The President of [West] Texas A&M has just manfully stepped up to declare in public that drag shows “degrade women and are ‘derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.’” This has prompted the predictable storm of manufactured gayfake outrage from the Commies, which he must have known would be sure to follow his remarks.
Now, while his courageous act is extraordinarily unusual these days in any figure of prominence, the most remarkable aspect of this turn of events is I think that *it had never before occurred to anyone that, in effect, drag shows treat women the way that the old blackface vaudeville productions treated blacks: with contempt.* This had not even occurred to me, and I wager that I am fairly unusual in my extreme sensitivity to and morose cynical enjoyment of the manifest and absurd contradictions espoused by the Left (whatever the character of its current skin suit).
For white men to make themselves up as black in public performances is bad, horrible, a sin that cannot be forgiven. But for men to make themselves up as women in public performances is totally cool.
So funny.
The Orthosphere 
Has anyone invited him to write for the Orthosphere yet?
I once read a scathing liberal-against-liberal attack on trans that described it as “men thinking they can be better women than women” and that “plastic breasts and dresses do not a woman make”. These same arguments apply to drag. Though for some reason I think the dragface practicioners enjoy the…discongruity? of their appearance. That’s why many of them have beards. They have to remind everyone that they are in fact men dressed as women. If they looked convincingly feminine it wouldn’t have the same effect.
It probably wouldn’t be prudent for him to touch us with a ten foot pole. Not, at least, until he retires.
But, in any case, he is in all likelihood – like almost all people with normal perspectives on things – in many respects a liberal, from his mother’s knee, and thus without realizing it. Most of what we say here cannot but appall most such people. Until they get to thinking, that is.
Thus, e.g., I would not be surprised if he thought (without ever having thought about it much) that gay marriage is perfectly reasonable, or that climate change is an existential threat to life on Earth.
The suggestion was mostly tongue-in-cheek, although the thought of an Orthospherian society of disaffected Texas A&M employees amuses me.
It really is funny how the reactionary worldview lies orthogonally to the American political tapestry. Rightists and leftists of both kinds are outraged for different reasons.
Yes, the poor man is in enough hot water as it is, and probably is reaching for allies. Here he would find sympathizers but far fewer allies than he could hope for.
I bet there are a fair number of senior people at institutions like Texas A&M, chthonic and normal liberals whether of the Old Left (or even of the New Right, of Second Wave Feminism, of Second Wave environmentalism, and so forth) or the Right, who are finding themselves left behind – indeed, horrified, stunned – by the currents of the latter day woke “new normal.” Their sort might be for our sort a promising mission field. Millions of minds are being cracked a bit more open with each passing day. Consider, e.g., how the mind of Tucker Carlson – a WASP Episcopalian of the old school – has been overturned, exploded and awakened by the events of the last few years. He is still convinced of the justice of the American Experiment … just barely. But, so was I back in 2011. At this point, he’s only one or two red pills away from conversion to full blown reaction.
It all depends on the context. In South Pacific (1958 film, 1949 stage musical), the sailors dress up in drag to make light of the absence of “dames.” The literalists who don’t understand variability of meaning based on context paint it with a broad brush and condemn it all.
I’ve thought that for many years, but I’m not the president of anything.
When you said the Texas A&M president was “he,” I feared you might be dead-naming the president of this Texas A&M president who presents as “she.” But now I see that that was West Texas A&M, whereas this is Woke Texas A&M. We’re totally down with drag shows here in “draggieland.” But minstrel shows, no. Nor do we approve of men who wade into marshes and imitate the call of a duck.
Make them eat their own dog food! They cringe and lash out. Hilarity ensues.
I have to say this was one of the strongest arguments I’ve seen from you, in the sense that I can axiomatically know you are wrong, but I would have a hard time defending this inconsistency.
Also, I’ve vowed to not get sucked into these discussions. So I asked ChatGPT to weigh in. You can argue with it if you want:
ChatGPT begs the question. It says no more in the final analysis than that black face is bad because it is bad, while dragface is good because it is good. It takes oppression as such to be axiomatically evil, e.g., when obviously oppression of evil is good. Duh.
