(This was originally published on Facebook, January 24, 2017, and got a lot of positive responses and shares. I ended up changing the privacy settings so that more folks could see it.)
Last Saturday, January 21, 2017, almost 3 million people (mostly women) around the world marched to protest, to show solidarity with each other, and to state that Donald Trump and his new administration are a threat that they won’t take lightly. He has made a lot of outrageous statements, a large chunk of them directed at women, who comprise 50.8 percent of our population. I’m sure Kellyanne Conway can’t admit to why they might have been mobilized, but most of the women I know were sickened that someone who treats women that badly could get into the White House — and with 53% of the votes of white women.
There have been a lot of posts about the march. Almost everywhere, the turnout broke through all expectations. Washington, D.C. had an estimated 500,000 marchers, about 3 times the crowd at Trump’s inauguration the day before. Chicago planned for 50,000 marchers, and at 150,000 they couldn’t actually march anymore. Los Angeles had up to 750,000 marchers. I joined my wife and a close friend in San Jose. The plane was 11,000, but the after march estimate was 25,000–30,000.
The symbol of the march was the “pussy hat”, a hat that gets it’s name from the fact than when pulled over your head, the corners look like cat’s ears. Get one that’s pink and it’s a “pink pussy hat”, the obvious double entendre put in place because of Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” comment. Donning pussy hats, donning pink pussy hats, was a sign of unity and defiance for these women. Many of the men that marched also wore them, in support of the women that they knew and the ones they did not.
Marching is a small thing, but I went to show support for my wife, for my sisters, for my mother, for my aunt, for all the women colleagues that I have, and for all of the women I am lucky enough to call friends. Women wanting to be treated with the same respect as any man, people wanting to be judged on their merits, not on a single aspect of their being, aren’t special rights, they are human rights. When you arbitrarily choose to limit the rights of some, you are saying you are free to arbitrarily limit the rights of all of us. I call that bullshit, and as a engineer, I have little tolerance for bullshit.
However, there have been lots of positive posts about the marches, some really dumb tweets, and one “I am not a disgrace” post that has been passed around by women who presumably voted for Trump.
I can’t speak for all the women in the marches. If we assume that they were 80% of the crowds, that means 2.4 million women. I can describe the women that I know that marched.
Most of them have careers. Some were doctors, some lawyers. Several were college professors. There were computer programmers. There was a writer of TV shows. There was a grad student and a high school student. There were women with Ph.Ds. (One of them grew up poor, went to community college, transferred to Berkeley, and went to grad school at Stanford. American dream.) None of these women would be called victims, dependent, or weak. Between two of them that I know, there were 3 black belts. There was a nurse and two fitness instructors. There was a person who works in IT support. There was a scientist. At least two were engineers and one of them a college dean. One is a department head in sociology. One of them was a famous judge I first met in the weight room. And yes, one of them was my wife and the mother of my kids.
Some might call them elites, but none of them as far as I know, own a yacht, or are members of a country club. They are hardworking and successful. Is that elite? When I go into surgery, I want my doctor to be that kind of elite. When I get on a plane, I want the pilot to be that kind of elite.
They walked because they felt disrespected by the throwback tide that led to Brexit and Trump. They marched to show unity and strength. They were not lewd; the pussy hat was a sign of unity and defiance.
Which brings me back to the “I am not a disgraced woman” posts. The post says, “I can work if I want”. That’s nice, but few single women would say that. Lots of married women can’t say that. Like most men, work isn’t a choice, it’s a necessity of life. It’s nice that someone has the luxury of choosing whether or not to work.
It’s nice that they don’t feel like a second-class citizen. Many women still do, or at least they feel like in certain circumstances, they get treated that way. It’s sad that the writer doesn’t remember much history or they would know that until very recently, women were treated very badly. (Try watching “Mad Men” or the 1960 version of “Ocean’s Eleven” to see how the media portrayed women. Look up those 1970s airline ads with “I’m Bambi, fly me to San Diego.”) The women that I know that marched are the least likely to be treated as second class citizens compared to most women in our country. They were marching to not go back to how their mothers were treated in the 1950s.
It’s nice that life for women in the US is better than Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or the Congo, but how low do you want to set that bar? It’s like getting food poisoning at Chipotle and having someone say, “Well you didn’t get Ebola, so why are you complaining?”
There is one thing I know about the person who wrote that note. It comes from the line where they write, “But do not expect for me, a woman, to take you seriously wearing a pink va-jay-jay hat on your head and screaming profanities and bashing men.” Well, I didn’t hear any women disrespecting men. In fact, around a half dozen times during the San Jose march, some woman I had never met turned and thanked me for being there. Several women on the light rail ride down to San Jose took pictures with the surfer/model looking dude standing on his own holding a pink sign that said, “Women’s rights are human rights.” More the point, the “pink pussy hat” is called that because (as mentioned earlier) when pulled over your head it looks like it has cat’s ears. I am pretty certain that anyone who thinks that hat looks like a “pink va-jay-jay” doesn’t have one of the latter.
And since we’ve established that the “woman” writing that post was a dude, it’s also obvious that they haven’t gotten a good look at a “pink va-jay-jay”, which means that they are (a) gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or (b) are lonely (hey, we’ve all been there, but I don’t think that post will help), and above all that (c) they have really, really shitty Internet access (I’ve been told they have pictures).