The SCUM Manifesto was written by Valerie Solanas in 1967. The first sentence pretty much sums up the whole piece, in terms of argument, argumentation, genre, and audience:
“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.“
At least as “argument” is taught in first year composition classes, that’s an argument. It isn’t argumentation, but a manifesto (which are rarely argumentation), oriented toward an audience open to considering men an out-group. She’s notorious for advocating violence against men, but that part of her manifesto is minimal. Most of it consists of a hyperbolic list of what’s wrong with men, much of which is simply flipping the tired accusations about women of that time, arguing they’re true of men (which is one reason some people find it funny). For instance, she insists that men are eaten up with guilt, shame, and fear about sex, jealous of women, and hating themselves. She goes on to argue that this jealousy and self-loathing lead to what we would now call “toxic masculinity.”
Solanas has two proposals. First is that women step out of the work force, off “the money system,” and leave men (62-3). These actions would to an immediate economic collapse. She admits that many women won’t take those actions (“nice, passive, accepting ‘cultivated,’ polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s Girls” 64). So, her second proposal is that SCUM (“dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant” 64) become an “unwork” force–taking jobs, and doing them badly–engage in disruptive anarchy and destruction, take over all radio and TV, “bust up” het couples (65-6). SCUM will also “kill all men who are not in the Men’s Auxiliary of SCUM” (66). So, she isn’t in favor of killing all men (#notallmen). At moments, she seems to suggest a world without any men, in which all babies are female, and produced in laboratories.
So, despite being famous for advocating violence against men, even killing, that’s a minor part of the manifesto. Most of it is about what’s wrong with men, and most of her calls for action involve “the money system.” But, the call for violence is there, albeit in somewhat disconnected ways. But, is violence against men really what this text advocates? Is this text really an argument for violence against men? Is it hate speech?
It’s important to try to figure out if a text is likely to incite violence against some group, and so we often have that argument, but we tend to try to answer that question by deflecting from questions about the text and its impact to the author and their group identity (that is, in- or out-group). And that’s what’s wrong with so much current political discourse. It’s a mistake because it tends to makes texts nothing more than Rorschach tests–telling us more about the interpreter than it does about the text.
Some people take the manifesto at face value, and they see it as a man-hating, het-phobic call for violence against men; some people say this manifesto epitomizes feminism. Some people interpret it is a kind of literal hyperbole. What I mean is that they read it as hyperbolic (exaggerated) but also an accurate expression of Solanas’ personal and understandable (given her life experiences) rage, or perhaps hers and all women’s intermittent rage about sexism, and how sexism is systemic, pernicious, and persistent. Some people read it as satire, in the same tradition as Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which has serious criticisms in its discussion, as does SCUM, but the call for eating babies is intended to shock people into more reasonable solutions. So, calling for hurting men is in the same category as eating Irish babies–not her real argument. Some people think it’s hilarious, and just a Lenny Bruce-kind of humor. It’s supposed to shock us into thinking about our tendency toward false essentializing of men and women. And some people think of it as a perhaps unintentionally genius satire on the genre of manifesto.
Every one of those interpretations is defensible, in the sense that it’s possible to find evidence to support the claims–not necessarily good evidence, and not necessarily logically connected, but evidence. The claim that it epitomizes feminism and the one that it was intended as satire are pretty much impossible to defend reasonably in light of intelligent opposition arguments, but they’re often directed at “in” audiences who don’t particularly want a reasonable argument (which means they’re much like the manifesto itself). All of the interpretations are, ultimately, about a moral (and important) question: is this an unethical, unreasonable, and harmful argument? Is this a responsible way for someone to argue in public?[1]
And we should ask that question about every major public statement. We should ask that about what politicians, pundits, influencers, and we say in the “public sphere,” ranging from what the President tweets to what we say on Instagram.[2]
Here’s what I want to argue in this post: the answer might be complicated. And it’s the word “harmful” that makes it complicated–because, I’ll argue, we don’t focus on “harmful” in terms of consequences; instead, we do so in terms of group membership, and that gets us into a mess. We should focus on harm, rather than whether we think they’re on our team.
Let’s go back to SCUM.
