Why so anti drag?

[nicetoseetgesunsout]

I've just watched the Paul oGrady tribute programme and it brought me to tears.
He did so much for children and their families and for so so many animals, plus against social injustice for gay people and anti section 28, not being scared to raise its injustice on mainstream tv.
My 75yr old mum is very upset about his passing.
Why the hate for drag performers?
My children grew up with Boy George,Marilyn and Leigh Bowrie RIP as they are friends. My children (boy and girl, now a woman and a man) always knew that they were, and are, men and saw them without costume wigs and makeup.
I'm also friends with a married couple who were drag queens a long time ago. My children have always known that these guys are men, dressing up as women, as they liked to and it was entertainment.
No offence meant to women. They saw them dressed as their drag persona but also without costume and mostly as men.
One couple of ex drag queens I know are now a Director for a hospice and his husband is a social work manager. Reputable jobs, no desire to be women and have two cats who are their babies. Lovely men.
Pantos have always had men playing women but we all know that they're men. Shakespeare plays had men playing women - that's more offensive to me.
Female authors like SE Sinton wrote and published amazing books without her obviously female first names - as she couldn't get published otherwise. These upset me much more

goodf
Of course men can like feminine things, and boys doing ballet has no stigma nowadays!

But Boy George wasn't in drag was he. He wasn't trying to pass as a woman nor did he make a caricature of women by his clothes or stage name. He was just himself and I applaud him and anyone like him.

Can you really not see the difference? One is unique and true to themselves.
The other is a grotesque caricature than degrades and demeans females.

Just like Minstrel shows did with POC.
No black person looked like a Minstrel.
No woman looks like a man in full drag.

DRAG was OK some years ago. Most people I know thought it was funny and entertaining, and enjoyed Paul O'Grady as Lily Savage, and Danny LaRue, and RuPaul, and Divine etc etc. But NOW in 2023 it's horribly outdated, misogynistic, sexist, naff, and grim. It needs to be consigned to the history books.

As pps have said, it's 'womanface,' it mocks women, and it's insulting I have no idea why DRAG is still a thing in the mid 2020s It's awful. Need to be binned. Who the fuck enjoys watching this grim, naff, shite?

It is fuck-all to do with being transphobic, and hating transgender people, and it's ludicrous to suggest that. As a pp said, DRAG is basically as bad as the Black and White Minstrels. Mocking, and derogatory, and generally bloody awful...

Why can't men like stereotypically feminine things? So much effort gets expended into telling young women they can do anything they want to and encourage them to adopt male sports, rugby, football, boxing etc etc

They can. I’d just rather they did it as men and boys and not pretend that liking those things makes them somehow actual females. The whole trans thing is incredibly regressive as it makes “tomboys” and “girls boys” feel they must be in the wrong body rather than just have non-typical pastimes and pleasures.

There wasn’t a link between drag and trans, but Stonewall included drag queens in their trans umbrella, and the history of Stonewall was rewritten to include Marsha P Johnson as an integral role in the stonewall riot, claiming he was a transwoman. Marsha P Johnson was a drag Queen, who played little role in proceedings.

I don’t personally like drag acts. I find them sexist. POG’s Lily Savage act left me cold so I didn’t watch. I don’t care if others enjoy drag though, but I draw the line at aiming drag acts at children, and think it seems to be part of this insidious obsession with dismantling safeguards around children and vulnerable women.

I liked Paul O’Grady a lot more once he retired Lily Savage.

Its the double standard that is appalling.

If its not ok to paint your face black and pretend to be a black person then its not ok to do the same to women.

I think it's because Paul OGrady
was not seen as a political animal and it was entertainment. Drag today has been forced on people as normal and peoples ' choice ' to like it has been taken away .

This

Pointless, uninformed, goady post.

Wish we were as cool as you… 🙄

It celebrates women. It never belittles them.

Utter tosh

I don’t get the hate for them and I don’t get the hype about them. I have friends who do drag but it’s not my thing. I do feel it’s taken over lately, like, does drag have to represent the LGBTQ+ community on every single occasion ? Can’t us normal gay people sometimes just be enough on our own?

It never belittles them

what does ‘fishy’ mean then?

