Faster Pussyhat!
By
Little known fact: Pink hats destroy feminist movements. This fact is little known because Petula Dvorak made it up. [Update – thanks to jamesjhare for pulling this plum from the WaPo.]
Pink pussycat hats, sparkly signs, color-coordinated street theater — all of it is gleefully in the works for the upcoming Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21.
And that scares me a little. Because all of this well-intentioned, she-power frippery can make this thing more Lilith Fair than Lilly Ledbetter.
Metaphail.
And the Women’s March of 2017 will be remembered as an unruly river of Pepto-Bismol roiling through the streets of the capital rather than a long overdue civil rights march.
To be clear – Dvorak is getting all worked up because some people started a project to make pink pussyhats for everyone who attends the march in D.C.
No one knows how many hats (or protestors) there will be. But Dvorak is convinced that the aerial shots of the march will be a big clot of pink, and that’s all anyone will remember.
This is serious stuff.
Dvorak has to spell it out, otherwise the reader might think This person can’t possibly be serious and go check the comics.
It’s about human rights. It’s about the way 51 percent of our nation’s population still gets less pay, less representation in elected office and in corporate corner offices, less access to health care, less safety and less respect that the other 49 percent of our deeply divided nation.
The important word is Still. Women are still struggling to get these things. And we are losing ground and it’s not happening because we’ve been walking around in pink hats. Blame may more appropriately be laid at the door of the GOP and its identity politics.
Case in point?
Bra burning. That’s the trope that folks have been using to dismiss feminists for nearly half a century.
In fact, no bra was burned at Miss America protests in 1968 and 1969. Feminists threw false eyelashes, mops, pans, Playboy magazines, girdles, bras and other symbolic “instruments of female torture” into a trash can. But the Atlantic City municipal code didn’t allow them to set it on fire
It would seem the Pink Curse has damned us already.
Bra burning didn’t happen, but some people believed it happened. And for reasons Dvorak doesn’t pause to consider in her mad dash to warn us of the perils of pink hats, some people have pointed to a thing that didn’t happen as a reason that women should be treated like half-humans. Similarly, a mighty tide of pink hats may or may not rush through the city next week. But if enough people believe it happened and decide that some women wearing pink hats means women should be treated like half-humans, then women are doomed. And the next generation of concern trolls will blame the non-existent pink hat wearers for inequality, rather than patriarchy and misogynists.
Another little known fun fact: Mohawk haircuts destroy the environment.
Dana Fisher, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, has been studying protests and political action for nearly two decades. And when she was in deep on climate change protests, she saw a hard-to-miss family: They all had mohawks, even the kid.
And despite the scientists, environmentalists and students trying to make serious points at the protests, all the cameras focused on the mohawk family. Everyone remembered the mohawk family.
And so the last spotted owl died alone in a trash can filled with bras and pink hats, the end.
