Guardian readers on 'misogynistic womanface'

Another fascinating thread today - and good to be able to discuss the nuances of drag and the varied history and development - along with acknowledging the current grim misuse of it with children.
And of course that the woman silencing Guardian has published those letters!

Boundaries: eroding them is the whole point, and there's no better illustration that DQST.

Great to see these letters getting sunlight in the Grauniad!

Like others I've ALWAYS been uncomfortable with men dressing up as women - even as a small child I disliked panto. My mum was matronly and well-endowed with a 'bosom'/shelf and I always felt men were mocking her shape - it just felt cheap, bullying behaviour.
And I have NEVER got on board with the drag thing, but put that down to me being heterosexual, so as long as it stayed in the pubs and clubs I just accepted it suited some people.

Drag should never have made it into schools, children's libraries and family-friendly events. It's simply not appropriate - it's grooming in plain sight!

I agree. Paul O’Grady said that Lily Savage was giving a voice to working class women. So many of the old drag acts were funny on their own, not because they taking the piss out of women.

I dislike drag in general and Drag Race makes me sick but I liked Lily Savage because Paul O’Grady was clever in making social and political commentary via a likeable character not just being constantly crude and demeaning about what a woman is as Drag Race competitors pass off as entertainment.
I also think in these days when a man can put on a frock and lippy then claim he actually is a woman drag is a different thing from back in Lily’s heyday.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5042222-the-anxious-generation

I'd like to be a fly on the wall during Guardian editorial meetings. I get the sense there's been some push-back to Viner.

Not the Guardian, but catching up with my reading, I see in last week's NS, several letters printed from GC women responding to the recent book reviews of Judith Butler and The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (there's a thread on it).

Well, this thread's an education, not least because the Graun actually published such a letter.

@MyLadyDisdainlsYetLiving I too have learned something today!

I learned something new today. The non-verbal exaggerated lip reading is called mee-mawing. Not Sheldon Coopers grandmother, but an old northern English expression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mee-mawing

I also love that those strong matriarchal women exist in other cultures too. When I went to uni I lived in an area with a large Asian community and I’d often pass little gaggles of older women on the street corners with the same conspiratorial body language. My good friend who was of Bangladeshi heritage told me that the conversations she overheard as she went past were exactly the same type as the white northern women of my home town. Someone’s husband was lazy, someone was lax in their housekeeping standards, someone smiled too much at the man who ran the corner shop etc. My friend wore western style clothes and had judgments passed on her every time, what must her mother think etc. we had a good laugh about it.

A whole generation of ordinary young lesbians has been taught that lesbian is a dirty, regressive and terfy term. Most call themselves queer, which means anyone can identify as queer, with no actual desire to be with someone of the same sex, or no consequences.
Lesbians who hold their ground about not dating/sleeping with people with fully male bodies are denounced as transphobic.
If any young lesbians have inclinations towards a butch presentation, they are being told on tik tok that they are, in fact, men. If they like a more androgynous presentation or switching it up, they are a they/enby. A young woman at Uni told me the other day that she went by he/they pronouns (had an obviously female body, with short hair), and was a non-binary butch who was in a relationship with a ‘beautiful woman’ (who was in fact a TW who was obviously male). Completely contradictory and incoherent formulations which didn’t even register to her. So, the contemporary conflation of gay = drag = trans isn’t surprising… despair-inducing, but not surprising.

This reminds me of about ten years ago when I argued that drag was misogynist with a gay friend and a straight friend (both men), who assured me I was misunderstanding it and was completely wrong. 😑

Then a drag performer confirmed that woman = make-up and frocks. I felt so depressed for the future

But some women do wear make-up and frocks! If a drag performer came on stage in a t-shirt, shorts and grubby Converse with their hair scraped back in a pony-tail they'd look how I often do but no-one would "get" that they were playing a female character. It's got to play up to a gender stereotype to be understandable.

And much as I am often found to be scruffing around in shorts and trainers, I also bloody love a frock, heels and full make-up. I'm still a woman in both outfits!

I too remember the sort of women who wore housecoats and who would never have dreamt of going out without a hat or headscarf talking over garden fences or doorsteps about other women who were "no better than they ought to be" or who had "fancy ways", together with a Nanny Ogg-style encyclopaedic knowledge of all local affairs. And absolutely to the mouthing/facial contortions to communicate without small people being able to understand what they were talking about. Or innocuous words that had a specific meaning - "Is he so" with raised eyebrows was a way of asking if a man was gay

I usually don't need anyone's help to look like an idiot 🤣🤣🤣

Ha! The same happened to me - it's some infernal MN formatting that is designed to make one look like an idiot... numbered lists don't seem to work.

