When I published a book called Vagina four years ago, arguing that targeting the genitals and sexuality of women was a political ploy, and that women need to defend their sexuality—and even their genitals—overtly in order to be a potent political force, the topic was seen to be outré, and I was chastised for introducing women’s reproductive organs into politics. The vagina has since made many rather shocking appearances in the political fray. Donald Trump and Billy Bush talked about grabbing women’s vaginas without permission. The New York Times ran the word “pussy” on the front page for the first time in its history. And when a woman with a national platform—Fox News’s Megyn Kelly—called Donald Trump out on broadcast television, like a metronome, Trump invoked for viewers the image of Ms. Kelly’s bleeding vagina. This attack was meant to silence Kelly, just as attacks on women’s vaginas always have been.

But on the Mall in Washington the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, you couldn’t shut nearly a half million women up about their genitals, their reproductive organs, and the politics of defending and attacking them. A groundswell of furious, mainstream-as-can-be women carried signs that were newly combative and explicit: “This Pussy Grabs Back” was one, and “If I wanted the government in my body, I’d fuck a congressman” was another. The icon of a uterus with fallopian tubes was on many signs; in one, the organ itself was giving Trump the finger.

In DC, New York, Seattle, London, New Delhi, and Christchurch, women—and the men who support them—flowed into a vast, iconic river of “pink pussyhats”—1.7 million of these were knitted by the PussyHats Project and worn at protests around the country and the world. Women of every background and age showed up wearing an item symbolizing a very personal part of their bodies, screaming mad in defense of their genitals, their wombs, their vital organs. Sick of sexual abuse. Sick of loss of reproductive control. Sick of being degraded. They even brought their kids to the marches; today’s rage was going to inspire the next generation.

This huge response was a result, I believe, of women’s awareness of a newly brutal form of political engagement, an overtly misogynist approach, aptly described by former Texas state senator Wendy Davis (of filibuster and pink running shoes fame), in a speech she gave at Princeton in 2015, as “Wolf Whistle Politics.”

What accounts for such explicit, in-your-face sexism at this moment in time? I would hazard that it’s the prospect of women in power at last. The presidential race clearly inflamed this new brutality. But it was just kindling that has been ready for some time to set a bonfire ablaze. 2016 was the year in which gender issues exploded all over the American political map. Everywhere you looked there was evidence of a gender crisis: gendered hope and gendered hostility; gendered rage, violence, and fear; pussy grabbing and invocations of Seneca Falls.