"Shut Up, Trappy Little Mama's Boy", A Review of "The SCUM Manifesto" by Valerie Solanas
Vitriol Valerate, Issue No. 10
now, before i begin my review of this book, i have to sayβ¦
that i liked it.
i didnβt think i would, but i liked it.
i guess the younget terfs are counting on some notion that we trannies wouldnβt read it, by representing the text as though itβs like some terf blackpaper? well, i can swear to everyone here and now that itβs not.
or maybe itβs the same habit that elder terfs share, by appropriating an author as one of them without any closer knowledge over the body of their work? the same happened with dworkin. but i can also swear to everyone that slapping a βTERF manuscriptβ sticker on the front cover of someone elseβs book without reading it does not make it so.
i acknowledge though that there is an albeit contrived sense of debate and mystery about the thoughts of andrea dworkin on mtfs between the word of her books and her joint works with catherine mackinnon and the word of her life partner for the last of her years, against the word of a terf who published a blurb about a book she wanted to sell, and other terfs who drone on that dworkin had some fleeting sympathies for a few transsexual prostitutes in europe but not some overly funded advocacy campaign for the global hegemonic dynasty of some shadowy tranny-pharmaceutical complex, and thence i must ask myself why my pockets arenβt loaded, and why i write for myself here on substack but not for the new yorker. iβm as objective and as imaginative and as clever as they come, but still penniless. i guess we may still have yet to unearth some kind of economic-marketing PR mechanism leveraged by multinational private enterprises to recuperate the aesthetics of being βrevolutionary and tolerantβ, but are rather sundered, independent, and in truth exploitative of the movements and groups which they claim to love in the name of stealing for themselves a higher bid of clients. if such a mechanism were to be found, i would bid you all to call it, βrainbow capitalismβ. itβs my idea, i came up with it. :P
recuperation of leftist revolutionary rhetoric and iconography, by a private enterprise that busted labor unions, but it has a hidden communist agenda and the commies are in on it, lmao
but as for valerie solanas, unless you just havenβt read her book, unless you just havenβt read anything about her life and her play that was for so many years held hostage by the gaunt-leer andy warhol, there is no mystery about what she thought of us trannies at all. and far be it from me to to call valerie solanas a terf, heedless are we of whatever some wide-eyed illiterate tranny-hating teenagers would tell us, and i bid you to stay heedless of them, they know nothing.
nevertheless, even if valerie solanas were a terf, i canβt set aside my fascination with her work. her vulgar βoffensiveβ expressions, her counterintuitive phrasing, her sense of humor. iβm drawn to it.
many women who were radical feminists in the sixties and seventies felt the same way, and felt that the following of her references to βf*gs and drag queensβ included mtfs. despite the vulgar expressions, she manages to find far better things to say about them than of just plain-old men. these feminists also understood that solanas lived in the same SRO hotel as some mtfs during their work under warholβs private ministry of βgreat artβ, and solanas used the same expression of βdrag queensβ for describing mtfs as warhol himself.
in any case, the manifesto itself spans around 30 pages and speaks almost no scholastic tongues. itβs not like anyone is being asked to read and fully understand marxβs βcapitalβ, or kropotkinβs βthe conquest of breadβ.
as a basic summary, solanas wrote that males, projecting all of their own qualities onto women, go about reducing women to the standing of the βf*gsβ which she believed males were meant to be, and defining themselves by all the strong independent qualities of female females, i think this is where solanas gets her phrasing for βmale femalesβ, females who are conditioned to mimic what solanas says are the passive, sexual, f*ggy attributes of the malesβ inner nature and vice versa, by convincing the world that men are women and women are men, and this leads to such hateful loathsome disasters as war, religion and conformity, the lionizing of fatherhood, the degradation of motherhood, child abuse, fake βpolitenessβ, the money system and fake βvalueβ, the fucking government, so-called βgreat artβ, etc.
and she offers us some tactics that harken us back to some of her anarchist contemporaries in UAW/MF, toward her utopic post-male civilization.
there were some moments in reading where it seemed to me that solanas had at times been contradicting herself, but she was simply relaying all that she learned from βmenβ, itβs men who are contradicting themselves in trying to prove an error, not her. that men to try to shove their f*gg*ness onto women, but being sexual, when men find it difficult to fight certain thoughts, they will blame it all on the βsexualityβ of women for being such βf*gsβ. i was bewildered about it for while, so thatβs just a heads up.
i think i want to touch on the implicit value it touched on for me.
when i was growing up i was deeply attached to my mother, more than my other siblings. i wanted to be like my mother for longer than i could remember. i wanted to do everything she was doing, i wanted to wear everything she was wearing. my father, who was obviously jealous and looking to instill manhood, encouraged my siblings to laugh at me and call me a βmamaβs boyβ. still, i grew up looking really fem, being bisexual, and being called a sissy and a f*gg*t. for a short time in high school, thought maybe i could avoid all the hassling by getting a girlfriend. that posed a unique problem for me, as the ladies who were straight werenβt interested, the ladies who were interested werenβt straight. itβ¦ it became something of a hang-up. even though i knew i was bisexual, i discriminated against non-straight women.
