Why is comparing Womanface to Blackface offensive?

Nicely put, Barracker.

I read that thread, and gave it thought, and I disagree.

I reject the idea that for any analogy to be allowable the history and useage must be identical.

Men, wearing fake breasts, fake hips, fake names, fake pronouns, fake hair, fake mannerisms are mocking and caricaturing a group of people who they have oppressed from the beginning of time.

I'm not going to compare and contrast the history of HOW the relative fakery of race vs sex was wielded, because that is not the issue.

The issue is the entitlement of one group of men to mock, degrade and imitate another group of which they are not part.

I will not enter into a competitive who has it worse challenge.

I simply don't accept the argument that the portmanteau of woman and face is verboten because someone declares it so.

And if my intent to use 'womanface' to describe men offensively playacting a grotesque caricature of women results in me being called a racist then that explains a great deal about the lack of validity of that person's argument.

English people can be as ethnocentric as Americans (I am neither), fyi.

Females have always, historically, been oppressed by males: I agree, 100%. No one is saying otherwise.

But White women (as a class) also oppressed black and brown women (as a class) (and I’m talking about my own family tree as well as history books)

While you were oppressed by Patriarchy, you also (as a class) benefited from the racism black women suffered from

I know it is starkest in the US, where WW owned black women (40% of enslaved people were owned by WW).

Some WW were complicit in WM raping black women (see: Celia the slave, a legal case), and in selling BW’s children for economic gain, even when BW begged them not to.

Not all white women! Obviously! Many white women were poor and had nowt to do with it! Just as not all men actively oppress women.

However. Black women (as a class) have not historically oppressed white women (as a class) - just as females have not structurally oppressed males.

This is the weirdest hill I’ve ever seen people die on.

Are we just expected to stop using the term "womanface" or are we expected to never draw any kind of parallel whatsoever between blackface and drag? Because the former might be reasonable, but the latter is definitely not.

I am not suggesting that female oppression isn't that bad. Fucksake, nothing I have ever said on FWR has even intimated that. Female oppression is ongoing, violent and an existential threat. So I want to use any means I have to fight it effectively. Clumsy and inaccurate comparisons and analogies are not going to stop it. So I'm quite happy to leave them behind.

'You can’t compare the public lynchings and slavery to female oppression'

Baby girls are killed just for being born female.
Female foetuses are aborted.
Little girls are mutilated (FGM).

These things are still happening.

Remember the taleban that should say.

'You can’t compare the public lynchings and slavery to female oppression'

Is this a piss take?

The history of the brutal oppression of women globally and still continuing in extreme forms in some countries is not so bad?

We used to be drowned. Burned. Chained. Women were property. I'm plenty of countries still viewed that way. Saudi Arabia had /has a legal system of male 'guardianship' (they are relaxing a bit at the mo but still) where women need permission to do pretty much anything. Remember the take an? And these are recent I find it baffling that on a feminism board women are so quick to say things are not so bad and have not historically been so bad for women around the world. I don't get it at all

Black women do feel belittled and insulted by drag though.

Black women also feel belittled, insulted and dehumanised by Blackface... which historically was as popular with white women as white men.

It is totally F I N E to hate drag and critique it! 100% fine. No BW I know had said “don’t critique drag!”

But every black women I know or follow in this discussion (including a couple in UK) has asked for white women to stop comparing drag to Blackface (either directly, or by liking / retweeting someone who did)

Because it is a poor comparison for A,B,C reasons and also painful for X,Y,Z reasons.

But what if you find those reasons unconvincing? The advantage of using the blackface analogy is that it's easy for other people to understand. You can ask: why is drag acceptable, but blackface not? Recently the Guardian reported on the horror caused by Justin Trudeau's use of blackface years ago, and then a day or two later did a piece on Ru Paul's Drag Race and how wonderfully subversive it was and how we should all applaud it. Pointing out the inconsistency (and arguably hypocrisy) of that position makes for a much more compelling argument than simply saying: "Drag is offensive to women."

Thanks cookie and I agree with you - this is a world away from pronouns.

Pronouns: White persons born [male] (mods, please don’t delete as I truly cannot explain otherwise) are forcing women to call them women. So successfully, that women on a feminist board can no longer say the word [male]!

Blackface: Black women have been explaining and asking for months now, that when white women critique drag (as you are fully entitled to do), to please do so without comparing to Blackface. Why? Because it is a poor comparison for A,B,C reasons and also painful for X,Y,Z reasons.

It reminds me of men who keep saying “but you have a gender neutral bathroom at home LOL!” Despite women explaining, repeatedly, why it is a poor comparison for ABC reasons.

I’m a bit hesitant to join in here, as I don’t feel like I’ve thought much about either blackface or drag - please excuse me if I say anything offensive, it’s ignorance rather than bad intent.

I’ve never thought that drag acts were funny, though I have sat through them for the sake of others. I do think it can be funny when a man very badly impersonates a woman for comedy - for example when Bernard Breslaw tried to disguise himself as a woman, and despite his terrible efforts another man would start to fancy him.
Anyway, my point is that the one benefit of drag is it demonstrates how terrible, how absolutely awful, men are at pretending to be women. It looks ridiculous and awkward.