PS I can count past one and have tried to edit it but the formatting keeps changing it.

I first went to a drag club when it was the venue chosen by my team at work. I enjoyed the local humour comedy routine (girls from there are posh, girls from there are common) because it was spot on but the whole thing made me feel totally uncomfortable:

1. He was better looking with better make-up and figure than I would ever have. I was an actual woman but he was a way better one. I'd never really felt inadequate or insecure as a woman before but I did then.

1. I was five years on from studying feminist theory at uni. I'm still scruffy now but my intellect had got me a boyfriend so not completely unattractive! I didn't wear make-up or revealing clothing because I believed that they demeaned me, demeaned women and played into the idea that a woman's only worth was her looks. I wanted people to see my brain, my opinions, my personality. Then a drag performer confirmed that woman = make-up and frocks. I felt so depressed for the future.

So I'm not a fan.

I would always separate female impersonators from drag. I don't think they are very closely related at all.

I always think drag is about something a little complex, which is the way when we are developing we notice and take on certain aethetics that we percieve as signalling that we are attractive to the objects of our desire.

This is more straightforward (not actually, just relatively) for straight people. There are certain socially and biologically driven things - cultural tropes but also just biological sings like breasts or beards - that we see as being attractive to the opposite sex. To some extent we will tend to take these on as part of a self-image, although adults generally understand they are very superficial. But most younger people will make some kind of gesture towards making themselves attractive because it's a very powerful drive.

Or to put it another way, the sex drive is built in and important to most people, but how we navigate it socially is based on a particular set of social constructs that can be somewhat arbitrary. We can't just escape that though, any more than we can escape language if we want to communicate complex ideas.

But for people attracted mainly to the same sex, it can be more complex. Men are typically attracted to cultural signals that are usually associated with women and femininity. Gay men are attracted not just to other gay men, but men who in many cases are attracted to women. I think this is part of the reason why some gay men are somewhat inclined to adopt more effeminate presentation, and similarly some lesbians do the opposite. It's like, which role to you identify most with in a film, the hero, or the object of that person's romantic interest?

I think drag draws somewhat on how gay men understand this element of their sexual expression. But it really doesn't have much to do with real women and isn't meant to.

I hated the bosom-hoicking comedians

Cissy and Ada? They were absolutely hilarious if you were familiar with the working class northern women of that generation, like I was. The exaggerated silent lip reading when talking about salacious matters, a habit left over from women who used to work in the mills which were so noisy that lip reading was the only way of communicating. My grandma did it, and I learned to understand it at a young age but never let on because it meant I got to know about things that weren’t meant for young ears. She never hoiked her bosom though, that would have been “common”

I also loved Hinge and Bracket, again being just about old enough to know old lady spinsters just like them. One of them used to breathe on her glasses with a honking noise prior to cleaning them with her hanky, which for some reason really tickled my funny bone.

Dame Edna stops me being 100% anti-drag, and I didn't mind Danny Carroll/LaRue from what I've seen of him, a bit before my time, and Lily Savage/Paul O'Grady [both Irish/Irish parentage!] but I hated the bosom-hoicking comedians. And when it was minority-interest adult entertainment, only to be found in deepest Vauxhall or down the far end of Mile End Road, fair enough.
But now it is misogynistic to the point of being grotesque, and ubiquitous, and I really hate that 'drag' has almost become synonymous with 'gay'. It must be so alienating for young people who think they may be gay or lesbian, to see some grotesque parody of womanhood with a dodgy name as their guiding light...
Here's an example: if you were a shy young person thinking your local Pride week might be a good place to meet other lesbians and gays - you know, just ordinary people who are gay - and you see THIS poster, how would you feel ?
[No disrespect to Wexford by the way, it's just such a good example of gay = drag]

Danny la Rue played both Drag and Panto. He said they were quite different arts. Danny was a bit old school , a practising Catholic , he wouldn't have boarded the trans train.

Context matters, too.

Whereas in the context of a club for adult male gay men, a drag act may be used to deflate heteronormative standards and even a form of self ridicule, in the context of a library read-along session for toddlers, that act is going to be either confusing, or inappropriate.

I don't care if gay men want to take the piss out of women or feminine stereotypes in clubs.

The issue isn't that, the issue is that drag queens are being used as cover for highly dubious and misogynist ideologies - 'sex clowns' is the perfect phrase for them.