after this, for some reason when i used pornography, i never searched for lesbian porn, and there very few times when i ever saw any. itβs not any kind of disgust, it just struck me as the kind i should never look for, like it was taboo.
but when i got around to reading the manifesto and seeing these words:
βEvery boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her,β
βThe male, in fact, wants desperately to be led by females, wants Mama in charge,β
it dawned on me.
lesbians are meant to be our true leaders. we must not sully their likeness with so much femininity and sexuality, in fact, weβre the feminine and sexual ones, not them.
however, while thinking of my own life experiences and word from the SCUM manifesto, when terfs go around saying that f*ggy/tranny/trappy males are going around as caricatures of women, i must wonder whether solanas would have thought that weβre living by all the βstereotypesβ that lie within our true nature as males, which had thus far been ascribed falsely to women by males before us.
i donβt know, if i decided i should be trans to catch myself a lesbian, then why didnβt i do just that? why would i wait a couple years after pushing away some advances from a sapphic lady before deciding to come out and transition on my own?
when solanas described a rising tide of males growing up as f*gs and wishing for womenβs liberation, by their own deeper self-interest in vicariously living through the deeds of liberated women, awestruck by their boldness and might to make the impossible possible ....
βSO COOL!β
.... it felt like she was describing me.
she writes of these f*ggy drag queens/traps/trannies that they are less miserable and more tolerable than men, and as part of a newfound βenlightened self-interestβ in which we know our own self-interest to be contingent on living vicariously through the fulfilling lives of liberated women. but hardly out of ideas and thinking that maybe we could go a bit further in hopes of winning truly fulfilling lives for ourselves, solanas says that weβd be better off still if we did all we can to become women, or as close to being women as we can. she doesnβt even bother bringing forth any misgivings toward the idea, rather she wrote it as if she came up with the idea herself, itβs as if to say, βwhy settle for living vicariously through us when you can become one of us?β at any rate, it is all the same as in keeping with her directive to destroy the male sex.
βIf men were wise they would seek to become really female, would do intensive biological research that would lead to men, by means of operations on the brain and nervous system, being able to be transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women.β
this is all why i have to wonder whether teenaged terfs promoting this manifesto have truthfully read and understood it. because in spite of all the rightful disdain toward males in general, after seeing βTERFβ and βSCUM Manifestoβ in their bios, and moreover after reading the manifesto, i must say, all this makes it look these βterfsβ are worshipping the text of something like a cold and unfeeling female-written ANTIPODE to terfish thought.
although i donβt have much of a liking to andrea long chu, i would agree with her assessment of solanasβ belief that it looks as though solanas was saying men are closeted mtfs, or maybe that mtfs would be better versions of what men are, or that males have some essence of what mtfs are within them which they would be better not to repress.
but now onto some of my misgivings with solanasβ post-male society.
yes, i have misgivings.
solanas, in her text, is establishing a pretty clear pecking order, with selfish groovy female females at the top, then f*****s/traps/trannies/drag queens and the βmale femalesβ (although itβs hard at times to tell whom she holds at greater disdain), and at bottom are males put on drugs by the SCUM regime, as men who spent their lives trying to disguise themselves as having the spiritual qualities of female females.
from reading βThe SCUM Manifestoβ, and reading about βUp Your Assβ, and lastly from reading about the life of solanas, she looks to give off the belief that it is only natural and expected that males should wish they were lesbian, it seems as though itβs only that she thinks males are better off and higher as individuals, if she would call us individuals, to simply acknowledge this truth and to own up to it rather than buying into the male narrative that males are lesbians and that females are traps, like no one would find out.
so for males to be higher in accepting themselves as the drag queens/trannies/traps that they were meant to be makes them more worthy of someoneβs attention and care, than the lowly abject turds who keep trying to pretend men are women and women are men, but the traps are still mostly seen as males, who, most of all by solanasβ word, are to be dominated by whichever females who should care to dominate them in a sane society. better to dominate a trap than a lowly abject turd, we see it all the time in some media.
and what if i told you that this is already somewhat the lived experience of some traps and mtfs, including myself?
i have been verbally objectified by women as a βtrapβ and a βfutanariβ, and i know other mtf transsexuals who had been molested by some women because they are trans.
if i didnβt know any better, iβd say that itβs like these women had read the manifesto in a past life.
as we are seeing a lot of this now, i fear this may be a natural conclusion of a society in which women are to become dominant while setting a higher priority on traps than on other males, and this is stuff that weβre seeing today.
and this is a terf who has harassed me personally. this attitude some of them are growing to have that there would never be anything that anyone could do to whatever male/mtf that would be too fucked up is earnestly becoming truly gutwrenching.
and i fear for our safety.
although the things that solanas wrote about toppling patriarchy and dominating men got my blood rushing, even though i was cheering for it, i fear that mtfs would become targets, beyond the length they already are.
even though i like the SCUM manifesto, even though itβs sharp and witty, and often spot-on about men, and Daddy, even though it isnβt a terf manuscript ....
.... i still think we ought to approach it with severe caution