FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - A Plea for Feminism

Rant Number 428 10 February 2011

Bias against men. The woman prosecutor in Sweden after the extradition of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange allegedly is guilty of that. Radical feminists, lesbians and the CIA – some unlikely bedfellows!

The priest feels voluble Mr Assange can look after himself but, stone him if you must, fair is fair - a modest plea for feminism is sometimes in order.

Valerie Solanas is my kind of feminist. Who she? Ever heard of the mythical Woman Who Shot Andy Warhol? That’s my gal. Totally obscure & marginal character, she catapulted herself to fame when in New York on June 3, 1968, she fired three bullets at legendary American pop artist Andy Warhol. At first declared clinically dead, it took five doctors & five hours of surgery to resurrect poor Andy. The gunslinger was arrested and tried. Her lawyer called Valerie ‘one of the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement.’ However, the judge found her mentally unsound - she got away with 3 years in the clink.

Solanas’ fame grew further when pornographic publisher Maurice Girodias published her scatological pamphlet, the SCUM Manifesto. The title is acronym for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’. I possess a copy. Anarchic and exhilarating, SCUM does not lack truth. The first paragraph announces that life in this society is ‘an utter bore’. It summons all ‘thrill-seeking females...to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.’ Man, according to our Valerie, is ‘an incomplete female’, ‘a lonely turd’, a ‘walking abortion’, even ‘unfit for stud service’. SCUM rejects work, pacifism and civil disobedience and calls instead for ‘unwork’, criminal action, selective destruction and discriminate killings. The Manifesto also urges the busting up of heterosexual couples, the media networks and cars. No wonder SCUM’s extreme language made some wonder whether the writer was an agent provocateur, an undercover female cop.

To understand Solanas you have to know her biography. Sexually abused by her father and brutalised by her grandfather, she later became a drifter and a prostitute. Then she wrote a filthy and gory play in several versions, Up Your Ass, replete with man-murdering heroines. It was this work that led her to Andy Warhol’s famed art establishment, the Factory. Solanas gave Warhol her book to read, as a potential producer. I imagine vainglorious Andy hardly noticed her – for him she was only a minor moth amongst the myriad freaks hanging around the Factory. When he failed to return her play, Valerie, paranoid with fears of plagiarism, struck.

Was Solanas really a hard feminist, a heartless dyke, a man-hating virago? I think not. Quite the opposite, in fact. When you read between the lines, the tough author of SCUM comes across as a vulnerable and sensitive person, yearning for human warmth and care. Again and again she accuses men of being incapable of ‘love, affection and tenderness’. I ask: why would she do that, unless those were the qualities she, as a woman, desperately wanted and needed? The very qualities her violent male relatives had denied her? Besides, the lady was clear-headed enough to see through the male drop-outs who, in the trendy ‘60s, posed as rebels and hippies. What enticed those phonies to the ‘commune’ was only ‘the prospect of all the free p...y’, she mocked. Nor was she seduced by the self-professed feminist men who applauded SCUM, eager to join her anti-men crusade. ‘Masochistic molluscs’, she derided them and of course she was right.

As to sex, it was ‘the refuge of the mindless’, she affirmed – here too she was almost right.

‘A woman...knows instinctively that the only wrong is to hurt others, and that the meaning of life is love.’ This may strike you as a bit sentimental but...what’s wrong with that? Sentiments are feelings and feelings are as important as reasons – actually, more important because reasons rarely really persuade and move while feelings always do.

‘The meaning of life is love.’ Sounds like a line in a cheap novelette? Don’t be so snooty, it is a statement that says a lot about girls like Solanas. Love, not just sex, was what she was she craved, what she needed, but it was precisely what the heartless men in her life, from relatives to lovers, had failed to give her. Love’s absence was Valerie’s personal tragedy. It robbed her life of meaning. Men had hurt her and men compounded the offence by denying her the only salve that would have healed the hurt: love. Pretty tragic.

SCUM is damning about religion and the churches, which the authoress regarded as designed to relieve men from any sense of guilt and shame – an odd view! Yet, if you remember St John’s tremendously beautiful words, ‘God is love and he who abides in God abides in love and love in him’, you might get an insight into the authentic religion that would helped Solanas to discover the Holy One whose love never fails. She died of pneumonia, aged, 52, in a squalid hotel in San Francisco. The death certificate might as well as stated as true cause of death ‘a broken heart’. Maybe near the end she saw the Infinite Love whom we call God, who knows?

There are of course other kinds of feminism than that which the priest is defending here. There is a doctrinaire, one-sided and monotonous type of feminist discourse, obsessed with equality with, and imitation of, the male member of the species. That is not the felt feminism of the SCUM Manifesto, the violence of its language notwithstanding. Valerie’s defiant howl issued from neither ideology nor spite. Rejection, abuse and hurt – take those into account and you will truly understand the Woman Who Shot Andy Warhol.

The plain truth is that too many men are bastards who take advantage of women. They get their pleasure out of the females and then move airily on, regardless of the feelings of the human beings whom they have used and hurt. That explains much about the rise of much feminism.

In conclusion: of Mr Assange’s whistle-blowing I wholly approve. Of his philandering – nooooo!