Christian writer on drag: 'men portraying women as a sex clowns'

[Parisite]

'There should be no place in any Christian tradition for drag... men portraying women as a sex clowns is an act of cruelty, and the opposite of progressive.'

Christian writer on drag in the Olympics opening ceremony, and the rise of the drag queen as a kind of redemptive hero in progressive Christianity.

www.flaneurnotes.com/post/dragging-the-seine

Yes. Good to see that theme of Christianity as a non-white, non-Western faith underlined so strongly in the article – ie parodying it is 'punching down'.

I agree but I am also sick of this idea of punching up and down. Too many people just seem to use it as a license to gratuitously insult.

' drag is men parodying women in the areas where women have been most demeaned and objectified down the decades, reinforcing stereotypes from which women have had to fight hardest to free themselves.

The big comedy tits and constant innuendo, the giddy bimbo persona, the comically excessive make-up and hair, the tottering around on high heels, the incessant use of trashy and demeaning terms such as bitch, ho and slut'

Men who are gender non conforming have often been insulted by being told they are womanly.

Drag is these men reclaiming the insults by parodying womanhood as hard as they can.

It is a reaction against homophobia.

What everyone misses is that in order to fight against the homophobia of other men, drag uses women's bodies and women's oppression as a sacrificial offering.

Women who protest are told they are part of the homophobia.

Yes, although we need to be free to gratuitously insult as the thin end of the free speech wedge.

Thanks, Arabella. I always find your comments on these boards helpful, and I like the way you've engaged with the article I posted and extended the point the writer makes. You're so right.

Yeah, I don't think it's a very good test in most cases of when something is appropriate or now.

In this case, it still wouldn't be appropriate for the venue even if it was a mainly white person religion, for example.

And more generally it gets very much into the weeds of hierarchical offence taking which can very easy end up becoming a kind of power play in its own right.

I think you can make an argument that where drag is confined to a very specific audience it's really very much focused on that and not much to do with women as such. - I don't mean female impersonation or anything like that, but gay men doing it in contexts like gay nightclubs.

Of course lots of gay men still don't like it or identify with it, but what is really weird is how its become so mainstream.

I think the writers idea that they are a redemptive figure for the religion of id pol is quite accurate.

Greer called that the 'third sex' - using a simulacrum of femininity as removed from actual women, a signifier divorced from material reality.

Sure, there's a place for drag.

Held up as icons of liberation and enlightenment? That's another matter. 'Sex clowns' is spot on. It's the positioning of queens that is the problem, not the existence of them. As the writers says - a new sacred priest caste.

It's taking what originated as a mockery of men pretending to be women and presenting it as actually an enlightened, morally aspirational, improved version of women. All the juicy fun bits without the tedious biology - pure tits, lips, and raucous crudity. Then women are told we have to laugh along while men mock us if we dont want to be bigoted killjoy Karens. Because we're just here to be used as entertainment at best.

The joke too easily slides.from the queen, who is supposedly sending himself up, onto all women, who are being sent up.

Fuck it.