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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Some have described it as "girl face," like the "black face" that people used to do in minstrel shows to make fun of black people. [...] We don't have to ban it all together, but we can limit it to the more fringe parts of society, like strip clubs outside of town, rather than welcoming it into public streets, libraries, and everywhere else where we're forced to look at it without consent.

I hate the way that "consent" language has infiltrated society at all levels. There's just a gradual erosion of people's understanding of private ownership, and public spaces. Whether it's oil pipelines, AI data centers or a new Buc-ees, everyone seems to think they should have a say in how private corporations use their own private property.

Black face is legal, and "girl face" is legal. If a privately owned business open to the public wants to put on a minstrel show or a drag show they are legally allowed to do that everywhere in the United States. The public is also allowed to boycott such businesses, if they want to. Stop being lazy and leveraging the government to do your work for you. Vote with your wallet, and don't frequent businesses that do things you find distasteful. If a public library has a drag show, go to your town council meetings and get the libraries defunded or whatever. Don't just hope that we'll all ban a thing you happen to dislike.

I've seen "you're violating my consent!" type language applied to copyright, immigration, spam, zoning regulations. It's everywhere. Laundering "I don't like this" into "I'm being raped." Hate it so much.

It really makes me feel like my consent is being violated.

On this meta note, I've seen a sort of parallel here with "consent" and "denial" that I find really odd.

In the past, I've seen some AGW-skeptics claim that the anti-AGW-activists calling them "climate deniers" is a dirty attempt at associating them with "holocaust deniers" because they're both using "denier." This, despite the fact that "denier" has a very well known, basic non-holocaust- (and non-AGW-)related definition in English that has no derogatory connotations whatsoever and only negative connotations in the sense that "denying" something means "negating" something.

More recently, I've seen some [people who consider AI training on copyrighted material without consent to be perfectly ethical] claim that the [people who consider AI training on copyrighted material without consent to be unethical] pointing out that the former are pro-violation-of-"consent" is a dirty attempt at associating them with rapists - i.e. people who violate sexual consent - because they're both relating to the word "consent." This, despite the fact that "consent" has a very well known, basic non-sex- (and non-copyright-)related definition in English.

Ironically, perhaps, these complaints are, in themselves, attempts to smear someone else as engaging in bad faith tactics merely through association of the same vocabulary.

That said, I haven't seen this that much. Just more than I would have expected and certainly far more than I would like.

I don't actually think consent is an ordinary word. It has a legalese connotation, and really does come up most frequently for ordinary people in the context of sexual consent.

Almost always the words "agreement", "signing a contract", "permission" or "asking me/someone" would be more casual ways to refer to this concept.

Part of the problem is the strange mismatch of expectations. If I say, "My neighbor starts mowing the lawn at 9 AM without my consent", it implies that there is some reason to think your neighbor should need your consent, but unless there are local noise ordinances or something, why should your neighbor need consent for that?

I don't actually think consent is an ordinary word. It has a legalese connotation, and really does come up most frequently for ordinary people in the context of sexual consent.

I suppose it's not too far from "molest" which is also an ordinary word with an ordinary non-sexual meaning, but which almost always gets used sexually these days. "Consent" is perhaps not an "ordinary" word, but I think most people who have been to the hospital as adults are at least familiar with "informed consent" or "consent forms" which have nothing to do with sex. And I think this is to enough of an extent that it's not justified to accuse someone who uses the term "consent" as trying to smuggle in sexual implications.

Part of the problem is the strange mismatch of expectations. If I say, "My neighbor starts mowing the lawn at 9 AM without my consent", it implies that there is some reason to think your neighbor should need your consent, but unless there are local noise ordinances or something, why should your neighbor need consent for that?

This is the true issue that should be being brought up in the example I provided. The disagreement with AI training on copyright-protected works without consent is whether or not consent is required. As someone who believes that there's nothing unethical about it, I openly say that I am freely violating the consent of the copyright-holders (and support Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Meta, etc. doing so) and that I feel no guilt over this, because their consent doesn't matter. Much like your neighbor doesn't need yours in your example. That's the point to make, not the one claiming that invoking the copyright-holders' consent is a way of smearing oneself or AI companies as rapist-adjacent.

Can I put syrup clubs anywhere? Can I allow kids to enter the strip club?

Can I put syrup clubs anywhere?

I prefer my syrup clubs next to a Waffle House.

Can I allow kids to enter the strip club?

I don't think this is a valid comparison, since drag is not inherently sexual or "adult."

Watch an episode of Ru Paul's Drag Race. It has a rating of TV 14, there's nothing that bad in it. Certainly nothing that would scar an older teen.

