7. The Scum Manifesto by Valerie Solanas

Probably the most entertaining feminist tract ever written, The Scum Manifesto (1968) was the work of Valerie Solanas, who later went on to gun down (though not terminally) her sometime friend Andy Warhol. The manifesto calls for the destruction of the male sex. ‘Rational men want to be squashed, stepped on…treated as the cur, the filth they are, have their repulsiveness confirmed,’ she wrote. ‘Scum’ has since been taken to be an acronym for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’, but nowhere is this invoked in the original publication. Solanas in fact denied that it was ever the case; it was a back-formation, with Scum originally standing for refuse, excrement, abjection, the beyond-marginal. Scum is not nice. ‘Scum will always operate on a criminal rather than a civil disobedience basis’, she declared. ‘If Scum ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.’

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