Monday, January 23, 2017

And A Little More on the Women's Marches


The overall numbers for the Women's Marches just in the US are awe-inspiring and awesome:

A professor of political science in Connecticut has aggregated the data from public reports of crowd sizes at the women’s marches across America on Saturday and reached an astonishing conclusion: More than 1 in every 100 people in the U.S. turned out to march against Donald Trump and for women’s rights on the second day of his presidency.
Drawing on reports of 526 different marches in towns as disparate as Wichita Falls, Texas — reported turnout: 150 people — and Washington, D.C. — reported turnout: more than 500,000 — University of Connecticut professor Jeremy Pressman, working with international relations professor Erica Chenoweth from the University of Denver, estimated that 3,341,823 to 4,611,782 people turned out to march across the nation.
The Census Bureau estimated that the U.S. population as of mid-2016 was 323,127,513.
“The overall number is bigger than I expected,” Pressman told Yahoo News about his findings on the protest crowds. “With a low estimate it’s a little bit above 1 percent, and with a higher estimate, it’s probably closer to 1 1/2 percent.”
We.Are.Not.Alone.

And that is a wonderful emotion for the resistance work!

Speaking of resistance, Media Matters summarizes a few quips from some conservative men about the marches.

Many of them are wonderful examples of the continuing need for feminism, because they suggest that the proper role for women is to serve and service men ("my shirts don't iron themselves." "the ham sandwiches don't make themselves") or that only really ugly women would want equality.  But Piers Morgan's tweet deserves closer theoretical analysis:




Morgan's idea of masculinity is a subtractive one*:  Any rights women gain must come from men's rights, because in his minds those rights always add up to some constant total.

Taken to the logical extremes, the only way men can be truly masculine is if women are doormats with zero rights. 

Poor Piers.  His world is full of frightening things, such as women walking or wearing pink hats.  Or speaking, I guess.

And this is so very weird:  A tweet by Michael Cohen, a Special Councel to Donald J. Trump, about those pink pussyhats many marchers wore:





As far as I know most of those hats were hand-knitted or hand-crocheted, many by the marchers themselves or by other women who wanted to contribute to the march. You know, self-reliance and other such -- um -- conservative values.





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* Credit for this term goes here.