Throughout the manifesto, Solanas extensively details how every failing in society is the doing of what she sees as the inherently inferior male sex. However, this is interspersed with a broader theory that the systematic oppression of women has limited society by delegitimizing half of the population’s contributions to politics, art, and social life. In that first paragraph, Solanas writes to all “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females”, and this is the audience she speaks through throughout– her imagined coalition of women that stretches out beyond the artistic/political/radical subculture that may read the manifesto.

I think the publisher sums this idea up pretty well in her preface, saying the idea that our society might be “so devoid of charm, warmth, spirit, enjoyment, and self-respect” due to the subjugation of women, who could bring so much to the world, seems meaningful and convincing. 

Then, the publisher finishes her preface like this:

“This little book is my contribution to the study of violence.” And we see where everything fell apart with the legacy of Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto. 

You’ve probably heard about this part: On June 3rd, 1968, in the height of Warhol’s success, unknown writer Valerie Solanas walks into the first floor of the Warhol Factory building and shoots Andy Warhol. Warhol is rushed to the hospital but doesn't die. “ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL” is on the front page of the Daily News. 

Here are the two main characters:

Andy Warhol, 40, is the center of the NYC artistic subculture. On the top floor of 231 East 47th Street, he operates an art studio/artist collective known as the Factory, the products of which range from films so abstract, so homosexual, and often so pornographic theaters won’t play them, to the beginning of the commercial Pop Art movement. The Factory is home to a cast of characters including David Bowie, transsexual icons Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling, and the Velvet Underground, a band credited with changing all of modern music and also making heroin kinda sexual. 

Despite being the center of this galaxy of superstars, Warhol was a vague and off-putting man. In one of my favorite quotes of all time, David Bowie says:

“[Warhol] wanted to be very superficial. And seemingly emotionless, indifferent, just like a dead fish. Lou Reed described him most profoundly when he once told me they should bring a doll of Andy on the market: a doll that you wind up and doesn't do anything.”

Then, there is Valerie Solanas. 

Solanas, in contrast to Warhol, was described by a publisher as “friendly, lively [and with] a sense of humor.” Her writing outside of the Manifesto was described as “rather clever” and “amusingly wild.” Like Warhol, she was openly gay for much of her life in a time when the only high profile homosexuals were gay men. 

Solanas was physically and sexually abused throughout childhood, was often homeless (some say by choice), and when she shot Warhol the papers misspelled her name over and over– she was Valarie Solanas in the nation’s biggest publications.

She was a playwright who tried for years to get her work produced, which brought her to her first encounter with Warhol. She had a play called Up Your Ass about a prostitute in New York City that she believed Warhol may be interested in producing, so she gave him a copy of the script in 1967, but Warhol later said it was so explicit he thought it might be a police trap to get his operation shut down for profanity. She returned, and Warhol claimed to have lost the script. As an apology, he gave her a walk-on role in the film I, a Man, and paid her $25. By several accounts, Solanas enjoyed her time on set and was satisfied with the payment. 

Solanas’s limited biography begs the question– why Warhol? Popularly, there are proposed psychiatric explanations, most involving a level of misogyny directed at Solanas. 

In court, Solanas was diagnosed a “paranoid schizophrenic”, which decreased her sentence– in the end, she was sentenced to jail for three years and served for one. Much of what she said and did lines up with the idea of paranoia as a symptom: for example, on that Daily News cover, she is quoted as “crying” “[Warhol] controlled my life.” After she was released from jail, she continued to send him letters and telephone calls, none of which he received. Leading up to the shooting, her friend and editor described her as deteriorating, becoming uncharacteristically angry. 

The misogyny came in when the public connected her work as a radical feminist with her instability– she began to fit the narrative of not just a crazy woman, but a crazy violent dirty lesbian who hated men. In the public imagination, there was no room for her as “friendly and lively”, and without the context of her personality and place in the artistic scene, the SCUM Manifesto was seen as a comically terrifying work. In the public imagination, she became a caricature of herself. 

Later, Germaine Greer and Ti-Grace Atkinson, among other prominent feminist thinkers, reflected extensively on her argument and placed her within the loose but influential movement of Anarcha-Feminists. The SCUM Manifesto contains aspects of Marxist feminism and ecofeminism that have since been legitimized within feminist scholarship and philosophy. 

That could be it, really– a radical feminist thinker and generally nice person gets swept up in mental illness, tries to kill a prominent man, and winds up the less successful lesbian version of Mark David Chapman. She later is validated by feminist scholars and the black and white picture of her in handcuffs is memorialized in a million Andy Warhol retrospective exhibitions.

But now, decades later, Solanas has reached a level of fame she never had while she was alive within a brand new group– radical feminists on the internet. 

(Going forward, it is worth noting that the Factory included several transsexual icons (namely Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn) and modern radical feminism has an intense negative focus on trans women, so it might be intuitive to make a connection between Solanas’s hate for Warhol and radical feminist transphobia. However, to the best of my knowledge, Solanas never talked about trans people and I can confidently say that trans people were not involved in her journey towards shooting Andy Warhol. Everything to do with online radical feminists’ hate towards trans people is outside of the scope of this essay.)

There is, kind of, an actual group that works in Solanas’s name– they’re called SCUM and they have an Instagram account I’ve followed out of curiosity for about a year. They’re a small but dedicated group of radical feminists in France who are currently focused on protesting paid surrogacy in Ukraine, recently crashing the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. There is also, as I mentioned, scholarly analysis of Solanas’s work in the decades since her death.

But much of Solanas’s new legacy as a feminist (not just the woman who shot Andy Warhol) is wrapped up in a wild proliferation of fans and memes online. 

My personal favorite Valerie Solanas meme, which comes up when you look up “Valerie Solanas” on Tumblr, is one of those extremely Summer 2023 memes of the Barbie template that has Solanas looking kind of clever and vindicated with the text “THIS BARBIE IS FOUNDING A SOCIETY FOR CUTTIN’ UP MEN.”