Dude: the notion of – and, a fortiori, the celebration of – gender diversity *just is* a mockery both of femininity and of masculinity. If gender diversity is real, then masculinity and femininity are not.
Which makes no sense to begin with, because one can’t obtain diversity among categories that are not in the first place categorical. If masculinity and femininity are not true properties of reals, then it is not possible to be masculine, feminine, or any combination thereof. Gender diversity presupposes and supervenes masculine and feminine genders qua real, true, objective differences between things.
Obviously, ChatGPT is not *thinking.* It is not parsing distinctions, or drawing equivalences. Such operations are possible only on meanings, and meanings are just what ChatGPT cannot … what’s the right term … operate upon. ChatGPT can operate only upon adjacency of character strings, whatever those character strings might – or might not – mean.
I grant that blackface was a tool of oppression. The difficulty for the coherence of your perspective – one can’t quite properly call it the perspective of ChatGPT – is that, while your sort don’t think of drag as oppressive, my sort does. The message of drag is, “you must accept homosexuality as normal and healthy, and allow us to promote it in kindergartens, so that your kids think it’s OK, and more of them grow up gay.” This is homologous to the message of blackface: “It’s OK, and fun, to make fun of blacks qua blacks, and only an uptight moralistic fool would think otherwise.” As blackface mocked both blacks and their apologists, so dragface mocks both normal heterosexuals – who feel disgust at homosexuality, transsexuality, and so forth – and their apologists among evolutionary biologists and realists.
Maybe the reason that you are having a hard time figuring out how to explain that I am wrong, even though you feel sure that I am, is that in some ways you are like ChatGPT: spitting out word salad to which you have been exposed, without really understanding what it signifies.
If you can’t see that drag is disrespectful to women, I am afraid I can’t help you, any more than I could help a tone deaf man hear the difference between a fifth and a third. Or, take another example:
You probably can’t see that these guys were honoring the noble ancient Indian foes of their forefathers and invoking their canny bravery to inspire and encourage them in the fight to come, either, am I right?
Would ChatGPT understand why white football players would want to call their team the Redskins – or, for that matter, the Vikings? No, of course not. It would not understand anything, because understanding is more than reiterated recombinations of character strings.
I recently wrote an inconclusive post on the perils of ridicule, but I will generally say that forbidding laughter at the expense of any group is a bad thing. The knowledge that I (we) can be ridiculed acts as a check on me (we) doing ridiculous things. I think our sacralization of Blacks has generally been bad for Blacks in an emperor’s-new-clothes kind of way. Take the Black droopy-drawers, let-your-butt-hang-out-style. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if that had been met with ridicule? But since Blacks are sacred we are given solemn lectures that the beltless look is our fault because of mass incarceration, its their culture, boxer shorts are colorful, etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile, a million more whites silently conclude that Blacks really are from another planet.
Ridicule can be misplaced, cruel, or in bad taste, but every person, class, race, and lifestyle community is improved by the possibility and actuality of mockery. Comedy is criticism and criticism is good.
I think we should recognize two very different types of drag show. In the first type of drag show, heterosexual men dress in women’s clothes and make fun of women. Think Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot. This could be cruel, but it could also be good-natured and beneficial as a check on the foibles and extravagances of women. In the second type of drag show, transexual men act out the sexual fantasy that they are women. They are not trying to be funny, they are trying to be sexy. They are trying to arouse erotic desire in men.
The poor president of West Texas A&M is stuck in a liberal moral frame where acts are objectionable because they disrespect a sacralized group. The real objection to drag shows (type two) is that they celebrate and foster a gross sexual perversion. The young men on the stage need help, not applause and catcalls. The young men in the audience should not be toying with the question, “Would it be hot to sleep with that shemale on the stage?” A drag show (type two) is not men mocking hoochy koochy dancers, it is men doing a hoochy koochy dance for other men. Sodomy on stage, in short.
Now that is a penetrating analysis, chock full of careful, fruitful distinctions.
NB that in drag show type 1, the performers are actually making fun *of themselves.* When we laugh at Some Like It Hot, it isn’t because we think women are ridiculous (even though they are of course in some ways ridiculous, as are men), but rather because we think Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon – and the pickle they’ve gotten themselves into, and the way they’ve dealt with it – are ridiculous.
