it's not SLUM manifesto..it's SCUM manifesto.. literally. and it sounds very interesting.

i'm reading this book called Female Perversions by Louise Kaplan, which i heard Dr.Drew talk about on Loveline - and it's nonfiction but somehow being turned into (has been turned into) a movie with tilda swinton, that chick who's in the deep end and the island leader gal from The Beach. i like her. she's exotic. so this book is very interesting.. i'm not reading straight thru, i'm skipping around to subject matters that are more interesting.. such as female pornography, which apparently doesn't exist untouched by the male ideas of pornography.. there are so many interesting details that i feel an urge to quote them here:

"the aesthetics of male pornography are developed around a denigration of women and a fear and hatred of the female body. pornography is a male invention, a literature of harlotry designed to detoxify and repair the actual female body. thus, with the avowed aims of arousing erotic desire in men and freeing women from the bonds of sexual repression, female bodies are stripped, bent over, spread apart, twisted. labia are pierced. breasts are lassoed till they swell to an abnormal size. nipples are pinched with clothespins. breasts of pregnant women are shown expressing streams of milk. buttocks are branded. the genitals of prepubescent girls are licked by dogs. nymphomaniacs are sated unto death. lesbians suck one another off. virgins are subjected to exotic practices that turn them into groveling nymphomaniacs."
"the effects of male pornography depend on the wearing down of resistance and the gradual dehumanization of human flesh. whoever the body and whichever the way, pornography entails a deadening of otherwise living, breathing, and therefore dangerous and unpredictable flesh."
..after the initial publication of Playboy in 1953, "before anyone knew what was happening or just why it was happening, these tame, some would complain conventional, respectfully dull masturbation inspirations shifted to brutality, violence, exploitation, and blatant misogyny. even hardened porno models - the ones who had already traveled the route from pretty porn to masochistic porn to Emperor Crown lesbian porn to animal porn and child porn - were alarmed by this growing trend in the porno industry. 'the hating way in which women are portrayed has escalated so fast. they used to be afraid to portray it at all, but now you see everything - women being skewered, women being killed.'
the pinnacle achievement of this shift from clean-cut porn to blatant woman-hating porn was the snuff genre [have you guys heard of this? jesus], so named for films in which porno actresses were purportedly murdered, snuffed out, as the cameras were rolling...they were meant to cater to a select audience of well-to-do men whose jaded sexual palates could be revived only by watching the dismemberment and mutilation of a female body. for the denouement, a man dismembers a woman's body piece by piece. the screen is bathed with images of chopped-up fingers, sawed-off arms and legs, blood oozing from every natural and newly created orifice.."
[pornography's essential deception is that it makes hate through the disguise of making love]
"valerie solanas decided to fight back against penis power by snatching the sun from the sky and burning up the phallocentric universe. she brought forth SCUM Manifesto, the platform for her one-woman Society for Cutting Up Men. In this, Solanas proposes that the male was a biological accident. the male Y gene is an incomplete female X gene. 'the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion.' maleness is an organic deficiency. the only honest males are transvestites and drag queens, for the central desire of every male is to grow into his true self by becoming a woman. a male's genetic destiny is confirmed in his early and complete erotic dependence on his mother. nature and nurture conspire to tie a male to femaleness for life. as solanas summarizes the plight of the male, she gives a personal twist to some contemporary ideas on the developmental dilemmas faced by most little boys: 'every boy wants to imitate his mother, be her, fuse with her.' 'it never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is he and she is she.' to exist as a person, the male throughout history has overcompensated for his shameful feminine strivings with his sexist patriarchal philosophy that eventuates in war, submission-domination politics, money, prostitution, mental illness, high art, and culture.
[SCUM women] will devote their lives to the destruction of the male sex and paternal power. as a temporary measure, the women will use sperm from sperm banks to reproduce among themselves and produce only females. after a while, when old age and death have been conquered, there will be no need at all for reproduction. soon every living being will be an XX and the human species will have fulfilled its true destiny. some men, those who have been clever enough to survive, will come to their senses. they will want to become female. they will conduct biological research and then 'by means of operations on the brain and nervous system', they will be 'transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women.' the few remaining men, those who are too stupid or frightened to achknowledge their desire to be female, will be allowed to go voluntarily to a suicide center, where they 'will be quietly, quickly, and painlessly gassed to death.' SCUM is a parody of what feminine pornography might be if it modeled itself on masculine pornography."


whew. ok. well obviously that is all quite crazy.. but there a few good points hidden in there. i'd like to read SCUM manifesto. sounds interesting, hm?
i'm worried now that all of my basic beliefs would never truly rid the world of a few of its major problems (not that that should really be a goal..that's like saying there will be no more pain in life..what the hell is that..). overpopulation, for example. since i believe that all killing is wrong..in hate crimes, in abortions, in executions, what have you (still haven't decided on suicide) - yet if we didn't have these things, abortion in particular, our planet's overpopulation problem would be growing even faster than it is now.. that is of course what people say, but then you think..well jesus the earth has lasted 80 billion years, what makes us think WE could really destroy it..but then sometimes it seems logical that that could be possible.. i know it's kind of creepy, but i kind of agree with china's policy about a 1 (or is it 2?) child limit.. maybe two would be better. then mandatory vasectomies and hysterectomies? i know most women (including myself) would gladly welcome a hysterectomy because it eliminates menstruation = paradise. the second i heard that i planned to one day bribe a doctor to give me one one day (because you can only get one now if there's some sort of problem, like ovarian cancer or something, since the ovaries are removed completely). otherwise any old person can just get their tubes tied, but that doesn't get rid of your period..so what the hell use is that? umm..i think of getting something like this sometime soon so i won't have to worry about accidental pregnancy during sexually active years to come.. then i worry that i may somehow change and want kids one day and that the fact that i can't GIVE BIRTH to them would be somehow devastating..which is silly, i hope i never think that..adoption, while inconvient (2 year waits), is far better for the world, plus you get out of the torture of child birth. i certainly would never want to accidently get pregnant and deal with having to decide what the hell to do..which i hope to jesus the christ that i would decide to have it and give it up for adoption, even though that is the hardest possible thing to do, but definitely the most morally lovely if you don't want a kid. it would almost be a good experience because (jesus i hope) i'd stick to my principles when they were least conveniant (the only time they mean anything) and do this ridiculously hard thing for the sake of not killing a human being.. i can see how easily i might fall into abortion states of mind..it's so so easy..(as easy as a thing like this could be) but jesus is it ever horribly horribly wrong. on all sides. ok so you see why i don't want an accidental pregnancy. obviously. but again, getting your tubes tied is like an extreme version of a tattoo, which i said i'd never get because i'm so ever-changing that i'd almost certainly not like it after a year or two..and then for the rest of my life. it's a statement that you must continue making for the rest of your life without fail. i'd never sign up for anything like that. religion, philosophy, music, film, anything. i don't hold anything as forever. so ok i wouldn't do this.. i'll just stay on the pill and hope like hell. or maybe i could have a screening process for all men that i'd have sex with that they must get a vasectomy beforehand! ha! lol. whatever.

i've officially signed up for my fall 2002 classes, i'm taking intro to computer science and english composition II (to get them over with), and then for lots of fun, existentialism, and sex, gender and culture. i was going to sign up for this class all about AIDs, which would've probably been excellent to know all about, but it wouldn't let me in because it's not in my assigned major..which is bullshit. i need to change my major to undecided like yesterday. ugh

well this has been extraordinarily long.

lovemelo