Invisibility: A Manifesto by Audrey Szasz // SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
A manifesto for daddy's girl! That giggling, vindictive, over-sexed, sit-on-your-knee, sweet-toothed daddy's girl!
A nymphet, a Shangri-La. You've seen her many times before: Humbert Humbert worships her, Hugh Hefner marries her, Freud psychoanalyzes her...
Valerie Solanas, among these, is obsessed with daddy's girl. She hates her, but secretly she is in love with her.In SCUM manifesto, she writes:
Daddy's Girl, passive, adaptable, respectful of and in awe of the male, allows him to impose his hideously dull chatter on her.
And then:
Daddy's Girl, always tense and fearful, uncool, unanalytical, lacking objectivity, appraises Daddy, and thereafter, other men [...] accepts the male definition of himself as superior, as a female, and of herself, as inferior, as a male, which, thanks to Daddy, she really is.
Valerie Solanas pins down the daddy's girl in a many armed attempt to define her but she fails ultimately in SCUM, wholeheartedly abashed. She looks at her, longingly I think, from afar.
Invisibility: A Manifesto does the opposite and achieves something totally radical instead. Its author, Audrey Szasz, does not try to reach out and locate daddy's girl, she simply exists as one.
Invisibility: A Manifesto does the opposite and achieves something totally radical instead. Its author, Audrey Szasz, does not try to reach out and locate daddy's girl, she simply exists as one.
Written in cutesy diary entries/sadist passages of erotica, daddy's girl plays a child prostitute, a murder's accomplice, a Nancy Drew, a school girl lifting her skirt... Here, daddy's girl isn't being looked in on, rather she plays with the idea of looking out. She knows exactly what she is in this dress up and this knowingness is what she gets off to.
She writes:
They think I'm overdressed. I think they're sloppy. I suspect that if I dressed more like an adult I might be taken more seriously on an intellectual level [...] if anything, being mistaken for an overgrown child or some kind of perpetual moron lends me a strange credibility amongst assorted perverts and deviants and that's enough for me. It's how my bread gets buttered.
In 50 or so pages, Audrey Szasz manifests a spiraling retort on sexual needs and desire. Her multicharacter enjoys masochism, perversion, abuse and the pleasures of playing the part of a little girl in cahoots with daddy. She identifies with daddy's girl for these very reasons. Simultaneously, it gives her the freedom to love and hate the exploitation that follows.
Perhaps what is most impressive is how wild and unyielding daddy's girl is here, neither tragic nor clichéd. Take from it what you will. This is not a totalising account of men's sexual fantasy nor a woman's, bent on submitting herself to the horniness of patriarchal dominance. It has many moments that slide, contradict and take as much as pleasure as pain. It remains disturbing, arousing and hopeless. But brilliant too, in the original way it frames thoughts around the ever enigmatic, always deviant and oh-so-darling daddy's girl.
Perhaps what is most impressive is how wild and unyielding daddy's girl is here, neither tragic nor clichéd. Take from it what you will. This is not a totalising account of men's sexual fantasy nor a woman's, bent on submitting herself to the horniness of patriarchal dominance. It has many moments that slide, contradict and take as much as pleasure as pain. It remains disturbing, arousing and hopeless. But brilliant too, in the original way it frames thoughts around the ever enigmatic, always deviant and oh-so-darling daddy's girl.