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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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drag is some kind of family-friendly show that should be normalized for children, and if intentional grooming isn't behind it, it sure seems to be groomer-adjacent to me.

Would you say the same about panto? Now of course there are probably individual drag artists who do inject an odd level of quasi-sexualisation into their act, but I don't think that is inherent to drag. Drag definitely can be family-friendly, because otherwise most British parents are apparently unwittingly exposing their children to 'groomer-adjacent' behaviour.

Drag queens typically perform in 18+ establishments, as a rule.

Moreover, pantomime dames don't actually dress like that outside of the theatre for any reason that I'm aware of. Once he's done for the night, Jim takes the wig off and doesn't think about it until the next performance. He certainly doesn't make a separate social media profile for his dame alter-ego, nor list it on his other social medias. It's entirely contained within that one specific context... and nobody had a problem with drag while it was confined to its specific context, either.

Pantomime dames are performing the role of a type of desexualised older woman (often, but not always, the hero or heroine's mother) and wear "ugly" makeup and padding everywhere, not just the chest. The borderline-inappropriately-sexualised character in panto is the hero, who is played by an attractive young woman in skin-tight trousers (leather if there is the slightest excuse).

Drag queens are performing a caricature of female sexuality - in that the character they are playing is supposed to be attractive to hetrosexual men (in some traditions of drag performance the actor in character also is, and in others she isn't).

If someone launched "pantomime dame story hour" in the UK, nobody would complain.