In 1967, Valerie Solanas published a manifesto (link). The next year, she shot Andy Warhol. She clearly believed, as she stated in her manifesto, that the male is:
“not ethically entitled to live”.
Growing up, she says she suffered sexual abuse from her father and grandfather.
Ted Kaczynski, a guy who wrote his own manifesto (and became a terrorist) was mostly concerned with power and the power process, Valerie’s first major complaint is that men are incapable of love.
Kaczynski wanted to destroy tech. Valerie Solanas wanted to automate men away.
My commentary will mix in my Christian angle on her manifesto.
The bangers from the manifesto:
"[he] sets out to prove that he is [a man]. His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing... Since he's attempting to prove an error, he must 'prove' it again and again"
"he is not empathizing with this partner, but is obsessed with how he's doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good plumbing job"
There’s a truth to this. Many men want to enhance their masculinity in the same way that women actively exaggerate their femininity. But neither of these approaches satisfy. We don’t live by bread alone. If men aren’t emotionally available, then they might as well be replaced by machines, which she later suggests.
"It's often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure"
"Supply the non-relating male with the delusion of usefulness, and... justify his existence by digging holes and then filling them up. Leisure time horrifies the male, who will have nothing to do but contemplate his grotesque self. Unable... to love, the male must work."
"Females crave absorbing, emotionally satisfying, meaningful activity, but lacking the opportunity or ability for this, they prefer to idle and waste away their time in ways of their own choosing -- sleeping, shopping, bowling, shooting pool, playing cards..."
I think she’s having trouble with the transactional nature of much of the world. Men do things to be useful so they can have money that they can then use to exert their will. Women do things from an innate desire, but lack the opportunities.
She also has trouble with the fact that men who earn end up being more respected than men who don’t.
"Unable to give love or affection, the male gives money. It makes him feel motherly. The mother gives milk; he gives bread. He is the Breadwinner."
This reminds me of the cloth mother experiment where the monkey drank from the wire mother but stayed with the cloth mother.
"For the kid to want Daddy's approval it must respect Daddy, and being garbage, Daddy can make sure that he is respected only by remaining aloof, by distantness, by acting on the precept of `familiarity breeds contempt', which is, of course, true, if one is contemptible."
Again, if men are the wire mother, then yes men are fairly contemptible.
"In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world."
In this line, it’s arguable that she’s taking on a stereotypical female naiveté. What she calls magic, men would call delusion. But she’s right. Men often barrel down a particular line of thought for too long, and they could benefit from looser, more divergent thinking.
"...the male seeks to isolate her from other men and from what little civilization there is, so he moves her out to the suburbs... to try to maintain his pretense of being an individual nu becoming a 'rugged individualist', a loner"
Again, great point. If she already believes that men are bad (as a category), then it makes sense that isolation is a strategy that men use. But another way to look at this is that family life is very different than single life, and it has a very different set of priorities. An environment designed to appeal to families is more likely to succeed in actually appealing to them than other environments.
However, the real tragedy is that many people who live in suburbs don’t end up getting to know their neighbors, and this is tragic outcome that can at least in part be blamed on suburban architecture.
"Traditionalists say the basic unit of ‘society’ is the family; ‘hippies’ say the tribe; no one says the individual."
I never thought of it this way, but it’s self-evidently true. There would be no tribe without individuals. Jesus would agree that family shouldn’t be the basic unit. Jesus said he brought a sword to divide the father from his son, etc. The people he didn’t aim to separate are husband and wife. Jesus also isn’t super keen on tribe either. Instead, his view was that we should be loving and compassionate to our neighbor, to the outsider, and the rejects.
Arguably, the basic Christian unit of society is not the self, but selflessness: doing for others without expecting anything in return.
"Although he wants to be an individual, the male is scared of anything in himself that is the slightest bit different from other men... If other men are 'A' and he's not, he must not be a man; he must be a fag. So he tries to affirm his 'Manhood' by being like all the other men."
This is an awesome point. It reminds me of Girard.
"...those females least embedded in the male 'Culture'... who are too childish for the grown-up world of suburbs... too selfish to raise kids and husbands... who trust only their own animal, gutter instincts... those who, by the standards of our ‘culture' are SCUM"
SCUM is a word that she wishes to appropriate for her movement.
