Valerie Solanas is the perfect example of a woman angered by society and her own views of the world. Perhaps not inherently a lunatic, but she’s definitely taken it upon herself to rant on the shortcomings of men. Her language is crude, her descriptions brutal, yet theres something invigoriating to this work.
This isn’t just a 50-page rant on man-hate. It’s also Solanas’s conveyance that there’s more to women than the term “women”; in this stagnant society that we’re used to, her belief, this utter conviction, is oddly refreshing. Ridiculed, yes, but the peculiar way in which she arranges her logic is interesting, and makes this material more into the depths of the radical feminist’s mind, if there ever was a feminist as radical and at the same time significant as Valerie Solanas. She seems to dig deeper into her own interesting logic, yet failing to acknowledge anything else. More than anything, this book felt like sporadic bursts of energetic rants, done for the purpose of releasing rather than conveying.
Her manifesto basically runs on the thread of this idea: “Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female.”
I’ve seen far too many reviews dismiss Solanas for having “failed” to expound on this idea. But, as a woman, it’s obvious to me that Solanas is angered by the implications of being a woman, and have hit too close to the far-radical end of things in portraying that the word woman is a characteristic more than a determinant of the sex itself.
His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing (Big Man with a Big Dick tearing off a Big Piece). Since he’s attempting to prove an error, he must ‘prove’ it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate compulsive, attempt to prove he’s not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman.
“The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world with maleness. The male has a negative Midas Touch– everything he touches turns to shit.”
“Eventually the natural course of events, of social evolution, will lead to total female control of the world and, subsequently, to the cessation of the production of males and, ultimately, to the cessation of the production of females.” And here it is–all her ravings on the course of the human race.
~4 stars.
Written in Sep. 18, 2023
