Friday, June 28, 2024

So you've been entertained by drag all your life, why is it a problem now? Part II

 Now, to be fair, I don’t want to come off as completely anti-drag.  As I said I’m still being entertained by certain drag performers, and they can be very entertaining.  I did attempt to watch some drag performances before writing this blog.   It consisted of about 5-10 minutes of RuPaul Drag Race All-Stars and, well, let’s just say a few minutes of some of those drag stars going into lewd sexual territory with their performance was enough to turn me off.  RuPaul is a much classier drag queen than what I was seeing on screen of the next generation of drag queen stars.    I also attempted to research the history of drag with it being either an acronym for those aforementioned Shakespearian young actors dressing as a girl to play opposite their fellow actors and complaining about the way their floor length costumes would drag on the ground.   [i]  Part of the reason why Shakespeare had to have a boy play a girl in his plays was because ironically Elizabethan women were meant to just be at home raising the kids.  If a real Elizabethan woman decided to be Juliet to Romeo in Shakespeare’s day she would have been considered a hussy for kissing a man not her husband. I vehemently disagree with Elizabethan era gender role assumptions but that was the attitude back 500 years ago.

 Drag has always been tied to theater performances and not necessarily to real life.   So, in some ways I can understand how drag can be used to question gender norms especially since a lot of gender norms seem somewhat arbitrarily pushed onto people as they are born and can change over time and from culture to culture.  For example, boys in the 19th and early 20th century wore pink and girls wore blue [ii]  if you were rich enough to buy multiple colored clothing for your baby to begin with.   Most parents back then kept both baby boys and girls in white dresses which make sense as it is easier to change a dirty diaper from underneath a dress.  I know as I write this post, I am wearing a pair of pants. I may have been accused of cross dressing in the 1800’s because only men wore pants then.   In the culture of the Maasai of Kenya and Tanzanian women have short hair and male warriors have luscious long braided locks.  [iii]   Heck, in a somewhat obligatory reference to my favorite show ‘The Chosen” for my blogpost I realize most of the actors are wearing tunics of various sizes and lengths which was the style of 1st century AD Palestine even though some other Asian cultures like the Persians may have worn pants[iv]   since the 6th century BC.  When you think about it a tunic is simply a masculine style dress in the same vein as a Scotsman’s kilt is a masculine version of the skirt. So, maybe it’s a good thing from time to time to question those gender norms. 

However, even though I am entertained by watching some drag performances, part of me is wondering if I should be entertained by drag performances.

Here is an interesting thought experiment to illustrate my point. Say, for example, Facebook was a thing back in the 1960’s or 1970’s or even maybe as early as the 1980’s and someone created a meme using the following images.  Please note, do not re-create what I am proposing!  There is a reason I’m about to use a hundred words or so to paint this meme and I still need Facebook to promote my blog.  You’re more than welcome to Google these images on your own and good luck Googling anything after that. 

Image #1-a poster promoting Clarence “Tom” Ashley performing country & western songs.

Image #2-a screen shot of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland performing in “Babes in Arms”

Image #3- a screen shot of Al Jolson from “The Jazz Singer.”

Image #4-a screen shot of Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds performing “Abraham” from the movie “Holiday Inn.”

Image #5- Lawrence Olivier from Shakespeare’s “Othello”

Image #6- Fred Astaire impersonating Bojangles in “Swing Time”

Image #7- Walter Long from D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”

Image #8- Brer Bear, Fox, and Rabbit from Disney’s “Song of the South”

And in the center this statement “You’ve been entertained by minstrel shows your whole life.  Don’t pretend you have a problem with them now.”  

