Dress to Impress article in today's Observer

[LaContessaDiPlump]

Anyone else seen this? Apologies, no link as it doesn't seem to exist online - yet here I am looking at it. That's odd in of itself.

Anyway, it's an article on kids wearing drag and focuses on three children, who to my eye appear male: Desmond (age 10), Thomas (11) and Zach (15). Desmond describes himself as gay (note: not trans!), Thomas doesn't mention sexuality/orientation at all and Zach says outright that 'the best thing about a boy wearing make-up is that it promotes a conversation'.

I am torn; on the one hand, I find the idea of kids adopting drag a little off-putting (esp as Thomas says he wants his future look to be 'spiky heels, a corset and ripped lace ungergarments'). On the other hand, these are three very obviously gender-conforming boys and the word transgender has not been mentioned once. I am very pleased with that bit

Any thoughts? To me it feels like the Guardian/Observer might be opening up slightly to the concept that you can like glitter and still be a boy. Happy days!

ripped lace undergarments

Bit disturbing.

I don't like kids being sexualised, whether it's pageants or drag.

I haven’t seen the article but from what you have said my issue would be serious concern that an 11yo’s views on fashion were so overtly sexualised.

I also personally think that 10 and 11yo is too young for make up.

The sex or sexual orientation for the children is irrelevant. I’d be horrified if either my ten year old DD or DS made a statement about corsets, ripped lace and spiked heels.

Pennywhistle but for the Guardian (a bastion of Transwomen are women NO DEBATE), it's quite bizarre to see any sort of acknowledgement that you can be male, non-gender-conforming and somehow not be trans! Faintly unnerving in fact

Did anyone ask the kids what 'drag' means?

Boys caricaturing women, and in a grotesque and sexualised way to boot.

I don't think that's compatible with a healthy view of women and girls, and it isn't gender noncomformity either, if the aim is to 'look female/feminine'

Gender noncomformity is wearing stuff you're not expected to and reinforcing that it is a normal thing for your sex to do. New age blouses and guy liner.

Not 'don't I look like a caricatured sex object woman in this costume'? That's wearing someone else's oppression for shits & giggles, making sure that association stays as watertight as ever, knowing you can take it off whenever you fancy.

Here's some pictures - it is a quite short article.

Couple more

EVERYTHING that Barrackerbarmer said.

I can't find this article on line to link to, but it seems to be a condensed version of this article which appears in Out Magazine earlier this year.

I am uncomfortable with the photo of the 11 year old which seems very sexualised. It reminds me of the sexualised photos of young girls that were popular in the 1970s and early 80s.

Hmm. Must say I agree with the two comments on the Out Magazine article:

Scott Healy · Nashville, Tennessee
With all the time that has been spent screaming that homosexuals are not pedophiles, you then go and support THIS?
Seriously.. a pre-pubescent boy, in drag, sponsored by a fetishwear company... and no one sees a problem with this?

Peter J Hernandez
Gee, if I didn't know better I'd think somebody was trying to set back the gay rights movement a few hundered years. There is nothing fabulous about the sexualization of children. Animals.

Wow so wrong. My son is 11....what are they thinking?

Horrific.

Agreed that this is too sexualised for children, girls or boys.

Sexualizing all the children, male and female alike, in the name of equality? Can they scream YES we are predators any louder?

I’m just....

Not so much at the 15 year old - but the little boys. They are little boys. Sure dress up etc -but what parent thinks this is a good idea in a national newspaper? Age 10/11?

What editor thinks this is a good idea?

Well, it's hard to tell from the pics you posted but I'm not really getting a sexual vibe. The 15-year-old is wearing makeup and shoes that it would be normal to see a 15-year-old girl wearing.

The younger child is dressed up and has makeup on but isn't showing any skin. It's normal for little girls of a similar age to dress up like this and try on their mother's makeup. It's just fun at that age and I don't see why children of either sex should be denied that fun. I remember putting my mum's makeup on at 6 or 7 and it was a game. Yes, you can argue it's too young, but that's only because we see makeup as tied up with the sexualisation of women. If boys and men having fun with makeup were normalised more, it would break that association. I believe makeup can and should be a pleasure, and it's only the gendered expectations tied to it that make it otherwise.

