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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36346 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Is Dylan Mulvaney the Trans Andy Kaufmann?

Watching the Dylan Mulvaney spectacle play out has left me with an odd feeling that I’ve struggled to quite put a finger on, with Mulvaney causing me to have something like an uncanny valley reaction to his transition and demeanor. I don’t mean this to say that Mulvaney looks almost female, but not quite, I mean that Mulvaney gives me the impression of someone that isn’t sincere about transitioning, but has put enough effort into it that I’m not exactly sure what’s going on and what to make of this person. In light of the recent Bud Light debacle I’ve finally settled on an explanation that makes more sense to me - Mulvaney is a modern Andy Kaufman, playing the part of a trans person well enough to convince some people, while others are in on the joke, and all of them contribute to Mulvaney’s accrual of fame and cash.

Who was Andy Kaufman? I think the Wiki summary is better than anything I’ll write up:

During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and theaters in a series of unique performance art/comedy shows, sometimes appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. He was also a frequent guest on sketch comedy and late-night talk shows, particularly Late Night with David Letterman.[6] In 1982, Kaufman brought his professional wrestling villain act to Letterman's show by way of a staged encounter with Jerry "The King" Lawler of the Continental Wrestling Association. The fact that the altercation was planned was not publicly disclosed for over a decade.

Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35.[7] As pranks and elaborate ruses were major elements of his career, persistent rumors have circulated that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax.[6][8] He continues to be respected for the variety of his characters, his uniquely counterintuitive approach to comedy, and his willingness to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences.[6][9]

Comedian Richard Lewis in A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman said of him: "No one has ever done what Andy did, and did it as well, and no one will ever. Because he did it first. So did Buster Keaton, so did Andy."[96] Carl Reiner recalled his distinction in the comedy world:

Did Andy influence comedy? No. Because nobody's doing what he did. Jim Carrey was influenced—not to do what Andy did, but to follow his own drummer. I think Andy did that for a lot of people. Follow your own drumbeat. You didn't have to go up there and say 'take my wife, please.'[97] You could do anything that struck you as entertaining. It gave people freedom to be themselves.[98]

Reiner also said of Kaufman: "Nobody can see past the edges, where the character begins and he ends."[99]

Kaufman made people laugh, get angry with him, and even physically attack him by playacting at different roles so successfully than people couldn’t tell where the sincere Kaufman stopped and the characters began. When I watch Dylan Mulvaney advertise native-scented deodorant, I don’t see someone that’s genuinely trying to be a woman. I see someone that’s clowning the concept, mocking women, mocking trans people, and exploiting the clicks for fun and profit.

I wasn’t around for Kaufman, so this comparison is likely imperfect. Nonetheless, watching people react to what sure looks to me like a running joke as though it’s perfectly sincere has been entirely surreal. I see people on the pro-trans side treating Mulvaney as sincere. If I’m right and this is a running joke, Joe Biden sure didn’t get the word. My inclination has been to chalk this up to people becoming sufficiently accustomed to never question claims from trans people that playing along with Dylan Mulvaney is no different than the rest of it, and even if they have doubts, they’re surely not going to look at Dylan and saying, “oh, come the fuck on”. So even though this was weird, it wasn’t until the Bud Light thing that it began to really seem hyperreal to me.

Here, watch this 35 second reaction video from Kid Rock. What’s going on here? Is Kid Rock sincerely pissed off at Bud Light, so pissed off that the only way to express it is with a burst of automatic weapons fire supplemented by some covering fire from a shotgun-wielding buddy? Is he basically sincere in his reaction, but strongly exaggerating the reaction because it’s funny? Is he ambivalent, but doing it for the clicks and lols? Is he part of the Bud Light advertising campaign, just driving the product into people’s mindspace? Does he agree with me that the whole thing is a big joke and he’s just rolling with his own improv? I don’t know and I don’t even know how I would know.

Vox reports that people have reacted in real life:

Don, a liquor store owner in Arkansas who requested to remain anonymous so he “doesn’t get caught up in the wokeness,” told me he’s seen a 20-25 percent dip in Bud Light sales since the controversy hit, with his admittedly small sample size of shoppers seemingly opting for Miller Lite and Coors Light instead. However, he doesn’t expect the backlash to stick. “A lot of people are talking about it, fired up about it, they’re never drinking Bud Light again, yada yada yada, but they’ll be drinking them in a month, as soon as the news cycle quits,” he said.

