Women Against Bush: One Message, Many Messengers

You know there's mad internal politics going on when NOW's classic "Keep Abortion Legal" signs are conspicuously missing at Saturday's "March for Women's Lives NYC" and Planned Parenthood organizes a Pub Crawl smack during NOW's "Code Red" rally in Central Park Wednesday night.

With only four days to distract the media away from the GOP and toward the issues (and the costumes), it makes some sense that the gazillion die-ins, ring-outs, and blocs of all sorts are happening all at once, but the overlapping feminist/pro-choice events were confusing to more than myself.

There was the Planned Parenthood march on Saturday, the NARAL rally on Tuesday and the NOW rally on Wednesday. "Is the Planned Parenthood march feeding into the UFPJ march?" emailed a friend and assignment editor at one of the major networks. Her mixing up of the two marches--one Saturday, the other Sunday--was understandable. Why wasn't the pro-choice march happening in conjunction with Sunday's march? Or at least during the RNC along with all the other side marches and rallies? And what was going on Wednesday? There were so many questions. "We wanted to own the day," PPNYC's Roger Rathman tells me of the decision to march over the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday. A "separate" rally, he says, "would give us the advantage of having a day to ourselves and not get embroiled in blade-of-grass politics."

PPNYC's day was lovely, but separate indeed. One woman I spoke to said she thought other protests might get ugly; here, strolling in the sunshine over the East River (children clad in "Bush is a Tush" T-shirts) it was "a kind of utopia." The estimated crowd of 25,000--mostly female and white, though a good span of generations--seemed an equal mix of single-issue folks and anti-Bush protesters who were participating all week long. When I asked a one mom from Westchester whether she'd be marching on Sunday, she seemed confused. "Oh, what's going on tomorrow?" Another woman said she didn't "trust the agenda" of Sunday's march.

There was the issue of separateness, but also an issue of messaging. The "pro-choice" in the mass-produced "I [heart] Pro-Choice New York" signs was so diminutive that from a distance it looked like an underline. In many of the photos, the march looks like a lot of women who just really love New York.

Elsewhere, creative but powerful messaging has been the name of the game. The thousand coffins in Sunday's march were as telegenic and poignant as the 978 boots and 2,000 shoes laid out in Union Square yesterday (the boots to represent the fallen U.S. soldiers, the shoes to represent a fraction of the Iraqi civilians killed). To fit in with this vast (and inherently pro-abortion rights) movement, pro-choicers might have organized a "million hanger heap" had they not been so worried about grass stains.

One group of media-savvy sex-positive feminists, the Axis of Eve, attempted to expose Bush's anti-woman agenda by exposing themselves. Yesterday they lined up 200 women (and a handful of guys--one, a retired Navy officer, who even waxed for the occasion) for a Mass Flash of their protest underwear (nothing more) in Battery Park. Red and pink "Fire Bush," "Lick Bush" and "Give Bush the Finger" bikinis matched with tanks bearing the group's name. The flashers marched in formation chanting, "Bush, Out of My Bush!" and "Which Side Are You On? The Panty Lines Are Drawn!" Understandably, the media lapped it up, and so did the police (who officially permitted the event at the last minute). They (or the Secret Service, who knows?) even sent an unmarked van equipped with a crane camera that shot up to catch a bird's eye view.

Of course, you had to buy the apparel (sweatshop free!) to participate--"Pantyware" parties have been going on all summer--and beyond the obvious critique that older-school feminists will have of the concept, there's been a lot of grumbling about whether this group is more of a business than a statement. After the chanting was over and individual "Eves" posed before clicking cameras, it felt somewhat like a fashion show. Or maybe Baywatch: one man brought a Bush-faced volleyball and set up a net of conjoined American flags, barking for more women to join the game. Nearby, Lois Weaver, a professor of performance in London, smiled for the cameras in purple heart pasties and a "Fuck Bush" string bikini, holding a "More Fucking Less Fighting" sign. "If you're going to flash, you should flash," she said.

Uptown, the atmosphere at the NOW rally was far less energized. The nearest entrances to the East Meadow are on 98th or 96th Streets, but cops were making everyone enter at 90th street, a glitch that NOW President Kim Gandy bemoaned in her fiery speech, which unfortunately fell on far too few ears.Perhaps we can all learn something about communication and solidarity-and not being afraid to ask for what you need-from the fun and fearless women of Code Pink.

At their Saturday evening Women Against War event at Riverside Church, Code Pink member Andrea Buffa implored the crowd to help her get to Florida before election day, "so that Florida doesn't become another Florida.""Who can donate $1,000, right now?" she asked the crowd. Three people rose up. "Who can give $500?" Six people. "How about $250?" and so on. Code Pinker Claire Droney is too busy getting her cohorts out of detainment to calculate exactly how much cash was raised, "but I can tell you she's going to Florida."

Jennifer Block

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