Please can someone explain the appeal of drag? ***MNHQ TWEAKING TITLE TO POINT OUT STRICTLY SPOILER IN THE OP***

[CurlewKate]

Watching Celebrity Strictly last night, it was obviously set up for Tayce to win. Why? A group of celebrities of varying degrees of charm and bumble- then they are all soundly beaten by a clearly skilled dancer who's a drag queen.
There have been drag queens on Sewing Bee and Masterchef and House of Games. And loads of other shows I can't remember.
What's the appeal? And why no drag kings? Strictly has been great at featuring same sex couples- why not do more of that?

I would love it if we could discuss this in a way that doesn't get the thread deleted, so please post with care.

So taking the piss out of women by dressing up as the most extreme, "slutty" version of woman their tiny minds can think of, using revolting language and names for females, etc - that makes them " one of the lads".

Dicks.

The post you're quoting literally says that they're a character though.
They're not pretending to be women..😕
"He when out of character."
Where does that say they think they're a woman?!
It's a character.
Lily Savage was she in costume.
Widow Twanky was she in costume.
Etc.

Playing a woman character ... is literally pretending to be a woman.

I know not all drag acts are overtly and deliberately offensive (Miss Carriage etc), but overall the tone does seem to have changed. We no longer seem to have Dame Ednas and Lily Savages, or the kind of drag Lenny Henry did in the 90s...funny, first and foremost. Henry's characters were sometimes sexually confident but they were still funny first and I don't recall anything that troubled me, though to be fair I was a kid. It was all just a bit more...wholesome?

But nowadays the culture does seem to have changed and there's definitely more of an expectation of fetishistic elements and things designed to shock that I don't recall being mainstream in the past (though I'm sure they existed). I have watched the odd Drag Race show and they just don't ever make me laugh, and they don't seem to be trying to make me laugh. Is humour really a driving force in it now?

For a character. Which happens in plays and theatre all the time.
They're not saying they actually are women.

The bit about which pronouns to use with males being 'in character' is interesting and hits on an important distinction between characters like Lily Savage and Dame Edna and drag performers.

The comedy roles Paul O'Grady and Barry Humphries performed didn't expect/require audience participation in the form of affirming them as women when in this role. A key feature of drag seems to involve this - which is another element that people dislike.

I presume, in SCD, there was an expectation/requirement for the judges and compares to also perform part of the drag act, by using female pronouns. They have had a range of celebrities with protected characteristics, none of whom have required this type of behaviour.

Barry Humphries always pointed out Dame Edna was not drag but a comedy character from several he played

No-one ever referred to Ian McKellen as 'she' when he played Widow Twanky (two seasons) in Aladdin at the Old Vic.

"There is something genuinely infectious about the relish with which McKellen throws himself into the part.." - review, The Independent

"The great thing about McKellen is that he brings on a genuine whiff of old music-hall:..." - review, The Guardian

"Sir Ian McKellen is in his second season as the Old Vic's widow..." "But of course, this is Widow Twankey's show and Ian McKellen packs us in to delight us all with his Wigan whimsy. His costumes and wigs understandably are feasts in themselves,..." - British Theatre Guide

Then why do they need to be "she"? It's not a play. They aren't playing a role. There is no need at all for them to pretend to be women, even temporarily.

Leaving aside the toxic aspect of drag, I think there are different appetites for the enforced audience participation element.

I am surprised by the perceived affinity between drag and trans people. Drag queens require/expect female pronouns to be used to support their act/performance, whilst transwomen require/expect the same for validation of their identity. The later group could easily find the former group to be trivialising something that is fundamental to their sense of self. It's great that they don't but it's difficult to fathom how/why they suggest a dislike of drag is somehow a slight on them.

For trans people, being referred to (and, ideally, regarded as) the opposite sex is said to honour their authentic selves. There are many people for whom authenticity is fundamentally important and this extends to not pretending they think men are women - be that for entertainment or validation purposes.

Nor Divine, for that matter. Although generally known by his stage alias, Harris Glenn Milstead knew he was a 'he' and referred to himself as such. He became mainstream, and was a skilled, versatile performer with many facets.

McKellen is a wonderful actor. The ugly sisters in panto have also always been played by men. There's a lot of camp in theatre, and a lot is also funny.