Just thought I’d leave that there.

One of the things that seems to me to be missing here is the fact that drag is largely performed by white men, not black men. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

That may have been true, in Britain, in the past...but not any more - and certainly not in the U.S. We even have Ru Paul's Drag race on British TV now.

*I think it's fine to draw parallels, but I think the term "womanface" is appropriate and suggests a sameness that isn't real8

Yes, I agree. Using that term is not the best way to go - and just distracts from the valid comparisons.

One of the things that seems to me to be missing here is the fact that drag is largely performed by white men, not black men. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) So perhaps black women don't feel belittled or insulted by it because for the most part it isn't directed at them.

When I look back at my childhood, it was quite common to see men in drag on television - Danny La Rue, Les Dawson, Edna Everage. I never felt comfortable with it, but couldn't really articulate why. It's only in the last couple of years that I've come to see it for what it is - a way for misogynistic men to mock and ridicule women. I don't buy into the idea that because a lot of drag is performed by gay men that somehow makes it subversive - we know quite well that gay men are capable of being misogynists. Look at Owen Jones and Peter Tatchell for starters.

And I don't like the idea that women are, once again, being told to shut up about something that makes us uncomfortable. It's always been the case on the left that sexism comes way down the list of priorities - after racism, after homophobia, after everything else. We live in an era where any assertion of basic feminist belief, such as the right to single-sex spaces, is met with accusations of bigotry and threats of rape and murder. If some women find drag deeply distressing and offensive, why does anyone else have the right to tell them that they're wrong?

Appropriative. Not appropriate.

Well as I said, patriarchy infects everything. But not not all drag is necessarily so, whereas I think all blackface is.

I think it's fine to draw parallels, but I think the term "womanface" is appropriate and suggests a sameness that isn't real.

Drag mocks femininity - you can opt out of femininity but Black people cannot opt out of their skin colour

But you also said that 'black skin itself became a SYMBOL for other cultural stereotypes and representations. It doesn't make those representations true, though. In the same way that the symbols of womanhood, in the guise of cultural representations and stereotypes used in drag and MTF transgenderism, are not necessarily true of women.

Drag is a much more complex and nuanced issue than blackface, imo

Only because it is another oppressed group doing it, though.....in this case gay men; who in trying to empower themselves, and rejecting disdain on account of their perceived femininity, are trying to claim back that trait by appropriating it and sending it up. It is still reliant on the deep roots of disgust for women and their bodies and sexualities, though.

People don't see sexism and misogyny which is why they can't see the misogyny in men dressing up as women

Transgendersim and much drag makes it fine and more than acceptable for men to appropriate femalenesss, and even see themselves as doing it better than actual women...and in a way that we just don't see the other way around.

Why aren't there any 'drag king' TV shows, and forums full of women telling men how they do 'masculinity' better than them? It is because men still hold the reins of power.

Drag on the other hand while insulting, is not being used to stir up hatred against women and justify acts of violence against us

Maybe that is not the explicit intention, but it certainly serves to propagate and manufacture offensive portrayals; involving the use of demeaning language and 'slag', 'slapper' motifs and tropes. As well as depicting female sexuality and female bodies as disgust worthy.

so mimicking the expected traits of the opposite sex is not of necessity contemptuous of their essential being

And yet so often it is. It is reducing being female to a parody of certain stereotypical, & exaggerated, displays and 'performances'.

Personally, I think our response to this is actual intersectional feminism. I have read black American women explaining the difference in nuance between how blackface was used in the US and why the glib use of womanface as a term is inaccurate. I know in the UK the historical use isn't quite as overtly violent. But if a black woman in a country where racism is still a very potent issue is telling me that using a phrase like womanface is not only painful in her context, but harms the argument because it evokes the same lack of nuance as those lists of women that align black women with trans, then I am going to take that on board.

If this was some blue haired white boy exploring zir's gender identity and thinking that zir could use a 'righteous' argument to shut down the comparison, I'd tell him to fuck off. But this is black feminist women who think that trans ideology is extremely bad and want to dismantle it, explaining how this is harmful to them and our wider cause, so I'm very inclined to pay attention.

Doesn't mean I'm going to stop pointing out that drag is rooted in misogynistic mockery. Just means I'm going to stop saying it's the same as blackface because an American black woman has explained that in her context, the comparison is not helpful or accurate.

It isn't offensive...it is a comparable and valid comparison.

Some people will launch on it in a knee jerk "don't be so racist and insensitive" type way...because everyone know 'knows' it is 'wrong' to be racist these days and so people are terrified of making 'mistakes'.

I agree we should not refer to it as 'woman-face', though, in order to side step the obvious pit-falls and distractions from the deep misogyny inherent in much of drag and in much of MTF transgenderism.

No, drag doesn't incorporate those men. Those men are predatory misogynists.

Drag is a very long-standing cultural phenomenon which at times has been subversive and liberating, and at others, being as how everything is in thrall to the patriarchy, it becomes a tool of oppression of women.

Drag is a much more complex and nuanced issue than blackface, imo.