Mick Hartley

It's not something I've thought about much, the drag scene. Doesn't appeal, so I ignore it. But Camilla Long is spot on here:

What were my feelings as the curtain swept back, revealing Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly in silhouette, all dragged up as Lady Antoinette and Miss Donna Lee? The first was: couldn’t they have thought up better names? Drag names are usually brilliant — Sham Pagne, Courtney Act, Camilla Toe — but these were mediocre. We’d been told that the stars of Saturday Night Takeaway were thrilled to be performing on national television as drag queens to raise money for food banks…

A make-up artist who applied the serious layers of bronzer to Dec’s beak said she’d told him their turn as drag queens would help child drag queens.

“While I was doing Dec’s make up,” she said, “I said to him: ‘When you go out there in drag and do this song on a mainstream stage, it’s going to change so many young queer children’s lives,’ and he totally got it.”

What was it about Dec, 46, clambering around in heels and lashings of highlighter in the manner of an ugly, over-made-up older woman, that she felt would be liberating to gay 10-year-olds? What, did she think, was it about his mocking killer bantam make-up that would make children feel safe and understood by a fellow traveller and not rush straight back into the closet?

Ant and Dec didn’t even look as if they felt safe themselves: they weren’t funny, didn’t look good, can’t dance and have no interest in make-up or wigs. I have no idea, beyond clicks, why they did it.

The show attracted 59 complaints — not many. But there were plenty of people who felt let down the pair used “womanface”, which means men dressing up as a woman in order to mock women under the guise of entertainment. It’s the same as blackface, but more easy to dismiss because it’s about women. Until six months ago I hadn’t even heard of it.

If you’d told me about it when RuPaul’s Drag Race began on British TV screens three years ago, I would have laughed. Drag is harmless, isn’t it? It’s just a load of silly men screaming and throwing wigs at each other, or occasionally turning to camera to tell us a backstory in which their family tried to exorcise the “gay demon” out of them. The most irritating it gets is when Harry Styles dresses up as a girl in order to flirt with older women. But watching Ant and Dec, I’m now not so sure.

For every queer child who feels “changed”, for better or for worse, by seeing two overexposed Geordies flog a charity single in clodding heels, there must be hundreds of little girls watching the hairy, older male stars of a show with eight million viewers horse around in plastic tits and wonder if this is what everyone thinks a woman is.

Did they really need to do this? Did they have any clue how drag comes across to the average woman? Most of my friends say the same: “I hate it.” Watch any episode of Drag Race and you will see that for drag artists, being female carries a narrow and uncomfortable definition.

To them, being a woman is to be in a state that is a perpetual — how shall I put it? — drag. When you aren’t cramming your body into painful shoes or pinching, unpleasant clothes, you must obliterate your unsatisfactory, ugly woman hair. You must scrape it back or pull it out, in order to replace it with fake, better hair, while fending off inevitable bitchy, critical comments from other women, or in this case, other drag queens, because to be a woman is to be slagged off by everyone forever, especially by other women. You must scrawl hideous Aunt Sally make-up over your face — if someone ends up looking too like a normal woman, you call them “fishy”, and it is not a compliment.

It reduces the complex business of being a woman to a pile of cheap rags and cosmetic procedures, even though the reality is that if any woman wore half the make-up used by your average drag queen, she’d probably be stoned before she got to the end of the street.

The Black and White Minstrel Show died of shame over forty years ago – and that didn't even use particularly offensive black caricatures. But here we are, all loving RuPaul's Drag Race….

Update: Dr Em at The Critic – How drag degrades women.