By David Futrelle
After hearing the news that the Miss America pageant is dropping its swimsuit and evening gown competitions to focus more on talent and brains, I headed over to Reddit to see what the resident misogynists were saying about the end of these noble traditions dumb things.
I expected some fulminating in places like the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit (and there was some), but it turns out that the Redditors who have the most to say on the subject are the Trump superfans who populate the TheDonald subreddit.
In countless threads on the subreddit today, TheDonald’s angry young (mostly) men set forth their trenchant critiques of the move.
More than a few of the critiques consisted of sometimes angry, sometimes resigned predictions that fat women with dyed hair would soon take over Miss America.
Others imagined the competition taken over by trans women:
![Shun_SPICY 6 points 4 hours ago Calling it now, next winner will be fat genderqueer mess of a human being with a sociology degree. permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]Supreme_Dear_Leader 3 points 3 hours ago Micheal Moore??](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/0015.png?resize=546%2C364&ssl=1)
And then there was this exchange:
![shannon9473 40 points 7 hours ago I’m genuinely upset. Why are they taking everything feminine away from us? permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]That_SoundDTOM 24 points 6 hours ago You know why. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]shannon9473 9 points 6 hours ago Can you elaborate why? Thank you permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]potatosurplus 20 points 4 hours ago They want to destroy masculine men and feminine women. They want a genderless society like in THX 1138 so they have subservient minions to rule over.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/000001.png?resize=580%2C770&ssl=1)
This dude had an even more alarming prediction:
While the denizens of TheDonald had the most to say about the pageant, don’t worry! The MGTOWs had some terrible opinions to share as well.
Such is the state of the discourse on Reddit today.
@Lumipuna: Doesn’t surprise me the least.
Yeah, I’ve been hearing about how the mainstream media is “liberal” my entire fucking life, and yet I never saw an actual liberal hosting anything prior to Rachel Maddow.
If those chucklefucks ever got within 50 miles of a genuinely progressive position on anything, they’d have a fucking aneurysm….
@Lumipuna
Voldemort?! :O
@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
And don’t you just love that Pocahontas’ hair is blowing in the wind that no-one else is feeling.
(Ms IBH became Pocahontas at the age of around 8 – standing in the living room leaning dramatically forward, and singing “Colours of the Wind”)
Do they realize they can still hold beauty pageants if they want to? It’s not actually illegal. It’s just one organization, which has chosen to do things differently. They could start their own pageant, with their own standards.
Oh, but that would mean they have to get off their asses and actually accomplish something, instead of just whining on the internet. Never mind, then.
A Miss Alt-Right America pageant would be both so horrendous and so hilarious. Contestants would have to carry their favorite gun during the swimsuit portion and instead of evening wear, they’d model their very best MAGA merch.
Scholarship aside, if the Miss America Pageant wants people to watch the pageant, they should just reality-show it and turn it into a straight woman’s version of RuPaul’s Drag Race, by making them sew dresses and do acting challenges and roast audience members or whatever. Without the pageantry, it’s just a scholarship ceremony, and no one wants to watch that. It has to be entertaining. RuPaul’s Drag Race spits out incredibly beautiful and talented drag queens all the time, and it gives them lots of money if they win. It also doesn’t solely depend on your looks. Usually your comedy and ability to curate fashion forward looks helps the most. What I love about RPDR is that it’s not about what your actual face looks like but what you can make your face look like, and they’ve got some avante garde shit going on. What always bothered me about Miss America is that every woman looks like a clone of the woman next to her, because creativity is not encouraged, just the stereotypical “midwestern prom queen” model. I still don’t know how the hell they judge it.
Or they could pick up a Eurovision model and just have the girls sing songs in whacky outfits while everyone votes for their favorite. Man, I’d watch the shit out of that.
In the meantime, they can have another organization that solely offers money to women who get good grades and volunteer and do all that extracuricular stuff, with no performance required. Or pit them against one another in a battle of actual skills, not one that relies on TV ratings. You can have a real scholarship or TV ratings. You can’t have both.
I’d like to see a real Miss Universe contest. One where you can say “That tiara really shows off her antennae”
@Lukas Xavier
Plus with the past year of their, coordination skills, chances are more than one would run off with the money.
It’s surprising there hasn’t been a Miss MRA pageant. I can just imagine a business that thinks pink guns will increase female buyers thinking the chance of winning a beauty pageant would entice women.
