Solanas, Satire, and the Machinery of Male Entitlement

"To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo."

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

For decades, this line from Valerie Solanas's infamous SCUM Manifesto has been dismissed, derided, and ridiculed as the rant of a radical, a madwoman, or a misandrist provocateur. And yet, despite the outrage, the memes, and the performative dismissal from men’s rights groups and their ideological offshoots, her sentence contains an uncomfortable and devastating truth—one that cuts through the noise of modern grievance politics with brutal, surgical clarity.

Men’s rights activists (MRAs), in their relentless campaign to reassert male entitlement in a world slowly unlearning it, have inadvertently proven Solanas right. Their rhetoric, their metaphors, their science-flavored justifications for dominance all orbit a single, pathetic gravitational truth: they see themselves as machines—machines built for sex, denied what they believe they are owed. And for this denial, they do not blame themselves, their choices, or their worldview. They blame women.

The entire philosophical and rhetorical structure of the modern men’s rights movement not only fails to contradict Solanas’s claim, but actually confirms it. Their logic, from the misuse of evolutionary psychology to the misreading of wolf behavior, reveals grievances that boil down to a single cry: I have needs, only a narrow set of skills and I have needs.

MRAs claim that men are dehumanized by society. They say men are only valued for their income, their strength, their utility. In this narrative, the male is reduced to a provider, protector, or sexual function—never loved for who he is. And yet, what is the solution offered by MRAs? Is it a call for emotional depth, vulnerability, or human connection? No. It is a demand for control. If society doesn't recognize their value, women must. If women don’t desire them, then society is broken. Their solution is not to expand what it means to be a man—it is to double down on a machine-like identity and demand that the world accept it as natural law. Thus, they reinforce the very dehumanization they claim to suffer. Their identity becomes: I am a provider. I am a protector. I am a sexual instrument. Or, to borrow Solanas’s phrasing: a walking dildo.

For years, MRAs and their intellectual cousins in the “red pill” and pickup artist communities cited the idea of the "alpha male" wolf to justify hierarchical masculinity. In the 1970s, animal behaviorist David Mech studied wolves in captivity and observed a rigid dominance structure, with an alpha male at the top who controlled the group and mating rights. This idea took off as metaphor: men are wolves, and life is a pack. Dominate, or be dominated. Secure sex, or be shamed. But Mech himself later disavowed his own research. In natural settings, he found, wolf packs aren't rigid hierarchies. They’re families, with parents leading offspring. The so-called alpha was just the dad. Despite this correction, the MRA world clung to the myth—because it serves a purpose. It justifies their belief that sexual success is a measure of masculine worth and that competition for dominance is the natural state of being. This fantasy lets them ignore any cultural or emotional nuance. It lets them believe that their rejection is unjust. After all, didn’t nature design them to be alphas? Again, this is not a vision of men as whole people. It’s a vision of men as status-driven machines competing for access to sex. A mechanical need, denied.

Jordan Peterson modernized this essentialist view for a new generation. In 12 Rules for Life, he famously references the dominance hierarchies of lobsters to explain male status behavior. His point: hierarchies are ancient, natural, and biologically rooted. Men are wired to compete. Some win. Some lose. Peterson doesn’t frame this as entitlement per se, but many of his followers do. And he himself leans into a moral panic about the erosion of these roles. He cites evolutionary psychology to argue that men prefer youth and fertility, and women prefer competence and status. All of this is framed as natural, immutable, and therefore justifiable. This becomes a subtle, well-spoken version of the same logic: If women won’t choose me, society is broken. The underlying belief: women owe men their preferences, and men are victims if they fall outside them. This argument is cloaked in academic language and careful disclaimers, but its effect is the same. Men are reduced to their role in a sexual economy—desiring machines whose success or failure is measured in erotic return on investment. Solanas saw that decades ago. She wasn’t inventing the insult. She was just the first to say it without flinching.

What ties all of this together—from the incel forums to Peterson’s fans to traditionalist grievance media—is a singular resentment. Not just that women have sexual agency, but that men might be responsible for their own unhappiness. They insist on entitlement to sex and companionship but refuse any suggestion that this requires introspection, accountability, or change. To suggest that men take responsibility for how they relate to others is, to them, an attack. To suggest that women’s desires matter equally is a betrayal of nature. This is the heart of Solanas’s critique. Men, in this worldview, aren’t animals with instinct. They’re machines running a bad program—a program that demands output (sex) without considering input (respect, empathy, growth). They’re machines that get angry when the vending machine doesn’t drop the candy.

