Valerie Solanas (1936-1988): photo by Fred W. McDarrah (1966)
'You're Gonna Wake Up ...' (Scum version)
Sleeveless shirt design by McLaren-Westwood for SEX (1974)
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore
and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women,
there remains to ... thrill-seeking females only to
overthrow the government, eliminate the money system,
institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.
I.
A bit like Alexander Trocchi, Valerie Solanas is one of those countercultural figures who left a real impression on Malcolm McLaren's imagination and thus on the aesthetics and politics of punk in the UK.
Listed as sleeping on the correct side of the bed on one of the first of the new shirts designed by Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood for SEX in 1974, Solanas had the additional honour of having lines from her SCUM Manifesto (1968) spray-painted on the interior walls of 430 King's Road.
These appeared alongside various Situationist slogans from May '68 and a paragraph taken from Trocchi's erotic novel Helen and Desire (1954) that for some reason haunted McLaren for decades afterwards, beginning: I groaned with pain ... [1]
I was amused to recently discover (thanks to Paul Gorman) that when once asked by an interviewer how she would spend a perfect day if she could go anywhere, do anything, meet anyone, Westwood replied she would visit Solanas in her jail cell after her conviction for shooting Andy Warhol with an automatic pistol [2] [3].
II.
Looking at the opening paragraph from the SCUM Manifesto printed above, I suppose it's easy to see why Solanas was attractive to McLaren and Westwood: you can't get much more of an aggressively anti-establishment attitude than that - it's pure punk masquerading as feminist theory; a violent rejection of mainstream society that calls for total revolution (or, failing that, complete destruction).
And Solanas herself, of course, might be seen as the ultimate outsider: angry, uncompromising, free-wheeling, thrill-seeking, etc. A little unhinged, certainly, but also, in her own way, groovy.
For McLaren, heavily influenced by Situationism - an avant-garde political movement that advocated using shock tactics and "anti-art" to wake up passive consumers - Solanas's literal assault on the pop-art elite (Warhol) and her wildly confrontational text perfectly suited his project of weaponised cultural chaos.
III.
Of course, the relationship between Solanas and punk was strictly one-way: she never publicly commented on her co-option by McLaren and Westwood into their imaginary universe and commercial aesthetic.
When SEX and Seditionaries were operating in the golden punk period between 1974 and 1980, Solanas was completely removed from pop culture. Following her 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol, she moved between prison and the madhouse, or was otherwise homeless.
Living in extreme poverty and struggling with paranoid schizophrenia and drug dependency, Solanas became a deeply reclusive figure, still highly paranoid about people stealing her work (as, in fact, they were). If she was aware of McLaren and Westwood printing her words on shirts, she never spoke about it to the few people who interviewed her before her death in 1988.
To McLaren and Westwood, Solanas was a quasi-mythical icon of anti-establishment rebellion - someone whose manifesto could, quite literally, be used to decorate the interior of their Chelsea boutique. I don't suppose they gave two shits about Solanas as a woman desperately trying to make ends meet.
But then, to be fair, they were cultural provocateurs running a business and promoting a band, not social workers and there's surely nothing more bourgeois than the idea of 'intellectual property rights'.
Notes
[1] See the post 'I Groaned With Pain ... On Malcolm McLaren's Obsession with Alexander Trocchi's Erotic Fiction' (22 Sept 2026).
[2] The interview appeared in a feature titled 'London Belles' from a short-lived, free magazine called West One and took place shortly before the shop at 430 King's Road was renamed SEX (i.e., when it was still operating as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die). At the time of the interview, Solanas was incarcerated following her 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol (see note 3 below).
See the Paul Gorman post of 16 October 2017 which can be found on the historic pop culture site Flashbak: click here.
[3] On 3 June 1968 the radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas fired at Warhol three times with a .32 calibre automatic pistol. The first two shots missed, but the third hit its target and penetrated multiple organs. Warhol survived the incident - after undergoing five hours of surgery - but was never quite the same again, the shooting having a profound effect on his later life and work.
For some reason, even though Malcolm loved Andy, Warhol was listed on the wrong side of the 'You're Gonna Wake Up One Morning and Know What Side of the Bed You've Been Lying On!' shirt (1974). Presumably, this was because the artist was viewed having sold out and become part of the establishment culture. David Hockney and Salvador Dalí were also named on the wrong side of the bed.
