I've long found it amusing that drag gets a pass from the thought police. It's parodying women -- holding them up to ridicule -- after all. Clearly this omission has much to do with the fact that it's a gay genre. So the usual rules don't apply, natch. So silly ...
Back in the nineties in Melbourne I used to know several bolshie women who would get all het up if they saw "misogynous" hetero blokes frock up (like on The Footy Show). Then they would go out to drag shows in gay bars and cheer the acts! They had the whole situation completely arse about, as usual.
By definition hetero blokes desire women. They are in awe of their beauty. Women are the mysterious, compelling other that they want to attract towards them. And it's women's feminine otherness that is their most powerfully intoxicating attribute.
So when straight men wear women's clothes it's usually a big joke to them (and most women, too). They revel in the grotesque awkwardness of their new appearance, often acting even blokier than usual. They're mocking themselves, mostly. But gay drag, in holding femininity up to ridicule, seems inherently more misogynistic IMO.
Well, however you choose to look at the performance genre, it depends very much on that eeevil gender binary doesn't it? And given that so-called social progressives have now officially deemed this to be a divisive weapon of oppression wielded by the patriarchy, and replaced it with a whole new paradigm of "gender fluidity" this could prove, er, problematic for screaming -- or rather, miming -- queens who cross dress for cash, don't ya think?
Neeedless to say, social justice warriors who live to demonise straight white males will go easier on the "gay community" in the short term. But they've been eating their own with increasing frequency of late (take what's happened to gay leftie Stephen Fry on a couple of occasions, for example). Could only be a matter of time before we read about the gender equity police throwing their usual (double) standards out the window and chucking massive tanties over the acts of certain prominent gay drag performers, I reckon.
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