The Writer of SCUM. Feminism's Embarressment

It is a story. It’s a gothic, blood-stained parable stitched together with cigarette ash and brilliance.

In another century, another cloister of shadows, they might have called her a madwoman and locked her in an attic. But instead, the city swallowed her whole. Valerie Solanas, born of violence, bred in defiance, died in obscurity. And in between? She wrote a scream so sharp it echoed through decades. A scream not everyone could bear to hear—because in its pitch was truth, and in that truth, a mirror.

The year was 1936, and the world had just barely begun to shape itself in the smoldering aftermath of the Great War, with another war whispering from the wings. In a small town by the sea, in Ventnor City, New Jersey, a girl was born. Her name was Valerie Jean Solanas, and she entered this world the way all women do: unnamed in the headlines, unseen by the men who would shape the times, and entirely too inconvenient to be noticed until she became dangerous.

She was, by all accounts, brilliant. Not in the way of lightbulbs or powdered wigs, but in the dangerous way—like a storm that lights up the sky so brightly you see everything that was hidden before. Her childhood was not a song but a sentence. Her grandfather molested her. Her mother threw her out. She was homeless before she was old enough to vote, selling her body and trading blows with a world that punished girls for surviving.

Still, she clawed her way into higher learning—studied psychology at the University of Maryland. Not because it promised salvation, but because understanding the rot helps you map the architecture of your own decay. She was queer. A lesbian in an era where that meant being hunted, pitied, or pathologized. And yet, she never bowed. Not to men, not to doctors, not to shame.

In 1967, Valerie wrote SCUM Manifesto.

The Society for Cutting Up Men. The title was a dare. The content? A blade. She called men biological accidents, walking dildos, machines wrapped in delusions of grandeur. She mocked the pillars of civilization that made women chattel and dared to call it love. She argued that if men ruled the world, and the world was on fire, then perhaps men weren’t the geniuses they claimed to be.

Was it satire? Absolutely. Was it rage? Entirely. Was it prophecy? In some ways, yes.

The manifesto wasn’t a declaration of war; it was an autopsy report on one. And if that makes you uncomfortable, it should. Because Solanas didn’t invent violence. She repackaged it in words, dipped it in ink, and dared you to look away.

Andy Warhol looked away.

He laughed at her script. Lost it. Ignored her. She handed him her work, and he handed her silence. For a woman like Valerie, silence was a coffin. It reminded her of every time she had screamed and no one came. Of every time she was touched without permission, of every time her mind was called madness just because it refused to kneel.

And one day, in 1968, she brought a gun.

She shot him. Warhol survived. History did not. In that moment, the media had its villain. Feminism had its embarrassment. And patriarchy had its perfect example of what happens when women are too much.

They called her crazy. A lunatic. A freak. They whispered that she had set the movement back, that she had tarnished the good, clean work of more presentable feminists. She was a stain. A liability. A threat to respectability.

They institutionalized her. Then forgot her.

But what they missed—what they always miss—is that Valerie wasn’t an aberration. She was a consequence. The walking end result of centuries of silencing, gaslighting, and erasure. She was not the movement. She was the wound. The rot that finally spoke.

She died in 1988, alone in a flophouse hotel in San Francisco. Officially? Pneumonia. But the truth is: she died of neglect. Died from being too loud in a world that rewards women for whispering. If at all. Died because genius in a madwoman’s mouth is always called insanity. She was 52 years old. The world had already used her up, then stepped over her body on its way to brunch.

And yet—her words live.

Her manifesto is sold in bookstores now. It gets assigned in gender studies classes by professors who would have crossed the street to avoid her in real life. It’s quoted by TikTok teens and recoiled at by men’s rights groups who believe satire is hate when it reflects too cleanly.

But let’s be honest: if Valerie had been a man, she’d be a cult hero. A renegade intellectual. The subject of dark biopics and punk rock songs. If she’d been a man, they would have called her uncompromising. A rebel. A visionary.

Instead, she’s the punchline. The warning. The woman they trot out to say, “See? Feminism is crazy.”

But Solanas was not feminism. She was what happens when feminism isn’t enough. When policy doesn’t reach the alleys. When slogans don’t stop the hands that grope you. When being right isn’t the same as being safe.

So why does she matter now?

Because women are still being told to smile through assault. Still being told to be likable while testifying to their own abuse. Because the same systems that ignored Valerie now repackage her rage into marketable brands while erasing the cost. Because trans women are being hunted, poor women sterilized, Black women ignored, and all women measured for how gently they demand not to be hurt.

Because the war she named never stopped.

Valerie Solanas was not a role model. She was a reckoning. She was not aspirational. She was a scream that got out.

Today, we’re told that feminism must be palatable to be effective. That our protests must be peaceful. That our hashtags must be clever, our stories neat, our pain camera-ready. But Solanas reminds us: justice isn’t always polite. Sometimes, it’s a growl in the throat of the last woman standing.

She reminds us that there is a cost to being unheard. That when a society fails to protect, acknowledge, or even see its most wounded, those wounds become something else. They become women with typewriters. Women with scars for eyes. Women who write things you wish you could un-read.

Valerie Solanas didn’t die a martyr. She died a mirror.

And we are still afraid of what she showed us.

"To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo."

She wrote that in fury. Men read it in fear. And instead of asking what made her say it, they asked how to shut her up.

But some voices don’t go quiet. Some words haunt. Some women do not get erased.

They become myth. They become fire. They become the question we are still too afraid to answer:

What happens when women scream, and still no one listens?

Sometimes, the scream survives.

Sometimes, it writes itself into history with blood and brilliance.

Sometimes, her name is Valerie Solanas.

Fictionalized by AI cover for manifesto...the above is not an actual representation of the original.