Drag as a category is similar to live music performances as a category, there is a range of salaciousness. On one hand you'll have performers like the Pussycat Dolls or Sabrina Carpenter who try to titilate and provoke, and on the other hand you'll have Christian rock which is squeaky clean and wholesome. Should we just blindly ban all music performances because some are 18+?

Ru Paul is degenerate. Just like syrup and strip clubs. It isn’t just about prurient interests.

If a privately owned business open to the public wants to put on a minstrel show or a drag show they are legally allowed to do that everywhere in the United States.

And what if they don't want to? What if they don't want to bake the cake? This appeal to freedom of association only ever flows in one direction.

I might point out that masterpiece cakeshop has won all of their court cases.

The problem is the asymmetry of legal remedies for the right and the left. When the left wins a case, it's done, they get to do whatever it is they wanted to do. When the right wins a case, there's another case which starts things all over again.

That's simply not true. Look at Roe v. Wade. After it was decided, the right spent decades trying every legal variant they could think of to get around it. Every side plays legal games.

Roe v. Wade is a popular allusion, but it's a really bad comparison. The right didn't spend decades trying every legal variant they could think of. The day after Roe v. Wade dropped, every single county in the country just treated abortion as legal through the first half of gestation. The closest immediate challenge was Danforth, and the restrictions there were either well outside of Roe's text (spousal approval, parental approval for minors) or within an area Roe specifically entertained (a methods-based ban on saline injection that the medical community had just started disfavoring in preference to prostaglandin and, the next year, D&E). Thornburgh was the sort of waiting period law and information-passing that The_Nybbler would consider an outright blessing compared to what New Jersey does for his interests. Hell, Akron did a specific thing Blackmun gave as acceptable (hospital requirements) and lost on it anyway because they had ill motive about it.

Most were just plainly outside of Roe, and not even arguably. Several major SCOTUS battles focused on federal funding, like Beal, Maher, Poelker, and the Hyde Amendment, but Roe never held that public facilities had to perform abortions. Connecticut v. Menillo had a state court invalidate a pre-Roe conviction for an unlicensed 'hobbyist' abortionist, and SCOTUS had to step in to say that Roe didn't mean randos could just go around pretending to be doctors for the purpose of abortion. Bigelow v. Virginia (in addition to being one of my go-to examples for why New Jersey can burn in hell) was about a statute that dated back to 1878, and turned on the First Amendment question.

It was only after replacing almost the entire SCOTUS bench and producing a widespread new judicial philosophy over two decades that we saw Casey, and even Casey was still futzing with the edges of how interest-balancing was done. It took another decade before you started to see serious efforts to actually go after its central ruling, and another two past that to actually overturn Roe.

Don't get me wrong; those were legal games. But they're a separate class from politicians in multiple states responding to Bruen the week of with press conferences explicitly stating they were going to make carry permits useless to carry anywhere (and then adding injury to insult by not issuing carry permits either), or Masterpiece Cake Shop by trying to support even dumber activist lawsuits with clearer malicious intent against the exact same target, or Calce after Caetano.

Abortion is about the only partial exception, but the important thing is that for most of the life of that decision, none of those things worked. The right would pass laws, they'd be struck down without having effect. Even now it's easier to get an abortion as a resident of Texas than a firearm as a resident of New Jersey.

Texas is just going to ban drag shows again, with slightly different wording.

If they try, the drag shows will still happen and the law will be stayed until it is dismissed. Nobody will spend more than a few hours in jail.

I'm on the record elsewhere on the Motte saying that I would prefer to limit non-discrimination law to essential domains like housing, banking and hospitals. I don't think governments need to force gay wedding cakes at gunpoint.

Not OP, but I think there's a difference between the freedom to provide a given service or not, and the freedom to refuse service to particular customers. Much as it should be clubs' choice whether they put on minstrel shows or drag shows, it should be a bakery's choice whether or not they want to sell rainbow-colored pride cakes. But the proper comparison for whether the bakery can refuse to sell a standard wedding cake to a pair of gay fiancés isn't that: it's whether the minstrel club can bar black people, or the gay club bar straight people, from entry.

Now you might argue that all of these fall under freedom-of-association, and I can certainly respect freedom-of-association absolutism as far as it goes. But they still seem like two easily-distinguished subcategories where I don't think you need to be biased in any specific direction to support one and not the other.

But the proper comparison for whether the bakery can refuse to sell a standard wedding cake to a pair of gay fiancés isn't that: it's whether the minstrel club can bar black people, or the gay club bar straight people, from entry.

But of course if they want to bar people with incorrect political views, freedom-of-association is right back on the table.

