Guardian readers on 'misogynistic womanface'

[theilltemperedclavecinist]

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/apr/07/drag-a-sexist-caricature-or-a-fabulous-art-form

Drag can be compared to blackface and yellowface: those holding the reins of power utilise performance to mock those without power through a demeaning parody. This reassures the dominant group of their superior status while effectively silencing the group being parodied.

Come on, Guardian, join the dots. We know you can do it!

Just seen this, great letters and great it's in the guardian!

Great letters. It's great to see people getting the knickers to actually say this stuff out loud and not be intimidated into pretending they don't see it.

Pretty sure I got moderated (and later perma-banned) for making a comment on the guardian comparing drag to black-face.
Although for some reason what would be deemed unacceptable in the comments section is sometimes published in the letters section. Not sure if there's any logic to that other than different people making the decision.

I agree with Dr Grace Barnes. Drag acts have made me feel sick to the stomach even when I was too young to know why.

Having been raised in a house full of sexist men (think 'Women are put on Earth to satisfy men' told to a small girl) the struggle to find confidence was hard enough without the likes of Danny La Rue parodying and making women look ridiculous on TV.

I cannot understand why they are still acceptable, feted even, when blackface is absolutely rightly not.

It's great to see people getting the knickers to actually say this stuff out loud

I love that expression and I shall use it henceforth.

Both great letters. My opinion is with the first, but the second at least correctly characterises many people's dislike of drag.

I think people are scared to criticise drag because of the obvious links to the gay community. And of course some enjoy the digs at women. I voiced my dislike of drag as it is womanface and takes the piss out of women in an all female group and was told it was an integral part of gay culture. So that makes it okay then? Interestingly the only time I have experienced voiced hatred for being straight (and being perceived as treading on gay toes for participating in an activity) was from a gay man who does drag. He wasn't in drag at the time so no excuses it was part of a performance.

Any drag name will tell you that this is demeaning to women - not an art form.

It’s amazing what blind spots people have. Progressives are happy to explain to everyone that gay folk are just like straight folk, but then it comes as a surprise that there’s misogyny in a men’s club? Say it ain’t so!

I think that's true. The Guardian's moderation team seems to be staffed entirely by youthful trans activist zealots who will delete any comment critical of gender ideology, however reasonably and politely worded. And if you do it more than once, they will ban you.

Well, I'm going to get shot down for this......but there are drag artists and drag artists. I liked Paul O'Grady and his Lily Savage, Les Dawson and Roy Barracklough's Cissie and Ada, also Dick Emery and Morecambe &Wise's female characters. What about Barty Humphries Dame Edna? All now sadly departed. Don't recall any of them being demeaning to women though, they were just characters. And of course there is a long tradition of men in drag in pantomime. Can't image Cinderella without male ugly sisters.

Any name? Not necessarily. There are nineteen misogynist drag artist names and one disablist drag artist name. Twenty too many.
But there are hundreds of performers.
Many names are just plays on words.
Examples:
Brand names: Minnie Cooper, Jan Sport, Brita Filter
Drugs: Kita Mean, Crystal Methyd
Objects: Barbie Q, Plastique Tiara, Elektra Fence
Foods: Tia Kofi, Baga Chipz, Shuga Cain, Kim Chi, Sminty Drop, Black Peppa
Places: Cheddar Gorgeous, Brooke Lynn Hytes, River Medway, Monet X Change
Not female: Yuri Guaii, Faux Fur, Sum Ting Wong
Not out: Heidi N Closet, Charlie Hides
Personality: Ivana Vamp, Imaa Queen, Mimi Imfurst, Amadiva
Plays on celebs: Tina Burner, Choriza May, Kendall Gender
Puns: Farrah Moan, Gia Metric, Elektra Shock, Hannah Conda, Ella Vaday, Courtney Act, Kitty Scott-Claus, Aubrey Haive, Rita Menu
Joe Black, Derrick Barry, Lawrence Chaney all used own names. Bob the drag queen thought Bob was funny (audience member hadn't heard their name and thought they were called Kate. I assume Blackadder reference). Danny Beard always keeps his beard.

