Now here and now another text falls into my hands. It is the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. What can I say about the author? She became known as the assassin of Andy Warhol, whom she had critically injured with three shots. She spent her sentence in a prison for the criminally insane… She is now called a radical feminist and she died homeless… None of that matters. What matters is her manifesto. I am amazed when I read it. Much of what I read there coincides with what I have experienced and written myself over the last few years. About the ego, about the mind. But Valerie Solanes relates her text to the man. To the man as a biological phenomenon. That’s the difference. The fear, the anger, the pain, the loneliness, the compulsion to act in order to feel, the soullessness and the inability to feel unity, the compulsion to create a crippled material unity through domination or annihilation, the actual weakness which is to be disguised by power, the powerlessness, all these characteristics are for her characteristics exclusively of men. „Man, deep in his heart, wants to be woman and knows his lack,“ she writes, and much more, where I find that we meet when we replace man with the masculine principle in her text. She recognizes so much, but in her contemplation she stops with man and does not look beyond. She does not recognize that man – whether man or woman – always consists of both aspects. Of the masculine and of the feminine. It does not recognize that the world is not dominated by the man, but by the male aspect, because this is the material, the acting aspect in a material world. Thus, the pain and anger she feels, which lead her to write this manifesto of hers (and also to shoot at Andy Warhol), is her own masculine aspect. It is the acting, the separating (into „she“ and „he“ separating) masculine part in her as a woman. Also, her expressed proposal to eradicate the man and to produce only women through artificial insemination has a deeply masculine origin. It is the concept of destroying that which causes one fear and pain. The search for unity through annihilation of the other. Even artificial insemination would be a feminine and masculine act, even if it were performed only by women, simply because it would be an act. Thus, their gaze remains stuck on the biological, on the material phenomena of a material world, in which also the woman, just by having a body, has the material, masculine principle in herself.
She describes the woman as „active and creative“ and in contrast to this the man as passive. What she sees is on the one hand the pure male principle, which is in extreme pain and hatred, so that it can only bring about destruction and calls this „man“ and „passive“ in the sense of „not creative“. On the other hand, it takes – without being aware of it – the harmonious connection between male and female principle and calls this „woman“. „Active and creative“ in the sense of „acting with divine, soul inspiration“. Male and female united. But it denies the presence of the masculine aspect in women, which in balance, yes, becomes a positive one, and attributes everything to „pure“ femininity itself.
Thus, in her eyes, man is the pure acting principle caught in the meaninglessness of his finite and solitary existence, while woman represents the perfect state between action and oneness. For Valerie Solanas, however, this state of woman is the purely feminine state, that is, a state that contains nothing masculine.
For me, the feminine state she describes represents the state that exists when mind and soul are in balance, when masculine drive and feminine soul force become creative together. Valerie Solana’s fallacy lies in denying man all feminine – soul – attributes and making him a pain-filled half-being, while redefining all the masculine attributes of woman, which she inevitably has, as positively feminine and denying woman the existence of masculine attributes. It will be what she has experienced all her life. She will have known men, who have been drilled in a material world to deny their soul side, as purely destructive beings and thus come to her conclusions.
Reading this manifesto is worthwhile. It was written by a woman who was able to sense the inner connections and who expresses fundamental insights in her words. It is her deepest life experience that she expresses. The insights of her life, which was marked by the exercise of the male principle towards her by men. Power-hungry and conscienceless and uncaring women do not play a role or were not considered in her explanations.
The physical rape, the unilateral, masculine, acting act, which is used in her text as a main proof of the nature and essence of man, is only an external appearance, on which a guilt of man – precisely through the physical act materially visible, in action, so to speak – is to be proven. It is the reduction to the penis, which is nothing but a biological fact, uninfluenceable for the individual, because no one can choose his physical characteristics. Thus, physical rape with a penis, the exercise of power over someone, based solely on a physical endowment that cannot be influenced, is of course a domain exclusively of the man, because the woman has no such organ. But there are also men who do not rape despite having a penis, and there are men who rape in a feminine, nonphysical way despite having a penis – exercising power and creating powerlessness, fear and pain. And it is the same with women. They can rape in a feminine way and they can rape – even in the absence of a penis – in a masculine way. Or they don’t rape. Everything depends on the relationship of our soul and mind in our consciousness. Rape is not the domain of men per se, just because they have a penis, and rape as such is most easily visible in the form of men exercising power over women. Rape is the material principle born of fear, pain and loneliness. An act of power and therefore of weakness. Both men and women possess this material principle. Both are potential rapists. Both are potential pain-filled, raging loneliness.
