SCUM Manifesto - Reception and Criticism

Reception and Criticism

Various critics and scholars have analyzed the Manifesto and Solanas's statements regarding it. Daily News reporters Frank Faso and Henry Lee, two days after Solanas shot Warhol, said Solanas "crusades for a one-sex world free of men". Prof. Dana Heller said the author had an "anarchic social vision" and the Manifesto had "near-utopian theories" and a "utopian vision of a world in which mechanization and systems of mass (re)production would render work, sexual intercourse, and the money system obsolete." According to Village Voice reviewer B. Ruby Rich, "SCUM was an uncompromising global vision", in the Manifesto criticizing men for many faults including war and not curing disease; many but not all points were "quite accurate"; some kinds of women were also criticized, subject to women's changing when men are not around; and sex (as in sexuality) was criticized as "exploitative". According to Janet Lyon, the Manifesto "pitt ... 'liberated' women ... against 'brainwashed' women".

Feminist critic Germaine Greer said that Solanas argued that both genders were separated from their humanity and that men want to be like women. Alice Echols says the Manifesto articulates gender as absolute rather than relative.

Heller argued that the Manifesto shows women's separation from basic economic and cultural resources and, because of psychological subordination to men, women's perpetuation of that separation. Robert Marmorstein of the Voice said that SCUM's main message included that "men have fouled up the world" and "are no longer necessary (even biologically)". Sharon L. Jansen said Solanas considered men "biological inferior". According to Laura Winkiel, the Manifesto wants heterosexual capitalism overthrown and the means of production taken over by women. Rich and Jansen said that technology and science would be welcome in the future.

Jansen describes the plan for creating a women's world as mainly nonviolent, as based on women's nonparticipation in the current economy and having nothing to do with any men, thereby overwhelming police and military forces, and, if solidarity among women was insufficient, some women could take jobs and "unwork", causing systemic collapse; and describes the plan as anticipating that by eliminating money there'd be no need to kill men. Heller said the Manifesto would let drag queens live and be "useful" and "productive". Jansen and Winkiel say that Solanas imagined a women-only world. Winkiel says the Manifesto imagines a violent revolutionary coup by women. Prof. Ginette Castro found the Manifesto was "the feminist charter on violence", supporting terrorist hysteria. According to Jansen, Solanas posited men as animals who will be stalked and killed as prey, the killers using weapons as "phallic symbols turned against men". Rich, Castro, reviewer Claire Dederer, Betty Friedan, Prof. Debra Diane Davis, Deborah Siegel, Winkiel, Marmorstein, and Greer said that Solanas' plan was largely to eliminate men, including by men murdering each other, although Rich thought it might be Swiftian satire and that men's retraining was an alternative in the Manifesto, Castro did not take the elimination of men as serious, and Marmorstein included criminal sabotage of men.

According to Jansen, it called for reproduction only of females, and not even of females once the problems of aging and death were solved so that a next generation would no longer be needed.

While, according to Lyon, the Manifesto is irreverent and witty, according to Siegel the Manifesto "articulated bald female rage" and Jansen says the Manifesto is "shocking" and breathtaking. Rich described Solanas as a "one-woman scorched-earth squad" and Siegel says the stance was "extreme" and "reflected a more general disaffection with nonviolent protest in America overall." Rich says the Manifesto brought out women's "despair and anger" and advanced feminism and, according to Winkiel, U.S. radical feminism emerged because of this "declaration of war against capitalism and patriarchy". Heller suggests the Manifesto is chiefly socialist-materialist. Echols has argued that Solanas had "unabashed misandry", and people associated with Andy Warhol (whom she shot) and various media saw it as "man-hating".