Plath, of course, wields the powerful and subtle hammer of her art. Solanas on the other hand is like a rat in a trap by the end. She understands, on some level, that material circumstances shape our lives, and must be altered if we are to improve the world. But she’s held back by the limits of her critique—she can’t see past gender. In this way, she exposes the limits of radical feminism. Seeing the world through a binary lens—men versus women—has its uses, but she can’t build a revolution out of that schism. The divide between male and female becomes a kind of spectacle she loses herself in.

There are glimmers in her work of an understanding of the actual material circumstances that shape our lives: “There is no human reason for money for anyone to work more than two or three hours a week at the very most” is a Marxist (a Marx-ish?) thought, and one that echoes Debord’s NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS. She’s reaching, just for a moment here and a moment there, for a revolution that would free everyone. But then she hoists her ice pick over her shoulder and continues on her way, looking for more assholes.

Even so, she’s left us with something unexpected: by taking us to the farthest extreme of a certain kind of radical feminism, she’s given us a glimpse of its limits. She sacrifices a true vision of liberation on the altar of gender essentialism. She makes me wonder: How much is my preoccupation with the crimes of men blinkering me? What am I not seeing when I monster the monstrous men?