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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating in spite of its faults, but shooting was absolutely unjustified, 4 Dec 2007
I expect alot of readers come to this militant feminist tract as I did, from the film I Shot Andy Warhol rather than through a women's studies course. The history of the manifesto is fascinating: Solanas wrote and self-published it in 1967 and approached Andy Warhol to formally publish it along with her play Up Your Ass. In an interview at that time, the pop-artist told journalist Grechen Berg: "I thought the title was so wonderful and I'm so friendly that I invited her to come up [to the Factory] with it, but it was so dirty that I think she must have been a lady cop...We haven't seen her since". But see her again he did - she tried to kill him on June 3 1968 and succeeded in gravely wounding him. Released on bail, she continued to harrass him and demand money and was sentenced to three years at the New York State Prison for Women at Bedford Hills. Upon her release, the SCUM Manifesto was published by Olympia Press. Radical feminist Robin Morgan, who had protested for Solanas' release, also included extracts from the tract in her seminal feminist anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful. It became a movie in 1976, written by Solanas and directed by Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyring. Warhol satirized her and her Society for Cutting Up Men in the film Women in Revolt (1971), substituting P.I.G. - Politically Involved Girlies! - for Solanas' so-called organisation. More recently, the debut album of the Manic Street Preachers quotes Solanas on the sleeve notes and their song 'Of Walking Abortion' on The Holy Bible LP (1994) is named after a quotation from the SCUM Manifesto. And, of course, 1996 saw the release of the biopic I Shot Andy Warhol in which Solanas, portrayed by Lili Taylor, reads extracts into the camera.
So why did this tract cause such a stir? Alot of its notoriety is undoubtedly a result of the shooting that - instead of her publications - brought her the fame she craved. But there is a merit to reading this more independently of the Warhol-Factory association. It is surprisingly compelling: although uncompromisingly demonising men, Solanas acknowledges towards the end that the conflict is "not between females and males", but rather between "selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females who consider themselves fit to rule the universe" and "nice, passive, accepting, 'cultivated', polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy Girls". Ultimately a radical overhauling of female behaviour in response to what feminists call 'patriarchy' has become a central facet of feminism. Solanas had studied psychology and - although she descended into paranoid violence and crazed behaviour that she herself did not attempt to psychoanalyse - she analyses well the sexism inherent in family systems: "Daddy, unlike Mother, can never give in to his kids, as he must at all costs preserve his delusion of decisiveness, forcefulness, always rightness and strength". With sentences like that, accompanied by her irrepressible, anarchic spirit, you can understand why Solanas seemed appealing to the more radical arm of the women's movement. There can, of course, be absolutely no justification - political or moral - for her brutal attack on Andy Warhol; her sustained insistence on it having been "a moral act" deserves condemnation.
In the manifesto itself, some of her comments can perhaps be understood as necessarily bold, given that second-wave feminism had a huge mountain to climb in overturning the patriarchy that had oppressed women for centuries, e.g. "Women, in other words, don't have penis envy; men have pussy envy". However other remarks - the better known ones - are so extremely derogatory that they are funny today, e.g. "Every man, deep down, knows he's a worthless piece of sh$!".
Solanas herself backtracked somewhat on the manifesto in later years, suggesting in a 1977 interview that it shouldn't be taken at face value: "It's hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the wrong word. It's just a literary device. There is no organization called SCUM...I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who think a certain way are in [the society]. Men who think a certain way are in the men's auxiliary of SCUM". Solanas died of emphysema and pneumonia in 1988 - a year after Warhol, coincidentally enough. San Francisco police broke into her room at a welfare hostel, intending to throw her out because she was behind with the rent, and found her maggot-ridden body. In doing so, the angry wish of Lou Reed and John Cale, who released a song about her on their Warhol tribute album, perhaps found fulfilment:
I believe there's got to be some retribution,
I believe an eye for an eye is elemental,
I believe that something's wrong if she's alive right now.
('I Believe', Songs for Drella)
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6 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A scathing insight into a hatred of male autonomy, 13 Aug 1999
By A Customer
Valerie Solanos brings us a hate filled manifesto wishing to crush all traces of male autonomy. Flawed in detail, but concisive in its sentiment the S.C.U.M Manifesto heralds a wish to entrap all males and belittle them in a state of female autonomy, whilst loathing so called feminists who still will regard some men as good.
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5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Insane rant against all males, 15 Jun 1999
By A Customer
Excellent. It sounds like a genuine frothing at the mouth feminist. Sort of thing they are probably mildly embarassed about stocking in a lesbian bookshop in camden. Indcidentally the sex pistols film "the great rock and roll swindle" quotes from it with the womans face who is reading it covered in crawling ants. The venomous passage is directly against steve jones in the film, but APplies to all men to a greater or lesser extent.Good fun to read on the train.
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