To think men dressing up as women, is equivalent to blacking up?

[crunchymint]

Men dress up as women for a laugh. It is about laughing at a stereotype of a woman. In the same way a white person blacking up is enacting a stereotype of a black person. Both are wrong.

YANBU, I agree. I find drag acts annoying and pretty offensive really.

....you do all realise that women are involved in drag as well? Either as female drag queens or as drag kings? What am I saying - this is Mumsnet, of course you don’t.

If we’re talking drag, they don’t dress up as women. They dress up as drag queens

Nice try, but no. Dictionary.com defines a drag queen as “A male who dresses as a woman and impersonates female characteristics for public entertainment”, and in the book, The Drag Queen Anthology, Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood define drag queens as “individuals who publicly perform being women in from of an audience that knows they are ‘men’.

Not all drag acts are the same as one another.

Some are spectacularly political, nuanced performances that question what it is to be a woman and what place we hold in a patriarchal society.
Moreover it questions what is acceptable behaviour for men and showcases how restrictive it can be living as a male within a patriarchal society.

Some are just tacky schtick.

But you can't really compare the two.

Quoting Dictionary.com? Bless.

And yes as someone else has pointed out upthread; it goes the other way too with 'Bio-Queens' (female drag queens) and Drag Kings.

I find saying women were legally slaves until recently really off as a comparison with the slave trade- sorry

Miggeldy- the book you're quoting is not very highly regarded and doesn't seem to be written by academics nor anyone with a working knowledge of the LGBT+ scene.

Women in the UK were slaves until recently.

Yes the famous women's slave market in South Yorkshire 1945-1972 is now a museum. Here you can see the block where men auctioned their women off, there are cases displaying the chains they wore and the whips they used to beat them with if they hadn't worked hard enough during the day. Also the "missing children's exhibit where the children of women were forcably removed and sold down the Rother. Don't forget to visit the underground railroad, where the slaves were transported to the free lands of Northumberland by a series of suffragettes.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3079824-is-drag-blackface-for-women

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2966343-to-talk-me-off-the-ledge-regarding-female-impersonators

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2988367-Feminism-and-Drag-Queens

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/993665-to-find-men-in-drag-offensive

Germaine Greer was arguing a similar thing yesterday on radio 4, actually, in a discussion on the menopause. Not in reference to drag acts, nor equating it to blacking up, but suggesting that female impersonators - Dick Emery, Les Dawson, Mrs Brown's Boys, and also many older female characters in the media - Nora Batty and even Acorn Antiques - exist to portray the post menopausal woman as entirely ridiculous and without worth, other than to poke fun at. It was one of the less radical, more persuasive interviews I have heard with her, and really gave food for thought.

No I am not comparing it to the Atlantic slave trade. Women were not captured and taken in long perilous journeys to be sold as slaves.
They were born into slavery and sold by their own relatives.

Quoting Dictionary.com? Bless

Are you unable to look at any others? Bless. OK I'll help you out:
Collins: A drag queen is a male entertainer who tells jokes or sings while dressed as a woman.
Oxford: informal A man who ostentatiously dresses up in women's clothes.
Merriam Webster: Definition of drag queen
: a usually homosexual man who dresses as a woman and performs as an entertainer especially to caricature stereotypically vampish women

Barbarian Women were sold as slaves in wedlock. And also sometimes by Husbands. I know where I live some women were sold by their Husbands.

the book you're quoting is not very highly regarded and doesn't seem to be written by academics nor anyone with a working knowledge of the LGBT+ scene.

See above. The definitions are the same everywhere, and claiming drag queens are not men dressed up as women is ludicrous.

Yanbu

In 1882 for the first time Married women could legally own possessions. Before that their Husband owned everything including the clothes they stood up in and their children.

Well done @Barbarianmum
But I guess this just doesn’t matter as much, because it’s not so obvious
Well done mocking women as slaves. You think being forced into marriage at 12 years old, no access to education and healthcare, used as a cleaner and a producer of children. Forced to have sex with a man or men you didn’t even chose. That’s not a form of slavery? This has been happening for thousands of years. To millions upon millions of women

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/modern-slavery-victims-women-girls-majority-world-report-a7954066.html

I agree OP, especially when it comes to the thorny issue of self id.... Rachael oleZal is roundly
Mocked for identifying as a black woman.... does anybody else see the double standards!?

Interesting pov that i hadn’t thought about.
Some very good points too.

Wife selling is even featured in the Mayor of Casterbridge. From the mid nineteenth century on men were sometimes prosecuted for selling their wives. But it persisted on with the last recorded case being 1913. Before the mid nineteenth century, Husbands were perfectly at liberty to sell their wives to the highest bidder. They would usually be paraded around the village or town square by the Husband.

Many women in the UK have enjoyed choice (albeit limited by wealth and class) in the matter of marriage for several hundred years now. And although their property became their husbands, they themselves were not property to be traded in the market place, and unlike slaves, they had some rights under the law. And rather than being sold by their families, their families gave money in the form of a dowry. And it was possible for their money and property to be protected in such a way that it remained their property. And, other than in the nobility, once widowed they were free, unlike slaves who formed part of their owners estate.

But yeah. Just like slaves.

Barbarian I assume you have heard of women NOT from the UK though? And that female slavery is an actual thing, even now, in the 21st century?
You're being pretty offensive making light of it.

1882 the Married Women's Property Act was not several hundred years ago. Before that married women did not even own the clothes they wore.
And yes legally women were property.

Yes of course there is modern day slavery. Its not restricted to women either.