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 .by Rebecca Odes

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Hats are playing bigly into the American Drama. You could even say they had a head in how we got here.

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When Trump tucked that mysterious cotton candy under a red baseball cap, he killed two birds with one stone. He put his most obviously laughable attribute out of sight and mind as he rallied his troops. But more importantly, by delivering those ‘alternative facts’ in a trucker costume, he somehow convinced Middle America that a man with a gilded penthouse was One of Them, despite decades of solid evidence to the contrary.

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Now half the country can’t see a red baseball cap without flinching. They’re the mark of the Trumpist, hater or enabler. And the mark of Trump’s lies even before he was sworn in—Made in China. (Hats off to this genius for brilliantly subverting the paradigm.)

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Our side made our own hat. In America. From scratch. People hated on it from the beginning. The pink pussy-hat is the perfect feminist foil: all the devalued characteristics of femininity knit/sewn/crochet into one.

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It’s too CRAFTSY. It’s DIY, a product of devalued women’s work, filler of female leisure time, siphon of energy from ‘serious’ (male modeled) activities.

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It’s too CUTE. The feline/woman thing runs deep into the double-edged sword of misogyny: adorable, evil, unpredictable. Pussycat ears are the bunny’s cousin, the progenitor of sexy Halloween.

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IT’s too PINK. The color of “girl” is a source of revulsion for tomboys and feminists everywhere; an emblem of false feminization of everything from razors to jigsaws, a marketing tool of questionable champions of women’s health.

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But. All those critiques are a product of the idea that femme is less than, that we need to reject every trapping of patriarchy in order to fight it. I think a case could be made for this being exactly the kind of rejection we need: taking ten different ways we've been minimized and crafting them into a source of power with our bare hands.

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You saw the pictures, right? Aerial photos of streets flowing pink, hats (at least momentarily) bridging the gaps we’re still trying to piece together in the heads underneath them.

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Katha Pollit started out a hat hater. But the march changed her mind. “Now people are talking of a “pussy-hat movement.” I’m not sure we know yet what that would be, but if it means creative, energetic, grassroots progressive politics with a feminist and anti-racist lens, let’s bring it on.”

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That pussy-hat means something else, too, though not to everyone.

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I, like millions of other women, grew into adulthood without a word for my sex parts that I didn’t actively dislike. This, despite a fully sex positive upbringing and an analytical embrace of sexualized culture. The word pussy has never felt particularly embraceable to me. I first read it in an issue of Penthouse Forum in junior high. It felt like a man’s word in a man’s world.

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My daughter, like millions of other daughters, was introduced to the word pussy by the president of the United States. It happened earlier than I would have liked, and at first I tried to shield her from it. But then I created a meme of our actual cat on the Night of The Pussy Grabber. She needed to know why. I presented it to her as plainly as I could, without judgment or association.

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Two weeks before the march, we started our hats. My daughter offered to knit some for her friends. I did the same. We worked together on the couch, knitting instead of watching TV. When it was time to make her poster, she drew a cat. Pussy Grabs Back. Knee jerking, I warned her that people might find it inappropriate. “But why?” she said, “It’s just a word for a body part.”

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Then she marched with a hundred thousand abstract symbols of the part of herself history has tried to make shameful and scary, and more than a few literal representations. Gender is not biology, and framing it essentially is exclusionary. But girls who do happen to have that body part are seeing it owned and named in public. And that’s a power cis girls have not had much chance to feel.

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That march was a global surge for love, safety, and mutual respect in the face of hate and oppression. Now we’re struggling to keep our batteries charged, to push that power into action, to turn that march into a movement. This hat may be our best shot at staying connected to the energy we gathered. When I went to a rally on Tuesday, I pulled my hat back out of the drawer. I walked down the street feeling something I have struggled to feel since election day: powerful. Connected to something greater and stronger than my own hopes and fears in the face of an increasingly alien nation. Five people stopped me to talk about the march and upcoming protests. The hat didn’t feel like a costume. It felt like a uniform.

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It’s a highly specific and imperfect one. Not everyone feels connected to the object, or the part that inspired it. Or to the arm of the movement that brought it into being—which speaks to the deep rifts we must heal to move forward. So maybe it can be bigger than just that hat, per my friend’s suggestions below. (David Brooks might look good in a pink beret.) Maybe it evolves into something that’s not a hat at all. Maybe things will go to total shit, and we’ll have to go underground. Right now, we need to show up, and not just for ourselves, but for each other. We need to show the world we’re here, standing up for what we believe is right, even if our country is getting closer to our definition of wrong. Maybe the hat can help. But if the pink hat’s meaning stops at the women’s march, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the people who wore it don’t.

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“Women and honorary women, here’s an idea: don’t shelve your pink hats. Wear them to work, PTA meetings, your mosque, synagogue, or church, the movies, games, the park, museums, the slopes, the supermarket, the library, the mall, airports, train stations, hikes, concerts, federal and local offices, the beach, the Whitehouse, bars, and restaurants. Crochet a bunch more. Buy some pink baseball caps, bowlers, deerstalkers, Stetsons, and berets. Wear one every single day so people know who they’re talking to. If this thing goes bigly, even Trump won’t be able to ignore.” -Charles Gansa

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