PussyHat Project Provides Sea of Solidarity at Women's Marches 

By the time I was ready to learn how to knit my pink hat for the ever-growing Pussyhat Project on Monday, there was a run on pink yarn at craft stores around the country. Luckily, Joanne's still had a decent selection, and I ended up spending the better part of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with friends drinking wine and learning how to make a hat on a loom.

We were a group of lesbians, gay men, a straight woman, and my friend's 13-year-old twin daughters engaging in a regular old-fashioned "stitch-and-bitch," at turns complimenting each other's work and griping about our own perceived lack of progress (in finishing our hats), and of course, discussing Donald Trump, the impending inauguration, our continued reverence for Hillary Clinton, and our profound dismay at her loss in the Electoral College.

Los Angeles-based women Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman launched The Pussyhat Project on Thanksgiving weekend with the hopes of providing the people at the Women's March in Washington D.C., a "unique, collective visual statement that will help activists be heard." And wow, was it ever heard, judging from the sea of pink hats in any photos from the hundreds of women's marches that occurred around the world (I'm sporting mine in the picture above, in L.A.).

The Pussyhat Project website provided various patterns for knitting the hats and instructions on how to distribute extra hats to people en route to the marches My friend Laura knitted 17 hats, some of which she distributed to people she met at the march.

Of course, the hats aren't merely an adorable symbol of solidarity knitted with the stereotypical color for femininity. They were a callback to Donald Trump's lewd language in those Access Hollywood tapes where he admitted to grabbing women without consent. "I just grab them by the pussy," the president of the United States said.

There has been some blowback to the Pussyhat Project for its use of the color pink and for equating genitalia with gender, but the women who launched the project explained that the point of the project is to reclaim the term as one of empowerment.

"Women, whether transgender or cisgender, are mistreated in this society. In order to get fair treatment, the answer is not to take away our pussies, the answer is not to deny our femaleness and femininity, the answer is to demand fair treatment. A woman's body is her own. We are honoring this truth and standing up for our rights," wrote the founders of the project on the website.

There aren't solid numbers available on how many of the millions of protesters around the world showed up sporting the pussy hat, but it's clear that the women, men, gender-nonconforming people, and children wearing the hats led to the ripple of pink that will make the photos from these landmark marches recognizable at first glance for generations to come.

Here are some of the fierce people at the Women's March in Los Angeles who proudly wore their pussy hats.