What Valerie Solanas has written is true. She also writes about the monetary system and governments. It is true in my eyes if the reader replaces the word man with the term mind when reading. For this mind – not in the sense of „intelligence“ but in the sense of the solitary, pain-filled and active principle – is possessed by both man and woman in different proportions. Thus, even the annihilation of man proposed by Valerie Solanas is not the solution, for there is enough yang in women to continue just as men have done before them. And the material yang will always assert itself in a material world and continue to experience and create fear, isolation and pain. The annihilation of the whole masculine principle is equally mutually exclusive, for this would mean the annihilation of all matter, leaving only the soul yin energy. I do not know, but I feel that this would not be possible.
Valerie Solanas propagates the free individual, of which she says that it exists only in the woman who is in friendship with a sex-mate of the same disposition and who strives for justice and love. Thus, she does not mean the lonely, „individualized“ and detached individual, but sees in the individual a being freed from the external – male – constraints of a society based on materialism. Thus individual in contrast to the member of the male collective. If it finds the ideal in the individual it propagates, it sees the ideal in the creative being, which is in the inner balance of forces and is whole and complete. In liberation from the supremacy of material society – and ultimately from the entire material principle of creation – she believes that through this individual in equilibrium she can make possible a society in equilibrium. If all are in balance, then society is in balance. Thus, it designs a society-consciousness, or world-consciousness, that is in balance of material and spiritual forces. The human social consciousness in which unity – (love), justice and equality prevail. It is just that Valerie Solanas does not say and mean in balance, but remains unilaterally separative and instead means and says feminine when she writes of the characteristics of her ideal individuals and society. Man falls completely out of her concept, since he is purely male and nothing more, according to her definition. He is bred away. Moreover, she denies the possibility of achieving this individual (independently female) state to anyone who fits into the existing material system: to the woman if she adapts and to the man in principle.
We must strive together for balance in each of us, so that our mind is no longer so lonely and full of painful anxiety. So that our consciousness hears the soul sense and can act together with the mind creatively and really meaningfully. The desire for gassing or the genetic eradication of one of our two polarities plays only to the mind, the male principle – in us ALL! – with all its destructive power into the hands.
Valerie Solanas was declared insane in the 60s and her manifesto was called satire or parody. So we come back to the beginning of my book and here we see, shocked and full of sadness, how the mind in the male materially dominated society uses its weapons to discredit and destroy the spiritual, through defamation and ridicule, through marriage bullying and much more. Bullying. I would like to take Mrs. Solanas in my arms, hold her and cry with her about this so cruel and so painful material world, which she has spread out before us on nineteen DIN A4 pages.
I would like to tell her that the man can also recognize the meaning, because he is also to a part female. And if you let him, then this side may also develop in him. It is not that he must strive in vain to be a woman. He carries all this within him, just as woman carries man within her and cannot deny him. We are consciousness. And consciousness always carries both within it. If we unite, we create a new consciousness, which in turn contains both. We have to change the material society. Bring it to the center. The world does not allow us to separate. This is our destiny and not an invention of men to exert control, although it may have evolved to that. The masculine on the outside protects the feminine on the inside. That is the principle. Both in man and in woman. If the women would exterminate all men, they would have to exterminate the whole world afterwards, in order not to become men. Because only then there would be in the one-sidedness the justice aimed at by Valerie Solanas, which only two independent women can realize. Ultimately, there must then be only these two women and nothing else must exist around them that could rub against this ideal. The compulsion to breathe and eat alone represents an unbearable restriction for the individual. A material constraint. A masculine constraint. So Valerie Solanas‘ ideal exists only in death, when the soul is separated from the body. As long as we are still on earth, the masculine and the feminine must remain united. This is our task: to achieve unity. The universal consciousness in the balance of forces.