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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36173 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.

Does this apply to anything with antinatalist consequences? How slight can it be? Should we not be encouraging women to work? Does this apply towards changing the status quo "in reverse" to undo feminism? Is this a mis analogy because feminist activists weren't necessarily expecting the antinatalist consequences?

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