It’s a fuzzy line.

What if the person isn’t baking a cake but officiating weddings, should they be forced to accommodate gay ones as long as they follow the same script as straight ones?

On the other hand, the person baking cakes won’t know whether their clients are gay without obnoxious vetting which would hurt their business. A man and woman can walk into the store and order a cake, then give it to their gay friends.

I believe freedom of association should work like that: a seller can refuse “service”, but once they provide it, can’t restrict the buyer or force them to retract.

Doesn’t zoning control where strip clubs can set up shop almost everywhere? What’s the reason that this same principle couldn’t be applied to drag shows?

Municipal govts. are allowed to ban strip clubs from certain zones because they have studies showing that strip clubs have undesirable "secondary effects" of increased crime. Quote from the latest (2002) case:

The central component of the 1977 study is a report on city crime patterns provided by the Los Angeles Police Department. That report indicated that, during the period from 1965 to 1975, certain crime rates grew much faster in Hollywood, which had the largest concentration of adult establishments in the city, than in the city of Los Angeles as a whole. For example, robberies increased 3 times faster and prostitution 15 times faster in Hollywood than citywide.

It seems like that would lead to a lumper/splitter problem. If you have to ban the exact same thing that leads to crime, you might end up banning strip clubs that have between six and fourteen letters in their name that are open at least to 1 AM but to not later than 2 AM, just like qualified immunity only ever applies to the exact same thing from a previous case.

Even that ruling doesn't sound like it goes that far, as seen by the reference to "adult establishments" rather than to only strip clubs specifically. Why wouldn't a drag show also fit into the category "adult establishments", if it is determined that drag shows are sexual? (Or would you say that it's a show, not an establishment, and that therefore strip shows at places that often do other things are not covered as adult establishments either?)

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Maybe it's bad precedent, but it is precedent.

The municipality's evidence must fairly support the municipality's rationale for its ordinance. If plaintiffs fail to cast direct doubt on this rationale, either by demonstrating that the municipality's evidence does not support its rationale or by furnishing evidence that disputes the municipality's factual findings, the municipality meets the standard set forth in Renton. If plaintiffs succeed in casting doubt on a municipality's rationale in either manner, the burden shifts back to the municipality to supplement the record with evidence renewing support for a theory that justifies its ordinance.

But you see the Motte and Bailey here, right? We're not just talking about private businesses. If the drag queens would keep it there, there'd be no problem (and most of us wouldn't even know that it exists). But they want to move it into public spaces, where we wouldn't normally expect to encounter sexually explicit acts. If I were to walk into the public library or downtown main street naked, I'd get arrested for public indecency, but the drag queens seem to argue that this is some sort of human right, even though it seems very much like a fetish for them.

I can't exactly "boycott" every single public space, and even if I did, I might actually have an opinion on whether its good for them to be used in putting children into someone's fetish play. At some poine, it's simply easier to do a blanket ban rather than try to play small town politics over every single posible location. And yes, when we're talking about people trying to force their sexuality on the rest of us, I do think that usingi the language of consent is appropriate.

If the drag queens would keep it there, there'd be no problem (and most of us wouldn't even know that it exists). But they want to move it into public spaces

Do they?

Are drag queens themselves pushing to be in public places or some other adjacent but still different set of people who are doing that?

"Drag Queens" aren't something that people are born as, or that they find themselves becoming through puperty and no fault of their own, or any of the other categorizations that are used to paint gays and muslims and other protected classes as blameless and without agency in choosing their behavior.

Any time a "Drag Queen" does anything, you can be 100% certain that he wants to be there and he wants to do it.

Who are you accusing of forcing the drag queens at gunpoint to do shows for toddlers at public libraries?

That's a completely different claim. Is it the drag queens who are the initiators or is it the activists around them, the ones arranging the event and the library staff?

There's a big difference between

"Hey, you really should come to read in this event. I've reserved the space, done the arrangements and convinced the staff." "Oh, ok, I guess I'll come, it might be fun."

vs

"Hey, I really want to do this thing. Is there any way I can make it happen?"

This is Jonathan Hamilt, co-founder of Drag Story Hour National and the first drag queen to read for Drag Story Hour in New York City. So it does kind of seem founded at least in part by drag queens (the other founder is a lesbian dating a transman.)

