Written by Valarie Solana’s
Published in 1967
The Scum Manifesto was truly an interesting read. There are many different extreme ideas and solutions in this book, however, there are also many interesting and believable ideas that are buried beneath the extremist and out-there ideas. Solana reverses the traditional viewpoints and challenges society’s views and beliefs about women. It is often debated whether this text is a satire or if Solana fully believed what she was putting down on paper. Regardless there are some important points that she does have considering her past experiences as well. There are very deep critiques about how men act in society as a whole as well as the mistakes that she believes they make. The interesting thing about this text is that the author is not just some random lunatic she actually went to school and had a short stint at UC Berkeley which is an extremely prestigious school, especially for a woman at that time. She was also an open lesbian in the 1950s which was definitely not socially acceptable at that point. From her perspective, I can see how she can have certain critiques with men especially considering her history with trauma and how she was a psychology major if you take out the extremism of her other viewpoints. However, a lot of what she says seems to be very much in the same vain as many hyper-masculine equivalents of similar texts.