The Male and Female Gaze

[Gangster Octopus]

Yeah, that's what confused me.

[ursus arctos]

The sad bit is that I can quite easily think of "arguments" for each of the possibilities

[Hot Pepsi]

Drag makes no sense to me. I don’t have a problem with it, of course. I just don’t get the aesthetic.

I don’t know if the performers are trying to look like women or trying to challenge the ideas of what man looks like or both. That’s all fine but I’m not sure why they’d want to go to so much trouble to do that. It seems like a hell of a lot of work.

It’s definitely popular, though. Even State College has a drag scene.

[Amor de Cosmos]

It's also got an incredibly long history.

[ursus arctos]

And close to universality

[Balderdasha]

Yeah, even Chongqing had a monthly drag night.

[laverte]

I'm sorry, but was it the teenage or ninja bit that was objectionable?

Or were Renaissance artists suspect due to their sexuality or otherwise?

That's a good point. It was a good old-fashioned scare story covering every possible angle:

A concern about the glorification of martial arts weaponry and the moral panic over the ‘ninja craze’ led to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being renamed the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles when it debuted on BBC1 in January 1990. Most of the media commentary over the course of the year was about ‘Turtlemania’ and the merchandise being sold to kids, but some newspapers warned about the bad influence that the Hero Turtles were having on British children.

The Daily Mail published a story of a four year old who ‘nearly bled to death after karate-kicking a glass door as he mimicked his television heroes in the Ninja Turtle cartoon cult’. Over at the Daily Telegraph, Victoria Mather claimed that ‘youngsters have been rescued from the sewers where they have been either seeking their scaly heroes or the necessary rat and user-friendly patch of radiation to turn themselves into pizza-powered warriors’.

The Daily Express reported that ‘a nationwide warning to children about the dangers of imitating the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles’ was issued the government’s Health and Safety Executive, concerning children playing in the sewers. An appeal was to be made on Going Live by Philip Schofield and Sarah Greene. The same newspaper also ran a story warning children not to binge on pizza like the Turtles, quoting a doctor who said ‘Eating junk food is going to turn the kids into aggressive echoes of the turtles’.

Following on from the success of the TV show, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was released in Britain in the lead-up to Christmas in 1990. Unlike the cartoon on the BBC, the film kept the original name, but according to the BBFC was ‘shorn of all flails in action and all but the most subliminal glimpses at rest’.

James Ferman, still at the helm of the BBFC, called for significant cuts to the film, and as reported in The Guardian, this led to a ‘lively debate’ among the Board’s film examiners, with one examiner saying that his nephews felt ‘the film had been ruined’ by the cuts. These kind of cuts also impacted in the TMNT sequel, The Secret of the Ooze, with scenes of Michelangelo using sausages in a nunchuck-style manner excised from the UK release.

http://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/when...el-the-turtles

[Satchmo Distel]

Drag makes no sense to me. I don’t have a problem with it, of course. I just don’t get the aesthetic.

I don’t know if the performers are trying to look like women or trying to challenge the ideas of what man looks like or both. That’s all fine but I’m not sure why they’d want to go to so much trouble to do that. It seems like a hell of a lot of work.

It’s definitely popular, though. Even State College has a drag scene.

I don't think drag by biological males is a gender identity. It's a way for gay men to get attention from heterosexual men and (depending on the explicitness of the show) interacting with heterosexual men in a seductive way (I've seen a show where one pretends to give a guy a blow job - while his girlfriend is sitting there next to him). They identify as men in every case of which I'm aware.

I don't have enough knowledge of biological females doing drag. I'm aware, however, that language around masculine females is changing and the terms of just 15-20 years ago are changing (such that Halberstam's 'Female Masculinity' (1998) is now massively out of date, as he has acknowledged). The boundaries are in flux and I'd need to be immersed in the culture to keep up.

[MsD]

I think it’s developed into a culture that goes way beyond that, but I’m not the expert.

[MsD]

There’s an article / interview here with Jonny Woo (who based a whole show around my lovely landlady at one point) as he’s quite insightful; I’m sure there are academic papers on the subject but I can’t be bothered digging for them just now.

https://www.timeout.com/london/night...-scene-profile

[Satchmo Distel]

I think it’s developed into a culture that goes way beyond that, but I’m not the expert.

I'm sure that's true too but the old forms are still there. It's definitely highly erotic in Key West, but that's a very specific "anything goes" location. Drag venues get a lot more police hassle in Tampa, for example.

[MsD]

[Hot Pepsi]

I don't think drag by biological males is a gender identity. It's a way for gay men to get attention from heterosexual men and (depending on the explicitness of the show) interacting with heterosexual men in a seductive way (I've seen a show where one pretends to give a guy a blow job - while his girlfriend is sitting there next to him). They identify as men in every case of which I'm aware.

