I’d heard of this for some time, but I just got around to reading it tonight. Valerie Solanas is best known for having shot Andy Warhol and one of his associates (I gather from mild research that it was essentially over business dealings that got dire alarmingly quickly, with the author believing that she had been tricked out of rights and payment to her work in perpetuity), I think, but this manifesto is probably a close second. It essentially posits that males are the ultimate root of society’s ills and that it is time for all of them to be eliminated.
Putting aside the parts that date it (there are some things mentioned that still seem relevant, while others are perhaps best seen as relics of 1968), such as technological references and the like, I’m curious to see what anyone who reads this (and I suppose there are at least two of you) thinks of the whole thing. It’s my least favourite sort of essay, the sort that mostly eschews argument in favour of presuming an audience that will recognize it as self-evident, but I suppose that that may well be part of the point, as it seems to prize instinctual understanding (and it’s still better than reading Rand). I suppose my first impression would be that I tend to agree about the symptoms, but not about the cause.
