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 and other games, breeding, reading, walking around, daydreaming, eating, playing with themselves, popping pills, going to the movies, getting analyzed, traveling, raising dogs and cats, lolling about on the beach, swimming, watching TV, listening to music, decorating their houses, gardening, sewing, nightclubbing, dancing, visiting, “improving their minds” (taking courses), and absorbing “culture” (lectures, plays, concerts, “arty” movies). Unable to relate or to love, the male must work. Leisure time horrifies the male, who will have nothing to do but contemplate his grotesque self.

Supply the non-relating male with the delusion of usefulness, and enable him to try to justify his existence by digging holes and then filling them up.

The focus of this edition is not on the nostalgic appeal of the work, but on Avital Ronell's incisive introduction, 'Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas.' Here is a reconsideration of Solanas's infamous text in light of her social milieu, Derrida's 'The Ends of Man' (written in the same year), Judith Butler's Excitable Speech, Nietzsche's Ubermensch and notorious feminist icons from Medusa, Medea and Antigone, to Lizzie Borden, Lorenna Bobbit and Aileen Wournos, illuminating the evocative exuberance of Solanas's dark tract.Ģ. In fact, the work has indisputable prescience, not only as a radical feminist analysis light-years ahead of its timepredicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against under-representation in the artsbut also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. But the Manifesto, for all its vitriol, is impossible to dismiss as just the rantings of a lesbian lunatic. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published this work just before her rampage against the king of Pop Art made her a household name and resulted in her confinement to a mental institution. SCUM Manifesto was considered one of the most outrageous, violent and certifiably crazy tracts when it first appeared in 1968. Avital Ronell reconsiders Solanas in light of her social milieu.

The scum manifesto