Drag queen takes king
Tonight is the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 3. Who cares, you ask? I do. My latest brush with acute illness has left me with a lot of time on my hands. Did you know you can watch every single scintillating episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race ever produced right on logo’s website, tiny and pixelated beyond your wildest dreams? Well, you can.
To say that I lay in bed watching every episode would be a gross understatement. I also watched the extra catty web exclusives where you get to see the drag queen contestants bitch about each other backstage.
All in all, I’m excited to see who wins. I actually, really, almost and maybe even truly unashamedly am.
Part of this, of course, is research. Or maybe reverse research, because I’m actually a drag king. That’s right: I have exactly one performance to my masculine alter ego’s name (which I can’t share because I just know he’s destined to become a famous playboy and I still have a secret identity to play fast and loose with here). And I’m just a handful of days from another, if I can decide what song we’re lip-synching to.
It was once explained to me that to do your makeup as a king, you just reverse everything that queens are supposed to do. So while a man will put a white stripe down the center of his nose to make it appear narrower and create the illusion of feminine features, a woman has to draw a dark stripe instead to make the nose appear wider. I have no idea whatsoever if this is valid or not. I know exactly enough about makeup to have never bothered to learn anything and I own a book by Kevyn Aucoin that I don’t entirely understand. That’s pretty much all I can say for myself when it comes to makeup.
Really, the assumption in drag is that the genders are opposites, and have minimal overlap. If I walk like a woman I obviously can’t be walking like a man. In a recent episode of Drag Race, a queen advised a straight jock on his first flight dressed as a woman that “girls don’t point”. Like, at things, with our fingers. Which, I have to admit as a girl, I do. But what we’re dealing with in drag isn’t gender; it’s fantasy gender.
Which is why it’s so powerful and challenging and fun, really.
But this is also why there probably won’t be a reality show all about drag kings. It’s the same reason handsomeness pageants aren’t neck-and-neck with beauty pageants for popularity and scholarship opportunities. Same reason both men’s and women’s magazines have hot chicks on their covers. This is gender 101 shit. We more or less all fetishize the image and the fantasy of femininity, regardless of which gender/s we’re actually attracted to. In performing the opposite gender, women lose that double-sided edge we come to expect. We’re no longer universal visual shorthand for “sex object”.
It took drag to make me stop and wonder if guys don’t sometimes feel bad that they’re largely excluded from pretty.
Of course, I kind of also love this about being a drag king. Performing maleness I don’t feel any pressure to look sexy in the ways I’m used to failing at (big boobs, long hair, perfect figure et al.), and I think that’s why I suddenly almost feel sexy. Or something.
Or maybe I’m drunk with power because I have a big fucking packing penis.
“It took drag to make me stop and wonder if guys don’t sometimes feel bad that they’re largely excluded from pretty.”
- Yes and no. You’re not supposed to feel bad about it, after all. Feeling bad about it is just as bad as being pretty. Worse, quite possibly. It’s kind of depressing to think about it in those terms, but lest we forget, it’s just silly nonsense which one can ignore at one’s option.
I find drag queens particularly sad because even when they’re over what society thinks of them, I think they’ve fallen into a second trap – they have (frequently – there are different reasons for being a drag queen, the desire to be pretty/be seen as pretty is only one of many) decided that the only way to be pretty is to be a woman – which is to say, they subscribe to the very same silly nonsense.
And I’ve seen some -very- pretty guys (actually I think the top three pretty people I’ve seen were all guys), so it’s not like we can’t pull it off.
I want to be a drag queen very badly. Too bad my vagina keeps getting in the way.
I want to be read as genderfuckery and subversive, but I’d end up being read as “skank.”
@Orphan Men can definitely be pretty as men. I’d venture to say that gay guys (who are definitely a large proportion of dag queens) understand that better than most people. When I say men are excluded from pretty I mean they normally don’t get to experience the specific power that come with having female beauty.
Personally, I don’t see drag as sad at all. I think playing with gender is healthy and can be elevated to an art form. But as someone who enjoys doing drag, I might be biased.
@ozymandias I have a cis female friend who used to do drag every weekend. Drag isn’t real gender, it’s over-the-top performance of gender, so I feel like no one should be excluded from it, whether they want to be a king or queen.
Throughout my life (and several times recently) I’ve seen someone and thought “he’s SO hot” and shortly after realized I was looking at a woman. Mixing it up is fun, and it’s good to have our perceptions challenged sometimes.
Oh, and your cock is totally hot, I’ll bet!
I didn’t mean to imply that doing drag is sad, only that one particular reason for doing so is; the need to feel pretty, and by implication, the feeling that one can’t be pretty as a guy.
As for female beauty, there does exist the male equivalent – or rather, the notion is less gendered than some people think. It’s just that half the population finds male beauty to be threatening and so avoids it. (It’s the same half which finds two guys kissing to be threatening, so it’s no surprise to me that the guys who like to kiss are also the ones more likely to be beautiful; it’s not like they’re going to be making friends with those people anyways.)
Guys are only “allowed” to be beautiful if they don’t look like they work at it, in which case they can’t help it so it’s okay, I guess.
I would venture to state that drag queens get more attention than drag kings not so much for the “sex object” reason as because:
a) in our still-entirely-too-patriarchal society, it’s just normal for a woman to want to look like a man, right? It’s “trading up”. People are fascinated with drag queens because they’re purposely trading down.
b) female gender performance includes a lot more tools and trickery than male gender performance. I mean, lots of ciswomen go around with fake hair, fake nails, fake eyelashes, fake eye colour, fake teeth, fake tans, fake boobs, an artificial colour on their eyelids and lips, fake leg-extensions in the form of high-heeled shoes, fake thinness in the form of waist-cinchers…and all of this (with the possible exception of breast implants, which are still pretty rare I think) is considered par for the course. Whereas if a cis man did most of those things we’d consider it weird or effeminate. So, I think people assume there’ll be a lot more interesting disguise involved in a man looking like a woman than vice-versa. They figure a woman doing drag will just cut her hair, put on some baggy pants, and bind her breasts, and that’s it – nothing to see here, kids, nothing to see.
Re: men being excluded from pretty: I personally am highly visual – I see a guy I think is hot and I’m just…stupified. Usually I can’t resist turning my whole head around just to watch him walk by. I always assumed this was normal female behaviour and was shocked to hear guys say that they feel like women care about their jobs and cars but never their looks. I like to think my open leering is helping to correct a major injustice in the world. :D