This is hardly a serious post, more of a rant at something I dislike really, and what I dislike is hardly relevant…
It’s hard to avoid them on TV these days, they seem to even be on gameshows in character now, I’m referring to Drag Queens. The DQ is not a trans person, they are not trying to be accepted as a woman, but accepted as the bad facsimile. Therefore I have so much less respect for them than the aforementioned, who is trying to be what they feel they should have been in the first place. Not that I agree they are or ever could be, just that I recognise that they genuinely admire and wish to be the real woman, not to send them up. What these guys are is the semblance of what one might describe as all the very least admirable traits a woman could possess, combined with a few that women only seem to possess when portrayed by men in a comedic way. When Terry Jones dressed as a woman for a Monty Python sketch it was for the sake of comedy, the character was comedic, when a dame does it in panto it is comedic and ridiculous, when a Drag Queen does it that’s only a small part of the overall desired effect. Mostly it’s shock value, the willingness of the male to play the female role as a sendup of the traits most easily identified as solely womanly. But in many ways this is a form of oppression (bear with me).
These traits are the ones that, in a general sense, are seen traditionally as excluding real women from holding important positions and being taken seriously. If we take Karen from The Apprentice (TV Show) as an example of the seriously taken woman, or maybe Harriet Harmon (politician, oft leader of the Labour Party), these women may posses the mannerisms and mechanisms that the DQ expresses so vividly, but do not bring them to the fore readily lest they be thought as irrational, emotional, bitchy, or overly self absorbed. These are the facets I’m referring to, and the DQ puts them at the front on steroids and then some. Every disqualifying statement a misogynist male could make about a female, when trying to qualify why they should not be allowed by a male society to occupy a position of power, is in the playbook of the DQ.
Our DQ accentuates the difficult high healed walk, the hips, the talk, the attitude, look, the self love, the overconfidence, of the trashy loud mouthed, and likely quite inebriated, female that in the estate everyone dreads to see emerging from their doorway. The DQ is acting like the dodgy mother of your pal that flirts with you when you call round from school, saturated with gin and trying desperately to deny the damage of the years, the cigarettes, and a litany of bad life decisions. He is a greatest hits of non comedy, a comedian that needs a uniform and a persona to become, not funny, but a grotesque in the same ilk as the bearded lady or the spider boy from the travelling shows of old. The DQ is the modern version of the freak, shocking and in your face.
Women love them, they love the show, gay men love them too, and even some straight ones do too, but I think they deal the cause of women to be a serious force in the world a great blow. Just my thoughts though…
pinkfloydpsw's Blog 
Leave a comment