B.tch Book Club

In the 2007 film Teeth, a medical doctor inserts his digits into the protagonist's vagina only to have his fingers bitten off. Gripping his bleeding hand, he screams, “Vagina Dentata!! It does exist!” Well, it seems that Jessa Crispin, the author of Why I Am Not a Feminist thinks that, unlike the vagina in Teeth, feminism has lost its bite. Well, after the gentle gender analysis of The Left Hand of Darkness and the cooperative vibe of The Will to Change I decided to take us into increasingly more radical territory, just in time for those cozy talks over the holiday dinner table.

“Are you a feminist? Do you believe women are human beings and that they deserve to be treated as such? That women deserve all the same rights and liberties bestowed upon men? If so, then you are a feminist . . . or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing, fiercely intelligent manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more.

Why I Am Not A Feminist is a radical, fearless call for revolution. It accuses the feminist movement of obliviousness, irrelevance, and cowardice—and demands nothing less than the total dismantling of a system of oppression.”
— Penguin Random House

“Radical change is scary. It’s terrifying, actually. And the feminism I support is a full-on revolution. Where women are not simply allowed to participate in the world as it already exists—an inherently corrupt world, designed by a patriarchy to subjugate and control and destroy all challengers—but are actively able to re-shapeit. Where women do not simply knock on the doors of churches, of governments, of capitalist marketplaces and politely ask for admittance, but create their own religious systems, governments, and economies. My feminism is not one of incremental change, revealed in the end to be The Same As Ever, But More So. It is a cleansing fire.”
— Jessa Crispin

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Tis the season to violently overthrow not just the patriarchy, but the entire male sex, no?

I said I was going radical for the holidays, and Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto delivers. Referring to men as “walking abortions,” Solanas is not afraid to throw acid at our feelings. It’s a short, 44-page, spit-in-your-face, punch-you-in-the-junk read and I can’t wait! Needless to say, this may bristle the hairs for some of you, but whether we see it as just revenge sci-fi porn or a seminal anarcho-feminist treatise for our ever-gelatinous capitalist patriarchal society, it’ll definitely give us something to talk about!

“Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its time—predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the arts—but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman.”
— Verso books

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”

“The male claim that females find fulfillment through motherhood and sexuality reflects what males think they'd find fulfilling if they were female.”

“Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more
mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male “culture”, in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is.”

“No genuine social revolution can be accomplished by the male, as the male on top wants the status quo, and all the male on the bottom wants is to be the male on top.”
— Valerie Solanas

I don't think SCUM Manifesto is old enough to be considered public domain, but it seems to me like Solanas would want it to be freely distributed, no?

So, here it is in photocopied book form:
https://archive.org/details/sparrowsnest-2426/mode/2up

And pdf:
https://editions-ismael.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1968-Valerie-Solanas-S.C.U.M.-Manifesto.pdf

And just free floating on the web:
https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/home/shivers/rants/scum.html

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