P*$$y Envy

After reading so much patriarchal dogma that comes flowing out of such great minds in Philosophy and Critical Theory, it is nice to see all of that flipped on its head for a second. Valerie’s SCUM Manifesto’s argument is to break down the system of domination through women pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and realizing their own power.

Valerie seems to not have any particular audience except for the world she feels is caught in this backward understanding of power dynamics between truth and reality. She addresses no gender/sex in particular but does give some direction to certain archetypes of people that exist in society.

Although I love Valerie’s espousal of feminist independence and power, her supporting reasoning that brings her to the social revolution she advocates is complete misandry. Beginning with the reasoning that men are incomplete people because they have the Y chromosome (which is an incomplete X, missing the fourth leg) falls so closely akin to Freud’s women and their penis envy that I knew it either had to be satire or grossly missing a larger picture of relationships, culture, sexuality, and gender. But in putting all that aside, her argument fights tooth and nail to prove the male inferiority and how that relationship has played out into a world where men try to take over through domination, violence and sex because of their ‘lack’ (to tip my hat to Lacan). In this patriarchal system men have also convinced women to be subservient and have subjected them to the role they find themselves in today through much institutionalization. If taken all reasoning to be true in her argument, here would be the crack in the dam; if men were so lowly and incapable of thought and feeling (like she claims multiple times, in multiple ways) there is no reasoning why the higher-being, AKA: ‘woman,’ would take to such subjugation. (At this point, that’s neither here nor there). The way to fight against the system though is to become SCUM, a Society for Cutting Up Men, to stop participating in the society the way it wants us to, vehemently. To stop buying, to be brash and crude, to loot, to destroy cars and businesses, to burn and pillage, to “couple-bust” and disrupt all that we have known to be good, normal, and comfortable-and adopt a new reality.

Through violence and everything that is the opposite of what feminine is, women should live for themselves, and only themselves. Creating, through the gathering of strong, dominant, independent women (and the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM), a new society. Divorcing oneself from the man-hate (which weighed against the amount of misogyny that has to be excused), the revolution that Valerie espouses is not so much about the man/woman binary but about the system itself, which falls akin to many-a-Marxist.

Amber Grimaldi