I think sex has always been the weakest link of free speech in Western societies. There was a long-standing fragile cope with the "know it when I see it" "rule" for porn, but the bottom line is that once sex starts becoming involved, even the most principled free-speech advocate runs out of tolerance for views that go against their preference. Being a drag queen is "speech" in the same sense that performance art is (it is meant to convey something), but it is speech that evokes the horror of the object of your sexual desire being replaced by a male caricature of it, so you label it "indecent" and invoke the right to not be exposed to it. What is the principled way to distinguish this from an argument that speech for any political system that relates to human sexuality at all is likewise "indecent" as it may invoke sexual horror in those who are repelled by some aspect of the system's programme? If you can be protected from disgust at drag queens, why can't a blue-hair campus activist be protected from disgust at Christians?

Free expression and the freedom from exposure can coexist: places advertising sex in abstract (like "NSFW") opaque to bystanders unless they consent.

In public spaces I think it should be the town that decides what's allowed. A problem with today's society is that large states and larger governments intervene in things that should be local: unless it's like child abuse or slavery, people can move (and I don't think drag shows fall into child abuse, although admittedly I've never seen one, I'm thinking more severe cases like physical assault, neglect, and deprivation).

I do think a "freedom of speech + freedom from exposure" set of norms is conceivable, but doing that in a principled manner, too, would require deep changes to how societies are organised. You do get at a key problem in suggesting that the town should decide (because you can't unify one individual's freedom from exposure with another's freedom of speech and his audience, if all three+ of them have to share a space), but (1) why is the town the natural unit and (2) would the results you get really be that much more satisfactory for anyone, if acceptable exposure were fully devolved to towns? You would get quite a lot of blue towns, in which drag queens and Democratic politics are considered decent but Christianity and Republican politics (all rape PTSD triggers!) are not, and red towns, with the converse; and many of them would have a pretty large captive minority of people with their speech much more constrained in practice than it is at the moment.

  1. Towns decide public spaces because they own public spaces. Individuals decide their own spaces (house or apartment interior, car interior, and exteriors to limited extent), groups of towns or states decide buildings that serve multiple towns (e.g. waste treatment plant, nuclear power plant; car exteriors should also be state or nation mandated, because the vast majority will drive between towns, and many will drive between states).

  2. You would have those towns, but many towns (including some cities) have roughly an even split, so I expect they’d be more reasonable. Also, I think the town shouldn’t dictate what people do within their own home or apartment room, although it would be hard to prevent them, it would be hard for them to enforce anything.

That sounds pretty backwards relative to what happened. The blue-hair campus activist didn't use the taboos around sex to argue for political censorship, they spent the better half of the last century using the principle of free speech to take apart all taboos, including the ones around sex, and once that allowed them to get strong enough, they turned around to impose their own taboos on people they promised "liberation" to.

Even outside of that, they don't limit themselves to demands of being protected from views they find disgusting, they demand the right to impose their views on people who find them disgusting.

I never claimed that this is actually the argument that blue-hair campus activists used, historically, to argue for censorship; only that they could use that argument, and it's not clear how you would refuse it on principled ground while allowing the argument against drag queens. The Schelling fence around free speech can only be reliably drawn around all speech, including speech that is optimised to make you imagine sexual scenarios that you find highly uncomfortable.

I never claimed that this is actually the argument that blue-hair campus activists used, historically, to argue for censorship; only that they could use that argument, and it's not clear how you would refuse it on principled ground while allowing the argument against drag queens

That battle has been fought and lost. There is no hypothetical "what if they used that argument" to consider. They did use that argument, and they won. The principle you are appealing to does not exist in any practical sense. Though maybe the real issue is that I'm just tired, tired of fighting this same battle forever. Eventually a person despairs of ever living in peace.

That's true. I can't really give you a logical argument for why it seems much worse to watch someone else's sex acts than to watch someone else's religious rituals. Nonetheless... it is, and I think the vast majority of people would agree with me on that. I suppose this is one of those "I know it when I see it" things, where the law runs into basic human nature in a less-than-perfectly-logical way.

For what it's worth, I wouldn't mind so much if they did it as peformance art in specially marked artistic venues. I have a very high tolerance for that sort of thing! My objection is more that they try to smuggle it in as innocuous behavior that should be accepted everywhere, which seems dishonest when it's obviously controversial.

It's a very obvious motte/bailey, isn't it? I've seen people argue Monty Python or WWI/II British crosssdressing humour is the same thing as all modern drag shows, and if people were fine with the former, they're hypocrites to not be fine with the latter.

being naked in public is different than doing black face in public so that is its own motte and bailey. If your opinion is that "girl face"/drag in public is more like black face in public then if black face is legal it follows "girl face"/drag should also be legal. If your opinion is that "girl face"/drag is more like being naked in public then your opinion sounds about right to me.

