The Pussyhats Are Watching

The day after Trump’s inauguration, millions of people put on pink knit hats with cat ears and walked into the street. That image—specific, slightly absurd, completely serious—is one of the better pieces of political design I’ve seen in years. The Women’s March on January 21, 2017 became one of the largest single-day protests in American history, and it happened on every continent, including Antarctica.

Trump arrived in office as the least popular incoming president on record, and he’d earned it. The campaign had been a sustained exercise in racism, misogyny, and open contempt for factual reality that would define every press briefing that followed. The marches were a response to all of it—to the cabinet picks, to the executive orders already being drafted, to the general sense that the next four years would be a systematic dismantling of things that had taken decades to build. Scarlett Johansson spoke. Alicia Keys performed. Yoko Ono was there, which felt exactly right.

The pussyhats were a direct callback to the Access Hollywood tape, reclaimed as symbol rather than wound. What I keep thinking about is the sheer numbers—Washington, London, Sydney, Berlin, cities with no electoral stake in any of this, showing up anyway because the logic of what was happening in Washington had implications that didn’t stop at any border. Whether those protests sustained anything or just burned bright and faded into the daily grind of the following four years is a harder question. But the image holds. Millions of people in pink hats, telling a man with a nuclear arsenal that they see him clearly, and they are not impressed.