Seeing Pink

It was certainly big. Estimates of the number of attendees at the National Mall have ranged from a 500,000 number given by crowd scientists to a 1 million figure given by the march organizers—plus another supposed 4 million at sister protests around the world. It was also one of the strangest demonstrations in U.S. history, enveloped in oddity from its very beginning.

The nominal founder of the march, now enshrined in march mythology, was Teresa Shook, a retired lawyer in Hawaii who was so appalled by the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States that she invited her Facebook friends to join her in a protest of Trump’s inauguration. In a flash she had 10,000 commitments, some from women who had already bought plane tickets to attend what they thought would be Hillary Clinton’s inauguration. Shook’s “Million Woman March,” as she called it, seemed a perfect way to get some value out of that airfare.

Then, in another flash, Shook got co-opted by Bob Bland (a woman, despite her name), founder of Manufacture New York, a Brooklyn-based “incubator” for designers of “sustainable” fashion. Bland had designed the “Nasty Woman” T-shirts that many Clinton supporters donned—with proceeds going to Planned Parenthood—after Trump bestowed that epithet on his opponent during the presidential race. Bland added paid staffers and, more crucially, financial support, from a range of sponsors. Planned Parenthood got top billing, with the title “Exclusive Premier Sponsor,” but there were more than 400 others, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, EMILY’s List, the ACLU, the American Federation of Teachers, the Human Rights Campaign, and MoveOn.org. Bland was now firmly in charge of the march.

No sooner had Bland installed herself at the helm than some black women-activists pointed out—quite correctly—that the march, like feminism itself, was a white women’s creation. A post on the march’s Facebook page accused the organizers of “appropriation,” of stealing the very name, Million Woman March, from a 1997 protest organized by black women in Philadelphia and modeled after Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March in Washington. “I will not even consider supporting this until the organ-izers are intersectional, original and come up with a different name,” the critic wrote.

Bland hastily changed the name to Women’s March on Washington and added three co-chairs reflecting various colors of the diversity rainbow: veteran protester and gun-control advocate Tamika Mallory, alternatives-to-incarceration activist Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour, a hijab-wearing Palestinian-rights agitator whose résumé includes organizing a group called Muslims for Ferguson and persuading New York City schools to close on Islamic holidays. Mallory, Perez, and Sarsour had earlier teamed up to co-chair another Ferguson-themed event, the 2015 March2Justice from New York to Washington in a protest against alleged police brutality.

More image trouble arose for the march in mid-January when it ejected one of its “partners,” an anti-abortion group called New Wave Feminists—because you can’t exactly extend the hand of sisterhood to abortion opponents when your chief sponsor is Planned Parenthood. A few white women expressed distress at what they perceived as the march organizers’ growing hostility to them. Bland had posted an admonition for white women to “understand their privilege” and pay more attention to “intersectionality”: the idea that minority women accumulate more points in the victim game than white women because of their twofer status as objects of discrimination. A blogger finger-wagged the whites: “Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less.”

Then there was the matter of the bright pink “pussyhats.” The cat-eared caps and the patterns for knitting them were the Instagram-friendly brainchild of several L.A. women, including a knit-shop owner, distressed by the impending Trump presidency. The idea was to play on a vulgar remark involving the word “pussy” that Trump had uttered in 2005 and also, as one Southern California knitter put it, to be “reappropriating the word ‘pussy’ in a positive way.” As knitters clicked out tens of thousands of the hats with their needles, and ads for commercially produced versions pullulated on Etsy and elsewhere, Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak worried that the feline headgear would make wearers look silly instead of serious: “an unruly river of Pepto-Bismol roiling through the streets of the capital rather than a long overdue civil rights march.” Citing such issues as equal pay and equal representation in corporate corner offices, Dvorak begged the marchers to leave the pussyhats at home.

Her words went unheeded, as I discovered at the march’s official start on the south side of the National Mall, where it was more like a lake of Pepto-Bismol. There were not only thousands of bright pink hats but thousands of bright pink jackets, shirts, scarves, sneakers, socks, and shoelaces. A mother posed for a photo with her small daughter who sported a junior-size pussyhat and a poster reading “I Vote in 8 Years.”

Marchers were marching—or at least some of them were marching as they chanted “Not my president!” and other anti-Trump mantras. A great deal more of the protesters simply milled about or stood in line at an agglomeration of food trucks whose operators were among the dozens of entrepreneurs on the sidewalks ignoring a “Peace Over Profit” poster held by one of the demonstrators and putting capitalism to work peddling water bottles, rainbow flags, candy bars, and “Thank You Obama” T-shirts.