I notice that "incredibly cheesy, campy effect" and "horrible taste" on one comment becomes "sexually explicit acts" and "fetish play" on the next. I'm sure there is some level of "girl face"/drag in public that you are ok with on a case-by-case basis. Personally I can tell you there have been plenty of incredibly cheesy, campy, and horrible taste outfits by clearly straight women that I kinda just huff my nose and ignore it, I certainly would not ignore sexually explicit acts and fetish play.

I think it is legitimate for you to participate in things like local schoolboard elections, or local city council elections to get performances that use your tax dollars shut down. I don't think it is appropriate to restrict everyone's freedoms because you're unwilling to take the time to research your local schoolboard elections. (I'm a libertarian, and I would generally prefer for government spending and policy decisions to be as local as possible, largely to avoid the incentive to keep making a bigger and bigger administrative state that is impossible to dismantle.)

I can't exactly "boycott" every single public space

Are these events really happening at every public space? I've wandered through various commercial neighborhoods in my city, and I've never just randomly stumbled upon a drag show. I'm sure on any given weekend, I would find one if I was determined to, but randomly having them happen has never really been an issue.

And yes, when we're talking about people trying to force their sexuality on the rest of us, I do think that usingi the language of consent is appropriate.

Drag doesn't have to be sexual though. Shakespearean actors did drag, and it wasn't sexual. English Pantomime had drag, and it wasn't sexual.

While I don't necessarily endorse drag shows for elementary schoolers, I think that a more toned down drag performance could, in theory, be appropriate, if that is what parents and the local school board want to do with their local community resources. I think it would also be appropriate to give parents the opportunity to opt out, as is often done for things like sex ed, or occasionally for other controversial parts of a school curriculum.

I think it is legitimate for you to participate in things like local schoolboard elections, or local city council elections to get performances that use your tax dollars shut down.

So why is it legitimate to ask for action at the local/district level, but not at the state level? That seems fairly arbitary. In fact, in the US legal system, states have rather more power than local districts, so it makes a lot more sense to act at the state level. In more practical terms: Most of us don't have the time or ability to fight lawsuits, so the only way it gets done is to pool resources and fight it at the state level. This is one of many issues where I think libertarians are just kind of naiive to how the real world works.

Are these events really happening at every public space?

No, of course not. In normal life it doesn't bother me that much either. But that cuts both ways... apparently this is such a minor issue that people can live without it. What's the harm if we just ban it? It seems like it would give a lot of people peace of mind, while only harming a very small minority. They could always move to California or New Hampshire if they really, really need to live as drag queens.

Drag doesn't have to be sexual though. Shakespearean actors did drag, and it wasn't sexual. English Pantomime had drag, and it wasn't sexual.

While I don't necessarily endorse drag shows for elementary schoolers

It doesn't have to be but... in modern practice, it almost always is. Nobody would really have an issue with shakespear festivals casting men in women's roles or whatever. But what the drag queens seem to really fight for is obviously a sex fetish for them, and I'm tired of having to look the other way and pretend like this is some high class theater thing. Really, it's fine, we can just ban this and it's not the road to slavery, it's just the road to a more civilized public life.

So why is it legitimate to ask for action at the local/district level, but not at the state level?

Because states have too many people. It’s easier to move towns than states because you can visit your old spaces faster, and there would be small groups that wouldn’t find refuge in any state, but may be large enough to take over a town.

Like @vorpa-glavo’s comment I support individualism when feasible, but individual homeowners aren’t rich enough for their own private park, library, etc. or soundproofing, road maintenance, etc. Towns are, so they shou

What's the harm if we just ban it? It seems like it would give a lot of people peace of mind, while only harming a very small minority. They could always move to California or New Hampshire if they really, really need to live as drag queens.

You do realize that this exact same argument applies to this forum, right?

So why is it legitimate to ask for action at the local/district level, but not at the state level? That seems fairly arbitary.

I mean, I'm partial to something like Scott Alexander's Archipelago, where aside from some high level rules everyone has to follow, everyone is free to pursue their own version of happiness, preferably in community with other people.

State level bans are preferable to federal bans, but I would prefer many bans to be at the city or county level, if they're going to happen at all, for two reasons: 1) the population of the United States has become less mobile and doesn't move as often, which means that the ideal of Archipelago, where someone can move to a different "island" that better represents their values is becoming less of a reality, and 2) I just think cities are more natural community-like units for policy to be carried out in than states.

Sure, and I think most people are partial to something like that in principle. The problem is... externalities exist. None of us can practice our own perfect freedom without infringing on our neighbors, at least a little. We're not actually living in an archipelago, we're living in a town where we all choke on each other's cigarette smoke and get stuck behind each other in traffic. And that means, we have to hide our shame so we don't traumatize kids.

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