[Amerikkka] impertinent petition for man-killing mayhem

[Joshua Bearden]

I am sure you already know more about Valerie Solanas and radical feminism in the late 60s then I will be able to learn about in the next year, but that doesn't stop me from pleading with you to include Valerie and the SCUM Manifesto prominently in your design ruminations.

I read the Manifesto for the first time last week and then hungrily consumed Breane Fah's thoughtful biography. I am convinced that there is rich material in the life and writings---especially the Manifesto---of Valerie Solanas to be explored through gaming. 

Reading the Manifesto is an exercise in role-playing itself. It casts the internecine social struggle against inequality, patriarchy, and oppression in desperately heroic* terms. Reading it, even as (or perhaps especially as) a ciswhitemalething is a thrilling experience. While Valerie scorns middle class liberal activism as ineffective and tame and contemptible, she reminds me of the comforting security that I was born to. I can't help but respond the the manifesto as a call to fantasize and speculate along the lines of Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read, or Deconnick's Bitch Planet.  And where I fantasize, I want to play.

I don't look to Amerikkka (or any game by any man) to be the ultimate answer to this urge, but I urge you none the less to see if you don't feel the same way.  I hope of course that militantly creative feminist game designers and radicals out there are already busy working on similar projects. But since I won't presume to tell them what they ought to do, I instead send this unsolicited advice to you.

*Desperately heroic in my new lexicon also means 'criminal'.

[Ron Edwards]

Yup.

Male voices in this matter as well. I have a draft of an appendix for Amerikkka, called "To the Women's Movement, from Your Son," which I may or may not include.