Summary
Valerie Solanas's "SCUM Manifesto" is a radical and controversial feminist text that argues for the overthrow of society, the elimination of the money system, complete automation, and the destruction of the male sex. Solanas posits that life in society is utterly boring and irrelevant to women, leaving only the option of revolution. She argues that males are biologically and emotionally deficient, incomplete females, and the root of society's problems.
Solanas claims that men are incapable of empathy, trapped in their egocentricity, and driven by purely visceral responses. She critiques societal norms like niceness, politeness, and "dignity" as male constructs to enforce blandness and suppress genuine emotion. She connects money, marriage, prostitution, and work as male inventions designed to control women and prevent a truly automated society. Men use money to coerce women, maintain a delusion of usefulness, gain power, substitute for love, provide a goal, and control fatherhood.
The manifesto attacks fatherhood as a source of mental illness, creating passive, dependent daughters and defensive sons. It argues that men suppress individuality, reduce women to animals through domesticity and motherhood, and prevent privacy by imposing family structures. Men isolate women in suburbs, prevent community, and enforce conformity to maintain their dominance. They create authority, government, philosophy, religion, and morality based on sex to control women and provide meaning to their pointless lives.
Solanas critiques prejudice, competition, formal education, and social classes as tools for male dominance. She attacks the prevention of conversation, friendship, and love, replacing them with "Great Art" and "Culture" designed to disguise male animalism. Sexuality is dismissed as a refuge for the mindless, and Solanas advocates for women to transcend their sex drives. Boredom is seen as the inevitable result of a society created by and for men. Secrecy, censorship, and suppression of knowledge are used to prevent the exposure of male inferiority, leading to distrust, ugliness, hatred, violence, disease, and death.
Solanas calls for the elimination of men as a righteous act, arguing that women have a prior right to existence. She believes that the male is gradually eliminating himself through wars, drugs, and fagotry, paving the way for total female control. She advocates for SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) to take over the country through various disruptive tactics, including unworking, looting, couple-busting, and killing. SCUM will recruit members and operate on a criminal basis, destroying harmful objects and selectively targeting men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary. A completely automated society will be established, eliminating money and government, and allowing women to solve the remaining problems and plan for eternity. The manifesto ends with a call for women to act now and seize control, steamrolling over those who resist the revolution.