Foreword
by Michelle Tea
“It’s hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the wrong word. It’s just a literary device. There’s no organization called SCUM… It’s not even me… I mean, I thought of it as a state of mind. In other words, women who think a certain way are SCUM. Men who think a certain way are in the men’s auxiliary of SCUM.”
I was thinking a certain way when I first came across the SCUM Manifesto. I had retreated into the desert of Tucson, Arizona, in the midst of what I now refer to as my Radical Lesbian Feminist Nervous Breakdown. I make light of it, but it was a dark and dangerous moment in my life. I had just learned that my stepfather had been spying on my sister and me through holes he’d stealthily carved in the walls of our home—the bathroom walls, the bedroom walls. Throughout my teenage years I’d lived with the suspicion that this was happening, a state of mind that had me tipping on a chasm of anxiety and denial I feared might end with me going totally insane. The thing was, my stepfather was cool. The dad he replaced had not been cool, he’d been a moody alcoholic who’d fight with my mom ’til she cried. When he came home from work adulterously late and fucked-up on booze or pills, we didn’t know what we’d be getting. This new dad was a cheerful alcoholic. He’d played drums in bands and had a pierced ear and a homemade tattoo on his finger. He was always nice to my mom, and to the rest of us. He took delight in cooking extravagant family dinners—3-alarm chili washed down with pint glasses of lime rickeys, gutted limes scattered across the kitchen table filling the house with the sharply optimistic smell of summer. How could he be spying on us?
For years I lived with the understanding that there was something wrong with me. Something dark and perverse. To see such a nice man, a man who finally loved me and my mom the way a father-person should, a man who went to the courts to adopt me, who bar-brawled with my birth-father at the local Moose Club over his love for us, his family—to know all this and then think that he’s watching me? Sexually, I guess? What a creep. What a creep I was.
What a fishbowl my teenage bedroom was. I loved to be inside it, reading books and magazines, listening to records, sneaking cigarettes out the window. Painting band names on the linoleum with nail polish, playing with make-up, lip-synching in the mirror. I’d be wrapping my blackened mouth around the voice of Siouxsie Sioux and would suddenly freeze: What if he was watching me right now? My room suddenly turned eerie, spooky. I was a girl in a horror movie. There was a terrible stillness, I felt like I’d been caught. To break the spell I’d do something bizarre, or lewd—grab my crotch, squeeze my breasts, squish my face into the mirror, my tongue lolling out. I’d look like a madwoman. I wouldn’t have done that, touched myself there, if I really thought my stepfather was watching. So I didn’t really believe it, and by extension it wasn’t happening.
Later, before sleep, I’d burrow under my neon-striped comforter to touch myself. I tried to make my face look really, really still in case he was watching. I didn’t want him to know what I was doing. I tried to put my face under the covers, but felt smothered. I popped my face back out into the cool air. He couldn’t be watching. He couldn’t be watching because if he was then I couldn’t masturbate and I really wanted to masturbate. What a creep. What a creep I was.
This was a long-term, low-grade crazy, a steady hum I could live with. When I found it all to be true—that there were holes in the bathroom door that fit perfectly with a hole in the jamb, creating a tunnel that aimed your eye right at the toilet, where I would sit and pee, or poop, or smoke a stolen cigarette, or masturbate. That there were holes carved into my bedroom wall, holes a person could access by walking into the back hallway, nudging over stray piece of paneling, pulling the electrical tape (dry and curled from being pulled so many times), and look through the hole in that wall right into the hole in my own. When I looked through that hole myself and saw it all—my bed, my posters on the wall, my clothes strewn onto the linoleum, the mirror I kneeled before, lip-synching. When it all came down I got a new, sharper crazy. I couldn’t hide it like I’d hidden the schizoid feelings of being watched and being creepy. I was filled with an electric hurt, a frenzied rage. I was sick, sickened.
My mother rushed to his side, to protect him. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, we had spent the past three or four years fighting weekly if not daily, about the way I looked, my white face makeup and dyed-black hair, my torn clothes. People would beat me up for looking the way I did, men and boys. I got in fist-fights or they just threw things at me from car windows, they just spit at me in the street, they just called me a freak and a slut as they sped by in their cars. That was how it went outside. Inside, it was a war with my mother, who thought I’d brought it on myself. I didn’t have to look that way. And then I went queer, and that was a problem. And then the insanity I’d been staving off, I think my dad is watching me, erupted into reality and I sort of lost my mind.
Having to leave my house, I moved in with my girlfriend, a prostitute. Needing more than the minimum wage I was making at a Greek deli, I became one too. Notice I didn’t say I “got work as a prostitute,” I “found a job as a prostitute,” or “was hired to do prostitution.” Prostitute is not a job, it’s something a woman becomes. My girlfriend and I would keep the phone numbers of the men we saw and crank call them after. We’d tell their wives. Make fun of what they’d wanted, make sure they understood we had not enjoyed it. Ask them to please stop calling prostitutes. I stole things from their homes, little things: a candle, a photograph, a toothbrush. I wanted them to feel unsafe, to become vulnerable. I felt so unsafe—before the start of every call I went on, I gathered in my mind my exit plan, what I would do if something went wrong. Would I know if a man planned to kill me? I feared my intuition was destroyed from all those years of doubting what I’d known and turning it back on myself. I scanned penises for anything that looked unhealthy, trying to keep myself safe in that way, too. None of these men would ever know anything about a life like this, a girl’s life.
It was clear to me now that men could do anything they wanted. A man could move into a family and secretly get off on the daughters for years and when the truth came out, nothing really happened. He would have to deal with the shame of being caught, but he kept the house, and the daughters had to flee. He kept the wife the daughters would never again be able to trust as a mother. He came into the family like an invasive parasite, killed it, and inhabited its dead body.
I ran away to Tucson. No reason, it was just where my girlfriend wanted to go and she was all I had now. She was my housing and she shared my rage. In Tucson I worked as a prostitute and read books, feminist books. I read The Courage to Heal, the sexual-abuse survivor’s bible. I read Mary Daly, and learned about the murdered witches, about widowed Indian women forced to fling themselves on the funereal pyre. I was learning about the global history of male violence against women and how all social systems accommodated it, from the government to my family. I started seeing so much it hurt. I started thinking that if I pushed my brain a little harder I could see into a person’s mind. It scared me too much to do it but I knew that I could.
I read Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy and the concept of killing men as a feminist action was introduced to me. A lighter read, Lesbian Land enchanted me with the reality that I could live in a world without men, that other women before me had begun to create these places, and that I could perhaps run to them. I visited one outside Tucson. The woman who gave us a tour was straight and brought her male lover in at night, which was okay with everyone. She slept on a mattress rigged up on a pallet and concrete blocks, right there in the middle of the desert. I saw a naked woman giving another naked woman a massage on a table set up in the shade of a mesquite tree. I met the land’s owner, a sixty-something-year-old woman high up in some scaffolding, building herself an octagonal house.
I thought I would move to that land someday. Meanwhile I lived in a rented abode downtown, close enough to the University to stage “Tit-Ins” on the lawn there, inciting women to take off their shirts to protest the laws that made women keep their shirts on, sexualizing their breasts, allowing them to have the freedom to be topless only in places like strip clubs, where men could profit and get off on them. My house was close enough to downtown that I could walk to