Bah, another error. That should be Miss NRA.
That reminds me of a question I’ve been struggling with for some time… Is drag comparable to cultural appropriation? Like, I’ve heard some people liken it to blackface (’cause it’s a caricature created by a dominant group of a mocking stereotype they have of the oppressed group), but I just don’t know… Kinda would like to know what people here think. 🙁
@Valkyrine
I came across this very question elsewhere quite recently, and don’t have a good answer. Part of the problem, for me anyway, was that the person who was asking it was a TERF (Julie Burchill), and I haven’t heard anyone else talk about the issue.
@Valkyrine @Pie
Two of my old feminist friends from University have TERF tendencies (we have some blazing rows, as I am not that way inclined at all – there are a lot of things I love about them and they are old friends, but they are also problematic friends. I guess we all have those).
They’ve also raised this – they feel drag is insulting to women and they don’t like the way it reduces femininity to lipstick and high heels. But they do also go with “men are men and women are women and that’s that” and I don’t like it when Jordan Peterson says it and I don’t like when they say it, and I have told them so. I feel that attitude is just as much of a straitjacket; we’re all still being forced into gender roles, just different ones.
I’ve thought about this and I don’t have a definitive answer, but I do have an opinion; which is that I don’t agree. I don’t think drag is comparable to cultural appropriation. There’s a couple of reasons for this.
Firstly, gay men are a minority group with a history of oppression and drag has a history of marginalisation, coming from when people were forced to perform traditional gender roles in public; you can see the same thing in lesbians, for example Radclyffe Hall who used to wear men’s clothes almost constantly, and the drag king tradition. My take on that is that when you don’t feel you fit into a “normal” gender role you start trying on other gender roles, but I’d need someone who was actually gay to comment on that, because I’m straight so it’s not really my place. So I think there is an argument that drag is actually an important part of gay culture – in fact I think that in some drag clubs there have been complaints about too many straight people coming in to see drag shows when it is not for them, can’t remember where I saw that but I am sure it’s a thing. So the TERFs will have to fight it out with the gay men as to who is culturally appropriating who, because I think the gay men have a case for keeping it.
I also think that it’s a mistake to think of gay men as the dominant culture. White men have it easy, to be sure; but white gay men not so much. Intersectionality does not just apply to women.
Secondly, shows like blackface are dehumanising. The characters are presented to be laughed at – the joke is “they’re black”. That’s the essence of blackface, right? I’ve never seen a drag show where the joke is “they’re women” and I have seen A LOT of drag. I’m not saying those shows don’t exist, but the drag I’ve seen presents “women” and “femininity” as powerful and not-to-be-fucked-with. Most drag queens appear to approach their characters very positively and present them as three-dimensional characters who are powerful and beautiful, and I know a lot of women who are very into the whole RuPaul’s Drag Race thing and see it as very empowering, because they identify with the people they’re seeing. So I don’t think drag is dehumanising, I think a lot of women can identify with it. I’m sure there are some drag queens out there who perform femininity like “women are the joke” but it’s not part of drag culture as a whole.
On a personal note, I’m very into the whole gender-fluid thing. I like it when the fences get knocked down – when people are androgynous and can enjoy being both masculine and feminine. There’s nothing I like more than a boy who knows how to wear makeup or a girl who knows how to wear a suit. I don’t like the gender corrals we get forced into, and I’m not keen on getting in one, whether it’s straight men or TERFS putting me in there. “You must wear makeup/you can’t wear makeup,” it’s all policing behaviour. I want to wear makeup and sequins when I feel like it and a boiler suit and Converse when I feel like wearing that, thank you. And if that applies to me, it should also apply to everyone else, which means I have a problem with the idea of saying people shouldn’t do drag. If they want to do drag, they should do drag. If a person does drag with dodgy sexist content that is offensive to women, fine, let’s take issue with that one person and not with the concept of drag as a whole.
Anyway. I’m Kent Brockman, and that’s my two cents. What do other people think?
Further to above (sorry, I have a lot of feelings today)
I don’t like the whole “I’m a bigger victim than you” smell of this argument. I’m not a big fan of the whole Oppression Olympics stuff that goes on (with radicals of every political stripe and colour). Nobody “wins” by getting to be The Most Oppressed.
I’m not saying it’s not important to have discussions like this, but at the moment frankly we have bigger things to worry about. Incels. Nazis. Donald Trump. Fundamentalist religions who think women are inciting rape if they leave the house without a male escort. FGM. Sex trafficking.To name a few.
