An appropriate song alongside today’s Women’s March on Washington, which saw crowds of thousands in cities around the United States and the world, Pussy Riot’s “Straight Outta Vagina” responded last October to Trump’s boast that all he, or any man, has to do to get women is “grab ‘em by the pussy.” “Straight Outta Vagina” means to remind Trump where he, and everyone else, comes from: women. Women are the source that sustains human life as it comes into existence and subsists, so it makes sense that women are the source that sustains economic growth. Women “fill your shopping carts”—in the ways they are exploited for the sake of consumerism and the ways they earn and spend their money. Today, the streets were full of women, not rioting, but peacefully demonstrating their abundant communal and political influence and power. Today’s marches confirmed, in the words of Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, “the idea of powerful female sexuality is much bigger than any populist megalomaniac man … Vagina is bigger than Trump.”
Pussy Riot's "Make America Great Again" offers a glimpse of what many fear life will be like under a Trump presidency. Trump has already taken action that indicates no interest in representing and serving all Americans, making the violent images in this video resonate with a terrifying truth about the potential of the future.