Yes, you can argue it's too young, but that's only because we see makeup as tied up with the sexualisation of women.
That is precisely the problem with doing this to children. It does not normalize make up on boys, but rather sexualizes these children because society views makeup as tied up with sexualization.

And to add - I think there needs to be more nuance in the discussion around drag. A group of big masculine rugby guys dressed in drag on a night out is insulting. The idea here, clearly, is that women are inherently less than, and things associated with women are inherently ridiculous. The idea that someone of the superior social group would willingly choose to present as one of these inferior beings is supposed to be hilarious. They're not challenging existing gender norms; they're reinforcing.

However, the kind of drag traditionally practiced by (usually very feminine) gay men is a totally different thing. This kind of drag has served an important purpose in building solidarity among a marginalised community - community marginalised largely by straight, gender-confirming. It's really crucial to realise that drag has its roots in deprived gay African American communities. The goal of this type of drag is not to mock women, but to mock and subvert the patriarchal social order that has led to such brutal oppression of gay men, and especially gay black men, over the years. If drag queens were on the side of patriarchy, they wouldn't have historically been beaten up, murdered and otherwise persecuted in such large numbers by gender-conforming men over the years.

Drag is GOOD for feminism because it challenges and expands existing expectations of gendered behaviour. It highlights the fact that femininity is no more natural to women than it is to men; men too can put on the act that is femininity and do it just as convincingly, because the whole thing is artificial.

Having said all that, I will acknowledge that certain drag acts do have very sexist elements, and certainly some of the language and slang surrounding drag is misogynistic. But that doesn't apply to every drag performer or every drag act; that's more about the way certain people practice drag than about the politics of drag as a concept.

At its core, drag (as performed by gay men) is feminist because it challenges the assumptions and undermines the power of the same group feminists need to challenge to succeed, gender-conforming straight men.

@thebewilderness indeed, but then how do we break that association of makeup with sexualisation? Surely only by encouraging men to wear it also. And if we acknowledge that it's very common for young girls to play with makeup, why deny boys that same pleasure just because we, as adults, have decided something is sexual? I'm sure the 15-year-old is trying to be sexy but that seems normal at that age. Certainly it would be considered normal for a girl. What the younger child is wearing appears entirely innocent. There's nothing inherently sexual about makeup, is there?

Also I don't agree with this:

"That is precisely the problem with doing this to children. It does not normalize make up on boys"

Of course it normalises make up on boys. The more you see something the more it normalises something. That is literally the only route to normalisation.

Thomas says he wants his future look to be 'spiky heels, a corset and ripped lace ungergarments').

Where does that come from?

It comes from porn, I suspect.

@tinycitrus he probably got the idea for this imagined look from tv, the internet or magazines, just the same way I got the idea for sexy outfits from girl bands when I was even younger and pranced around in my underwear and my mother's high heels to try and imitate them. Clearly children absorb all kinds of ideas about sexual things and may even try to do things society reads as sexy from a young age. So long as the adults in their lives don't encourage them to do these things in public surely that's all that can be done? He's not wearing that outfit in the photos. He says it's for the future. So presumably either he realises it's not appropriate yet, or he has an adult in his life who keeps boundaries in place. Hopefully both.

I don't think most of you would look twice at a girl dressed that way at a costume party. Seems like a pretty standard princess dress-up outfit to me. Even with the makeup. So long as the kid is doing it themselves and having fun with it rather than being pushed into it by adults i don't see the issue. He's having fun and challenging gender norms at the same time! And as OP said he isn't claiming to be a girl. I really can't see anything bad in this at all

Seeing makeup on boys and men in theatrical productions for all these years has not served to normalize makeup on boys and men, so seeing them in the magazines and newspapers isn't likely to either.

It’s a crass shit article and really just represents why a lot of people have turned away from and don’t trust the mainstream press.

Even the broadsheets just run weird nasty spiteful click bait stuff in which the subjects are clearly “set up” to look like overdramatic attention seeking freaks

(you imagine the journalist contacting them, sympathetically saying that it’s all about representation and giving them a voice, and then they’re immortalised as oversexualised weirdos)