I was full of rage then: red, male, viciously intellectual. I got it into my head that for my final project that semester, I would get my hands on a piano and do art things to it. I found one for free on Craigslist, a worn but fully functional eighty-eight-key spinet piano at a community center in Jamaica, Queens; somehow, I persuaded my two roommates to allow me to keep it dead center in our small dorm room. In the weeks that followed, I molested the thing. I tore out the wood paneling over the hammers, clumsily modifying the strings so that the piano would snap and hiss metallically when certain keys were struck. I tore pages out of used books, including the pop psychology classic Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and papiermâchéed them to the instrument’s aging flanks. Feminism, I thought. For weeks, my hands and clothes were covered in DIY paste, making me look like a compulsive masturbator, which I was. But this was Art, and I would not be stopped. I had just cheated on my girlfriend, and I was very sad.
Piano keys, like human teeth, are buried in the gums. When ripped out, they have roots: slender rails of soft, blonde wood, often at a slight angle. I discovered early on that the flesh of a key received ink gladly, yielding under pressure. On a whim, I inscribed one key with a quotation, before carving the name of the author into the ivory with a screwdriver. I decided I would do this with all the keys. I developed a suite of formal constraints: that I would write in black ink; that I would write in a tiny hand, as I have done from a young age, considering it a mark of erudition; and that each key would be devoted to a different text on the politics of art. Most of these texts were manifestos and avantgarde writings from the second half of the twentieth century. One of them was SCUM. Me too, I thought.
BONGI. You’re wrong—I’m not a
watcher; I’m a woman of action.
When he learned that she had shot Andy Warhol, Valerie’s publisher, Maurice Girodias, wondered in alarm if he had been wrong to take the SCUM Manifesto as an elaborate joke. “But it was a joke. It had to be!” he wrote. “She could not possibly have convinced herself that she was about to carry out the greatest genocide in the history of mankind single-handed!” This is the question everyone always asks about Valerie: How could she be serious?
Easily, I suppose. Jokes are always serious. At an academic event, I was once asked what I had meant by the term ethics as I’d used it in a publication. I hesitated and then I said, “I think I mean commitment to a bit.” The audience laughed, but I meant it; they laughed because I meant it. In stand-up comedy, a bit is a comic sequence or conceit, often involving a brief suspension of reality. To commit to a bit is to play it straight—that is, to take it seriously. A bit may be fantastical, but the seriousness required to commit to it is always real. This is the humorlessness that vegetates at the core of all humor. That’s what makes the bit funny: the fact that, for the comic, it isn’t.
Solanas was always known as “incredibly funny,” her biographer reports, noting that Valerie herself had commented on the uses of humor in the campus newspaper during her years at the University of Maryland, College Park. “Humor is not a body of logical statements which can be refuted or proved,” she wrote, “but is rather a quality which appeals to a sense of [the] ludicrous. Nor can humor, if it is truly good humor, be triumphed over by mere ‘massive education.’” Or, as a disgruntled reader put it in a letter to the editor, “It would appear that Miss Solanas establishes a point so she can stab something or someone with it.” This would become the first principle of the SCUM Manifesto: Valerie would make statements not because they were accurate or provable, but simply because she wanted to. Readers would be confronted by desire, not truth, peeking out of the text like a tattoo from a sleeve—a reminder of the flesh behind every idea.
Hence Valerie’s choice of the manifesto as her preferred form of expression. The paradox of the manifesto—and I’m convinced that Valerie knew this—is that its call to action is just that: a call, not an act, desire spilling over the lip of the text like too much liquid. It’s too serious to be taken seriously. More often than not, the manifesto is the refuge of the failed artist, the wannabe revolutionary—successful artists, after all, don’t talk about art; they make it. “SCUM is the work of the ultimate loser, of one beyond redemption, and as such its quality is visionary,” wrote the critic Vivian Gornick in her 1970 introduction to the manifesto. Impotence is always grandiose, and vice versa; this was as true of Valerie’s personal life as it was of her political fantasies. Her shooting of Andy Warhol capped off a period of intense paranoia regarding her publisher, whom she believed to be exploiting her; after she turned herself in to the police, she identified herself to reporters as a writer. “For Valerie, everything was her theories,” her sister, Judith, would later say. “Violence was just something that happened.”
