#manifestos

[victusinveritas]

[nobrashfestivity]

Valentine de Saint-Point. Figure Metachorique (Metachoric Figure), 1913-1923. Woodcut. Adrien Sina Collection.

Manifesto of the Futurist Woman (Valentine de Saint-Point)

We want to glorify war—the world's only sanitation—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of libertarians, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and the contempt for women.

Humanity is mediocre. Most women are neither superior nor inferior to most men. They are equal. All deserve the same contempt.

Humanity as a whole has never been anything other than the terrain of culture, a source of geniuses and heroes of both sexes. But for humanity, as for nature, there are times that are more conducive to flourishing. In the summers of humanity, when the earth burns under the sun, geniuses and heroes abound.

We are at the beginning of spring; we miss the abundance of sunshine, or, in other words, a good amount of bloodshed.

Women are no more responsible than men for the way in which the truly young, rich in sap and blood, are being dragged through the mud.

It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, brilliant, or powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an era only because he is composed, at the same time, of masculine and feminine elements, of femininity and masculinity: he is, consequently, a complete being. Every exclusively virile individual is a brute; every exclusively feminine individual is a female.

And what applies to individuals also applies to any community and any era of humanity. Fertile periods, those in which a multitude of heroes and geniuses emerge from the realm of culture in all their splendor, are rich in masculinity and femininity.

Those periods in which there were only wars, with a few representative heroes because the epic spirit wipes out the rest, were exclusively virile periods; those that denied the heroic instinct and, looking back to the past, annihilated themselves in dreams of peace, were periods in which femininity dominated.

We're living through one of those periods. What's missing, in both women and men, is virility.

That's why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right.

To restore some virility to our races, dormant in femininity, we must lead them toward virility, even at the price of falling into coarse animality. We must impose on everyone, men and women, who are equally weak, a new dogma of energy, in order to achieve a period of superior humanity.

Every woman should possess not only feminine virtues, but also virile ones, without which she is nothing more than a woman. Any man who possesses only masculine strength, without intuition, is nothing more than a crude animal. But in the period of femininity in which we live, only the opposite exaggeration is healthy: we must take the crude animal as our model.

Enough of these women whose “arms laden with intertwined flowers rest on their laps on the morning of departure,” whom soldiers should fear! Of women who, as nurses, perpetuate weakness and old age, domesticating men for their personal pleasures or their material needs! Enough of women who create children for the sake of it and distance themselves from all danger and adventure, that is, from all forms of joy! Of women who educate their daughter for love and their son for war! Enough of these women, octopuses of the heart whose tentacles drain men's blood and make children anemic! Of women so obsessed with carnal love that they exhaust all desire and prevent its renewal!

Women are the Furies, the Amazons, the Semiramis, the Joans of Arc, the Jeanne Hachette, the Judith and Charlotte Corday, the Cleopatras and the Messalinas: combative women who fight more fiercely than men, exciting lovers, destroyers who break weakness and aid selection through pride and despair, “despair through which the heart reaches its maximum performance.”

Let the next wars bring us heroines like the magnificent Catherine Sforza, who, during the sack of her city, seeing from the walls that the enemy was threatening to kill her son to make him surrender, heroically pointed to her sexual organ and cried at the top of her lungs: “Kill him, I still have the mold to make more!”

Yes, "the world is corrupted by prudence," but, instinctively, woman is not prudent, not pacifist, not good. Because she completely lacks measure, she is condemned to become too prudent, too pacifist, too good during humanity's sleepy periods. Her intuition and her imagination are both her strength and her weakness.

It's individuality in a crowd; it parades the heroes and, if there aren't any, the fools.

According to the apostle, the spiritual inspirer, the woman, the carnal inspirer, sacrifices herself or cares for others, provokes rivers of blood or stems it, is a warrior or a nurse. It is the same woman who, in the same period, according to common ideas surrounding the day's event, throws herself onto the railway to prevent soldiers from going to war or runs into the arms of the victorious champion.

