The S.C.U.M Manifesto

The Society For Cutting Up Men (Valerie Solanas 1968) ______________________________________

I'm sure she would hate me for saying this but after reading her manifesto, I am quite convinced that if Valerie had been born a man, she would have been quite similar to me. Apart from the most extreme and vitriolic of her anti-male views, their is much to be admired in her manifesto; and given the creative nature and sporadic chaos of her often turbulent life, I feel a definite affinity, and creative kinship with her. Their is absolutely no doubt in my mind and social experience, that men are clearly responsible for the majority (if not all) of violence and war all over the planet. In this respect I am an ardent feminist.

her view the Ego-centric male as universalis harder to justify, but in my experiences of life and art she is largely correct, men in general (I include myself) and especially those who claim to be artists are incredibly self-centred and ego-driven. This is not always a negative trait for it depends upon what the goal and aims of this drive is directed towards.

You can clearly see the self-centredness in the persona of Damian Hirst who preoccupies himself with the role of the artist as celebrity, the defining example being Andy Warhol, who is also the main protagonist for the anti-male S.C.U.M manifesto.

But one could hardly claim that Nelson Mandela was self-centred or ego-driven for wanting equality and democracy in South Africa, but that is exactly what his drive and ego-consciousness fight for. Is anything really possible in life without some expression of the individual ego? I believe it is just a question of how much we express of ourselves for ourselves, and how much of ourselves we express truly in the service of others? A notion that to my mind that is not incompatible with itself, for it seems to me that it is possible to fully express the self, and therefore the individual through means and ways that are in complete synthesis with the expressive needs and wants of others.

I do not believe the individual (expression) must be oppressed for the greater needs of the community (Society), or that the wider community must only serve the needs of the most powerful individuals in Society. There is, and always be relative social tensions between the individual and the group(s) to which s/he belongs at both the micro and macro level; the central creative issue in terms of personal, social, and economic development of all our individual and collective human potential, is how to create a sustainable socio-economic balance that allows all of our individual and community strength to emerge and thrive in tandem, which clearly is not how our current Society is at present maintained or governed.

This is an argument that I feel sure the extreme views of valarie Solanas would agree with, because of course she would argue that the reasons for the individual, collective, social, and economic imbalance is simply down to the self-centredness, ego sex, and power drives of men.