On June 3, 1968, a young woman named Valerie Solanas shot pop artist Andy Warhol from almost point blank range at the artist’s Factory studio in New York. Amazingly, two out of three shots missed, and Warhol was able to (narrowly) survive his single wound. The resulting furore of publicity ensured that Valerie Solanas, and her vitriolic anti-male tract The SCUM Manifesto, endured an everlasting notoriety thereafter. The SCUM Manifesto, written in 1967 and originally self-published in 1968, remains a powerful and sustained attack on the human male, a species which Solanas once vowed to erdicate from the face of the Earth (SCUM?is sometimes said to be an acronym of Society for Cutting Up Men). As such, it stands as one of the primary documents of radical feminism; it is also an avant-garde work of alienation, and a compelling insight into the mind of an innate outsider.