In drag show type 2, the whole point of the exercise is to suggest that it is actually kind of cool for men to pretend to be women (or, by extension, vice versa). With drag queen story hour, the next step, implicit in the stage show, is explicitly taken: it suggests that we ought to take men who dress up as women *seriously,* as role models for our young children. Transsexualism takes the next step after that.
Did you just call ChatGPT “Dude”? Because I haven’t expressed any opinions of my own in this thread, so far.
But I basically agree with it. Drag shows and blackface shows may have some formal similarities but they aren’t the same thing, they have different social, cultural, and political contexts and meanings, which is why they aren’t treated the same. In particular, drag shows are part of a widespread and cross-cultural phenomenon where biological men perform as women, from Shakespearean actors to the Zuni lhamana.
Also should note that while I am in general a skeptic about the intelligence of LLMs, the more you lot disbelieve, the more credence I give it.
Dude, you wouldn’t have posted the ChatGPT reply if it hadn’t expressed your opinion. So I was calling you Dude on account of your buying its “argument.”
Minstrel shows and drag queen shows are different, in many respects – obviously. But they are alike in their mockery of the sorts of people they caricature, and the contempt implicit therein.
What’s an LLM?
JMSmith…
With all due respect, calling these males desiring to be women “men” is its own kind of subversion.
Degeneracy is most apparent when you remind people of the telos from which the degenerate has fallen short. The fall of Adam did not remove Adam’s manhood. It just perverted it.
Well JMSmith… There must be an aspect of “degeneracy” which includes the purposeful destruction of “manhood.” And when this destruction manifests itself in the expression of a male desiring to be a “woman,” for traditionalists, conservatives, the right, etc. to clap back, “No, no… He is really a MAN,” just seems like its own kind of subversion of men and manhood.
LLMs are large language models, of which ChatGPT is an example.
The point was that your interpretation of drag (that it expresses contempt for women) is perhaps plausible, but it’s far from the only possible interpretation or motivation. I doubt it is the dominant one, but what do I know. You could ask some practitioners but somehow I don’t think you are really interested in understanding their motivations.
I’ve never given much thought to drag, but it seems to me that it is not about contempt for women, but about subversion of traditional gender roles. The contempt, if it is there, is for the rigid stereotypes that we are expected to conform to.
People like you, who value normativity above all else, are quite right to see it as a danger. It is indeed an attack on the very basic foundations of culture. Well, not an attack exactly, the foundations have already crumbled, it is more like an attempt to deal with that fact, just as the rightwing efforts to restore old-fashioned masculinity or forge new forms of it are attempts.
I grant that drag can have many motivations or intentions other than contempt of women, jumbled together. Almost all human action is muddled that way. Indeed, I grant even that drag performers are probably not conscious of any intent to degrade women (my impression of gay men is that, while they find women sexually uninteresting, they get a huge kick out of femininity, and are often quite fond of women, and enjoy them). They would seem rather to think that the main point of drag shows is, as you say, to challenge – by degrading – sexual norms established in culture, and derived from – and ordered to – the biological realities of sex.
My point is that the subversion of sex roles *just is* degradation of women qua women, willy nilly (and ergo likewise of men qua men); for, subversion of sex roles is vitiation of the sexual dimorphism that characterizes all the mammals, and upon which the propagation of our species depends. When traditional sex roles are deprecated, women have a harder time figuring out how to act as women – and, in particular, how to act toward men, and in respect to their notions about the best way for women to live. To undermine femininity is to undermine women, and so to hurt them.
So, while drag performers might not intend to propagate denigration of women, that is indeed what they are actually doing. That denigration cannot but be a factor of the soaring rates of loneliness, childlessness, depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation among women.
When traditional sex roles are deprecated, women have a harder time figuring out how to act as women
Female = Large gametes
Male = Small gametes
This holds true throughout nature. Everything else is socially conditioned.
When traditional sex roles are deprecated, it is easier to impose the non-traditional sex roles preferred by Satan.
Precisely – It is a deconstruction of femininity.
