This. I have been wondering/fuming about this for YEARS.

…one day soon, drag artists will be about as politically acceptable as the Black and White Minstrels are today. Right now, you cannot turn on your TV without being assailed by some hideous gurning goon in a garish dress and ludicrous make-up lampooning the female sex – the BBC, in particular, seems obsessed with drag queens. They are even invited into our schools to disseminate filth masquerading as sex education to kids.

For some reason, a reason hard to comprehend, the objections made about ‘blacking up’ do not apply to drag artists. They are, of course, two sides of the same coin, or perhaps the same side of the coin. Drag artists are not paying homage to women, they are parodying and belittling them for the purposes of humour. They dress in the manner of slappers and tarts, with short skirts and fishnets and vast, bulbous cleavages perpetually on display. Their names are usually a parody, too, of women’s names: they are rarely called Anne or Sarah, but more usually Roxanne or something similar which denotes, somehow, a comedic and perhaps repellent sexual voracity.

The reason isn’t hard to comprehend once you become aware of how deeply ingrained contempt for women is.

The Black and White Minstrels were castigated for being a cruel parody of blackness – and indeed that white make-up around the eyes and the mouth is a little weird and demeaning. But compared to the appearance of the drag queen, the Minstrels were an object lesson in respect and even reverence. With both the drag queens and the notion of ‘blacking up’, it is a case of a tranche within society which has power mocking a tranche within society which does not. That, at least, is the Marxist way of analysing it and it is certainly why nobody blacks up any more.

Marxist? Is that Marxist? It doesn’t sound very Marxist to me.

It’s right though. Men mock women because they can. Men hate women because women are contemptible, or otherwise men wouldn’t mock them. It’s an endless loop.