Spotlight on First-Year Writing SCUM Manifesto: The Argument for a “Male Misogyny”

“Males, like rats following the Pied Piper, will be lured by Pussy to their doom, will be overcome and submerged by and will eventually drown in the passive flesh that they are” (Solanas 44). Comparing men to rats, a subhuman species, is not the only derogatory analogy Solanas makes in her SCUM Manifesto. The Manifesto, written in the late 1960s during the second-wave feminist movement, characterizes male patriarchal society as evil and calls for women to refashion civilization. The intentions of Valerie Solanas and the revolution she advocates are proclaimed in the first line of SCUM Manifesto: 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, thrillseeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money work system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex. (3) In this radical feminist statement, Solanas goes beyond women’s rights and calls for an overhaul of the patriarchal system. Yet, the implications of destroying the government, the capitalist system, and the male sex are laced with much significance in the Manifesto. Although feminist and nonfeminist critics alike dub SCUM Manifesto the work of a “manhating, crazed lesbian,” it is actually an important radical feminist text of the women’s rights era (Third 106). As journalist Suzanne Moore emphasizes, “The thing is, you either happen to think this [SCUM Manifesto] is a work of unadulterated genius, or you dismiss it as the ravings of a loony psycho-bitch, not understanding that this is exactly what makes it so compelling and so charged with insight” (48–49). Scholarly discourse available on SCUM Manifesto is limited in scope, primarily concerned with the juxtaposition of Solanas’s radicalism with that of other feminists of the time, the classification of her work as one of violence and satire, and the argument surrounding the question of her sanity. Much of this discourse ignores the fundamental themes and strategies the Manifesto employs, overlooking her insightful remarks and intuitive claims. For example, a majority of scholars discuss how Valerie Solanas’s work captures an extreme form of “terrorist feminism” as she employs humor and satire to invoke a reaction from her audience. Amanda Third relates that the Manifesto “deploys violence to political ends,” conspires to “destroy the institutions of governance,” and “aims to dismantle the (patriarchal) state” while denouncing widespread societal norms regarding the male and female (110–12). Third also