By Laura Ainsworth, Staff writer
October 26, 2022
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I refer specifically to the practice of performing in drag. (Those of us who already find this shockingly offensive are just ahead of our time.) And by “drag,” I’m not talking about the centuries-old contrivance of an actor artfully impersonating a woman…
https://www.imdb.com/name/
...but the cartoonishly in-your-face, exaggerated, hypersexed, slutty drag that is currently in vogue at children’s birthday parties and suburban libraries. As a woman, a biological woman, I find this obscene “gender appropriation” horrifying and grotesque.
I’m not the sort of person who goes around looking for reasons to be offended. It takes a lot to offend me. And I speak as someone who once bought a ticket to a drag show in San Francisco. (It was kind of tawdry and underwhelming, actually; I thought it would be more fun.) I hail from the theatre and cabaret world and can easily imagine myself playing the lead in VICTOR/VICTORIA. But the vulgar stereotype of women being paraded onstage today is in some ways very much like the old theatrical ‘art’ of blackface, as staged with giant ridiculous watermelons and the backdrop of an endless cotton field.
I’ve been putting this type of drag show in the same category as blackface for some time and honestly thought I was alone in doing so. But lately I see that it’s a thing, and is being called by its detractors “womanface.” How did I miss this? Here it is in the Urban Dictionary, where it has been since September of 2020:
https://www.urbandictionary.
To me, though, this term doesn’t fully capture the vulgarity of what this practice does to femaleness. Blackface at least primarily focuses on the face –- which is bad enough –- but these drag performers manage to find find lewd ways to distort and degrade virtually every aspect of the female form. It’s just insulting.
In yesterday’s newsletter, we linked to a piece by Brandon Morse in REDSTATE called “The Rise of Womanface and the Glorification of Mental Illness,” which featured a social media influencer named Dylan Mulvaney who enjoys documenting his/her “girlhood” online. (It’s a gross caricature; no actual girl I’ve ever met is nearly this frivolous.) This is the person whose popularity on TikTok got him featured in an interview video by cosmetics superstore Ulta and even led to an invitation to the White House to meet President Biden, who apparently has solved all the nation’s problems related to crime, the border, inflation, the supply chain, China, the war in Ukraine and so much else that you’d think would’ve taken precedence.
The Ulta promotion featuring Mulvaney did not go over well, to say the least. The trans community might “buy a lot of product,” as someone in the industry laughingly told me, but they can’t make up for the loss of business Ulta will suffer for pushing this on its increasingly irritated female clientele.
It’s time to stand up to this oppression. No one gets to tell me how to think or speak on this or any other issue. Mulvaney calls women who accuse him of gender appropriation “transphobes,” but he’s got it wrong. If I were afraid of transgender people or transgenderism, I WOULDN’T be speaking up. The real transphobes are the ones going along. And calling me names like “transphobe” while accusing ME of bigotry and hate doesn’t make any sense –- it just calls attention to his own biases.
Here’s what Morse had to say about “womanface”: “It’s the comparison to the very frowned upon ‘blackface’ that the left will selectively cancel people over depending on where they are on the political spectrum. The only difference between womanface and blackface is that one concerns race and the other concerns gender. They’re both a mockery of the thing they’re acting as, but...one is a social faux pas, and the other is encouraged to the point of being a protected identity.”
He also said this: “Like a small napkin over a massive pile of garbage, ‘womanface’ advocates like Mulvaney are being used as a pleasant and seemingly harmless front to cover a highly dangerous and quickly spreading mind virus that is killing our society. It has every intention to normalize itself in today’s youth and, sadly, is making a lot of progress...Mulvaney represents something incredibly toxic to both society and the individual. He is attempting to normalize a sickness that could disrupt society’s understanding of basic nature and the natural order and do serious harm to those who buy into the delusion.”
Here’s a good commentary on the White House’s silly pandering to Mulvaney and other TikTok influencers. We learn from this that Mulvaney has become quite the celebrity and was even invited to speak at the Forbes “Power Women’s Summit.” He wore a cute little midriff top.
It seems that once again, the left wants to have it both ways. Feminism taught us that stereotypical behavior such as playing dress-up and styling Barbie’s hair had nothing to do with biological gender. Having different toys for boys and girls was seen as societally wrong; toy departments even tried to mix it up. But in 2022, if a boy gravitates towards “female” gender stereotypes, it must mean he’s not a boy at all but, “deep down,” forever and always, a girl. Which is it?
One thing that’s true of a lot of (real) women, myself included: We tend to be the pleasers, the accommodators, the ones who try to go along, to smooth things over --- until it gets to be too much, and then we finally just boil over. It’s clear in this case that we’ve been shoved to the back of the bus in favor of particularly loud identity groups. And we’re being lectured to about how we’re supposed to feel about it. But there’s one thing that every (real) man knows from experience: NEVER tell a woman how she’s supposed to feel.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2022/10/ainsworth-on-gender-appropriation-the-new-blackface
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