Well, what are those people thinking? Are they genuinely pissed, but not so pissed as to permanently give up a product that seems completely fungible with other light beers? How about Ben Shapiro:

The post started to pick up steam in conservative circles relatively quickly. Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro decried the collaboration on his show, saying, “Well, folks, our culture has now decided men are women and women are men and you must be forced to consume products that say so.” Shapiro appears not to be much of a Bud Light fan himself, so he probably doesn’t have much to boycott. “I understand Bud Light is piss water masquerading as beer,” he said, “so I guess that, you know, it’s sort of trans beer.”

Well, I’m glad he at least kept the on-brand smugness. In fact, no one seems to be missing out on their normal branding, which lends itself to the hyperreal experience. In keeping with that, I will smugly note that I don’t drink that shit anyway and I’ll be cracking an IPA from a real industry underdog - Lagunitas(tm), a tiny subsidiary of a little-known international parent company. Thank God that I’m not getting taken in by all this hyperreal marketing.

The Bud Light debacle made it into the watercooler talk at my work, which is rare but not unheard of for culture war items. The general consensus seemed to be: it’s not just that he’s a man trying to be a woman, it’s that he’s trying to be an “adolescent girl”.

Oddly enough, I had the opposite reaction as you. If you want to be a woman, why would you want to be a business professional or something? why wouldn’t you want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos, dancing, screaming, waving your hands everywhere, and doing whatever gets you the most attention? His is perhaps the most sincere desire to “be a woman” as I’ve ever seen. Maybe the programmers with anime profile pics are the inauthentic fakers?

Your observations make sense to me.

"We're all bubbly little bimbos who designate specific booty shorts for our retail adventures? Is this what you think puts us in the same category?"

Back in the early days of the Great Awokening, the idea of "womanface" (as analogous to theatrical blackface) made the rounds. One Harlem drag queen wrote a surprisingly reflective response, not only owning the unapologetic misogyny of the drag community but actually calling for drag queens, not to change in any meaningful way, but to at least listen, to validate (how feminine!) the concerns many women have about drag as mockery.

I encountered these ideas again in an interesting book review of Once a Man, Never a Woman--this time, in the context of transsexuality:

What truly drives the relationship to its breaking point is Shannon’s eventual realization that, with his slinky dresses and high-heel boots, Jamie isn’t a wannabe woman so much as an amateurish imposter. What he imagines to be womanhood is in fact a male masturbation fantasy that presents women as endlessly parked in front of boudoir mirrors, staring dreamily at their own decolletage as they mist themselves with bulbed perfume bottles. As Shannon writes, real women are more likely to spend their lives fleeing such male-imposed expectations...

I seem to recall that the Motte (used to?) have a poster who claimed to be trans-aged (i.e., a young person in an older person's body), though for various reasons they didn't like to make a big deal about it. This seems to happen enough that I've read more than one article about an adult male living (at least part time!) as an underaged female (occasionally, even a prepubescent one).

That seems ridiculous to me, but not like, substantially more ridiculous than drag queens generally, and it follows the same basic pattern--I expect you'd be hard pressed to find a non-fictional six-year-old girl with the same actual taste and style as Stefonknee Wolscht. But six-year-old girls aren't generally in a position to complain about being parodied.

I also wonder a fair bit about the fact that outrageously distorted caricaturization seems to be less of a thing with females who live as men (or even as non-binary). Most of the "trans" females I encounter are just not-very-girly lesbians using counterintuitive pronouns. I don't know if this is because it would be difficult-to-impossible for someone with a female body to convincingly parody masculinity (at least without the aid of dangerous quantities of illicit steroids), or if there is something else at work there (one theory I've toyed with is that males tend to style themselves trans in hopes of getting a certain kind of attention, while females tend to style themselves trans in order to avoid that exact same kind of attention, but I would be hard pressed to prove this to anyone's satisfaction, I think). Or maybe it's just because masculinity is often enough a parody of itself.

The place where the comparison breaks down is that the audience for blackface was white people but the audience for 'woman face' is heavily female. It's not straight men who sit around and enjoy caricatured performances of femininity, it's gay men and straight women. This is partly anecdotal since the people I know who like drag are mostly straight women, but the RuPaul subreddit did a survey and it was 50% women and 38% men, trans men outnumbered transwomen ~2:1. Given that reddit's user base skews male that might understate the prevalence of women in the drag fanbase. A random masters thesis on James Charles I found on Google says his audience was 85% female.

Then there's Chrissy Chlapeka and the TikTok Bimbo movement which seems primarily aimed at women, though I can't find demographic stats.

The kind of 'Bumbly Bimbo' performances that appeal to straight men are well, porn. Belle Delphine is also doing an obvious performance of an excitable girl.

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