I don't have enough knowledge of biological females doing drag. I'm aware, however, that language around masculine females is changing and the terms of just 15-20 years ago are changing (such that Halberstam's 'Female Masculinity' (1998) is now massively out of date, as he has acknowledged). The boundaries are in flux and I'd need to be immersed in the culture to keep up.

Are many heterosexual men into drag shows? Never once in my life has anyone in my life suggested going to a drag show as an evening's entertainment and the only people I know who are into it are LGBTQ+ and even then, it seems to mainly be because their friends are are in the show.

As that quote MsD cites mentions, it can veer into misogyny, I think. That's always bothered me a bit.

[Satchmo Distel]

Yes, I agree, and also racism (I once saw a Tina Turner pastiche that was in that realm).

[scratchmonkey]

Bumping this thread back up to the front as I've just read an article that may be of interest to some and to MsD in particular (apologies if you've seen it already):

https://garage.vice.com/en_us/articl...wigs-interview

[MsD]

I hadn’t seen it, thanks. I love the B52s.

[scratchmonkey]

Also quite enjoy them. That picture of them at the top of the article is utterly fantastic.

The bit that particularly spoke to me was talking about how their fashion was inspired in part by the 60s Italian styles that were prominent in Fellini films, in particular the oversize and exaggerated elements, which I think ties into the almost-throwaway line in the article about how their fashion was also inspired by drag, which in itself is a kind of exaggeration, a hyper-femininity. John Waters and Pee-Wee Herman pop out to me as other people using these visually over-the-top fashions in their work to create the mood that they want.

(I don't have a lot of experience with fashion or visual design in general, so there may be a term for this kind of specific approach -- I do have a friend who has a PhD in Architectural History who specialized in "hyper-real" architecture, that is to say, architecture that is designed to evoke something by appearing in a similar form that is over-emphasized to a degree that it is completely unrealistic. The classic example that he gave of hyper-real architecture is Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland (which is of course features centrally in much of Disney's branding) which, although it evokes the style of some Bavarian castles, makes absolutely no sense from a historical perspective of castle design and doesn't really function as a space to be inhabited at all, because its entire purpose is to make you think "CASTLE".)

[MsD]

Yes, the other element is camp, which is a whole subject in itself.
I’m off to sleep and have been working on a research report otherwise I’d want to discuss more, but that is very interesting.

[Balderdasha]

I don't tend to experience as much everyday sexism and misogyny these days. This is for multiple reasons. I'm older, leave my house less frequently due to the pandemic and working from home, go out less at night due to life stage, and when I do leave I'm usually accompanied by my children, which deters some of the worst offenders.

Sadly it does not deter all of them. Yesterday, I took my kids to the swimming pool for their lessons. It was baking hot so I was wearing denim shorts, a blue sleeveless top and sandals. The outside pool has just opened to all swimmers. As I frogmarched my children into the pool entrance door (holding them by the hand, so it was 100% obvious that they were mine) a group of about five or six drunken, pasty yet sunburnt men came out of the other door. They caught sight of me (and it must have been me, there was no-one else there), cheered and yelled in chorus "What a day! What a pair!" while leering at my chest. From the lyrical way they yelled in unison, I got the impression that they had been yelling exactly the same thing at any unfortunate female in swim gear or summer clothing for several hours previously. If I was alone, I would have challenged them and probably got into a huge ruckus. But with children in tow and only two minutes to go until the start of swimming lessons, the only option was to not escalate things. I ignored them and just walked past.

But it made me very angry. Why does anyone think that this is any sort of way to act, especially in public and around children? I mean, my kids were so focussed on getting to swimming that they didn't even notice, but that's not the point.

[lambers]

It is sad, but unfortunately taught.

This has brought back memories of a trip my youth football team took to a tournament in Torquay, when I was around 12. The boys were being driven in a minibus by one of the dads, the only other adult in the vehicle was their brother in law (also a dad to one of the players).The other adults, all male, including the manager, were in a car convoy behind.

Now the scene is set, I'll get to the point. That is, the two bus "adults" felt it necessary to point out nearly every female we passed, particularly any that were larger than average with "she's a big old bird!", promoting a response the boys were encouraged to repeat of, "who's that then?", answered by, "that pterodactyl!". I feel horrid typing that out, but in this case accuracy is needed.

I remember thinking it very odd at the time, but felt impelled to join in with the group. Luckily my dad and other older males that I regularly saw elsewhere never reinforced the behaviour and I later recognised it as the horrible misogyny that it was/is.

[Nefertiti2]

Thanks for sharing Lambers

his on attitudes to sex from privately educated young men suggests what toxic influences they have been exposed to

https://twitter.com/lottelydia/status/1418101149304037377?s=20

They should really be subject to some kind of reeducation or questionnaire before they are allowed to enter universities or other spaces with mxied genders and ethnicities