I dislike it, find it embarrassing!

Is that ok with you?

No offence meant to women.

That's where you're wrong. Womanface is always, inherently, offensive to women. Was it on mumsnet where we had a poster whose son was a drag queen? She knitted him a fake pregnant belly to wear in his act, and posted a link to his performance. It was horrifically misogynistic.

Drag queens don't 'celebrate' women. They mock women. They exaggerate features, they insult women. The only women I've seen look anything like drag queens are Dolly Parton (bless her, all bust and blonde wigs, lovely woman) and Bet Lynch, a Coronation Street character. Both using exaggeration for their onstage performance.

I worked with a young woman whose best friend from childhood had become a drag queen. She loved him dearly. I often wonder if she still supports what he does (or if he still does it, as there are other ways to 'woman' in public nowadays), because she was a sensible woman and I would have expected her to be able to see through the 'celebration' nonsense.

Drag has a long, rich and complex history within gay culture and a bunch of (largely) straight (largely) women are not the intended audience. There are many tropes within drag which are actually about challenging and subverting the kind of misogyny which drives homophobia. But the nitty gritty of the cultural context is so specific to gay men’s experiences that to an outside audience it appears impenetrable, open to misinterpretation, or even offensive.

Many gay men find the current feminist angle on drag-as-mockery perplexing because the idea that it is mocking couldn’t be further from their minds. Most drag personas are derived either from an aggregation of strong women in their own lives, or a kind of fantasy figure of a powerful, take-no-shit personality who nevertheless still holds appeal to men.

The naming conventions (punny stuff like Anna Rexia or Dixie Normous) are intended to be subversive, not funny. If you think it’s a joke, you’ve missed the point. Taking the kicking-down shit that women and gay men get from straight, patriarchal society all the time and making it into a name, a badge of pride, a bold performance, a two-fingered salute. It’s meant to be a fuck-you to the world, not a joke at the expense of women.

I do understand why some people do but personally I don’t see drag as ‘womanface’ because it suggests that there’s automatically something demeaning about being a woman; that there is something inherent in women that is there to be mocked. It feels a bit internalised misogyny to me. But as I say that’s just my view and I know many of you think differently.

Of course some drag acts are offensive but then there are offensive performers across all mediums. Finding an individual performer or performers offensive doesn’t automatically mean there’s a problem with the whole medium, or the entire culture.

I'm a lesbian. A moderately butch lesbian. Short hair, checked shirt, jeans, boots. Clearly a woman, but not a woman in a push-up bra and a face-full of make-up. For years I attended Pride. For years I endured the insults of drag performers who, under the guise of humour, called me an ugly bitch among many other things. This was at Pride. Lots of drag queens are angry gay men who really don't like women.

You wouldn't black up and then, in blackface, insult the black people you were imitating, would you? Why is it okay for men to dress up as women and insult us? It's not.

I’ve never seen it as mocking actual women, but playing with the performative and cultural aspects of “femininity”. If our culture deems long hair and big boobs and high heels the peak of so-called “womanhood”, what happens when you take that to extremes? What happens when a man does it?

I’m not sure the blackface comparison holds up entirely although I do get it up to a point. Men performing blackface were generally straight white men — the dominant culture. Drag performers are generally gay men — a minority. There’s a cultural contextual difference there.

I hate it. I find it offensive and tediously immature.

Come on, let's not pretend that the likes of Dame Edna Everage and Lily Savage, or a pantomime dame is in any way similar to today's drag queens slut dropping in front of children and calling themselves names that many would find offensive.

Just like people can have no problem with trans people but have a HUGE problem with the behaviour of trans people and trans allies who have literally attacked women trying to have a conversation, so can people take issue with different aspects of drag even if they are friends with people who have previously been involved.

In that case Minstrel Shows celebrated Black people yes??

If not - what's the difference?

I think there's always a lunatic fringe with every movement, its unfair to tar the majority because of the behaviour of the crazy few xx

Agree.

If women - the class of people who are at a societal disadvantage to men- deem that something the man says is funny is in fact inappropriate then it's the men who are wrong

Blaming women for not getting the humour is exactly what goes on under the guise of banter - poor dumb women too frigid and uptight to appreciate our great wit