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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36174 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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A question: Is dressing in drag (that is, a man dressing like a woman potentially with makeup and so on) an inherently sexual act? I ask because it seems to me differing beliefs about the answer to this question are at the root of differences in belief about the propriety of events like Drag Queen Story Hour and perhaps related to trans issues more generally.

For my part, I think the answer is "No". This isn't to say that nobody ever dresses in drag for the purpose of engaging in a sexual fantasy, certainly some people do. Similarly I do not intend to claim drag events are always appropriate for children, I've been to ones that certainly would not be. There does not seem to me anything inherently sexual about someone in drag reading an age appropriate book to children though.

So I guess I'm interested in hearing from people who would answer the opposite way to my posed question and why they think so. Some ancillary questions: If it were a cis woman dressed similarly would it be equally inappropriate? Or is the fact that it's a man dressed that way central to the impropriety? Is there an implied inference that the only reason a man would dress in drag is for a sexual purpose? That seems like a failure of imagination to me.

There's no law of the universe making it sexual. It being sexual is an observation about how and why it's done in modern American society. There's probably some extreme edge case that isn't sexual (maybe Norman Bates in Psycho), but when it comes up in politics, it's never about such cases, and there often seems to be an element of "Ha, ha, you can't prove it's sexual".

There's the comedy element of cross-dressing, and it's hard to know if that is to be considered drag or not. Think of Monty Python sketches or pantomime dames, where (for the dames anyway) while there is bawdy humour and double entendres involved, those are supposed to go over the kids' heads and be for the adults in the audience.

There were female impersonators, some of whom vehemently denied they were gay, such as Danny La Rue.

And then drag as it is today.

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