I have no problem with drag - from what I've researched of the performers' POVs, it often stems from a genuine love of women and a wish to be like us rather than misogyny.
Pantomime dames can be more problematic. On one hand you have performers like Paul O'Grady who are passionate about the art and defending women - he said that he ‘hate[s] that traditional dame thing, which is basically a heterosexual man taking the piss out of women,’ and on the other Wyn Calvin, Ian McKellen’s Dame coach, who said, ‘I tell everyone who asks about playing the dame: you must fail to be feminine.'
The Dame is often portrayed as a distorted manifestation of female sexuality that is reduced to its constituent fetishised body parts, mainly breasts, and this is obviously problematic.
Yet there is more to a Dame than this. She played as angry, self-sufficient, dominant, sexually demanding, manipulative and vain, as well as being kind, practical, brave and generous. She enjoys a freedom that real women are often denied by society, where the message is generally along the lines of ‘Stay in your box and know your place.’ A Dame’s place is generally where she wants it to be. In Germaine Greer's essay on Jan Morris from The Madwoman's Underclothes, she argued ‘Women have long been considered saints. Quite reasonable men are more disgusted by drunkenness and foul-mouthedness in women because they think of them as above the ordinary coarseness of mankind.' Perhaps a Dame can be not only a parody of womanhood but also a pastiche of how women could be if only we had real societal freedom to act as we wished.