Therefore, no revolution should be undertaken without it. Therefore, instead of despising it, we must embrace it. It is the most fruitful achievement of all, the most enthusiastic, the one that, in turn, will increase the number of followers.

But no feminism. Feminism is a political and intellectual mistake on the part of women, a mistake their instincts will recognize.

Women should not be granted any of the rights demanded by feminists. Granting them would not lead to any of the excesses desired by the Futurists, but, on the contrary, to an excess of order.

To impose obligations on women is to make them lose all their fertilizing power. Feminist reasoning and deductions will not destroy their primordial destiny; they can only falsify it, forcing it to manifest itself through detours that lead to the worst errors.

For centuries, feminine instinct has been insulted, and the charm and tenderness of women have been appreciated. The anemic, stingy with their own blood, demand that she be nothing more than a nurse. And she has allowed herself to be domesticated. But throw her the new message, or some war cry, and then, riding once more on the back of her instinct, euphoric, she will set out in pursuit of unexpected conquests.

When you have to use weapons, they will polish them.

He will help you choose them. In fact, if you don't know how to recognize genius, because you still rely on outdated fame, you have always known how to rekindle the spirit of the strongest, the victor, the one who triumphs through muscle and courage. You may be mistaken about this power that imposes itself so brutally.

Let woman once again find that cruelty and violence that make her attack the vanquished simply because they are vanquished, to the point of maiming them. Stop demanding for her the spiritual justice she herself has tried in vain to achieve. Woman, become once again sublimely unjust, like all the forces of nature! Freed from all control, your instinct recovered, you will take your place among the Elements, fate pitted against conscious human will. Be the selfish and ferocious mother, jealously guard your children, have what they call all rights and all obligations toward them, as long as they physically need your protection.

He allows man, free from family, to lead a life of daring and conquest as long as he has the physical strength to do so, even though he is a son and a father. The man who sows does not stop at the first furrow he fertilizes.

In my Poems of Pride and in Thirst and Mirages, I have renounced sentimentality as a weakness to be despised because it curbs strength and makes it static.

Lust is strength because it destroys the weak and excites the strong to use their energies, and thus, to renew them. All heroic people are sensual. Woman is, for them, the most sublime prize.

A woman must be a mother or a lover. True mothers will always be mediocre lovers, and lovers will always be incomplete mothers due to their excesses. Equal in life, one completes the other. The mother who conceives a child builds the future with the past; the lover unleashes desire, which leads to the future.

LET'S CONCLUDE:

The woman who keeps a man with her tears and sentimentality is inferior to the prostitute whose boasts incite her pimp to maintain control, at gunpoint, over the darkest areas of the city: at least she cultivates an energy that can serve better causes.

Women perverted for too long by morality and prejudice, return to your sublime instinct, to violence, to cruelty.

Procreate for the fatal blood sacrifice, while men are responsible for wars and battles, and among your children, as a sacrifice to heroism, take the side of Destiny. Do not raise them for your benefit, that is, to diminish them, but rather, in the broadest freedom, for their complete expansion.

Instead of reducing men to the slavery of these execrable sentimental needs, encourage your sons and your men to surpass themselves.

You are the ones who make them. You have all the power over them.

You owe humanity heroes. Make them!

٭

Valentine de Saint-Point (1912)

Translation from English: Diego L. Sanromán.

By Alphonse Mucha 1900s

[insomniac-jay]

I made Lip Service's logo last night (don't mind the watermarks)

[peachyblkdemonslayer]

My favorite thing about Manifestos is how the couples look like they would be dating or married to each other

We love a couple who is established by their looks alone that how we know their looks good well with each other

[iwrite-thereforeiam]

did i churn this out on a Canva template? yes. yes i did. still working on it but tune in for the rest folks.

[jacobwren]

"Where is the art that strikingly knows it’s own futility but stumbles forward compellingly, anyway, because as an artist you have no choice?" (From my 2011 manifesto: Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings.)

[meadow-lands-faerie]

Going to start making blackout poems out of political party manifestos. They'll read better than any of the original shit.