NIHILIST ASEXUALITY

Another stream of political celibacy/asexuality that emerged in the late six-ties originates with the radical feminist uptake of Valerie Solanas’s infamous SCUM Manifesto (1967).⁸⁴ Solanas was a radical antiestablishment figure, a sex worker, a sexual violence survivor, and poor—“theorizing and writing from the social gutter.”⁸⁵ She intentionally disidentified from various identity positions, including feminism and lesbianism—rhetorically taking up nihilist asexuality as a radical challenge against the state, patriarchy, poverty, and basi-cally everything she detested in the world. If erotics, as I formulated it at the outset of this chapter, is about the energy of collective struggle to end oppres-sion, Solanas was on the outside of the erotic energies of the sixties and seven-ties since she worked as a single unit, alone against the system. Yet her work elucidates an acidic erotics that was based in a raging dissatisfaction with the conditions of her life. Applying a Lordean framework of erotics to Solanas, Solanas refused to be “docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined [and to] accept many facets of [her] oppression as [a] wom[a]n.”⁸⁶ Instead, Solanas’s erotics were based in a blistering anger against each and every condition of her own oppression and the erotic struggle to imagine a different futurity for those rare women she identified as “groovy.” Further, Solanas’s invective erot-ics provided a ground for the spurring of an asexual eroterot-ics among radical feminists, as I will explore in the subsequent sections.

While in recent years there has been a mounting interest in Solanas’s anti-establishment persona, her work and her language have also been understood as transphobic. I read and understand Solanas as a radicalist who uses the SCUM Manifesto to disrupt hegemonic discourses of sexuality, writing from a position of a socially marginalized person who deploys against cisgender men many of the cultural myths that have been lodged against cisgender women throughout history. While, like many of the other feminists cov-ered in this chapter, Solanas draws on a strong gender binary between “men”

and “women” and “males” and “females” as well as on biological determin-ism around gender, her work also at times undercuts this binary, suggesting that in addition to men and women, she also envisions other genders such as

“groovy females,” “scum women,” and the “Men’s Auxiliary” who defy patriar-chy as well as “daddy’s girls” and oppressive men who support patriarpatriar-chy. In this sense, it could be argued that she identifies several genders in her SCUM Manifesto, even as she relies on the gender binary. Also, it should be noted that Solanas herself did not give the name “The Society for Cutting Up Men” to her manifesto—rather, it was provided by her publisher—and that the manifesto itself was polemical rather than prescriptive.⁸⁷

Borne of a frustration with the operations of prestige and wealth within a patriarchal context that left her disinherited, impoverished, isolated, and liv-ing precariously on the inconsistent alms of others, Solanas’s radical feminist asexuality is a nihilistic asexuality, an asexuality of death, decay, and social extermination—an antisocial thesis. Solanas speaks to us as a killjoy from a position of nihilism, disbelieving in the possibility of change, even as she advocates for a most radical type of system overthrow.⁸⁸ Her proposed solution for overthrowing “male” society and culture is as follows. In the manifesto, SCUM—who are “self-confident, swinging, thrill-seeking females”—are after creating “a female society . . . [of] funky females grooving on each other.”⁸⁹ In order to do this, the true scum of the earth, or men who are oppressive, must be eliminated in whatever way possible, and their “male culture” (i.e., patriarchy) must likewise be exterminated. Part of this strategy for eliminating oppressive men is asexuality, an end to the reproduction of men. In addition to aiding in the elimination of oppressive men, asexuality also redirects SCUM women’s attention to other pursuits, namely the remaking of society. SCUM women are “those females least embedded in the male ‘Culture,’ the least nice, those crass and simple souls who reduce fucking to fucking, who are . . . too selfish to raise kids and husbands.” Further, “these females are cool and rel-atively cerebral and skirting asexuality.”⁹⁰ Solanas writes that “if all women simply left men, refused to have anything to do with them—ever, all men, the government, and the national economy would collapse completely,” and this is the ambitious and fictitious goal of the SCUM Manifesto, a complete remak-ing of society through a complete annihilation of “male” (that is patriarchal, capitalist) society and culture.⁹¹ Crucially, asexuality is central to this, because it fractures women’s intimate ties with men, their oppressors, and thus frees women to engage in the making of a new world and new world order. Women do not have to bother with sex and they can adopt a post-sex politics since

“they’ve [already] seen the whole show—every bit of it—the fucking scene, the sucking scene, the dyke scene—they’ve covered the whole waterfront,

been under every dock and pier—the peter pier, the pussy pier . . . you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM’s been through it all, and they’re now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out.”⁹² In this sense, women can free up their energies, distance themselves from the efforts of pleasing others, seek-ing instead to “destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it.”⁹³ This is a revolutionary vision that draws from Black Power organizing and efforts to build black culture apart from white people’s control of culture and the ideol-ogy of white supremacy. For Solanas, this fictional project would involve the annihilation of any and all men who are oppressive, the end of the reproduc-tion of male culture and gender, but also the end of reproducreproduc-tion itself, the end to the reproduction of the female gender and the cultural construction of femaleness. She asks, “Why produce even females? Why should there be future generations? What is their purpose?”⁹⁴ This nihilism serves to question the dominant patriarchal system as well as feminist stories of optimism, hope, and social repair. It is informed by Solanas’s place on the margins of society and her inability to surmount the class-based and gender-based oppression in her own life as well as by a vision for a different world free of oppression.

It was Solanas’s radical, and by that I mean unprecedented and ragingly angry text, along with the events that unfolded around her shooting of artist Andy Warhol, who functioned as a symbol of a “new” cultural capital that was nonetheless persistently male, white, and capitalist, that registered political celibacy/asexuality as a viable theoretical feminist tactic among radical femi-nists.⁹⁵ After Solanas’s shooting of Warhol in 1968, Solanas became a conten-tious figure in feminist circles, with some touting her as a feminist symbol and others, such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), denounc-ing her violent actions as deleterious to the feminist movement and its public reception, with the NOW national president, Betty Friedan, arguing against the “sex warfare” of radical feminism.⁹⁶ Among Solanas’s supporters, Flo Ken-nedy acted as her lawyer, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz visited her in jail, Ti-Grace Atkinson visited her in prison and attended her trial, and Robin Morgan (edi-tor of Sisterhood Is Powerful [1970]), Dana Densmore, and Dunbar-Ortiz pop-ularized her work in the women’s movement.⁹⁷ Alice Echols, in Daring to Be Bad (1989), argues that Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz introduced Solanas’s text at the women’s meeting that took place at Sandy Springs, Maryland, in August 1968, reading excerpts from the manifesto aloud and proclaiming it “the essence of feminism.” ⁹⁸ Shortly after, “SCUM . . . became obligatory reading for radical feminists,” providing the basis for incorporating political celibacy/asexuality into radical feminist politics.⁹⁹