Rather like a house fire deconstructs conventional notions of a domicile.
That was a surprisingly reasonable reply.
Well, beg to differ. Sexual dimorphism is one thing, sexual roles are something else. They have a shared history, of course. The different social and economic roles played by men and women were tied to their biological differences, over millenia of history. But we live in an era where biology is less important. It doesn’t matter what genes or genitals you have to do the job of a computer programmer or a financial advisor.
Are you saying drag shows are an important factor in the psychological problems of women? Doesn’t seem likely. More likely, both are symptoms of an underlying cause. It’s modernism and capitalism and technology that have subverted gender roles, just as they break down all traditions. The drag performers are a symptom, not a cause.
Likewise! Thanks, a.morphous.
That’s what lots of people blithely thought, once upon a time. The notion hasn’t worked out very well as carried into practice: women are miserable these days, much more than they used to be. So are men. Kids, too.
To say that biology is less important than it used to be is to beg the very question at issue, no? There are lots of good female coders and financial advisors, to be sure; lots more of them than there are female electricians, linemen, plumbers, truckers, and so forth. But more men are good at those professions than women; and women are less interested in them than men.
No, I’m saying that they are a factor in the psychological problems of women; they are one among many ways that modern culture denigrates womanhood, and tries to get women to act more like men.
We agree, except about capitalism; we haven’t been a predominantly capitalist country for a long time now. Indeed, since about 1913 we’ve been more and more anticapitalist, more and more statist; capital has more and more come under the control of the state, and vice versa; both the Big State and Big Business are interested in deleting all social organisms other than themselves (and each other – such is their symbiosis), so that all of us are rendered social atoms, entirely dependent upon them, and so beholden to them.
I would add that symptoms can themselves be causes. My vertigo might be caused by a disorder of my inner ear; but it can itself cause me to fall and break a collarbone.
women are miserable these days, much more than they used to be
Really? Freud’s clinical profiles of his women patients (and most were women) repay study
Freud was an author of fiction and he stole his women from Ibsen.
One such motivation for “drag” was/is in the elevation of “black” males over white females in the Affirmative Action hierarchy.
Kristor…
How is “gay men” not an explicit subversion of the sex roles?
Can a man really be sexually attracted to boys and still be considered a man?
I see what you are driving at, and cannot but agree that homosexuality is a defect of manhood that goes to the root thereof. But men are and remain essentially men, whatever their defects. This is why they can end up in Hell, and deserve it.
Drag has always been a deconstruction of femininity.
One sees this done in a light-hearted way in the English Pantomime tradition, where the rôle of the Pantomime Dame, typically a sharp-tongued, matronly character, is always taken by a man. Conversely, the Principal Boy (the hero) is always played by a woman (in tights).
Nice connection, Kristor.
I don’t know anything about the history of blackface minstrelsy: so I question whether it really was meant to be dehumanizing towards blacks and a means of showing contempt for them. Or was it just a way to poke generally harmless fun at a group, similar to how comedians in the recent past would joke about the foibles of various ethnic groups? Perhaps both.
At any rate, the reason blackface is offensive now is not because of its association with minstrelsy in the distant past (no one except for historians even knows anything about that anyway), but because the media tells us that it is offensive. It’s the same reason that the erstwhile nickname for Cleveland’s major league ball club is offensive: because the media has decreed that it is. Turner Movie Classics was showing Orson Welles’s Othello some time last year, and the host in introducing the movie felt compelled to warn viewers that Welles played Othello in brownface as was “unfortunately typically done in that era.” But obviously there was no motivation on Welles’s part to dehumanize or pour contempt on the Moors by donning brownface.
That’s not to say that things cannot be legitimately offensive because of certain associations with how it was used in the past, but in this case, it seems that connection would have been entirely lost were it not for the media making sure we were aware of it. And now, it’s not that blackface is wrong only when it is done to mock blacks, which might make some sense, but blackface is intrinsically wrong, so that even if a child wanted to dress up for Halloween as some famous black athlete he admired, say, it would still be an example of racism beyond the pale.
