adventurous informative medium-paced

3.25

I think this manifesto is interesting. And it’s not funny like some reviewers say it is. It’s the manifesto of a woman who was treated horribly by all the men in her life. A woman who saw the females in her life and in society similarly mistreated. And while it is clear she had some sort of mental illness that does not mean she was unintelligent. She had very good points and many of her arguments were founded in logic and study. 

What detracted from her well thought out theories and conclusions were the wild theories, conspiracies, and over emotional tandems she sometimes spiraled into. And while she did have many good points it was undercut by the belief she held that men are biologically and genetically inferior to women and therefore biologically and unmoveably the way that they are. 

To her men are turdwads that they cannot be anything like females. She thinks that even in a perfect society they would not be like us. In fact, that in a perfect society they would not exist at all. 

It is very clear to me that her writing is shaped by her own personal trauma and experience and that she allowed it to sometimes take over good sense and reason.

Valerie Solanas created a dystopian society in which SCUM takes over. Women have left the work force and gained total and complete identity, power, and freedom. And her way of achieving this utopia is by killing all men who don’t conform and become “SCUM auxiliary males”. Those males who submit under SCUM rule and work to decimate the male population. 

So she isn’t actually for peace and equality. She is technically for violence and coldness. She speaks of empathy (or a lack thereof in the case of men) but the world she describes lacks the warmth that makes us. 

And yet, strangely enough, the example she gives of a perfect Manless society seems to me a type of grace. She is extending to them a candle that says you are less than animals but I have that shred of empathy and wisdom that you do not so I will not treat you the way you treat me. And that says a lot of society and why Valerie Solanas was the way she was.

It seems that she’s always consistently of two minds about things. The way she talks about men in relation to women and the way she talks about women in relation to how she views herself.

She knows that what men lack and why this world has gone to shit is a lack of empathy and kindness. But she doesn’t think that the women who lack empathy and kindness are all that bad in fact she wants them to rule the world. To her, they are the only kind of women that can. The passive, kind, dependent, subdued, dignified, and scared girls  (“daddies girls”) are a byproduct of men who are nothing-who have nothing intrinsically exciting and happy and passionate in them. So she could in theory and in practice steamroller over them as SCUM are impatient and have no time for useless protests and mind numbing wait for those around her to change. You either are SCUM or you are not and though some women may yet be conformed and turned into SCUM, there isn’t time for that bullshit to her

And all this may sound like she was a crazy lunatic but she wasn’t. She was not for violent riots and indiscriminate killing but for the cool, selective, logical execution of her goals. She wasn't heartless. She wasn’t for destruction. She wrote that there would not be destruction enough to close roads and paths needed for ambulances, aid, and food. Nor anything that impeded roads to hospitals, etc. She was in a way, fair. Better than the politicians we have now, honestly. 

So what I mean to say is that Solanas was a very vulnerable, straightforward, passionate woman who was stepped on all her life, until the very end. She dreamed of a society in which she had power and where people viewed her as an equal or even better-as a superior. She had problems that could’ve been fixed with kindness, proper medication, care, and a recognition of her talents but she didn’t have any of that. She was intelligent and ahead of her time. She isn’t one for the history books because as she says herself SCUM is (for now) the bottom rung of this metaphorical ladder we call society.