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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24867 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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I don't believe crossdressing itself is inherently sexualized,

I disagree even on this point. There are literally NO subcultures in the western memeplex where crossdressing isn't involved in either a fetish or a sexualised lifestyle.

Welllll.... wearing the clothes of the opposite sex in a non-sexualised way was part of old Hallowe'en traditions (men dressing up as women in aprons etc, women wearing trousers and caps before it became common or usual for women to wear pants). it was all part of the theme of disguising yourself to protect against the malign spirits and the upheaval of the normal rules (this being the night the borders between the Other World and our world opened, and spirits and ghosts could cross over into the human realm and humans could cross over into the other world). Think of it as the spirit of Saturnalia. It's known as guising in Scotland.

The English pantomime tradition carried this on in a way, as well as the comedians who dressed up as women - Les Dawson was not portraying a drag queen, though the humour did depend heavily on double entendres.

There have been plenty of edgy comedians who cross dressed in nonsexual but still not exactly child-friendly ways.

don't they do that as part of their bit BECAUSE it is inherently sexual? after all sexual humor is one of the more universal forms of comedy.

There is a sexual element involved, in that it used to be inherently ridiculous for a man to dress as a woman, the opposite sex. But not as in relating to sex - 'ordinary men doing ordinary things, but they're dressed as women' was enough to sell Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari's Bosom Buddies to ABC! However once they started developing romantic plot lines for the characters in the second season, people got uncomfortable with it.

Sometimes it’s just edgy incongruity. Not granny approved, but not purely sexual and/or relating to other male/female differences.

Pantomime dames in the UK/Australia, which leads into crossdressimg comedians/entertainers like Dame Edna Everage and Mrs Brown?

Do panto dames, Dame Edna and Mrs. Brown (might also innclude Mrs. Doubtfire) represent a subculture in the same way as Glitter & Titter Cabaret, where London's finest burlesque stars, drag queens, and comedians light up the stage? Their audiences I suspect are different. Is there much crossover amoungst the performers?

Lily Savage (Paul O'Grady) was a pretty standard Drag Queen until they broke out to become a prime time TV star with what was essentially a panto dame performance. So some crossover at least. I'd say panto dames certainly used to be what I would call a sub culture, I don't think it is as big a thing as it used to be though.

Drag brunches tend to be PG (with some light innuendo) and remind me pretty heavily of panto dame performances, which is what made me think of it.

According to Wikipedia

O'Grady obtained his breakthrough into television when he played the character of a transvestite prostitute informant, Roxanne, in three episodes of ITV's police drama The Bill between 1988 and 1990.

Sometime later

He turned down ITV's subsequent offer of a weekly show because it would air before the watershed and thus force him to drastically alter his act into a form of light entertainment.

Is there much Panto that would have to be after the watershed because it's inappropriate for children?

Also Paul O'Grady was a homosexual, neither Barry Humphries (Dame Edna) nor Brendan O'Carroll (Mrs. Brown) were members of this particular peculiar subculture.

But also did appear as Lily Savage on Breakfast programs and primetime television shows. Pantomime humor from Panto dames is built heavily on innuendo and adult jokes that go over children's heads, but can entertain their parents. Lily Savage was very close to this, just dialled up a notch. Seriously go on Youtube and pull up Blankety Blank which was a primetime show. They call it risque but it's just the same kind of innuendo you would find in panto. Now it is on a spectrum and Savage is more crude than a panto dame at his worst, but he settled into a fairly generic prime time career.

Lily Savage's prime time persona was fairly tame. Whether the actor playing the character is gay or not has no real impact on what the character said. Indeed O'Grady himself was much tamer than Savage in his TV persona once he switched out. He himself made the point he only dressed as a woman for money, just like Humphries et al.

We're Humphries or O'Carroll as risqué as O'Grady?

