Drag on BBC

Because men get a pass in this society where women don't.
It's ok for a man to "punch down". Not acceptable for a woman.

I have never been comfortable with drag - I cannot understand how women are torn to shreds for cultural appropriation for wearing corn crow braids and events like darkie (darkening) day are depicted as racist (actually symbolises the winter solstice) but men can dress up, pretend to be women and it is celebrated. The nuances are lost on me.

I went to see a pantomime recently with the children.
Two things struck me:

First, the "Principal Boy" always used to be played by a young female decades ago, now it is always a male. Why? What changed?

Second, the "Dame" had truly awful clothes and make-up - and that is a big part of the joke. Sparkly blue eye shadow up to the eyebrows, a big blob of pink on each cheek, and bright red lipstick badly applied. Silly, jokey pantomime costumes.
The panto dame is not like modern drag, because modern drag artists take the make up and clothes seriously. Where did the new drag queens come from?

I don't mind pantomime dames. The previous generations of performers mentioned up thread were more like dames than today's drag queens. They were deliberately "unconvincing" imitations of women.

You're right, so everything we do & everything we don't do is to be laughed at!

They just can’t make up their minds, can they? It’s almost like they’re determined to be offended and marginalised at all costs…

Traditionally drag would come from the gay clubs and then performers (like Lily Savage) would hone their act to become mainstream.

Nowadays it appears that as soon as you put the veneer of drag over anything it all becomes acceptable. Drag Queen Story Time sees a lot of men (who I doubt were drag queens before) do a lot of lewd behaviour in front of children, but it's acceptable as long as cross-dressing is involved.

I don't particularly have a problem with drag, but what I have a problem with are the (essentially) amateur performers catapulted into mainstream without having done any of the hard graft and changing their act to be suitable for mainstream.

There are fantastic makeup artists about, so TV productions can drag anyone up, but after the drag makeover what talent do these people have? Being loud and screaming a lot is not a talent. Whereas Lily Savage, Dame Edna etc were truly talented and it wasn't the drag part that was the talent.

Did it start in the 90s with a sudden craze for drag queens in movies? I remember one film where a female R&B singer sang an outro under the credits dressed in drag. I can't remember the film, though.

I think 'gay mens club' drag has always been more misogynistic than the drag we traditionally saw on TV.

Its a disgust of womens bodies and mocked straight men falling for femininity. They will say its a reflection of the women they grew up around, but thats them seeing women only as carers. Everything else about us is grotesque to them.

I find drag these days, absolutely grotesque and derogatory. In the old days, the 70/80s, it was clearly men dressed as women, such as Hinge and Bracket, Danny La Rue, nothing too offensive in my view. Just funny.
These days these drag acts even try to talk like women! I find the whole thing repulsive to be honest. There is no real humour about it. Just a hideous parade of the most outlandish make up, hair and outfits.
Ru Pauls Drag Race especially, makes my stomach, as well as the tv, turn over!
What is the agenda they're pushing?! They're even included in adverts now. It's truly awful.

illinivich · Today 08:32
I remember when the trans community hated drag. They didnt like the use of pronouns, the superficial idea that clothes alone make a man a woman, and the comedic element of men dressed as women. So I'm not sure whats changed?

I can remember when the gay community [gay men, that is] hated drag.
I can remember when gay men hated flouncy pseudo-feminine camp behaviour and condemned it as an offensive stereotype of gay men, who are men who are attracted to other men, not men-pretending-to-be-women.
I can remember when you had to go a good distance down the Mile End Rd to find drag acts, and they were only popular with a small number of people.

So I'm not sure the renaissance of drag originates from gay men as a community - misogyny will use any means possible to get at women, I suppose, and any existing strand of sexism, however niche, will be co-opted to carry and normalise the anti-women message. Currently it's drag.

That's actually a really good point. I was wondering why so many girls and young women go for the extreme fake look.

I really do believe the modern beauty standard for women is based on drag. The heavy makeup, the extreme enhancement of facial features and curves. The crude caricature of womanhood has become an acceptable mainstream look. I do believe it has made the acceptance of cross-dressers as women easier for society.