Because, duh, starting in the 1960’s we realized blackface minstrel shows are a huge problem!  Blackface minstrel shows perpetuates a horrific stereotype of African Americans as dumb happy savages and was/is incredibly cruel and insulting to the numerous African American performers then and now like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Richard Pryor, Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, Diane Carroll, Cicely Tyson etc. as well as the rest of the African American race.   I would much rather watch Lawrence Fishburne as Othello than the greatest Shakespearean actor of all time in blackface. The last white actor to sort of wear blackface was Robert Downey Jr. in 2008’s “Tropic Thunder” which the filmmakers did call out on screen was wrong but that was part of the gag.  Yes, I have watched some of those movies where the stars went blackface.  I may be one of the last human beings on the planet to have seen Disney’s “Song of the South”, a film the NAACP protested when it 1st debuted in theaters in [v]  1946 but was still part of the Disney re-release rotation to movie theaters in 1986 when I saw it.  I was entertained as a kid by “Song of the South” and other minstrel show performances in movies and TV shows, but now I feel I need to put on a hairshirt and flagellate myself for laughing along with Brer Rabbit in his laughing place that made many an African American feel miserable. 

So, the more I’ve analyzed this drag performance meme, and drag in general, the more I realized something.    A drag performance is often a chauvinist minstrel show on the same level as those white entertainers who performed in blackface for the minstrel circuit in the late 19th and early 20th century.    Think about it, most men who perform in drag are not going to base their appearance on how I look at 5:30 on a Tuesday morning, my puffy eyes reflecting the 3-5 hours of sleep I shorted myself the night before, my graying dishwater blonde hair very disheveled and gnarly, and my lips looking like they belong on a Peanuts character  rather than on the face of a seductive model in a girlie magazine.  I look this way as I wake up at 5:30 am because in a gesture of love and devotion I make my husband’s lunch before he leaves for work around 6:30 am and I still need to wash up the dinner dishes from the previous night I was too tired to wash before washing myself up, putting on a layer of office appropriate makeup, and leaving for my job after making my lunch and some coffee around 8 am.  Yet, as I stare at myself in the mirror in the early morning hours, I know I am a woman, a real woman with the need to try and fit in with society’s ever changing and often contradictory definition of what a woman is.  A drag artist, on the other hand, goes all glamor in their dresses with over-the-top makeup, false eyelashes, high heels, falsetto voices and bouffant wigs to portray an image of Barbie doll womanhood Barbie herself lamented was impossible for women to live up to in her billion-dollar blockbuster Warner Brothers movie.  On the other side of the drag spectrum some drag performers make every woman look like some slutty grotesque clownish bitch.   I am never that over the top in my glamor as a woman and I hope even when my body is hurting from that time of the month, and I really want to be a bitch I try my best to hold it in. The only time in my life I may go over the top glamor is on a formal occasion like a wedding, or an awards/corporate formal banquet or other significant event and I think this is true of most women nowadays.   

 As much as some conservatives have an irrational fear of a drag performer turning their children trans, I could also see a drag performance being insulting to a transgender woman who at least wants to be a woman with their own puffy eyes and disheveled long hair and Peanuts mouth at 5:30 on a Tuesday morning.   I can even see how drag may be insulting to some gay men who may not want to see a stereotype of them being flagrantly effeminate over the top high heeled sexual fops when just like that gay pride flag homosexuals also come in a rainbow range of personality types.  The closest drag performance as an unglamourous woman might be famous 1980’s Drag star Divine and his performance as Edna Turnblad in the original 1988 “Hairspray” during the at home segments.  However, even Divine was portraying more of a stereotype of a disheveled distraught housewife than what an actual disheveled distraught 1960’s housewife would have looked like.