Obviously, the various interpretations mentioned above are incompatible, especially in terms of policy consequences—if it’s seriously calling for killing men, it’s hate speech; if it’s all a joke, then treating it as hate speech is singularly humorless, and Swift was engaged in hate speech (so satire is dead). So, how do we determine whether SCUM is actually, and not just hyperbolically, inciting violence against men? In other words, how do we determine the moral impact of texts? Note that I didn’t say the “morality of texts,” but the “moral impact”–they’re different. (I’ll get back to that.)
Here’s the problem. If we’re sympathetic to feminism, we’re likely to explain Solanas’ rhetoric as hyperbole or satire, and therefore not having a harmful impact at all. The less sympathetic we are to feminism, and the more that we think feminism is necessarily hostility to men, the more likely we are to interpret the text as a sincere call for violence against men and hate speech.
So, our interpretation of whether the text is hate speech or humor is likely (but not necessarily—I’ll get to that) strongly influenced by whether we empathize more with her as a woman and feminist (she’s in-group) or with the group she attacks (men, out-group).
Here I have to engage in what-is-not-actually-a-digression into the question of methods of interpretation. We often think of the “meaning” of the text as the message the author intends to send to an audience, and we think a good reader is one who correctly decodes that message. It’s the transmission model of communication. And, really, that’s a perfectly fine way to think about some parts of communication—we should try to figure out what someone is telling us.
It gets vexed, however, when we are thinking about the moral impact of a text, and that’s what the question of whether Solanas is inciting violence is all about. The problem is that, if we try to determine the impact of the text by decoding the author’s intention, we haven’t necessarily determined its impact (texts often have an impact not intended by the author). Instead, we’re likely to assess the moral impact of the text on the basis of whether we agree or disagree with the author. And that method will tempt us into being sloppy Machiavellians.
By sloppy Machiavellian, I mean the notion that the morality of an act or text is determined by intention–all means are morally neutral. We think that, if the author has moral intentions, it’s a moral text, and if they don’t, then it isn’t. Except, we don’t really think that. We don’t care whether the author meant well by their own lights, but by ours. Too often, what we mean when we say that the morality of a text is determined by the morality of the author’s intention is that in-group members (people who want what we want) write moral texts, and no one else does.
We do this equation of morality and intention because we tend to think about morality through the lens of Christian notions of sin. Christian notions of sin emphasize intention (legitimately, I think)–a person sins by doing something they know to be wrong, or by failing to do something they know they should have done. Sin is always within our ken.
Not all bad things, morally harmful things even, are usefully framed as sin, especially if we’re thinking about public policy and discourse. If we separate harm from sin, then we can think about times and ways that someone might do something harmful and/or immoral all the while thinking they were doing the right thing. They meant well. Meaning well and doing harm can take several forms, from doing something to a person they don’t want done but we think they want (or should want) to granting ourselves moral license because we’re on the side of good. We might make harmful mistakes, or have good intentions but bad information. Harm and sin aren’t identical.
If we separate sin from harm, we can talk and think more clearly and honestly about how people–including Christians who “meant well”– have so often ended up on the wrong side of right and wrong.
When you do the kind of research I do—what rhetoric people used to justify hanging Quakers, banning anyone who disagreed on fine points of Calvinist theology, engaging in massacres of Native Americans, prohibiting the freeing of enslaved people, supporting lynching, silencing legitimate dissent, appeasing or actively supporting Hitler, being Hitler, advocating race-based mass imprisonment—what you learn, very quickly, is that everyone thinks they’re justified in what they do. Everyone, including Hitler, believes they have good intentions. That we believe we are on the side of good doesn’t necessarily mean we are.
Reducing all questions of impact and morality to whether the actor had moral motives has the odd consequence that we explain exactly the same behavior (chasing a squirrel) as moral or immoral on the grounds of what motives we attribute to them. Chester chased the squirrel because he’s aggressive; Hubert chased the squirrel to protect his family. And, typically, we attribute good motives to in-group members (people we think of as “us”) and bad motives to out-group members (them). Solanas was engaged in hyperbole; Solanas wanted men killed. Our politicians are mistaken; their politicians lie (or, “our politicians lie because they have/they’re trying to get good things done” and “their politicians lie because they’re dishonest/greedy/corrupt”).
