Anthony McCarthy of Echidne of the Snakes wrote about the touchy subject of drag queens and the performance of gender. Here’s the basic pitch

Whatever I might think about drag and its relationship with the wider view of gay men, I’m certain that the drag queen role isn’t a good one for women to follow. The paper today informs us that RuPaul has a new program which is based on professional drag queens instructing women on how to be women.

He said it here.

Yeah, about that. But first let’s get a couple caveats out of the way. Is McCarthy bashing trans people (transsexual, transvestite, or transgender)? No, I don’t believe he is. Is he rejecting the notion that gender as a component of identity separate from sex? No, not that either. And, since it’s often confused even though they’re actually miles apart, is McCarthy confusing “female impersonators” like RuPaul with transgender or transexuals? Again, no. He’s just calling into question the notion that it’s a good idea for people who dress like women but make a point of not identifying as women giving women who do identify as women instructions in how to perform as women.

I mean, the only possible real good that could come out of the whole concept of the program is that gender, as opposed to virtually all other elements of identity, is constructed and performed based on the approval, disapproval, or outright direction of others rather than ourselves.

That the best people to instruct women in how to perform their gender might be men who are said to perform it better than women naturally do only makes the whole gender enterprise more contrived.

Which is fine, of course, and not in a “nothing wrong with that” way… I mean it _really is fine to be have in contrived and constrained ways — we do it all the time in games, say, where the rules can be almost completely contrived.

Unless you’re so far into it you mistake the game for reality, and the rules for laws of nature, and performance of the game for the way we “naturally” ought to be.

Which, unfortunately, when it comes to the game of gender an awful lot of people do. With very unfortunately consequences.

McCarthy continues

The story is that when the Stonewall Inn was raided it was the drag queens who were the first to resist. I wasn’t there and have never spoken to anyone who was. Since that is widely reported by people who were there, it’s a laudable act on the part of those who resisted anti-gay oppression. But that doesn’t erase the negative implications of drag and its promotion of oppressive stereotypes for women, and, indisputably, gay men. Living a phony stereotype is oppressive, especially one assigned for the purpose of entrapping victims into oppression. The powerful elite, comprised of straight men, wasn’t going to allow those assigned roles to be empowering. I don’t for one second see adoption of those roles as being empowering, that is a delusion useful to the established order. With this show, with the actual instruction of women by professional drag queens in how to live their act, that promotional aspect isn’t deniable.

Yup. I think if you want to go careening about in stockings, high heels, heavy makeup, and a wig more power to you! Lots of people do — from the annual Pride parade to the very elderly housewives in the grocery store next to my old neighborhood.

But thing is it really is approximately as likely, and as appropriate, and most importantly as authentic(!) on men in parades as women in grocery stores then why continue pretending that it’s actually about women at all? That it’s about cross-dressing at all, instead of just dressing? And just enjoy it for what it is instead of what-it’s-not-but-pretends-to-be?

Because if you’re going to go the other way, and go ‘round saying oh no these guys can show you how women really are? I don’t think that’s a very good idea.

About this James Chartrand business.

A lot of people are seriously chuffed with her for pulling a fast one, selling out, betraying other women writers, and (hey, this one bugs me too) extending her adopted macho persona into an entire professional-writers website, Men with Pens.

Second, based on my (peripheral) experience with commercial writers over the years it’s not that uncommon for a single writer to work with mulitple pen names. For instance the local edgy alt-weekly might rather not use the same writer who also writes the gardening tips for the local flower and garden newsletter and ad copy for the local university alumni office. So folks use different names — big deal, so what? And if you use different genders? Also big deal, so what?

Note also the e-book title available under “Our Books” at Men with Pens: How To Create Believable Characters. Nice work, James!

Some things I do get uncomfortable about though. For instance that a lot of people prefered to hire and read copywriting from James… as long as they thought he was a man. Published research says academic reviewers consistently give higher ratings when a single letter in a submission is changed, turning the author from, say, the woman’s name “Joan Smith” to the man’s name “John Smith,” or “Jean Fitzpatrick” to “Dean Fitzpatrick.”

That Chartrand got pulled in when she dropped that hook over the side isn’t a problem for me at all. What is a problem, though, is that despite thoroughly faking it she built a website that’s… well, more aggressively “masculine” than I, a thoroughly red-blooded, XY-chromosomed man, am able to manifest. Which, if I was conflicted all Hemingway/GQ/Details-like about what “being a man” might mean probably wouldn’t be doing me a lot of favors. So in other words it’s not as much that Chartrand was “selling out” women as that she was helping to continue setting up men with, in this case, literally made up standards of what constitutes an authoritative male voice.

“Masculinity” already impoverishes men enough without people — women and men — literally playing it up. Although I think it’s a marvelous indictment of the whole conceit that biological women are able to pull it off as effortlessly as biological men. But here’s the deal: masculinity, like femininity, is a total fucking joke. Name one thing besides maybe peeing on cigarette butts in a urinal and needing to do things to keep your testosterone levels on an even keel that’s really all that “essentially” male? Right, that was a trick question! There are plenty of men throughout history who never saw either a urinal or a cigarette butt who nevertheless made it from first breath to last without ever losing a Y chromosome. And, to be perfectly fair, there are plenty of women, Chartrand not the least of them, who are able to nail the concept on the first go.