I have been thinking about Drag as I have been disliking it more and more recently and I didn't feel that way before. While I never loved it, it was fine and could sometimes be funny.

I also read the thread that Posh linked to earlier. On that thread a poster dismisses those who do not like Drag as bigots. So, I have been trying to work out if my change of feeling towards Drag is unreasonable.

In the past i can remember my friends' Dads dressing up as Pantomime Dames for the local am-dram panto. I remember the Queen video where they all dress up in Drag inspired by Corrie. I can remember how that caused Queen issues in the US, but how it just was funny for everyone that I knew here in the UK (and how stupid the US was for not getting the joke). I thought about the sketches in the Two Ronnies and also Lily Savage. The wonderful film 'Some like it hot'.

What these all made me think of was how funny it was. The men looked so silly as female impersonators. Even the Lily Savage character was - to me - a bloke that looked so silly and that it what was funny, I was laughing at the man. Freddie was the funniest because he still had his tache! Then there was the Eurovision winner with his beard.

The more modern Drag (Drag Race inspired, which I have watched BTW) that I have seen just doesn't have the same feel of laughing at the bloke dressing up and looking so silly. It is moving to the women that they are pretending to be being the butt of the joke. I see this more and more, and the more it swings that way, the less I like it. The less we are allowed to laugh at men looking stupid in womens' clothes, the less I like it.

Maybe some will find these thoughts unreasonable. Maybe there was always Drag where taking the piss out of women was always the aim, maybe it had just passed me by? However, I guess that the important point for me is identifying who the butt of the joke is, as that is a big factor in how I react to it. Maybe my feelings towards Drag will continue to change. Maybe one day, I will decide that it just isn't funny anymore full stop? Time will tell, but I am definitely moving in that direction. Hopefully, I will always be able to enjoy 'Some like it hot' so maybe I won't get all the way there.

It's not just the BBC. It's everywhere, increasingly so.
Dh has been to two separate corporate events this year and all the entertainment at that was based around drag acts. That would never have been the case even just two or three years ago. The industry they're in has nothing remotely to do with drag and tbh the most likely speaker or entertainment in the past would have been the exact opposite type of thing (also not ideal!)

I remember that @Ereshkigalangcleg Really nasty term to use.

I remember when the trans community hated drag. They didnt like the use of pronouns, the superficial idea that clothes alone make a man a woman, and the comedic element of men dressed as women. So I'm not sure whats changed?

TRAs whinged to Channel 4 when they used the extremely misogynistic term "fishy" on the Big Fat Quiz of the Year because it implies that there is something physical about being female. Women also complained that it was offensive and misogynistic. Guess who got an apology?

Because this is obviously what we women do all the time - fondle our boobs and leak urine 😡

Spot on.

I remember when the trans community hated drag. They didnt like the use of pronouns, the superficial idea that clothes alone make a man a woman, and the comedic element of men dressed as women. So I'm not sure whats changed?

Maybe its gay men pushing their dominance in the LGBT family. But i think men are using the bbc to push female impersonation as 'family friendly' and gay therefore not a sexual threat to women and girls.

I notice the Strictly winner goes by he and she pronouns which is an attempt to remove the recognition of sex which is key to tra.

It's very strange, it's like saying, Hannibal Lecter won an Oscar, instead of Anthony Hopkins.

Sexuality unlike age, sex and race isn't visible.

A drag queen is a clear visual for LGBT+ inclusion. (99% are gay and it also fits in with the ambiguous trans umbrella).

So I think for the BBC drag = gay + trans.

Please can someone explain the appeal of drag? MNHQ TWEAKING TITLE TO POINT OUT STRICTLY SPOILER IN THE OP http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/5237734-please-can-someone-explain-the-appeal-of-drag

There's already a thread about it here.
There was one on SCD and also one on Blankety Blank.
It's so tedious

Is the Strike series good then? I might give it a watch. Will see if it's all on iPlayer.

They're very good, albeit not as good as the books. They’re on iPlayer up to and including Ink Black Heart.

From the brief clip I saw it seems a new character in BBC’s silent witness (or is it waking the dead?…but the only with Emilia fox) may be TG.