I wonder whether the Turner Classic Movie moderator would feel the need to insert a trigger warning before a screening of Tropic Thunder, with Robert Downey Jr. doing a classic minstrel show blackface schtick all the way through – brilliantly, hilariously. It’s OK for some sorts of people to say the N word in some contexts, and for other sorts of people it is absolutely verboten at all times. The inconsistency is risible.
I suppose it comes along with the fact that since early on, America was not a nation, but rather only a territory of many nations jumbled together in close proximity and governed by a civil order (administered for many decades mostly by the nation of the Founders). If we had never allowed immigration other than from Northwestern Europe, it would be different. Consider that it is safe – correction, was safe – and indeed unremarkable for the British to consider amongst themselves that the wogs began at Calais, and that there are out beyond the Channel nothing but wogs. But once you mix the wogs in with the British within the British Isles, why then one can’t blithely say anything at all about any people at all; one must forever guard one’s tongue.
Ain’t diversity great?
I agree, but I wonder if statism is a natural offshoot of Capitalism? If we imagine a perfectly unregulated society, then government is just another kind of “corporation” and it is natural for every kind of corporation to be in mutual competition until one (or two) take a dominant position. Whether it is Standard Oil or America, Inc, everyone is competing for capital and seeking to control a preponderance of it for their own self interest.
Capitalism is a kind of economic natural selection, where economic might makes economic right. Capitalism–like most ideologies or worldviews–need to be informed by something else to ensure good or moral outcomes.
This is where integralism comes in, but if we take a wider definition of integralism that our ideologies and worldviews must be informed by some moral system not necessarily the Catholic one, then Statism just is such an integralist system. One aspect of modernity is the belief that Government drives and defines morality. Why wouldn’t moderns have a lot of trust in a Statist system as a result?
They would. But I’m not sure the modern age is different in that respect; in any age, most people are fairly anxious to find out what most people believe, and then believe it themselves. People want to fit in. And likewise, most people are anxious to ascertain where social authority lies, and get on its good side.
As to your first question, I would answer that statism is one of the sorts of defects to which societies in general are perennially prone. Healthy societies are subsidiaritan. Sick societies tend to fall away from subsidiarity and toward centralized control – i.e., toward tyranny, and adaptive lock up, thus fragility. The cultural fragility of the West right now is a manifestation of that. So much of our public discourse is carried on under terms that have only the most tenuous connection to reality – under the terms of fantastic pretenses (viz., transsexuality) – that we are due for (indeed, may already be in the midst of) a major comeuppance, a rude awakening, and (one may hope) a course correction.
Finally, I would agree that societies are integralist by nature, except when their First Principles are in flux – except, i.e., when they are more or less disintegrated. The First Principles of the West have been in flux since 1517. Before that date, almost everyone in the West took it for granted that, while the state and the church were separately governed, the former was in the final analysis and at bottom regulated by the latter. Thus the modern period that began in the 16th century is a time of social disintegration.
while the state and the church were separately governed, the former was in the final analysis and at bottom regulated by the latter
That is by no means clear, as witness the long quarrels between Empire and Papacy over precisely that issue and the Guelph and Ghibelline factions in Italy.
The whole issue around “Divine Right” was the independence of the state from ecclesiastical control and focused on the denial of the Pope’s power to depose a sovereign or to dispense his subjects from their allegiance. Similarly, in France, both Royal and Ecclesiastical Gallicanism asserted that “(1) sovereigns are not subject to any ecclesiastical dominion in things temporal; (2) they cannot be deposed, whether directly or indirectly, by the authority of the rulers of the Church, (3) their subjects cannot be dispensed from that submission and obedience which they owe, or (4) absolved from the oath of allegiance.”
In England, we find the statute of Provisors & Præmunire 1392, (16 Ric 2 c 5), regarding Church appointments:
The prevailing legal opinion was that the King is supreme (1) over all persons and (2) in all causes, ecclesiastical or temporal.
This was indeed as things turned out the prevailing legal opinion in the secular courts of law – which is to say, ultimately, in the courts of the kings. But those opinions would have been otiose, so that it would never have occurred to anyone that there was any reason to formulate and promulgate them, were it not for the fact that the Pope and the Church hierarchy loyal to him had a different opinion, prior thereto, and discomfortable to the kings, which had great traction upon the minds of men, and therefore great effect upon the legitimacy of royal sovereignty – and which now and then prevailed, so that kings were from time to time deposed by the Pope, and complaints about them could be lodged in the courts of the Vatican.
