Story Six

That time I realized history was rhyming again.

I was not a fan of the pussy hats. I thought they were silly and counterproductive and above all not half as cute as the women who wore them thought they were. Put bluntly, they were the worst kind of PR stunt, and not one that I thought would move many needles. Pussy hats belong to the fans of the Allyssa Milanos of the world, women who talk a lot in very strong terms but don’t ever say much of anything. Solidarity is one thing, but pointing at the obvious and telling people to look at the obvious thing isn’t quite the same thing as taking a stand. Women, because many women hadn’t felt terribly uncomfortable or personally threatened until recent years, were running around a bit adrift doing silly things like wearing vaginal puns on their heads to register their discontent with the patriarchy.

I understand those women, to some extent, and I am not complaining here about women who mean well and do what they think will be most useful. I’m not complaining about anyone. I say this all because years ago now a record amount of women put on silly fucking hats and staged a massive protest in the Capitol (this was before the insurrection, when you could do things like gather tens or hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall without anyone thinking it was a national security threat) and as far as I could tell, their main concern was the patriarchy, generally speaking.

I was a journalist in early 2017, and I covered things like marches and protests and the occasional armed rebellion, and I did not go to Washington because I couldn’t find any journalistic impetus. I have often been on the front lines of American history in my young life, have taken images that rocketed around the world and written copy that made people thousands of miles away feel as though they were right there alongside me. But the women’s march seemed, to me, like one of those things where every suburban mom decked out in feather boas and face point and those damned hats was likely to record every second of it to their Facebook or Twitter accounts. There wasn’t news to be had there excepting perhaps the crowd size.

These years later, I don’t regret it. I love visiting DC and typically look for any excuse to go see my friends and have some drinks with staffers and generally pretend to be a far more professional type of person than I am. DC is the place you go to sit outside the Cannon building during lunch and count the number of staffers who walk by in sensible beige heels and conservatively colored sheath dresses and last season’s Michael Kors bag in one of the five approved colors which is on the Hill what passes for individual expression. The goal of DC, at least the parts that are taken up with finance and the business of the people, is to be as interchangeable as possible. But going to DC with thousands of tourists all descending onto it in a single day is simply volunteering to become a human map; that many phones trying to access the cell towers means nobody can access their maps and even if they can get signal, most people struggle with the idea that “I” street is spelled “eye” street sometimes.

While I can be a harsh critic, I also know that my own philosophies on effective movements don’t always translate. I am right more often than not, which is still not always. My role is meant to be observation and critique, which is to say I will call things silly or ineffective when I see them that way, but I recognize that my critiques come from specific lenses. The hats were fucking silly but the camaraderie and community-building that those women did likely bore fruit unrelated to my own criticism; even my heart was warmed by the interviews with little girls who had never been in a feminist space, and the viral videos of women singing catharsis and joy in defiance of the tiny men who needed force to keep power.

But in the days after the march, social media erupted with women largely congratulating themselves for what a good job they’d done by wandering around the Mall and listening to some speeches. They congratulated themselves that they were good guests in the city, that they hadn’t really bothered anyone. It occurred to me that the thesis of the march, the thing these women were proud of, was that they had showed up in enough numbers that if any men had been watching, they would have noted that actually, there’s a lot of women in America! And they vote!

Of course, we know that women don’t vote in a monolith, and we know that white women tend to vote very differently than Black ones, and we know that angry women are not the same thing as enraged women. The enraged women did not go to the women’s march, for the most part, because we already knew that a march was not going to make the men see reason. The men, by and large, were going to treat us like Wilson did the suffragettes when they first started picketing the White House (which was actually quite innovative at the time.) He patronized their little efforts and waited them out. But they were not there for a day; they were there until they were arrested and force fed in prison. It was the stories that were printed nationwide about how women were strapped to gurneys and had tubes shoved up their nose and food funneled into their stomachs that made people think “maybe this has gone too far.” It was also the work of state committees gaining enfranchisement little by little, it was also the work of Black suffragettes who were largely shoved to the side, it was many things that got women the vote. But none of those things were pretty, nor non-confrontational. And none of them were done by women who wanted to have a single parade to alert the men that they didn’t like the vulgar man who’d just been inaugurated.

Back in 2015, a lot of women on the Internet started talking about fascism, and how actually we should really worry about it. We were told by women and men both that we were being hysterical, that we were being dramatic, that we were being ahistorical; after all, fascism was a specific political thing, not a mere coarsening of the discourse. The trouble was the rapey guys; we were taking back our power by talking about how many times men had tried to make us victims. We were out for blood. We were on the upswing, there would be a backlash to this bro culture, the arc of the universe bends towards justice.

Of course, the fascism materialized in the years since Donald Trump became a symbol for every nationalist and isolationist. We revisited the 1930s for a while there, letting loose our worst impulses and turning on each other as though the problems we face as a nation were down to white dudes suddenly not running *everything* and instead only running 80% of things. As though the problem were a lack of religion or a lack of children or the fact that women had begun to understand that scrubbing a home every day and cooking full meals and watching children was itself work that brought value to the economy same as any mid-level sales job did, if not more.

I would venture a guess that most of the women who then worried that maybe we were coming off as a bit shrill are now sitting, watching men writing their op-eds in the last few weeks, thinking the same thing about that effort as I thought about the hats. On the one hand, yes, welcome to the fight, it’s actually very good to see so many people standing up to do even a little bit. Every effort helps, all tactics are useful if they bring awareness or activate someone to find a way to subvert the kinds of norms which kill people. But the op-eds aren’t going to help shit. A conversation, years late, between men who have just now realized what women have been talking about for centuries, is not materially helpful in the struggle for the liberties and full humanity of women.

And the men, predictably, are angry. Men in groups communicate with bravado and bluster and threats and that is how it comes to be that most women know a good man in private but in public he will write an op-ed not early, not when the danger is on the horizon, but just in time to have claimed the mantle of discontent. The op-eds now are coming after the Texas ruling, after months and years and decades of stories about abortion access, after the Court has been stacked, after the issue is nearly foregone.

I don’t care if people keep the hats; wear whatever makes you feel happy.

But I wish more people were taking off the gloves. Solidarity is crucial, but it doesn’t mean much if it comes packaged politely and upsets nobody.