TERFs piss me off, because I feel like saying “why don’t you get out there and tackle the actual misogynists who are actually genuinely calling for women to be killed, instead of whinging about people who are basically on the same side as you because you don’t like their choice of gender pronoun.” It’s picking an easy target. If you argue with other people on the left, you know no-one will put a brick through your window.
As for Julie Burchill, if I ever find myself agreeing with her about anything I immediately reassess said thing
You can’t discuss the history of drag without the history of being trans in the West. Many, many people remembered as drag performers were not. They were (and sometimes are) people desperate to be seen as themselves, to be acknowledged, even for just an evening, as who they really were, instead of the performance that formed their entire life. Which may be Burchill’s problem.
@Violet the Vile
I agree, I also like people being able to express themselves how they like regardless of sex/gender, but the thing is I also thought that to be case on the context of race/ethnicity/culture. Like, I’ve heard(read on the internet) people say that white people shouldn’t be able to cosplay poc characters, wear dreadlocks, kimonos or bindis, and I was kind of confused so I tried to figure out where the line was. No offense meant.
Though I do have to disagree with you on two points. One is that I don’t think that it being part of gay culture should mean it makes drag (or any other part) immune to criticism of misogyny. And two, I’m not quite comfortable just accepting the “bigger things to deal with” thing either. It kinda sounds like the kind of thing you often hear from people trying to shut down the conversation on anything.
^^This!
Although my trans friends are both very uncomfortable with drag shows, I think mostly because they’re worried that they might be mistaken for drag queens when of course they’re women. That’s very different from saying drag shows shouledn’t exist.
@Dalillama
Very true, sorry, I thought that and then didn’t address it in my extra long post
@Valkyrine
No offense taken!
Being part of gay culture certainly does not make drag immune to criticism. Frankly, I don’t think anything should be immune to criticism. I think we should all freely criticise/critique/cover everything (I once had a drop down and drag out argument with a friend over the cover of “Comfortably Numb” by the Scissor Sisters. She was personally offended because she thought Pink Floyd songs should be sacred. I don’t think anything at all should be sacred. That row got a lot more heated than it should have done) The point I’m making is that it has a place in gay and trans culture which is hugely important to gay and trans people – so at what point do we decide whether feminists or LGBTQ people have more “rights” over it?
The only thought I could come up with is the one above that people should tackle it on a case by case basis. IE if you find a drag artist offensive, object to that one person. And hopefully that way a dialogue will start between the two communities which will ultimately benefit both. I think that’s really the only workable solution, but please understand, all of these long ramblings come with the disclaimer that it is my opinion and I am not laying down any law here.
Two – “bigger things to deal with”. Yes, you’re right. I didn’t mean to sound dismissive; apologies, I could have explained that much better. What I was trying to describe there was my personal emotional response, so I don’t expect anyone to do anything with that, as it were. That’s how I feel; I don’t think anyone else “should” feel like that.
@Valkyrine
BTW the way you said “no offense meant” makes me think you thought I was angry with you. I’m not at all.
I’m just an academic who loves debating and has a lot of thoughts and verbal diarrhoea haha
About POC cultural appropriation – I will defer to our resident POCs on that one, as I am a very white woman from an very white city and I don’t really think I’m best placed.
@ violet
Next time you’re dealing with a Floyd gatekeeper just say “Excuse me, do you mean The Pink Floyd!”
@alan
Hahahahahaha!
@Violet
I’m a comfortably straight cis man who does not consider himself a transvestite but does occasionally wear clothes that are traditionally associated with women, as witnessed by my gravatar pic.
That particular outfit couples male associated clothing (dress shoes and trousers, shirt and tie, velvet waistcoat and pocket watch) with female associated clothing (fascinator, kitten mask, 1930’s Hollywood actress style coat with faux fur collar and cuffs) to try to create an androgynous look.
Whilst this isn’t remotely drag I wanted to chip in with what I’m trying to do with it:
a) make a statement about cultural gender dress conventions
b) look fucking amazing 😉
What’s so bad about a genderless society?
@watching in horrified fascinator
Sounds fabulous!
Also you get +100 xp for the brilliant nym
I think I have frightened Valkyrene away with my enormous slightly aggressive-sounding posts. Sorry, come back! it was just a thought dump!