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The OP's question wasn't about what should or shouldn't be kept away from children, but whether drag is inherently sexual. That's the only question I was answering, so following that up with a discussion of what is or isn't appropriate for children seems like an orthogonal and perhaps just uncharitable response. Nothing you've said here is responsive to any of the arguments I raised for the particular claim that drag seems to indeed be as inherently sexual as blackface is inherently racial.
If I am in favor of keeping children in the shallow end of the swimming pool, I must by analogy oppose tall drinking glasses, I suppose. Some slopes are indeed slippery, but you seem to have engaged the genuinely fallacious version, here. "If we stop kids going to drag shows, what's next!? Banning dances and bringing back Victorian fashions?"
Funny, when I read your reply, I thought to myself "Gee, did I misread OP and insert my own preexisting knowledge of culture war bullshit into it? That was rude of me!" Then I reread OP:
The whole discussion in the OP is about whether Drag is sexual, and whether that sexuality makes it inappropriate for children. OP further cites questions of the drag queens themselves engaging in "Sexual fantasy" as a potentially inappropriate element for children. So no, that question is not "orthogonal" to the one raised in OP, the entire question in OP is not whether drag is sexual in a banal sense (a point I addressed in my own reply to OP), but whether it is sexual in a sense that is inappropriate for children.
Your little syllogism of "JP/Feminists say Makeup is sexual >> Drag Queens wear makeup >> Drag queens are sexual >> sexual things are inappropriate for children >> Drag queens are inappropriate for children" doesn't work because the meaning of "sexual" shifts midway through. Feminists/JP define makeup as sexual in the banal sense in which athletics, dancing, etc are sexual; then you shift that definition to "too prurient for children" midway without showing your work. So my slippery slope is on point here, just as athletics aren't inappropriate for children despite having sexual elements to them, makeup isn't inappropriate because it has sexual elements to it. Your own article proving "makeup is inherently sexual" contains the passage:
Trying to draw some kind of weird logical circle for why inappropriate stuff is inappropriate leads to over-classification and lack of clarity. Sexualized drag shows are inappropriate for children due to content, not because you can point to some banal element of drag as inherently sexual. @hoffmeister25 is on point here, it is inappropriate if the people involved are doing or being inappropriate things; trying to draw the line at an arbitrary point like "Man in a dress" or "Makeup" creates an illogical boundary, making compliance more difficult and the purveyors of the rule look foolish.
I occasionally look at "events in my local area" type lists, and there are a surprising number of drag events included in those lists. Clearly they have an audience. And every single one of them that I have ever seen was flagged as "adults only 18+". Sure, you can dress in drag and just do normal stuff, but it doesn’t seem wrong to note that drag is usually heavily sexualized in the specific way Americans think of as inappropriate for children.
If people were putting on Strip Club Story Hour, where the clubs served Capri Sun and virgin daiquiris in the afternoons while reasonably dressed strippers read books to kids, we would probably think this was pretty fucked up and suspicious, even if the kids are too ignorant to figure out the context. If there were multiple videos of kids being encouraged to tip the strippers with dollar bills tucked into their pants, doubly so. And if creepy strip club managers used to opportunity to try to convince little girls to come get a job as soon as they turned 18, I don’t think anyone would be surprised.
Wouldn't this be perceived as "Nice"? But as, something similar did occur and backlash was sufficiently strong to end it, maybe not.
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This is not how I understood the question, or how I approached it. I took the question on its face:
OP goes on to suggest that this is at the real center of debates about "Drag Queen Story Hour" and so forth, so presumably if we can reach agreement on this question, then we could reach agreement on the latter question. This may or may not be so, but my impression of this framing is that it is a way of trying to get clear about a less-obviously-charged question before worrying about the details of a more obviously charged question. Maybe I'm the one who misunderstood the OP, but I read your leaping straight to "and is this appropriate for children" as missing the point of the discussion.
I have never said "therefore drag queens are inappropriate for children" in this thread. I have explained why it seems clear to me that "drag" is inherently sexual, and you have said nothing to demonstrate otherwise, so if you want to have an argument with someone who is saying the things you're saying I'm saying, you're going to need to find someone else to argue with.
Again--which of my responses to Gillitrut or Gemma are you getting this from?
I feel like you're just spoiling for a fight. I was responding to Gillitrut in an analytic way, describing what comes to my mind when I hear "drag," and also pointing out that I am hesitant to do even this since of course there are many kinds of drag, and edge cases, and etc. I think my analysis is good in part because it also captures the discomfort people often feel in other situations unrelated to drag queens. Others have been quite civil in pointing to counterexamples, and I think in general the question "is drag inherently sexual" is an interesting one for reasons that have nothing at all to do with children. It's not that far from other arguments people have about e.g. whether breasts are "inherently sexual." Personally, I think lots of stuff is inherently sexual, to greater and lesser degrees, and I think that if we were Puritanical or Victorian about those things, I wouldn't personally like it but I would understand the argument.
Sure, fine, whatever, you don't think drag is inherently sexual, I get it. I disagree, for all the reasons I've cited, none of which you've provided any plausible pushback against, because you're too busy focusing on shit I didn't say.
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