Here is where Solanas’s sentence becomes not just a barb, but a diagnosis. A walking dildo—a tool, not a person. A machine—functional, not relational. But crucially, the MRA worldview doesn’t want to escape this frame. It insists on the primacy of male sexual need, and sees rejection as oppression. It treats feelings as valid only when they serve desire. So we get this paradox: they want to be loved and needed, but refuse to accept the responsibilities that come with being fully human. They become, in essence: dildoes with complex emotions. They cry out, 'I have needs,' and despite being men—despite their supposed strength, reason, and superiority—they demand those needs be met while behaving like infants. They insist on being coddled, absolved of responsibility, and affirmed by women who owe them nothing, all under the banner of biology. In doing so, they trade adulthood for entitlement and confuse being human with being obeyed.

And some even acknowledge this in their criticisms of Solanas—though unwittingly. On the r/MensRights subreddit, one user lamented: "It's full of hate against men. It advises male babies must be killed. Men's rate in the world population must be reduced to 10%." Their outrage over SCUM is consistent, yet often lacks the self-awareness to see how their own dehumanizing worldview aligns with the one Solanas mocked. As journalist Chris McEvoy noted, MRAs often cite SCUM “which called for gendercide against men,” even while acknowledging that Solanas was likely mentally unstable. They use her as a symbol of misandry, while never reckoning with the uncomfortable accuracy of her satire. What they hate, ultimately, is the mirror.

It is also important to place Solanas’s provocation in context. The outrage directed at her words often ignores the historical and ongoing reality of manifestos of violence authored by men—not metaphorical, but literal calls for domination, revenge, and often murder. From Eliot Rodger’s manifesto, which served as a justification for his 2014 misogynistic killing spree, to the countless online posts and forums where male grievance becomes a precursor to real-world harm, women have been the repeated targets of ideologically-driven violence. Rodger’s 141-page diatribe wasn’t framed as satire—it was a deadly serious account of his perceived sexual rejection and his belief that women should suffer for it. He was not the first or last. In 2009, George Sodini entered a Pennsylvania fitness center and murdered three women after years of blogging about his belief that women unfairly ignored him. In 2021, Jake Davison killed five people in Plymouth, including his own mother, after producing online content steeped in incel ideology and misogynistic resentment. These men didn’t write manifestos as symbolic protest—they laid out roadmaps to destruction and followed through. Similarly, incel communities online have produced manifestos filled with calls for violence, many of which have inspired mass shootings and attacks. These are not fringe figures; they emerge from the very ecosystem that MRAs and adjacent groups nourish, a space where women’s autonomy is viewed as oppression.

In contrast, Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto was never tied to an organized campaign of violence against men, nor did it inspire mass male killings. SCUM is not misandry at its most literal—it is misandry as mirror, a performance of patriarchal cruelty staged in reverse. If it feels hateful, it’s because it borrowed the tone and logic of manifestos written by men, turning the weapon of rhetoric on its makers. Solanas didn’t invent the vitriol; she inverted it, reciting the rhythms of misogyny back at the world to reveal their sickness. What unsettles is not her anger, but its uncanny familiarity. It was, if anything, an exaggerated and theatrical inversion of the systems of domination that had long dehumanized women. Her vision was symbolic, absurdist, and scathing—yet it is her words, not Rodger’s or similar male-authored manifestos, that draw enduring public disgust.

This double standard reveals much. The world is more comfortable with real violence committed by men than with rhetorical violence imagined by women. In many cases they dismiss those women as "crazy." MRAs take Solanas as a personal insult, yet rarely acknowledge the ways in which real men have enacted the very violence she dared to parody. They don’t feel like human beings. They feel like machines that no longer get used. And rather than step off the assembly line, they rage at the customers. Solanas didn’t just insult them. She saw them.

None of this is to say that male pain isn’t real. It is. But it is not unique. Pain is not the private property of men. Women have known loneliness, humiliation, and abandonment too—often while navigating a culture indifferent to their suffering, and frequently while being expected to soothe the pain of men at their own expense. Loneliness, rejection, confusion—these are deeply human struggles. But the answer isn’t to retreat into bitterness, machine logic, or fantasy biology. The answer is to recognize the lie in the system that says masculinity is earned through dominance, and value through sexual access. Men are more than machines. But only if they choose to be. To reject Solanas’s critique, men must do more than get angry. They must become human again—not demand others do the work of being human, for them.

The tragic irony of modern men’s rights ideology is that it sets out to reclaim manhood but winds up confirming the very critique it claims to resist. In their self-pitying anger and scientific justifications for entitlement, MRAs reinforce Solanas’s harshest words. They reduce themselves to machines of want, furious that the world doesn’t feed them. To deny her would require becoming what she said they could not: emotionally intelligent, relational, responsible. Human.

SCUM stands for the Society for Cutting Up Men. Though often read as a literal call to violence, many scholars interpret SCUM Manifesto as a hyperbolic, performative critique of male-dominated systems—meant to shock, not to instruct. It is not the stand alone manifesto in the gender violence genre it is a rare one written by a woman.