Valerie has been arresting me with her desires for a long time. These days she lives in my head, like a chain-smoking superego: bossy, demanding, impossible to please, but always enjoying herself. I thought at first of writing this book, after Valerie, in the style of a manifesto—short, pointed theses, oracular, and outrageous. We share this, I think: a preference for indefensible claims, for following our ambivalence to the end, for screaming when we should talk and laughing when we should scream. But the last thing I’d want is to get in Valerie’s way. I don’t really want to tell anyone what to do; I want to be told. It’s no accident that Valerie can sound like a dominatrix in SCUM.
While I was finishing this book, a friend alerted me to the existence of a pornographic video in which a female teacher uses a quotation from the SCUM Manifesto to seduce two female students, turning them into lesbians. This made instant, perfect sense. It’s what Valerie did to me.
GINGER. She has penis envy. She
should see an analyst.
When I say that everyone is female, I am simply restating something psychoanalytically uncontroversial—namely, that castration happens on both sides. Men as well as women, for Freud, represented partial, imperfect solutions to the universal threat of castration. The presence or absence of a literal penis is, it turns out, only incidental to castration anxiety; what matters is the idea of one. For Freud, this phenomenon could in many cases be traced back, empirically, to the sexual theories of young children. “We are justified in speaking of a castration complex in women as well,” he clarified in a 1920 footnote to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. “Both male and female children form a theory that women no less than men originally had a penis, but that they have lost it by castration.”
In the years that followed, Freud would make the castration complex the cornerstone of his theory of sexual difference. Initially, both sexes enjoy a phallic stage: the boy with his penis and the girl with her clitoris, each blissfully unaware of the other. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, there is only one sex: male. “We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man,” Freud wrote in a 1932 lecture on femininity. With the onset of the castration complex, however, the sexes start to diverge. For the little boy, the sight of his sister’s genitalia gives rise first to denial, then to unwilling acceptance, then to crushing anxiety that, for any of several sexual crimes (chief among them, his Oedipal desire for his mother), his father will deprive him of that cherished member. For the little girl, by contrast, the discovery of the penis provokes, after a similar period of denial, a profound experience of envy that persists in the unconscious long after she has resigned herself consciously to her lack of one. In normal cases, penis envy leads the little girl to divert her original desire for her mother to her father, who might replace her missing penis with his own, and then to her husband, who will give her a baby as a penis-substitute; if left unchecked, however, it will result in neurosis, frigidity, and, in extreme cases, lesbianism.
Pretty much since its introduction, the concept of penis envy has been decried as singularly misogynistic. Even Freud seems to have known this. (“You may take it as an instance of male injustice if I assert that envy and jealousy play an even greater
part in the mental life of women than of men,” he wrote.) Those feminists of the sixties and seventies who weren’t content to write Freud off as a patriarchal quack sometimes proposed reading him as an unwitting theorist of male power. Shulamith Firestone, in her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, wrote that it was wiser to take penis envy “as a metaphor” for the little girl’s nascent consciousness of gender hierarchy: “The girl can’t really understand how it is that when she does exactly the same thing as her brother, his behavior is approved and hers isn’t.”
In a short 1922 paper, Freud famously interprets the head of Medusa, the snake-haired Gorgon of Greek myth whose horrifying face, when looked upon, was said to turn men to stone. For Freud, the myth is a simple expression of castration anxiety, the Gorgon’s gaping mouth standing in for the vaginal opening. Freud then reads the Medusa’s petrifying gaze as a symbol for the boy’s erection, offered as a stiff reminder that he “is still in possession of a penis.”
