Manifesto:

We address the powers that be on this planet, the shrouded men who carry the world of knowledge in their briefcases, who decide where the sun goes, who concoct the shape of alphabets, who play politics like a worn-out game of checkers, who choose which is left and which is right. We ask them to reach deep into the velvet bag of power and like Prometheus once bestowed fire upon man, we ask that they give to women a voice.

Who, exactly, are we? We are women – that is, we are any person who has ever called herself woman or been called woman. We is me, and it might be you. We are any person who fears walking alone at night, jogging from the warm beam of one streetlamp to another, desperate to stay in the light. We are any person who looks back on history and fears that it will resurge like a dusty tsunami and that she, too, will become only womb. Above all, we are any person that chooses to be “we,” that will join us in our pussy-hatted march.

Let us be clear: when we ask for a voice, we mean a voice that will be heard in the halls of power at the top of great mountains. Women already have a voice and have been shouting for quite some time now. Perhaps you’ve heard even us screaming on streets, in hospital beds, or lying on the grass. We simply ask for certain men, who may or may not be named Mitch McConnell, to drag their rotten heads out of the sand in which they’ve buried it, to clean their ears, and to listen. And we are only asking because it is the polite thing to do and we have been socialized to be polite and old habits die hard and we are trying our best.

Let us speak to power. Let us be power.

Please (but read that in a very angry, very nasty voice that bites like a pink asp).

While we are here, we have a list of other polite demands. We want pencil skirts to be burned, except maybe a few which we can keep in a museum along with other instruments of torture. The pencil skirt, a staple of the businesswoman’s wardrobe, binds the legs together like a twisted mermaid and only allows a wearer to move her feet four inches forward with each step. We are quite literally trying to run a race with our legs tied together, and we will not do it anymore.

We reclaim the colors pink and red and we also will be keeping blue, green, orange, purple. We will wear power suits or bikinis or potato sacks in any color we choose, and we reject the attachment of any meaning to our plumage.

We need to re-visit the Disney princess movies. We understand that they are part of our cultural heritage, but so are a lot of things that we definitely don’t teach children to emulate (we hope), like the conquistadors and Harvey Weinstein . As for the princesses, Moana, Mulan, Anna and Elsa are fine. The rest are on thin f***ing ice. The Sleeping Beauty film should come with a manual about how to teach your daughter to never, ever, ever be OK with being kissed while she is in a coma.

We thank you for your time. If you are of the male persuasion and confused, do not worry, we trust your mothers or sisters or girlfriend or girl friends will explain why this is important to you later.

Process Notes: For this piece, I really just wanted to have a little fun with it and make my points in a very weird way. In some ways like Bread and Puppets, I wanted to embrace the absurdity and found that doing so was a good writing exercise. One thing that I was thinking about while writing is that I didn’t want to make a hard binary between man and woman or to be exclusionary in any way. I would love any suggestions on how to be more successful with that.