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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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born out of women's rage as a collective

It hasn’t been mentioned much but the earliest published work to include the phrase “free pussy” is Valerie Solana’ anti-male SCUD Manifesto, 1967, maybe the most anti-male book ever written. Bolding the relevant parts:

The "hippie", whose desire to be a "Man", a "rugged individualist", isn't quite as strong as the average man's, and who, in addition, is excited by the thought of having lots of women accessible to him, rebels against the harshness of a Breadwinner's life and the monotony of one woman. In the name of sharing and co-operation, he forms the commune or tribe, which, for all its togetherness and partly because of it (the commune, being an extended family, is an extended violation of the females' rights, privacy and sanity) is no more a community than normal "society".

A true community consists of individuals--not mere species members, not couples--respecting each other's individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally--free spirits in free relation to each other-and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of "society" is the family; "hippies" say the tribe; no one says the individual.

The "hippie" babbles on about individuality, but has no more conception of it than any other man. He desires to get back to Nature, back to the wilderness, back to the home of the furry animals that he's one of, away from the city, where there is at least a trace, a bare beginning of civilization, to live at the species level, his time taken up with simple, non-intellectual activities--farming, fucking, bead stringing. The most important activity of the commune, the one on which it is based, is gangbanging. The "hippie" is enticed to the commune mainly by the prospect of all the free pussy--the main commodity to be shared, to be had just for the asking but, blinded by greed, he fails to anticipate all the other men he has to share with, or the jealousies and possessiveness of the pussies themselves.

Men cannot co-operate to achieve a common end, because each man's end is all the pussy for himself. The commune, therefore, is doomed to failure: each "hippie" will, in panic, grab the first simpleton who digs him and whisk her off to the suburbs as fast as he can. The male cannot progress socially, but merely swings back and forth from isolation to gangbanging.

Solanas’ experience with men in her life failing her developed into an ardent misandry and culminated in, of all things, a murder attempt on Andy Warhol. It’s interesting that the oldest source of this term also includes consensual gangbanging within a fraternity-like organization of men, though here she critiques them for whisking the woman into the burbs rather than dropping her for reputational reasons.

One interpretation I've read is that this phenomenon was driven just as much by the women. Hippie couples would join a commune and the women would go on to compete for the sexual attention of the commune leader. When the men objected the women would go on to complain of their "possessiveness".

Traditionalists say the basic unit of "society" is the family; "hippies" say the tribe; no one says the individual.

Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?

Eh, must've been the wind.

SCUD Manifesto

Saddam Hussein's inspiration!

For those unfamiliar with Solanas, it's the SCUM Manifesto, with SCUM standing for "Society for Cutting Up Men".

Lmao yes you’re right. She was not a Baathist.

Honestly, I'd guess Valerie Solanas being a Baathist wouldn't even be top 5 in the strangest links between American progressive activists and third world postcolonial regimes.

If someone told be Solanas was a Baathist, I would believe them. I do not think she would have called her work of Baathist apologia the SCUD Manifesto though. From the point of a Western useful idiot, that would be a phallogocentric take on what Baathism was really about.