What the march seemed mostly to be about was self-expression via posters—but a peculiar sort of self-expression, oblivious to the impression that the marchers might be making on onlookers who didn’t share their ethos. The well-funded Planned Parenthood had printed up its own posters that said, not surprisingly, “I Stand With Planned Parenthood.” NARAL’s signs, also professionally designed, featured a cat emoji preceded by the words “Keep Your Laws Off My.”

But relatively few demonstrators seemed to want to carry the canned and relatively sedate slogans that the advocacy groups had prepared. They preferred to write and draw their own, with no holds barred. The word “nasty” appeared in many of the homemade signs: “Nasty Woman,” “You Haven’t Seen Nasty Yet,” “Stay Nasty,” and (on a poster held by a man) “I Like Women Extra Nasty.” The word “pussy” also got play: “I Grab My Own Pussy,” “This Pussy Has Claws.” Other demonstrators drew elaborate renderings of uteruses and fallopian tubes. “Why RU So Obsessed With My Uterus?” a sign asked. There were several pinkish, purplish hats, neck-rings, and paintings that apparently represented vaginas. “My Gender Is a Dynamic, Not a Disorder,” a sign read.

The other thematic focus of the posters was the president himself: “No Trump-Pence.” “Trump Is Hitler.” “No Trump—No KKK.” “Putin’s Bitch.” And most colorfully: “Good Cheeto, Bad Cheeto,” with cutout photos of the cheese snack and Trump’s face.

Furthermore, it seemed that for all the efforts of the Mallory-Perez-Sarsour diversity troika and all the online rhetoric about intersectionality and privilege-checking, the demographics of the march were exactly what its critics of color had complained about: overwhelmingly white. There were a few African-American, Latina, and East Asian women to be sure, but not many. And after three hours’ worth of trudging through the crowds and looking at thousands of demonstrators, I spotted exactly four hijabs. Perhaps socially conservative Muslim women don’t really want to associate with double-entendre hats and “I Grab My Own Pussy” posters.

There was another demographic not much in evidence: men. The march’s organizers had begged “all defenders of human rights” to get themselves to the Mall and show the flag. New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait wrung his hands: “For men misinformed by its poorly-chosen name, the Women’s March is for ALL anti-Trump Americans. Please attend!” Yet the female-male ratio on Jan. 21 stagnated at an overwhelming 30-1: the occasional guy in a T-shirt reading “Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda.” I asked one of the men, Joe Newton, who hailed from Brooklyn and looked as though he could be Bob Bland’s next-door neighbor with his earring and skinny pants, what had happened to the rest of his sex. “I don’t know,” Newton answered. “I wish there were more men here. It wasn’t intended to be exclusive.”

The most telling aspect of the march was its sad-sack aura, of which the relative absence of male participants was only one part. Ultra-saturated pink is a color that doesn’t flatter most complexions and hair hues, and it especially doesn’t flatter women who believe that attention to one’s looks is internalized sexism and would rather stay up all night painting uteruses on posters. When the most glamorous female at a gathering is the 82-year-old Gloria Steinem (who was distinctly not wearing one of the cat caps but, rather, a perfectly tailored parka and a perfectly styled blowout), something is off.

The vast crowds and the general chaos prevented me (and many of the marchers) from getting anywhere near the central and most sensationalized portions of the event. I missed Madonna’s various bombs: F- and blowing-up-the-White-House. (She later clarified that she’d had no serious thoughts of anti-presidential violence.) I missed Ashley Judd’s recitation of a poem about Trump’s supposed sexual yearnings for his daughter Ivanka.

But what I didn’t miss was the feeling that the march wasn’t really about an opportunity to “make history,” as the website put it. None of the “serious” issues that the Washington Post‘s Petula Dvorak alluded to in her column—the glass ceiling, the 78 cents that women are said to earn for every man’s dollar—found its way onto any of the handmade posters I saw. Only a handful of the demonstrators’ signs mentioned, say, immigration, climate change, and restrictions on Muslims, favorite progressive causes all. The march instead seemed to be a form of grief work: Hillary Clinton was supposed to win the election, but she didn’t. The hated Trump won instead, and the huge gathering of the likeminded who had voted for her was therapy.

“I came for my daughters,” said Bonnie Rae of South Bethany, Del-aware, who had risen in the middle of the night to ride in a caravan of five busloads of women. “I want something better for the future than what we have now.”

Late that night on a D.C. Metro train a woman sitting five rows behind me who had attended the march announced loudly, “I felt comforted. All around me it’s all red. I’m from western Michigan where it’s all red.”

Charlotte Allen is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.