The Twig Benders

New York: The Feminists, 1970. A disturbing piece of "feminist pornography" in which the director of an all-boys school has sex with a student after mutilating his penis with a needle and razor while her cuckholded husband commits suicide after mutilating his own penis with a needle.

The work was published by the Feminists in two mimeographed versions: The Twig Benders: A Pornographic Study of Pornography and Sexual Oppression, which includes other examples of men being raped, murdered, humiliated and mutilated, and this one simply titled, The Twig Benders.

The work was apparently authored by Wilda Holt, writing under the name Wilda Chase, who according to the Feminists' Ti-Grace Atkinson was a sweet, but rage-filled woman who'd been sexually abused by her grandfather and who found herself orbiting the most radical feminist groups in NYC. Atkinson claimed that Holt was the only woman she knew of who had attended a meeting of Valerie Solanas' group, SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) before Solanas was institutionalized for shooting Andy Warhol. According to Atkinson, Holt "blew her head off" in the mid-1970s. The only source of information on Holt is Breanne Fahs' interview with Atkinson for her article, "Ti-Grace Atkinson and the Legacy of Radical Feminism" (Fahs, Breanne. "Ti-Grace Atkinson and the Legacy of Radical Feminism." Feminist Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, 2011, pp. 561-90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23069922. Accessed 19 Jan. 2024.

Three 11" x 8 ½" sheets mimeographed from typescript, 6 p. Scarce, like all other Feminists' documents. Five copies of this edition in institutional holdings via WorldCat.