"the male cannot admit to the role that fatherhood plays in causing mental illness."
Now this is a bit unfair. She props up women who are too selfish to raise children but berates men for not picking up the slack?
She really doesn’t like the male “Culture”. She finds living under it to be oppressive. She sees how creative women can be, but none of their abilities are being cherished and so they become passive.
She’s judging men on lacking love, and believing that women should be in charge. She’s endorsing disobedience to the male order, and asking men to submit to a female one.
There’s a parallel to Christian thought. Jesus saw his followers as his bride. He didn’t coerce, but led with love. When the Pharisees asked which commandment (rule) was the most important, Jesus gave two: loving God and loving others.
"In fact the problems of aging and death could be solved within a few years, if an all-out, massive scientific assault were made upon the problem"
Jesus also embodied this by healing people.
"The males like death -- it excites him sexually and, already dead inside, he wants to die."
Instead of being for or against death, Jesus says that to live, you must first die to yourself.
"The male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live"
Men can very much be emotional leeches. And this might be because we have trouble with love. We aren’t able to love in the way that women can.
"...this moral issue will eventually be rendered academic [because] the male is gradually eliminating himself. In addition to engaging in... wars and race riots, men are more and more either becoming fags or are obliterating themselves through drugs."
Don’t let the word “fag” throw you off; she’s in favor of LGBT rights.
"The female, whether she likes it or not, will eventually take complete charge"
There’s a sense in which the biggest religion on earth already believes something like this. She might say that Jesus is still the male lead, or that maybe the Father in heaven is. But as far as life on earth is concerned, the only visible part of this structure is the bride of Christ, which is female.
"If men were wise they would seek to become really female”
She goes on to say they'd do research to transform the male body and brain into a female one.
"Should a certain percentage of men be set aside by force to serve as brood mares for the species? Obviously this will not do. The answer is laboratory reproduction of babies."
"Why produce even females? Why should there be future generations? What is their purpose? When aging and death are eliminated, why continue to reproduce?"
"A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder:"
Jesus doesn’t think this is the answer. If you’re gonna do something violent, go to the temple and flip some tables.
"SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at."
This is an interesting approach to speeding up automation. She doesn’t believe in dropping out of the workforce. Instead, she wants women to fuck up intentionally. If the employees who operate the equipment do this, we get an incentive to automate more away. This is pretty insightful.
In a capitalist system, you work and invent so you can make money. And she’s right about the utter corrupting influence of money. So of course the natural question would be: what replaces the incentives that money provides? And her answer is clever: entropy. This is not a bad idea at all, and I think she’s onto something.
"SCUM will couple-bust -- barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up."
I don’t think she’s talking about race, but it’s still an awful thing to advocate for.
"If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade."
"SCUM will keep on destroying, looting, fucking-up and killing until the money-work system no longer exists and automation is completely instituted or until enough women co-operate with SCUM to make violence unnecessary to achieve these goals"
Entropy as a means of generating pressure to innovate. This has to be true, but I never thought about it in quite this way.
"A completely automated society can be accomplished very simply and quickly once there is a public demand for it. The blueprints for it are already in existence, and it's construction will take only a few weeks with millions of people working on it."
Her eagerness mixed with optimism is palpable. She was 31 when she wrote this manifesto. There’s some chance that she was getting desperate to find love, and the manifesto was a round-about way of doing it.
"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."
Many of the best men do aim to render themselves useless. If they’re good at programming, they create better tools to make it easier, etc. And if you use money as a tool, then you shouldn’t end up creating wasteful or terrible things that do more harm than good simply to meet market demand.
Conclusions
She’s really insightful for a crazy person. I got the same impression from Kaczynski’s manifesto. The question is, where did she go wrong?
She seems to have trouble with the very idea of depending on men providing. It’s transactional. To some extent, technology does give us surplus, and this could mean men are becoming less relevant.
What if she’s guilty of the very things that she’s blaming men for? One could argue, “the lady doth protest too much”. Maybe she’s incapable of love though she knows how to follow orders. She points to this in a few places. What if it’s not men that wish they were women. Maybe she wishes to be a man?
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