The twenty names which I agree are offensive don't reflect the hundreds of names performers have chosen.
In all walks of life, you'll have a minority who don't reflect the masses.

Danny La Rue used to term himself as a “female impersonator”, and along with the other artists mentioned used to make it clear their female characters were an act and not an aspect of their own personality. If being interviewed on Parky or Wogan, it was clear from the way they were being introduced what to expect - eg was it Barry Humphries turning up or Dame Edna? I’d put Mrs Merton/Caroline Aherne in the same category to be honest, it’s just her character was the same sex as her.

With modern drag artists it is difficult to separate the man from the character. The character is the dominant force, it is part of the artists personality. And I think that’s the main reason I feel so uncomfortable about the modern form of drag. Not that the old fashioned type doesn’t have misogynistic aspects, but it was clear it was an act, not a personality.

That depends on the act. Many performers are clear on who they are out of drag and many are clear that they identify as men. Drag is an act, a performance, a show, a job: but not who they are. It may be a form of escapism, a facet of their personality, an alter-ego but that's not for all performers. One size doesn't fit all.

RuPaul himself was very clear back in the day that the art of Drag was very different to transsexual and was just a liberating costume, very clear on his own identity as a man and didn't conflate the two.
It was only when the trans umbrella was widened to include transvestism/cross-dressing (which again, one can argue is different to drag performance) and transgender as opposed to transsexuality, that RuPaul was pretty much told he had to educate himself so as not to get cancelled.

I like drag shows, but think they belong in pubs and nightclubs. I don’t understand why we are acting like there’s been some kind of Bolshevik revolution and we have to scrutinise every aspect of our lives for wrong think.

That's true. We should bring the "female impersonator" description back into more general use.

I will put up my hand and say that there is - in my humble opinion - good drag and bad drag.

Good drag is Cissie and Ada, Lily Savage, pantomime dames, Cupid Stunt and so on. They're not trying to be women, it's an act and very clearly so. It comes, as far as I'm concerned, from the music hall and burlesque traditions of sending something up or making a point about subverting societal norms. Or it's just being funny - in the case of Cissie and Ada, a very working-class sort of humour given the characters they represented - because the humour lies in something not being how we expected or so exaggerated as to be ridiculous while maintaining a kernel of reality we find funny.

Bad drag is just woman-face, it's horrible, grotesque and mocking. And there's a fuck-ton of it about. It's a cheap, poor, lazy imitation of what drag should be, and that's before we get to the bit where some performers actually call themselves women, as if the horrible character they project is actually a representation of a female. Burlesque went the same way; there were some very good acts out there that were very funny (the best I saw was a woman doing a burlesque strip-tease that (deliberately) went wrong: she got her top stuck on her head, fell over her tights and so on) or very beautiful, clever or had something to say. But then it went mainstream and suddenly every corporate gig had some woman flouncing about in a rhinestone bikini for a bit before whipping it all off and waving some tassels around. What was the point of that beyond a bit of tedious and gratuitous "Oooh, look at us being naughty!" nudity?

The woman-face end of things is just crass and has to become more so to get attention. And it's doing down a genuine art-form, IMO.

Context matters, too.

Whereas in the context of a club for adult male gay men, a drag act may be used to deflate heteronormative standards and even a form of self ridicule, in the context of a library read-along session for toddlers, that act is going to be either confusing, or inappropriate.

I don't care if gay men want to take the piss out of women or feminine stereotypes in clubs.

The issue isn't that, the issue is that drag queens are being used as cover for highly dubious and misogynist ideologies - 'sex clowns' is the perfect phrase for them.

Danny la Rue played both Drag and Panto. He said they were quite different arts. Danny was a bit old school , a practising Catholic , he wouldn't have boarded the trans train.