There’s a much more obvious interpretation, of course: that the little boy, forced by the abyssal glimpse of female genitalia to consider the possibility that his own penis will be removed, secretly finds the idea arousing. “Women … don’t have penis envy,” Valerie fumes in SCUM. “Men have pussy envy.” As usual, she was right. Indeed, the castration complex is easily mistaken for the fear that one will be castrated; in fact, it is the fear that one, having been castrated, will like it. Pussy envy is therefore not the mutually exclusive opposite of penis envy, but a universal desire atop which the latter develops as a reaction formation: Everyone does their best to want power, because deep down, no one wants it at all.
BONGI. Hell’o, Gorgeous.
Up Your Ass begins with a catcall. “Hell’o, Beautiful,” Bongi whistles to a broad on the street. When her advances are ignored, she becomes vicious. “Stuck-up, bitch,” she grumbles. It’s easy to hear Valerie’s own misogyny here, lightly disguised as satire. Bongi tries her luck with another passing broad, who also ignores her. Her indignation becomes more eloquent. “Oh, my, but aren’t we the high-class ass,” she says. “You got a twat by Dior?” The leap from a general accusation of narcissism to the suggestion of a designer vagina is telling; in fact, Freud had already claimed vanity as one of penis envy’s more unusual effects. Women, he wrote in 1932, “are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority.” What he’s describing is effectively a peculiar structure of narcissism rooted in self-loathing: the female loves herself only because she hates herself. When she makes herself beautiful—perhaps for her boyfriend or husband, perhaps for strangers on the street—she does so not out of self-regard, but because she has emptied herself out and assumed their desires as her own. We might call this a narcissism for the other: vanity as the expression of someone else’s narcissism.
A few months into hormone replacement therapy, I saw a subway advertisement for a breast augmentation clinic. Those days there was nothing I wanted more than full breasts. My own were practically nonexistent, and I wore stick-on silicone pads to compensate. The adhesive gave me a nasty rash; every day, the pain would dance across my chest like static on an old television set. The subway ad listed the cost of the operation ($3,000), as well as other services offered—“all forms of body contouring, including liposuction, tummy tucks, and Brazilian buttock lifts.” One often encounters such advertisements in the New York subway system, but this particular ad had been defaced: some enterprising activists had tagged it with two political stickers. “THIS INSULTS WOMEN,” read the first. “LOVE YOUR BODY,” intoned the other.
It was also around this time that I started seeing ads for a documentary called This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous. They featured a beautiful woman floating in a pool, her long golden hair curling beneath the water’s surface like a halo. This, I learned when I watched the film, was Internet personality Gigi Gorgeous. Gigi began posting makeup tutorials and personal vlogs on YouTube in 2008—the early days of that site—and before long she was making serious money thanks to sponsored reviews and beauty product endorsements. At the time, she was posting under the name Greg Gorgeous, an effeminate gay boy with blonde windswept hair and a love of contouring. In 2013, after a few years of cross-dressing, Gigi came out as a trans woman, documenting her transition, including several surgeries, for her many fans online. Now famous, Gigi continues to maintain her YouTube channel, which currently has over two and a half million subscribers, while also pursuing modeling and acting in Los Angeles, where she lives a Kardashian-adjacent lifestyle.
As a child, Gregory Lazzarato was a competitive diver. He won the Canadian national title in three-meter diving in 2005. In a photo from the event, Greg, thirteen, stands in a black Speedo on the diving platform. He’s dry: he hasn’t dived yet. His pale blonde hair is chopped into ugly, workmanlike bangs that cup his brow nervously. He is shredded, for a thirteen-yearold, his abs locking together like puzzle pieces. His eyes are fixed somewhere to the camera’s right, and his expression is tense. He’s probably looking at the water, gauging the distance, but his eyes don’t look like they’re seeing anything. His mind is elsewhere. There is something unbearably sad about this image. He looks cold, alone. His skin is being watched. He is bracing himself for the angry kiss of chlorine, the plunge into the deep end, the way the water will suck him in, swallow him whole.
