“I’m surprised women don’t find the way drag queens characterize them to be highly offensive”
“Think about it. Is there a dime’s worth of difference between the drag queen persona and Caucasian entertainers donning blackface for laffs?”
We ran across that little Chestnut on a well-known social media platform.
And we don’t believe anybody has ever framed the crisis faced by the drag culture in quite that way.
Just about all of the negative discussion revolving around drag queens present them as a direct threat to the safety and security of the children of America.
We have never seen, in all the reportage we have consumed on this issue, a single individual suggesting that the drag community flirts with misogyny. That drag queens in fact represents an assault on the female of the species..
But it does make sense.
After all, since the days of Milton Berle and Bugs Bunny in drag, drag queens have always characterized women as loud, rude and crude.
And, just as with caucasians in blackface, drag queenism has always relied on the most negative of stereotypes in order to get laughs.
But then the question.
Why are women themselves not rising in righteous anger as the Black community did over blackfacing?
We might find the answer to that in this response to the young man who posed the original question.
“Quite a few women do object, but then find themselves being bullied and called ‘bigots’ and ‘terfs.’ All for objecting to the idea that we are fodder for entertainment. Our biology is not a costume for men to play with.”
And the woman went on to say
“The characterization of women is really a caricature of women, that’s why I refer to it as costuming. Most drag I’ve seen seems to focus on all of the negative stereotypes and assumptions about women. This frequently reinforces an undertone of misogyny.
If it is not okay for whites to do blackface, or really to portray any other racial or cultural stereotypes, than why is it okay for men to do ‘womenface’?”
Certainly a fair question but so far it’s not a question anyone is asking
And probably no one ever will. Because “comfort zones” must be protected and the answer to THAT question would not be what a lot of people would want to hear.
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