The ICC tries to do the same thing these days, with not dissimilar results. After all, how many legions has the ICC?
The Vatican had an easier time of enforcing its ukases upon kings when kings relied for their rule upon the fealty of their vassals, and maintained no standing armies of their own (and levied few taxes directly upon any but the subjects of their own personal domains, instead delegating that function to their vassals). If the Pope ruled against you and excommunicated you, and your dukes and earls began to worry that if they stuck with you they might be following you to Hell, why then suddenly your regnance got a lot less secure. Your vassals might begin to wonder whether or not your levies upon them – your wars, and your palaces – were just and prudent altogether; might begin to wonder whether the Pope had a good point.
Indeed, if things had gotten so out of hand that the Vatican had even begun to pay attention, they must have been already pretty dicey, and the vassals might already have been looking over their shoulders – and down the subsidiaritan hierarchy at their own vassals – and begun to wonder where their advantage, and justice, truly lay.
When his knights killed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry II knew he and his whole realm were in mortal peril, and to salve it, he submitted to having himself (according to William of Newburgh) “flogged, first five strokes of the whip from each of the prelates present [before Becket’s tomb], and then three lashes from each of the 80 monks.” His predicament was not merely temporal.
Such censures were effective, when the monarch already faced internal opposition – Henry IV and the German princes, King John and the barons.
Otherwise, they tended to be a brutum fulmen
As late as 1829, the oath prescribed by the Roman Catholic Relief Act (10 Geo4 c 7) included,
Old suspicions die hard
One aspect of modernity is the belief that Government drives and defines morality.
Is this a modern idea?
We find Ulpian (170-228), who flourished under Hadrian, writing, Iuris praecepta sunt haec: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere. ( Dig. 1.1.10.1 Ulpianus 1 reg.) – These are the precepts of the law: to live uprightly, not to harm another and to give to each his own.
The laws of Solon in Athens and Lycurgus in Sparta were similarly regarded. Thus, we find Socrates in the Crito imagining the Laws of Athens saying,
It is, perhaps, true that the notion of the General Will reinforced this: the government was seen as the appointee and agent of the people and its actions as the consummated result of their own organized wishes.
Once you actually raise children, you realize the government is no help at all. Neither is the Church, for that matter. Mostly useless, sometimes pernicious.
The Athenian laws were the inception of democracy, which is a flavor of liberalism. Liberalism requires the state and not the individual to be the arbiter of morality. This may not be modern in the sense of “Current Year” but it is modern in the sense that it spills over the levees of traditionalism and poisons the wells it fills.
Spartan laws were not liberal in the democratic sense but the entire culture was oriented around the service to the state, which again has the funny effect of putting the state central to considerations of morality. Apparently Spartan men had a reputation for going absolutely hog-wild when they left Sparta–the video I watched on the subject described it as a kind of “Spartan Rumspringa”–they were not bound by considerations of individual morality, but only such morality as required by the state, for the service of the state. A Spartan man traveling in Athens was not bound by Athenian law and felt no moral obligation to Athenian people. Only Spartan Law and Spartan people could impose moral obligations.
The Spartans lived under laws of their own making and magistrates of their own choosing, which is why Sparta has often be referred to as “a lightning-flash of freedom, in the dark night of despotism and crime.”
As for the Romans, the great lawgivers of Antiquity, whose jurisprudence underlies our modern civil codes, they were a a people who hated work, despised commerce and lived by plundering and enslaving their neighbours. To be successful at this (and they were very successful) it was necessary to cultivate certain very real virtues: courage, perseverance, self-control, prudence, discipline, constancy in misfortune, devotion to the community. Patriotism meant hatred of foreigners – indeed, the very word “Foreigner” (Peregrinus) is a late one, in Latin, as Cato observes; before the end of the Second Punic War (218 – 201 BCE), they simply made do with Hostis or i>Servus – Enemy or Slave.