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Notes -
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:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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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