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A non-central objection: minstrel shows were one of the dominant entertainment formats in American during the 1800's where drag is subcultural. Drag is a tiny percentage of the entertainment options available to contemporary women, where it would have been one of the few available to black audiences and performers. Women also have a lot more commercial power and ability to create their own entertainment media than slaves did. It would be much more surprising for contemporary women to make up the majority of an audience for an entertainment format devoted to mocking them, then it would for some black people to have attended minstrel shows.
Straight men are the most underrepresented group among drag consumers, and my guess is they're not less interested in mocking women than women are. If the audience for minstrel shows had been entirely Irish immigrants, black people, and contained very few native born white southerners that would indicate something pretty weird was going on.
I googled "most followed beauty YouTubers" and depending on what list you look at gay men like James Charles, Jeffree Star, and Bretman Rock are somewhere in the Top 10. Gay men might be overrepresented in their audiences relative to their share of the population, but these aren't minor figures, these are some of the most successful people in the world at selling makeup to women. As you pointed out with the gay male 'gal pal' stereotype there seems to be a large subset of women that enjoys male performances of femininity and I don't know how to prove this but I strongly suspect that they don't find them demeaning
My core question is, what do you think the women who enjoy drag understand themselves as doing? These are usually young, pro-LGBTQ women who probably self ID as feminist, do they think drag performances are true reflections of how women are, that women are ridiculous, and mocking women is fun? I'm not a woman but I googled why women like drag queens and in this thread a female commenter says "it's a laugh at a performance of femininity not at women".
That makes sense to me. Drag queens are extremely technically proficient at make-up and they don't try to look like attractive women. They take a product meant to make women more appealing to the male gaze and exaggerate it to the point of absurdity. I don't think the idea is that women are ridiculous, the idea is that the performance society demands from women is.
Edit: I guess the way I'd put it is that I suspect what is being mocked in drag is not women but the performance women are expected to do in order to appeal to straight men. This is why gay men find it amusing because they are not attracted to women and so they find women's performance. Absurd. Some straight women are also alienated or frustrated by what they are expected to do to appeal to straight men and so also find a mockery of these expectations. Amusing. Straight men for the most part. Quite like what women do to appeal to them and are there for the group that is least interested in a mockery of it.
My impression from the drag shows I've been to is that straight women love them because they take all the fun of fashion shows (beautiful, over-the-top clothes and makeup, interesting choreography and stage design), replace the sexually threatening models with gay men, and then pepper in some good old fashioned insult comedy aimed mostly at either the most conventionally attractive woman in the front row, or the uncomfortable straight men who were dragged to the show. The women I went to these shows with never seemed to feel mocked in any way, or to enjoy them on some sort of meta level. They seemed to genuinely enjoy drag shows as earnest celebrations of pretty clothes/makeup and catty humor. It's just the "gay best friend" trope applied to public entertainment.
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Classic feminist nonsense. Do they also like gay men’s fashion ironically, to laugh at how fashion-obsessed the imposed female gender role is?
High performer with a noncompete clause. Looks like enough of an explanation.
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Men being better at selling make-up is not surprising.
Most top chefs are men too.
I can only see feminism working out if they put dudes in charge of it.
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