But Gigi Gorgeous repels depth. She rests delicately on the surface of things, like a water skipper, never sinking. Over the years, her makeup tutorials have bled into confessional videos and behind-the-scenes footage of her gender surgeries without a fundamental shift in affect, tone or intention. The point was always to be gorgeous. And she really is, in a transcendently conventional way: blonde, skinny, big tits, rarely appearing on YouTube or Instagram without a full face of cosmetics. The sheer amount of time, energy, and money this woman has spent to look this way—not just lipstick, mascara, and a wide away of skin products, but facial feminization surgery, hair extensions, electrolysis, multiple rounds of breast augmentation—is simply astounding. I envy her tremendously.
At the heart of Gorgeous’s body of work, not to mention her actual body, is a rigorous, compulsive submission to technique: the stroke of a contouring brush, the precise curve of a breast. If it’s not perfect, it must be done again. It’s not just that conventional beauty standards require Gorgeous to use these techniques to be recognized as a woman, though this is certainly true. It’s that the very fact of her submission to them is female. Gender transition, no matter the direction, is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy. You cannot be gorgeous without someone to be gorgeous for. To achieve this, Gorgeous has sanded her personality down to the bare essentials. She laughs at what is funny, she cries at what is sad, and she is miraculously free of serious opinions. She has become, in the most technical sense of this phrase, a dumb blonde.
MISS COLLINS. She is, without a doubt, the most
garish, tasteless faggot I’ve ever run across.
There have long been feminists who have sought to repress male-to-female transsexuality on the grounds that it expressed a quintessentially male fantasy of womanhood. These days they’re known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists—TERFs, for short. The classic text here is Janice Raymond’s 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, whose author famously claimed that “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.” In Raymond’s telling, instead of rejecting sex-role stereotypes altogether, as any good feminist would do, transsexuals simply substitute “one sex-role stereotype for another.” This makes transsexuality a perverse extension of sexual objectification, “the ultimate, and we might even say the logical, conclusion of male possession of women in a patriarchal society.” “Literally,” writes Raymond, “men here possess women.”
Raymond is obviously a bigot: she makes no effort to conceal her disgust for trans women and especially for forms of med
ical intervention like genital surgery. (Indeed, it is an eternal irony of the trans-exclusionary feminist that she regards nothing with greater horror than the prospect of someone’s penis getting chopped off.) But she’s also not entirely wrong. Of course it would be ludicrous to try to understand a transsexual woman like Gigi Gorgeous without any reference to stereotypes; on the contrary, commitment to being stereotyped is right there in her name. Gigi Gorgeous is young, wealthy, white, blonde, blue-eyed, skinny, tanned; she has full, pouty lips and large, round breasts. This means that Gigi is a TERF’s worst nightmare: a shameless cosmetic miracle, assembled by a team of plastic surgeons, endocrinologists, agents, and marketers—a walking, talking advertisement. I love this about her.
Valerie is sometimes considered a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a moniker I’m sure she would abhor (above all for the “feminist” part). The truth is probably blurrier than that. She certainly knew people we’d call trans today. Her biographer reports that in the summer of 1967, Valerie could be found loitering in Washington Square Park with Candy Darling, soon to become Andy Warhol’s transsexual muse. At times, Valerie spoke admiringly of Candy, describing her as “a perfect victim of male suppression” to a mutual friend she had cast in Up Your Ass; at others, paranoia on the rise, Valerie was known to accuse Candy of making fun of women for gay men’s entertainment. The SCUM Manifesto is similarly ambivalent, offering measured praise for drag queens. “The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess,” Solanas writes, with the qualification that the drag queen’s deep insecurity about being “sufficiently female” leads him to cling “compulsively to the man-made stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.” This tension is borne out in the bitchy queens of Up Your Ass, who spend their brief scene strutting for an amused Bongi and ragging mercilessly on each other’s appearance. “She’s so vile. Miss Trashy-Ass,” complains Scheherazade. “Maybe so, but at least I’d never wear gold eye glitter to an afternoon mixer,” Miss Collins fires back.
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