Science & Tech Quote by Valerie Solanas

Solanas doesn’t reach for polite provocation; she reaches for acid. The line is engineered to offend because offense is the point: a rhetorical grenade lobbed at the sentimental habit of excusing male violence, selfishness, or sexual entitlement as “animal instinct.” Calling a man an animal, she argues, is generous - animals are alive in a way that suggests spontaneity, even innocence. Her counter-image, “a machine,” strips away romance and even biology. It’s not lust as nature; it’s sex as repetitive function, a program running with no conscience and no curiosity.

“Walking dildo” is not just crude for shock value. It’s a deliberate collapse of personhood into instrumentality, a reversal of the gaze that reduces women to parts and uses. Solanas turns that logic back on men and makes it grotesquely literal. The obscenity does two jobs at once: it denies readers the comfort of abstract debate, and it exposes how much public language already hides sexual coercion behind euphemism.

Context matters. Solanas wrote out of the late-1960s feminist underground and the scorched-earth polemics of the SCUM Manifesto, where exaggeration functions like political theater. Taken as sociology, it’s indefensible; taken as satire, it’s a furious parody of misogynist reductionism, insisting that if women are treated as objects, then men can be named as devices. The intent isn’t balance. It’s retaliation - and an attempt to make “boys will be boys” sound as ugly as it is.