The Curious Afterlife of the Pussyhat
For the 2017’s Women’s March protesting the election (and odious existence) of Donald Trump a number of women wore pink pussyhats designed to comment cheekily on Trump’s infamous quote about one of the great perks of fame being a perpetual green light to grab attractive women by their genitalia.
The pussyhat definitely had a cultural moment. It made the covers of Time and The New Yorker and was referenced on Saturday Night Live. But that’s all it was: a moment. The pussyhat was created and designed for a very specific context: to impishly remind a forgetful public of the horrible things Trump said in private about women and consent and fame and sex.
Outside of that context, however, pussyhats were just unflattering headwear.
It’s not like Make America Great baseball hats. The original cultural context of MAGA hats was as campaign merchandise. Make America Great Again was Trump’s 2016 slogan so if you saw someone in the hat you knew exactly who they were going to vote for and also that you should avoid them if at all possible.
Make America Great Again hats transcended their original cultural context. Even after Trump shocked and horrified the world by getting elected president in 2016 his fans continued to wear MAGA baseball hats. It became a way of showing the world that you supported Trump blindly and completely. If anything, there seemed to be more MAGA hats after the election than before it.
A new cultural context sprung up around MAGA hats. They became a way for true believers to signal to the world, like-minded souls and detractors that they were all in for Donald Trump, that they believed in him as something much more than a political figure or someone running for office.
Wearing a MAGA hat in 2017 or 2019 or 2022 was a clear-cut way of branding yourself as a Trump supporter. When Kanye West wore a MAGA hat on Saturday Night Live it was a statement that everyone immediately understood.
That is not true of pussyhats. The pussyhat understandably did not survive its original cultural context involving the Women’s March and Trump’s leaked audio from Access Hollywood.
The pussyhat lives on, however, in right-wing memes. Along with brightly colored hair, crying/screaming and ill-fitting tank tops, pussyhats are ubiquitous staples of feminist fashion in hateful Alt-Right propaganda.
It’s easy to see why. Conservative misogynists like to depict feminists as angry, vulgar, emotionally stunted children desperate for attention. Pussyhats fit into that conception snugly.
To Trump supporters, it’s way more embarrassing that women briefly wore silly, tasteless hats as a form of protest than it is that a man who posits himself as a champion of Christian values uttered the words “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful (women)— I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy” when he was only 59 years old.
If I were a Republican, I would not want to remind people that a man they worship uses phrases like “grab em by the pussy” but I don’t think Trump supporters are capable of shame.
Just as the January 6th insurrection was downgraded from “enduring humiliation to American democracy and the Republican Party” to “patriots enjoying a rowdier than normal tour of the Capitol that libs blew out of proportion”, Trump’s vulgar banter has gone from something that could have cost Trump the presidency to harmless locker room talk Democrats focussed on instead of real issues affecting the American people, like Hillary’s emails.
It’s not unlike how feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were caricatured as angry shrews who burned their bras en masse to protest sexism and deprive their breasts of adequate support.
The problem is that bra burning wasn’t ever really a thing. It was more of a myth than a reality but that did not keep Conservatives from clinging to the myth of the angry feminist bra burner because, like pussyhats, it neatly fit their conception of women as silly and over-emotional, attention-hungry and impractical.
If you turn your enemy into a joke then you do not need to take them or their needs seriously. Turning women with legitimate grievances into crude stereotypes of incoherent, childish rage allows the right to deny their humanity and if you don’t see your enemy as something less than human then there’s no limit to how monstrously you can mistreat them.
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!
PLUS, for a limited time only, get a FREE copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al when you buy any other book in the Happy Place store!
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!