SCUM Manifesto

The SCUM Manifesto, self-published by Valerie Solanas in 1967 and commercially released in 1968, remains one of the most volatile, polarized, and essential documents of twentieth-century radical feminism. Frequently reduced to the acronym “SCUM”—often cited as “Society for Cutting Up Men,” a phrase that appears on the Olympia Press cover but never in Solanas’s actual text—the work is a blistering amalgamation of utopian theory, biting satire, and raw political rage. Solanas opens with a diagnostic premise that upends millennia of patriarchal thought: the male is a biological accident, an “incomplete female” or “walking abortion” whose Y chromosome renders him emotionally deficient and incapable of empathy, love, or genuine connection. In a direct inversion of Freudian theory, she argues that men suffer from “pussy envy,” a deep-seated inferiority complex that drives them to construct a world of war, prejudice, and artificiality in a desperate attempt to compensate for their inability to simply be.

This theoretical foundation launches Solanas into a sweeping critique of modern society, which she views as a “shitpile” maintained by male incompetence and insecurity. She dissects various male-dominated institutions—war, fatherhood, the money system, authority—with ruthless precision. Money, she argues, is a tool of male control, an “utter bore” unnecessary in a technologically advanced society where automation could eliminate labor. Work, therefore, is a method of keeping women suppressed. To remedy this, Solanas proposes a revolutionary program executed by “SCUM”—dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females. These women will not seek equality within the corrupt system but will instead “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”

Solanas distinguishes these revolutionary women from “Daddy’s Girls,” passive women who cling to patriarchal approval and accept a subservient role to feel secure. The conflict she outlines is not just between men and women, but between the “civilized” women who uphold the status quo and the “unladylike” radicals who seek to dismantle it. Her proposed methods for dismantling the patriarchy are vividly specific and often darkly comic. She calls for a “un-work force” to sabotage industries and lists targets for elimination that range from rapists and politicians to “men who play Muzak” and “owners of greasy spoons,” blending lethal seriousness with an absurdist humor that challenges the reader to distinguish between literal violence and metaphorical destruction.

The manifesto’s reception was irrevocably altered by Solanas’s attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968. This act of violence propelled the text from the margins of the counterculture into the center of a feminist firestorm. For radical feminists like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Florynce Kennedy, Solanas became a “heroine” and the “first outstanding champion of women’s rights,” her act seen as a logical, if extreme, response to patriarchal oppression. This embrace, however, caused a deep fracture within the women’s movement. Liberal feminists, led by figures like Betty Friedan, recoiled from Solanas’s violence and misandry, fearing it would discredit the fight for equality. The “Solanas affair” thus became a defining moment that split the movement into reformist and radical camps, exposing the tension between the desire for integration and the demand for total systemic overhaul.

In the decades since, the SCUM Manifesto has undergone significant critical re-evaluation. Biographer Breanne Fahs and philosopher Avital Ronell have moved beyond the “madwoman” trope to analyze Solanas as a prescient cultural critic and a master of high satire. Ronell positions the text as a work of “literary terrorism” that “brings the logic of the system to its breaking point.” Seen through this lens, the manifesto’s hyperbolic violence is not a literal battle plan but a performative strategy—a “radical negativity” that mirrors the violence of patriarchy back onto itself to reveal its absurdity. It is a text that prefigured “Up Your Ass,” Solanas’s earlier play, sharing its gutter dialogue and distinct brand of “misanthropic extremism.” Whether read as a serious political program, a Swiftian satire, or a queer theoretical text that explodes the gender binary, the SCUM Manifesto endures as a “document of profound vulnerability written in a voice of profound empowerment,” a weapon of radical humor that continues to shock, provoke, and inspire.