Dame Edna stops me being 100% anti-drag, and I didn't mind Danny Carroll/LaRue from what I've seen of him, a bit before my time, and Lily Savage/Paul O'Grady [both Irish/Irish parentage!] but I hated the bosom-hoicking comedians. And when it was minority-interest adult entertainment, only to be found in deepest Vauxhall or down the far end of Mile End Road, fair enough.
But now it is misogynistic to the point of being grotesque, and ubiquitous, and I really hate that 'drag' has almost become synonymous with 'gay'. It must be so alienating for young people who think they may be gay or lesbian, to see some grotesque parody of womanhood with a dodgy name as their guiding light...
Here's an example: if you were a shy young person thinking your local Pride week might be a good place to meet other lesbians and gays - you know, just ordinary people who are gay - and you see THIS poster, how would you feel ?
[No disrespect to Wexford by the way, it's just such a good example of gay = drag]

I hated the bosom-hoicking comedians

Cissy and Ada? They were absolutely hilarious if you were familiar with the working class northern women of that generation, like I was. The exaggerated silent lip reading when talking about salacious matters, a habit left over from women who used to work in the mills which were so noisy that lip reading was the only way of communicating. My grandma did it, and I learned to understand it at a young age but never let on because it meant I got to know about things that weren’t meant for young ears. She never hoiked her bosom though, that would have been “common”

I also loved Hinge and Bracket, again being just about old enough to know old lady spinsters just like them. One of them used to breathe on her glasses with a honking noise prior to cleaning them with her hanky, which for some reason really tickled my funny bone.

I would always separate female impersonators from drag. I don't think they are very closely related at all.

I always think drag is about something a little complex, which is the way when we are developing we notice and take on certain aethetics that we percieve as signalling that we are attractive to the objects of our desire.

This is more straightforward (not actually, just relatively) for straight people. There are certain socially and biologically driven things - cultural tropes but also just biological sings like breasts or beards - that we see as being attractive to the opposite sex. To some extent we will tend to take these on as part of a self-image, although adults generally understand they are very superficial. But most younger people will make some kind of gesture towards making themselves attractive because it's a very powerful drive.

Or to put it another way, the sex drive is built in and important to most people, but how we navigate it socially is based on a particular set of social constructs that can be somewhat arbitrary. We can't just escape that though, any more than we can escape language if we want to communicate complex ideas.

But for people attracted mainly to the same sex, it can be more complex. Men are typically attracted to cultural signals that are usually associated with women and femininity. Gay men are attracted not just to other gay men, but men who in many cases are attracted to women. I think this is part of the reason why some gay men are somewhat inclined to adopt more effeminate presentation, and similarly some lesbians do the opposite. It's like, which role to you identify most with in a film, the hero, or the object of that person's romantic interest?

I think drag draws somewhat on how gay men understand this element of their sexual expression. But it really doesn't have much to do with real women and isn't meant to.

I first went to a drag club when it was the venue chosen by my team at work. I enjoyed the local humour comedy routine (girls from there are posh, girls from there are common) because it was spot on but the whole thing made me feel totally uncomfortable:

1. He was better looking with better make-up and figure than I would ever have. I was an actual woman but he was a way better one. I'd never really felt inadequate or insecure as a woman before but I did then.

1. I was five years on from studying feminist theory at uni. I'm still scruffy now but my intellect had got me a boyfriend so not completely unattractive! I didn't wear make-up or revealing clothing because I believed that they demeaned me, demeaned women and played into the idea that a woman's only worth was her looks. I wanted people to see my brain, my opinions, my personality. Then a drag performer confirmed that woman = make-up and frocks. I felt so depressed for the future.

So I'm not a fan.

PS I can count past one and have tried to edit it but the formatting keeps changing it.

Thank you for the great comments. My reaction to drag depends on whether I see it as a parody, or as a portrayal of a character who happens to be female. So, I like Cissie and Ada, Lily Savage, Dame Edna, and Brian's Mum from Life of Brian. The sex clowns, not so much.

The logic is hard to articulate, but similar to why the Black and White Minstrels were so infuriating. You don't know us, you don't even bother to see us: so how very dare you pretend to be us?