Meaning it’s all made up. Which wouldn’t be a problem at all if drunks in bars, bullies on playgrounds, and psychos with handguns weren’t either perpetually trying to live up to those meaningless, in some cases literally fictional standards or, worse, using other people’s failures to meet them as an excuse to do violence against them. Which sets off yet another cycle of men and boys looking for answers to the literally unknowable-for-certain question “what does it mean to be a man?” And finding hints in… “manly” graphics like the bullet-shattered logo James Chartrand chose to keystone her blog, or teasing remarks about “mommy bloggers” on… a working mother’s blog.*

Bottom line: getting jobs with fake names is fine. Finding success with your fake name is fine too. Taking your fake name and using it to perpetuate your ideas about your name’s gender attributes, though, isn’t so hot.

* For the record I don’t believe Chartrand ever suggested there’s any problem at all with bloggers who are also mothers. As for the “mommy blogger” genre, well, fair or unfair that gets a lot of criticism from most quarters.

Update: Woah, as Sungold ever set me stright? And in comments, below, Anonymous points to a post by Chartrand’s erstwhile gender-bending partner, “Harrison McCleod” who says the choice wasn’t as simple as Chartrand makes it sound. But it does indeed sound like she at least occasionally specifically criticized women writers as a class. Good to know. —fl

Summary: Failing to understand “everything I do is masculine” causes men (and their partners, and fellow men) unimaginable but also unnecessary grief.

Samhita of Feministing says

A movie about the changing tide of masculinity? I want to see.

She wrote about it here.

You know what drives me crazy about the trailer? A bunch of grown men with beards, penises, jobs, and partners wandering around worrying that they’re somehow not… men! WTF?

My metaphor for “masculinity” has cutting, carving, or tearing away of everything about biologically male humans that doesn’t fit the stereotype.

How can it be that we call rediscovering, embodying, or otherwise adding back the cut-away parts emasculating? Instead of, I don’t know, maybe remasculating.

What’s funny is that you never see “men’s liberation” groups pushing to expand the definition of masculinity to include more of the full range of human possibilities. Instead it’s all about trying to get everyone to agree our metaphorical amputations should be accepted and/or seen as superior.

p.s. and dear sweet mother of pearl how bought into stereotypes is it to say men are “finding their feminine side” when they do anything outside the confines of masculinity?

Sadie of Jezebel says

We got a number of distressed emails about a recent piece in Details. Possibly because the description read, “Getting tricked into fatherhood by a woman hell-bent on getting pregnant is much more common than you think.” Good to know!

Deceptive, baby-hungry women have always been a staple of male-mythology; punching a hole in a condom is the sort of thing we like to do between maxing out guys’ credit cards on shoes and sleeping with their best friends. So it’s not shocking that this particular urban horror story should make the lad-mag rounds just in time for Halloween.

Read the quote in context here.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are as many women who perforate condoms in order to get pregnant with their unwilling partners as there are men who do so to get their unwilling partner’s pregnant, i.e. some but not very many and certainly not enough to warrant a “words of warning” article in Details. (I mean… seriously, in the average Details readers dreams do women want to have their babies!) Sadie puts it in perspective:

For every Cosmo-wielding nutter this guy dredged up (and I’d really like to see the email he sent out requesting quotes from “friends”) he could have found ten thousand who found the idea not merely abhorrent, but insulting and frankly incomprehensible.

Of course, to the author it makes total sense

For the record, one needn’t be “pro-life” to recoil in horror at the implications of one adult using actual pregnancy as a ploy or, worse, punishment against another. It is absolutely and unequivocally a woman’s right to choose whether she will keep a pregnancy to term. It is not, however, the right of any party to chose parenthood for another without his or her competent decision to do so. And while some religious denominations might be sanguine about it, the idea of one person potentially creating a third human being for use as an instrument against another strikes me as brutal, thoughtless, and deeply alienated from the condition of being human. And can I just say it’s also a lousy, lousy reason to have sex. I don’t mention it as often anymore but this is the sort of thing I mean when I say I’m a prudish libertine: mutually agreed-upon sex is great. Mutually agreed-upon procreation is also great (as can be mutually agreed-upon sex for procreation.) Sex to make someone an unsuspecting parent, though, is just ewww!

But the above paragraph is a digression: Details- and perhaps Cosmo-reader fantasies notwithstanding, the likelihood of one adult partner attempting to make an involuntary parent of the other is vanishingly small when compared with, oh, say, the chances of both parties being confronted with the possibility of an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy do to failure to use contraception either correctly or, for that matter, at all. It would be lovely if Details, and its sister (in spirit if not in fact) publication, encouraged deeper introspection in that direction.