I'm old enough to remember those truly dated, horrible comedy duos of which the Two Ronnies were one, and they often performed in drag. I clearly remember their fake mini-series starring Diana Dors called 'The Worm that Turned', where all men were forced into drag and called by women's names, whilst women ruled the world with a hard iron fist and turned the UK into a feminist dystopia. Their 'secret police' who marched around wearing shiny hot pants were memorable.

Barker was a genius. Even he couldn't have known at the time how precient his parody was - but the whole piece was a clear satire of the horribly sexist practices and attitudes embraced by the BBC of the day. This series showed what it might look like if the boot were on the other foot, and it wasn't pretty.

Yes, so the hot pants were terrible (!) and Dors screams when she sees a mouse, but aside from that I'd be inclined to view the whole thing as a very feminist commentary. It was clever stuff - dated but bitingly, wittily funny.

It also features a girl called Jack ...

If you want to admire make-up skills, there's Glow Up.

I mean, obviously they have to do drag as well as other forms of make up, but this is the BBC after all.

It's insulting to women and not funny.

It is mental parodying women taken on assumed mannerisms that are meant to somehow reflect feminist in a rather disturbed exaggerated fashion. The allusions to sex or female genetalia are gross, slightly scary ot at best the worst kind of basic humour.

We do not parody ethnic minorities or religions so why are women fair game??? We are hardly likely to see a drag act parodying a Muslim women with a mocked up name? Why because it's simply offensive so it must be true for all women.

We have come al ong way in terms of protecting people from insult on TV where parody has been used (It ain't half hour mum) so why is 50% of the population allowed to be the butt of this humour?

It seems to me a gay man fetish that should be left out of the mainstream.

When referring to theatre remember there were periods where some couldn't be actors as it was not ladylike .. i.e. titillating. OK Shakespeare did it in the 16th century but that was a different period of our history. There is a lot from our history we do silently drop....with urning for example. I think any erosion of misogyny should be applauded.

The key point is that some women find it offensive. Why are they pilloried, instead of being listened to?

Other groups who may be offended would be listened to if people impersonated them.

Why not women?

If mental can step into a women's shoes for glamour purposes why aren't these men praising pregnancy or menstruation if their affinity with feminity so established. It seems like the more basic and hard parts of being female are simply avoided by drag. Being female or appearing female is simply not something you walk in and out of on a whim to fulfill your own rather strange desire

If some wear t shirts and jeans and no make up is it drag for a man to do this. Of course not

Drag is primarily a device of gay men to gain attention from homosexual men by using an artifical feminity with exaggerated female sexual chaeacteristics i.e. enlarged breasts. Basically as my female daughter put it it's 'bloody weird'.

Why do allow such a fetish as entertainment?

@SmallGreenBabies "The suggestion to have more same-sex couples instead of the first drag queen seems strange/arbitrary, why does it have to be one or the other?"

Because being a drag queen is not a sexuality. Its's a job.

And,for the record, my thread is not spiteful and neither am I.

In the 90s I worked behind a bar in the gay scene in Manchester. There was often drag on and I remember how dated and misogynistic it was even back then. In fact some of the most misogynist things I've ever heard came from drag queens as part of their act usually to the guffaws of their largely gay male audience. Always comments about fishy fannies.

It was the first time I realised how much some men hate women.

I used to love Hinge & Brackett but those days are long gone. Replaced by aggressive women hating brats.

They were referring to him as ‘she’ as well, which I was like ‘eh?’ as he’s not trans - he’s literally a man in drag.

And by drag I mean ‘a highly fetishised notion of what women look like’

Totally agree.

The humour of Hinge and Brackett was far cleverer and more sophisticated than RPDR and all that ilk - which relies on crudeness, vulgarity and turns women into cartoonish caricatures. They adopt stereotypical feminine behaviour, and the inference the audience is encouraged to draw is not that the stereotypes are comical, but that women are. Drag gives men free rein to insult women whilst hiding behind womanface.

Quite rightly, people of colour will no longer tolerate ridicule and will vociferously call it out. As women, we are encouraged to ‘laugh along’ with bad taste jokes, otherwise we ‘lack a sense of humour’ and are thereby colluding in our own oppression. It’s time we called drag out for exactly what it is; blatant sexism and misogyny disguised as ‘entertainment’

Worse still, we're called"pearl clutchers" or that we've "got our knickers in a twist" - classic put downs of women, which have been used on this thread.

Or 'hysterical'. Used all the time on here to denigrate women.