S.C.U.M.

Along with ‘Achilles Heel’ was a copy of ‘S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) MANIFESTO’ by Valerie Solanas.

Published in 1971 she had already shot Andy Warhol and her sanity was questioned. Everything about her that I have read so far, including her manifesto, reminds me strongly of the character Helga in Heimat who joined the left wing terrorist organisation Baader-Meinhoff. She even looks like the actress chosen to play Helga. Always in love, attention-seeking, always intense, mostly angry, her search for the unattainable (in whatever form) drives her into more and more radical paths until she forsakes art for politics and begins killing. Maybe Valerie Solanas had that same restless passionate discontent. I wonder if the character of Helga owed anything to Valerie.

There is a very good introduction to ‘Manifesto’ by Vivian Gornick which is easier to read than the rant itself. This claim for the Women’s Liberation movement particularly interested me:

The Point of Women’s Liberation’ is not to stand at the door of the male world beating our fists and crying “Let me in damn you, let me in!” The point is to walk away from that world and concentrate on creating a new woman who will take no place in that world, a woman who will make that world fall merely by refusing to populate it, a woman who will remake herself - and her daughters - in a far more divine image (i.e. more recognisably human) than the one she now occupies.

If that truly was the point of WL then it has utterly failed. Women are still battering at the door yelling ‘Let me in. Let me do what you do. Provide crèches so we can park our babies. Pay me equally for what doing what YOU do but give me more maternity allowance. Don’t penalise me for being a women (in fact treat me better than men).’ Only young women in extreme situations (Malalai Joya for one ) are challenging the world created (or so WL would have claimed) by men. So far we have bred Margaret Thatcher and Condoleeza Rice. Women doing men’s job’s like men.

Maybe that’s fine too - we’re all human beings struggling to make a living and hack out a life for ourselves and our families. It just gives the lie to what was generally thought back in the day that to give women power would change the world.

The position of women in society never really entered my consciousness and when it did, through the media, it was of academic interest. I hadn’t wanted a career badly enough to care who got more pay than me, I wanted a secure home and a family. My husband was far better suited to provide the security I hankered for than I was, and I was better at cooking. I didn’t mind spending the day watching the infants in the park, getting up at night to see to them etc. and etc. I would have minded having to go out to work and leave them for someone else to look after, which is what so often happens now. Why have the children in the first place if I was going to hand them over to another woman? Added to this I had always perceived women as the centre, the ruling force even, of their world. My mother’s will was paramount in our household. In the homes of relatives and my parents friends I saw much the same thing happening. The women were queens in their houses and everything happened in relations to their wishes; everything rotated around them. The men I came into contact with may have had power in their work life but took a back seat in the household, furthermore the work they did was FOR the household so that meant they were constrained by their wives and the needs of the children to work at whatever job they could find.

Valerie Gornick acknowledges this last point: “However when it’s all over what one is really left with is a deep and widening sadness for all of us - men and women - caught as we all are in the labyrinthine mazes of sexism. For, quite apparently, the men described by Solanas’ fire and ice are as much prisoners as they are jailers, as much victims as they are victimisers, as much the bewildered dupes of their own superior position in the system as they are its profiteers.

It looks from where I'm sitting as if the movement succeeded in its pratical and political aims (rights, pay, creches etc.) but failed to achieve the aspirations of its sub-text. Both men and women seem to be suffering in their roles now - exhausted, stressed, struggling to live up to expectations, their own and those of society, and struggling to make ends meet. It ain't good.