So, deciding that a text is moral to the extent that the author has good morals often gets us into a circular argument: that person is doing a good thing because they have good motives; I know they have good motives because they are one of us, and people like us have good motives; we have good motives because people like us are good, and good people have good motives.
I’m not saying we should ignore intention altogether; I’m saying that it shouldn’t be the criterion we use for thinking about the impact of public discourse. It might be tremendously important for determining whether someone has sinned, but that determination doesn’t happen to be on my list of job duties. It can also be important in personal relationships for thinking about what happens next. [3] But, if a public figure keeps meaning well and doing harm, that’s a problem regardless of their intentions.
If we think about impact, then we can look at what a text does, or can be plausibly read as likely to do to a majority of audience members. As it happens, those criteria can be assessed straightforwardly when it comes to SCUM: there has never been an incident when a few thousand women committed violence against men, saying they believed they were doing what Solanas wanted, or that they were inspired by her.
Whether a text incites a group to violence depends on the power and authority of the author (the extent to which the author has a base that will do what the author advocates), the extent to which inciting violence is one of several plausible interpretations, the size and makeup of the audience (is there a large audience primed for violence), the target of the violence (does the text reinforce and rely on the audience’s pre-existing belief that the target is a group or member of a group against whom violence is always justified), and a context of legitimation (this violence is framed as legitimate by the in-group). While one of several defensible interpretations of SCUM is that Solanas is advocating violence against men, none of the other characteristics apply. She had little or no power and an outlier argument that readers were (and are) unlikely to read anywhere else, let alone as a dominant narrative for a large community.
I should say that I don’t like the book. I don’t know whether or not Solanas was seriously calling for violence against men–I think she was a troubled and tragic person who may not have been entirely clear about what she wanted. I don’t think it’s funny; I think it’s painful to read. I can understand why some people would find it funny, and I can see it as a brilliant parody of manifestos (a genre I don’t much like). I’m not saying either of those is a bad reading–they just aren’t mine.
The SCUM manifesto is not responsible public discourse–there’s a sense in which hyperbole and satire often aren’t–but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has an immoral impact. And, again, not all public discourse has to be responsible.
Imagine that there had been an incident when a few thousand women felt inspired by SCUM to attack violently a gathering of men, and they said they thought she wanted them to do so. And imagine that people who liked her said that she wasn’t responsible for that behavior because what she said was satire, hyperbole, well-intended, and so on, although she had written something that thousands of people misunderstood. But, if her manifesto did result in a mass of people engaging in violence, then Solanas would need to take responsibility for that impact, as quickly as possible, and try to stop it. The longer she took to clarify her intention, the more irresponsible she was. Even (especially) if she didn’t intend the violence, it would be tragically irresponsible were she not absolutely clear about her intention as soon as the violence started.
If a person might trigger a violent attack they didn’t intend, they’re rhetorically irresponsible. If that attack happens, and they don’t immediately try to clarify their intention, they wanted the attack, didn’t care if it happened, or are outrageously irresponsible. If a few thousand women attack a gathering of men, believing they were doing what Solanas wanted, and a defender said it wasn’t her responsibility because her text was ambiguous, they’re saying she’s irresponsible. The ambiguity of her intention coupled with her audience’s response might be a reason she shouldn’t be prosecuted, but it would also be a reason she shouldn’t be trusted in a position of power.
[1] By “responsible way to argue” (or “responsible public discourse”) I don’t mean humorless, data-heavy, or anything especially complicated. I just mean discourse for which they take responsibility. So, they try to be honest and accurate and fair to the opposition, and they own up to what their intentions are (see, I said the issue of intentions matters–it just isn’t the only or most important issue).
[2] I don’t think everyone always has to behave responsibly in public discourse–that would be a very boring world–but because we should be wary of trusting the judgment of people who rarely are. We might take great pleasure in what they say and write, retweeting, reposting, sharing, rereading, but we wouldn’t give them the keys to the castle.
[2] It’s also important in personal relations. But, after a while, if a person keeps hurting you or people you love, you’re going to stop caring about whether they meant to, and worry more about how to protect yourself and others.