Women, know your limits. Thou shalt not halt the rhetoric of misogyny legitimised by the rise of United States President Donald Trump by taking to the streets on your silly Women’s March. No, stay indoors! Just soak up this wave of misogyny because everything is lost and protests never ever work and face facts: One of the problems with this Women’s March (though everyone is welcome) is that it contains way too many women. That’s bound to alienate certain guys ...
I have seen such views propagated on social media. Basically, women such as me organising, resisting, coming together just for a few hours in many cities around the world to make themselves visible is somehow not the right sort of opposition to Trump.
We have been patronisingly told that the Women’s March will make things even worse. For whom, one has to ask? We have also been told that now is not the time. I agree: We should have done this long, long ago. We could have read the runes; feminism has been demonised by the right as responsible for everything from unemployment to domestic violence for some time. Such a narrative is now mainstream, and we see to what and where it leads. This march, though, initially arose out of the fear and frustration of a grandmother in Hawaii. Her Facebook group led to the setting up of the march in Washington. Sister marches were soon announced in many cities across the globe.
People, some of them women, clearly felt the need to organise, to mark what is happening and to make our voices heard. That is fairly simple. For some of us it is about showing international solidarity. But I don’t pretend protest is ever simple. There are always tensions. The march yesterday was both an anti-Trump protest and a rally for women’s rights. These two things are intimately connected: Trump is part of a backlash against feminism that has been a long time brewing. Trump has no subtext. His hatred of women is overt. Women are property or ornament. This is not hidden.
The criticism that the goals of the march were too vague has some validity, though actually the organisers in Washington thrashed out a series of goals that tried to take into account the complicated meshings of race and gender. This is not easy. Nor new. There were groups supporting this march whose politics were very far from mine, but I will have to get over myself. Those who stirred themselves, mainly on social media, to protest against the protest may have thought they were being iconoclastic, but they were merely expressing their powerlessness. If voting doesn’t work and protest is useless, what exactly is the answer? Surely it lies in the relationship between the two, and that involves ongoing organisation. Any activist worth their salt knows that’s what the real work is.
Some people were there yesterday to make themselves feel better as well as make the world a better place. That’s how it works. One of today’s goals is surely to energise and connect women, to say to those who feel under attack: We are here too. You go on ahead. We have got your back. All of us have seen the disconnection of many from any kind of politics and also the disconnection between social movements such as Occupy from electoral politics. The prize is now to connect.
Those who would take away women’s rights have already mobilised their anger and frustration and many have been slow to realise it. We now have to do the same thing. We will be seen and heard.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Suzanne Moore is an award-winning columnist for the Guardian.
