Valerie Solanas did. Author of SCUM, a feminist manifesto. Often referred to as the Society for Cutting Up Men. She used silver bullets. Or bullets coated in tin-foil. Andy Warhol was a vampire after all. I had never known who shot Andy Warhol. I knew there was a movie about it. I never watched it. I didn’t think I needed to know who shot Andy Warhol. But I do. Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol.

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. Solanas in SCUM (1968)

In the recent issue of October that focuses on Any Warhol, Catherine Lord writes about Valerie Solanas, in an article titled ‘Wonder Waif Meets Super Neutuer.

Solanas didn’t like the term feminist.

SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to achieve its ends. Such tactics are for nice genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be effective… SCUM will not subject itself to getting rapped on the head with billy clubs. – Solanas in SCUM (1968)

Feminists were ‘daddy’s girls’. She was queer. Lord describers her as “not just a working girl, but a working class queer who was either behind the times or ahead of her time or who never really had a time or whose fifteen minutes turned out to be more like five.”

American artist Carolee Schneeman credited Solanas with accelerating the “issues that would carry feminist theory and practice into our present moment”. Swedish author Sara Stridsberg wrote the book Dromfakulteten based on Salonas’ story. Delphine Seyrig and Christine Roussoplos made a video that documents Seyrig dictating the SCUM manuscript while Roussoplos types it up on an old typewriter.

To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo – Solanas in SCUM

Lord claims that “queer theory would not have happened without ACT UP would not have happened without the feminist movement. The feminist movement would not have happened not have happened without Valerie Solanas”. Lord also refers to curator Connie Butler’s 2007 exhibition “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to posit that “absolutely nothing in the twentieth century was more influential than the feminist movement”. So who shot Andy Warhol? Valerie Solanas did. And I should know about Valeri Solanas.

A couple of clicks and a signature and soon I was done. My girlfriend had a little more trouble. It seems she had disappeared from the electoral roll. Immediately I became suspicious. I castigated her for insulting our democratic privilege and never voting. I had already spent most of the weekend sulking because she refused to join me at the polls in August to hand out ‘how to vote’ cards. ‘You obviously don’t care about how much money we get given after you have a baby because the Government has pulled RU486 from the shelves,’ I said, slipping from my soap box as I wagged my finger at her.

‘I vote,’ she shrieked. ‘I voted for Kevin, I even voted at the Council elections’.

We called the AEC to confirm she had been erased from the electoral roll. ‘Have you gone by any other names,’ they asked. ‘No’ ’Are you sure about your birthday?’ ’Yes’ ’You’re not on the roll”

I looked at my girlfriend with distrust. The AEC doesn’t just erase you from the electoral roll. She had either lied to me about voting or had lied to me about her name. Possibly she was a spy. She was Russian after all. And attractive.

After an hour of intense physical interrogation. I decided to trust her. The AEC must have erased her from the roll. But why? I needed to know. Luckily I knew what to do as I had taken an investigative journalism class at university. I jumped on to Google.

I typed in ‘lying voters unenrolled’ and came across an article on the GetUp site titled: ‘Your vote stopped! Get the facts’. It seems that if the bulk-mail from political candidates currently clogging up your letter box is returned to the sender, then the politician has the ability to report you to the AEC, and subsequently have you removed from the electoral roll. This allows political parties to target areas of the electorate and weed out any absentees. If you live in a Labor district of a marginal seat, then chances are the Liberal candidate will bulk-mail that area to weed out any potential Labor voters that have moved house, usually young mobile people like my girlfriend and I.

This wasn’t too much of a problem five years ago, you could still rock up on polling day despite being removed from the roll and cast your vote as a provisional voter. The Howard government got rid of this, and now these votes are rejected. So you could effectively turn up to vote on August 21, find you are not on the roll, and be told you can’t vote and… Read more

According to Heidegger in his essay The Origin of the Work of At, art is a form of unconcealment, and beauty ‘is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment’. In being exposed to truth through art, lives are infused with meaning, as he writes, ‘the temple, in its standing there, first gives things their look and to the men their outlook on themselves’. Fitzgerald surely then would have had some impact on the outlook on the lives, and the meaning infused in those lives, of the readers of his work. His novels and short stories might not tell us directly how to live, but by reading his work, our lives are altered in some sense. This is what art does, or at least what I hope it does.

But what if Fitzgerald cut through all the crap, the metaphor and imagery, and simply put in bullet form a list of directions on how to live, surely that would save some time, help us Get Things Done®. Why should we fluff about with art when we can simply refine our language, be concise and straightforward. Adapt the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of journalism to literature, where we start with all the information that is needed, the who, what, where, when and how, and leave the less valuable dribble to the end, so that it can be quickly cleared up by the editor’s delete key. The question then is what is the valuable dribble and what is the useless dribble? What in life should we value and what should we discard? I believe that judging value is what art gives us the capacity to do, but possibly a straightforward list, written by an esteemed artist, such as Fitzgerald, would suffice.

In a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Fitzgerald provides us with this straightforward list:

What to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

What not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Fitzgerald writes in the letter that all he believes in in life is “the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties”. These are extraordinarily conservative values for a ‘dreamer’, the role society generally ascribes to most artists, and seems to be more harmonious with the ideology of a Thatcher or Read more

‘What is it about being the first man to vaginally penetrate a woman that is so appealing?’ Emily Maguire asks in her essay on virginity in The Monthly. She describes ‘virgin porn’ websites that feature videos of women being ‘deflowered’. She writes that ‘the porn sites tell us that virgins are precious, rare and worth 30 bucks a month.’ Thirty-bucks too much as a quick Google of ‘virgin porn’ can unveil free ‘defloration’ videos such as ‘The Defloration of Melinda Kiszner’.

Virgin porn rates quite well on the porn sites, with Melinda Kiszner’s defloration receiving 7750 votes of support, and only 623 against. Yet the authenticity of the video is quickly dismissed. One commenter says ‘fake cause’ when I fucked to my girl she scream so different, painful, almost cry, also, she move so natural, totally fake,’ and another writes ‘what a piece of crap.. showing hole with NO hymen and then the magic gushing blood fountain.. for retarded teens at best.’ I assume that by ‘retarded teens’ the commenter is referring to virginal teens who don’t have the experience nor knowledge to assess the authenticity of a true deflowering. But why do these ‘more experienced’ men (I assume men) fetishise the act of sex with a virgin so much? Maguire proposes that the ‘attraction has to do with pain and power.’

The erotic thrill, it seems, is in the fantasy of breaking a girl down (“It took us months to talk this virgin into showing us her cherry.”) and then making her bleed (“You have to be gentle with them, the first time hurts!”).

Pain and power. The two pillars of masculinity that continue to corrupt the burgeoning gender identities of many a young lad. From Rugby League stars pummelling into each other, to the conquering heros of Hollywood blockbusters, such as Sam Worthington in the upcoming ‘Clash of the Titans,’ power and pain go in hand in hand with the idealised narrative of masculinity. Yet this masculinity myth that pervades the media has moved from the more traditional idea that power comes from inflicting pain, to the more current concept that power comes from enduring pain. Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Extreme injuries in extreme sports. Fetishising the infliction of pain is almost taboo outside of Tarantino flicks. Yet the virginity porn demonstrates that fetishisation of the infliction of pain, especially on women, still holds currency, albeit not in the mainstream.

I want to uncover where all this stems from. The masculine as “conquering man” because surely that is why fetishisation of virginity persists. It is the act of invasion of claiming new land, of puncturing the earth with a flag pole. To where no man has gone before. All that bullshit.

In Martin Amis’ The… Read more