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.

It depends. If there's an all-male performance of a Shakespeare play for example, then fine to have men playing the female roles. The principal boy in pantomime is usually played by a woman. There are "trouser roles" in opera where a female singer plays a man. Acting is all about pretending to be someone else. A straight role played by a gay actor, an Englishman played by a Scot, a woman played by a man, fine.

Obviously it's different when the purpose of the dressing up is a deliberate negative or mocking caricature of a particular group. And in that case, we have to decide whether all stereotypes are equally offensive or whether some aren't. It's difficult.

Crunchy I might be wrong but I think the 1882 act only allowed them to keep their own earnings, they were still property themselves I thought?

Drag has made me very uncomfortable since I was a little kid. As a teen a gay lad at school explained why.

I realise there may be some drag acts now who are politically nuanced but as as concept I hate it. Always hated the les Dawson thing etc.

As Madonna sang "for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think that being a girl is degrading".

I don’t think it’s the same as blacking up.
I live RuPauls drag race though so I guess I’m biased.

Also children were legally property and belonged to the father. That is why there was no law against abusing or even killing children. The first prosecution for severe abuse of a child took place under a law designed to protect animals.
That is also why men could beat and rape their wives, because legally they owned them. There were very few rights in the past for women.

The modern anti slavery movement recognises that slavery takes many forms. It does not have to take the form of the black atlantic slave trade to be slavery.

Most drag acts are gay. They have oppression of their own to deal with. It was illegal to even be gay for hundreds of years. Have you read about Stonewall? They couldn’t express themselves or wear women’s clothing without being beaten and victimised. There are bigger things to worry about than drag queens (assuming you are talking about drag as entertainment if you’re comparing it to blackface which was about ridiculing a race that the white man had power over.)

Why does the history of female oppression have to be proven to be as bad as slavery of blacks to warrant caring about?

Lighhouse Yes the law in 1882 allowed them to keep their own earnings and gifts specifically given to them. It was simply the first law in freeing women from slavery to be enacted.

Shouty So you don't care about lesbians who are oppressed as women and by their sexuality - and some by other oppressions? Events supposedly for lesbians and gay men frequently feature drag acts.
And no, gay men do not get a free pass from misogyny.

YANBU, I hope one day it becomes as unacceptable as blackface.

Women are the slaves of the world .

How come women dressing up as charicatures of men is not a mainstream thing? (I know 'drag kings' but it's on nowhere near the same scale).

Completely agree op and a brave post.

Totally fed up with it all. Now men identifying as women can access female dormitories in youth hostels

Of course this will roll in until one poor woman is raped and murdered by a bastard bloke in a dress invading a previously safe place

but hey who cares?

What is a woman anyway?

You just need to identify as one. You don’t need to have had a period or been pregnant, been marginalised and had sexist comments. Na that’s just all crap isn’t it not real life experiences.

No - women and children were not property in the UK. No one has been, with some exceptions, since mid-mediaeval times. The last exception were coal miners in Scotland, who were technically serfs until round about the Union of 1707.

You don't agree? Your legal citation please - unless you are also relying on The Mayor of Casterbridge to prove this.

The Married Women's Property Act 1882 abolished the common-law rule that married women could not legally own property. The could still, however, be beneficiaries of trusts, which is why in older novels, marriage settlements normally involved lots of trust deeds resulting in women living in houses owned by trusts (which effectively meant being owned by them). The Act did not say women could not be "owned" because that was already not possible at law.

@eightfacesofthemoon 'some minorites'

Most drag acts are gay. They have oppression of their own to deal with. It was illegal to even be gay for hundreds of years. Have you read about Stonewall? They couldn’t express themselves or wear women’s clothing without being beaten and victimised

so its ok for one oppressed group to ridicule and deride another oppressed group, is that it? Asians are just fine doing blackface....

Women are the slaves of the world

someone needs to go up to Highgate Cemetary and stick a stake through the old bearded fool's grave. Women are disadvantaged by comparison to men, wordwide. But describing them as "an oppressed class" or "slaves" ignores how in the West they are in a position of comparative privilege to all other people.

Women were legally slaves in Britain until recently.

"Recently" being 1882?

It’s not just drag. It’s programmes like the League of Gentlemen - not out and out drag, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable. And not uncomfortable because I am being pushed outside my comfort zone (for which I think good comedy has a role to play), but uncomfortable because it’s actually quite offensive stereotyping. If it’s a valid female role, give it to a female actress. Otherwise it’s just white males taking the piss at someone else’s expense, who never get a comeback.

@inosaursandtea

Straight cis twats

There's no such thing as cis.

As for drag acts, I do find them quite offensive apart from a few. Lily Savage was great, because she was just a character that O'Grady played, not a drag act as such. Same with Steve Coogan and Pauline.

from Wikipedia:

Slavery in Great Britain existed and was recognized from before the Roman occupation until the 12th century, when chattel slavery disappeared after the Norman Conquest. Former slaves merged into the larger body of serfs in Britain and no longer were recognized separately in law or custom.[1][2]

Footnotes:
Maitland, Frederic; Pollock, Frederick (1895), The History of the Laws of England Before the Time of Edward I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 34.
David A. E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England: From the Reign of Alfred until the Twelfth Century (1995)

"Chattel slavery" means ownership of one person by another. This differs from serfdom, which means the right to buy a person's labour without the consent of that person. As I noted above, the last vestiges of this in Britain ended in the early eighteenth century.

Please stop the offensive comparisons with the transatlantic slave trade, which only ended in the nineteenth century, and with the slave trade in both men and women that still exists today.

Not the same. Men who dress up as women for a comedy act are having fun with the stereotype of women, which women may CHOOSE to adhere to or not.

It’s also amusing in the way that they can’t compete when it comes to the modern idea of female beauty, such as with their larger calf muscles and bigger jaw, etc. It’s funny because they look clumsy and, lets be honest, ridiculous. That’s part of the show.
This does not include genuine transgender or men in drag who aren’t dressing as women for comedic value. I think we all know the difference.

I find ‘blacking up’ as offensive as I would ‘whiting up,’ or ‘yellowing up.’ Nobody chooses the colour of their skin, in the way that a woman chooses to wear makeup, a flowery dress and high heels.

If you aren’t talking about literally ‘blacking up,’ but rather dressing and immitating someone else then I don’t see any issue with that. Black people aren’t inferior. My children dressed in traditional Chinese clothes for Chinese New Year. Nobody saw this as akin to ‘blacking up.’ Why? Because we don’t believe that Chinese are inferior. Same with black people, same with women.

I completely agree OP and the sooner it is considered as unacceptable as 'blacking up' the better imho.

I can't remember the exact wording, but the current forms you fill in if you get married effectively ask for the woman's fathers details, it's a hangover of when women were the property of their male relatives. It irked me at the time. Because it still reads like you're property.

No, it's not funny at all.

That reply was to @Ansumpasty