Humphries was mostly g-rated, his persona was that of the spinster aunt with delusions of grandeur who made innuendo sometimes but was mostly oblivious - like a drag version of Hyacinth Bucket. She claimed to have a son who lived with his chum, and she was sure both would find Mrs right one day. But right now they're looking in all the wrong places (with a suspicious glance at the audience) - for an example of the Dame Edna kind of risque.

I'm familiar with Hyacinth Bucket her husband Richard son Sheridan his roommate with whom he was buying curtains.

I have not watched all their output, but I would say Humphries was the least risque, Mrs Browns Boys does have a lot of adult humor and vulgarity and the like and may be more of a match for O'Grady's non-primetime stuff. Some say: "With its emphasis on profanity, drag, vulgar sexual humour, physical clowning and sentimental family values, Mrs Brown’s Boys is a show that unashamedly taps into an end-of-the-pier comedy tradition"

Mrs Brown: I remember one night, me and Redser, walking along the beach at Portmarnock. He started chasing me into the sand dunes…so I was lying there, I said (flirtatious, sexy voice), ‘What do you want?’ (laughs remembering). He said I want your knickers around your ankles (flirtatious laugh). I had to get my feckin’ handbag and put them on!"

This is a bad argument. What the parent poster was claiming was that crossdressing does not imply sexualized lifestyle. What you are claiming is that sexualized lifestyle implies cross-dressing (a claim I don't follow btw, I don't think that there is that much cross-dressing in the straight vanilla hookup culture).

It is as if someone claimed to argue that skin contact does not imply sexuality, and you tried to refute them by (correctly) observing that almost all sexuality involved skin contact.

I mean what comes to mind are two things done in the West. First, acting. People wear costumes. To represent the character they are portraying. Second would be fraternitie using dresses as humiliation or just as a quirky costume for a party. Those things are rare, but I don’t think it’s true that no contexts in any culture have cross dressing must be sexualizing it.

Also, Milton Berle.

You should go to the theater more often. The pantomime dame of traditional British panto, for example, is a perfect example of a performance style that's quite similar to gay drag, but intended to amuse a wide audience (including young children), not to arouse in any way. You would also be hard-pressed to argue that a hyper-traditonalist production of Hamlet where Ophelia is played by a young lad in period dress, as she would have been in Shakespeare's time, is shooting for "fetish content".

I think we were implicitly talking about men dressing as women rather than women dressing as men, but you'll find an even greater wealth of 'wholesome' examples of crossdressing if you start looking at crossdressing women and girls - the archetypal Eowyn/Mulan/etc. story is hardly a bodice-ripper.

And all that is without wading into the Trans Question in anyway, as that would be tedious and probably unproductive.

I think @WandererintheWilderness is correct on this point. For example, I have a friend who wore a dress for Halloween one year. He doesn't have some weird fetish or lead a sexualized lifestyle, he just did it for a lark. Or for another example, Trey Parker and Matt Stone wore dresses to the Oscars the year they got nominated, because they thought it was funny as hell to throw people for a loop as they pointedly refused to answer questions about why they did it. So crossdressing isn't inherently sexualized. But it is certainly true (imo) that the typical example of crossdressing is sexual in some way.

There is an argument that a man wearing a dress for Halloween is doing something sexualised; he's just doing a sexualised thing as a joke rather than as an integral part of his identity.

Well, no surviving ones, at any rate; the most famous one was the mass of women cross-dressing in the '60s and '70s. Of course, that movement was so overwhelmingly successful that it's just the room temperature now.

There's also tomboyism, though that's not really an organized subculture so much as an emergent phenomenon.

The main way to tell whether a particular crossdresser is doing it for fetish/sexualized reasons or not is to look at how well they fit into the surrounding environment. If they're in formal wear when everyone else is casual (which covers both your average drag queen and Sam Brinton) it's 100% fetish/sexual, but if it's not then it's reasonable to assume they have other goals (where, sexual or not, they're unlikely to try and make it your problem).

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