Let’s look at an image from that drag meme-Robin Williams as “Mrs. Doubtfire” to see what I mean about a drag performance as a chauvinist minstrel show.   I am a huge Robin Williams fan.  You would think I would love Williams’ performance as Mrs. Doubtfire since it’s one of his most iconic movie characters.    Truth is, I’ve never been able to get through an entire viewing of  ”Mrs. Doubtfire” until this blog when I forced myself to watch it to the end.   Robin Williams plays Mrs. Doubtfire as a stereotypical image of what a British nanny would be like instead of the chocolate covered fingerprint stains on their comfortable pants and shoes, I’m sure most nannies (British or otherwise) wear nowadays.   Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire also shows the stereotypical male clueless moments about traditional female chores like cooking where he burns the food and then nearly burns himself. (The irony being that many women chefs are still fighting for equality and respect in a male dominated restaurant industry).  There’s also shoe on other foot moment where a male sexual harasser becomes the victim of sexual harassment as they gain unwanted attention from a man while they are in drag.   There’s the complaint about the shoes and pantihose whose sole purpose is to make a woman more attractive even if it ends up making their bodies very uncomfortable.   No woman really wants to wear pantihose and high heels on a routine basis.  But we feel we have to wear these uncomfortable things because we are judged not by our thoughts and actions but on how attractive we are.     Ultimately, I guess I was mostly turned off watching my beloved Mork from Ork being nasty to my mother’s beloved Remington Steele while they both vie for the love of America’s beloved Gidget as opposed to Williams going effeminate as Mrs. Doubtfire.   So no, I wasn’t that entertained by Robin Williams in drag.

Because this is what I realize many a drag performance is about.   In some ways drag acknowledges some of the impossible standards that women have to face when men change their comfortable loafers for high heels, but at the end of the day a drag artist can remove their makeup and big hair wigs and relax going “Thank god I’m a man” and don’t have to worry about those petty female things on a day-to-day basis.       

There are also times when drag doesn’t work or cannot work.  I know there are also drag kings where women dress as men.   However, a woman’s biology prevents her from coming across as a man.  Her voice will always be higher pitched than a man’s unless she’s managed to down a few dozen East German vitamins[vi] .   Most female drag performers play young boys like how Broadway’s “Peter Pan” is always played by a woman because boys have not undergone puberty and have the higher pitched voice.  Only Julie Andrews as a true female soprano could hit the high notes in “Victor/Victoria”. Even cross dressing has its limits, which is something the members of Monty Python also agreed to.    A classic example is their famous “I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK” song/skit.    The joke wouldn’t have worked if Cleese or Idle wore a dress & bra looking like their dear mama playing the lumberjack’s best girl.   The other Pythons realized they needed the skills of an actual actress hence the need of the 7th Python-Carol Cleveland.   She appeared in 33 of the original 45 episodes and per another Netflix documentary[vii] I watched on Monty Python, they fought to keep her because they knew she was the only one who got their absurdist sense of humor such as her overly dramatic reaction to finding out how effeminate her beloved macho lumberjack was.        

 I have not studied philosophy to any type of degree where I can answer a philosophical argument of what is a woman per that Matt Walsh’s documentary of the same name.  I’ll leave that up to Simone de Beauvoir and her book “The Second Sex.”    It’s right up there with whether falling trees make noises in deserted forests.  I’m not a legal expert like supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, for all of the grief that senator must have gotten when he asked her during her US Senate confirmation “What is a Woman”, he knew it was highly probable some harry oaf of an XY Homo Sapin whose urethra and gonads are prominently displayed on the outside of their body would sue a local police department for violating their civil rights when they were arrested for being naked in a locker room primarily meant for XX Homo Sapiens whose urethras and gonads are kept on the inside of their body and whose mammary glands have swelled up as a result of naturally produced estrogen/progesterone around the age of 12 when that harry oaf of an XY Homo Sapin promptly declared “I am a woman” as the police arrested them.     I just know, to use the words of a song I heard as a child a woman is supposed to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, remind our man how much of a man he is and still find enough energy to clean the bacon grease out of the frying pan we fried the bacon we brought home hours before and that is stressful!   I know that I will on some level always be belittled and denied any level of agency or intelligence because I am a woman.  I just know it’s hard to be a woman nowadays and I don’t need some man in drag to belittle that reality by making fun of the concept of womanhood, even if it is very entertaining.   

 

 

 


[vii] Netflix Monty Python Almost the Truth Copyright 2009

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