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Why Drag Queen Story Hour?
Okay, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here.
Let’s say I am a liberal who wants to improve acceptance of trans/etc. people. Why on Earth would I have drag performers talk to kids? Teachers or storytellers do not normally dress that way. Heck, almost every workplace would look askance on that kind of attire. Why not have a trans-person dress like a grade school teacher or librarian? People who complained would look silly, and it would convey the message transgender people are normal and nothing to be scared of. This is how gays and lesbians were handled in media, after all.
Show of hands – would having a Chippendales dancer or Playboy bunny in their outfit be much better than a drag queen? Sure, the parents would probably pay more attention, but it would just be bizarre for the kids. If you really want to play up the dress-differently aspect, have the trans-person dress as a superhero or other costumed character.
It really does seem to be about the sexualization, disturbingly. Yet if you mention grooming, people jump on you as a homophobe. It doesn’t matter that people around here would probably rather let Rick Grinnell and Chad Felix Greene watch their boy for a week than leave their girl with Joe Biden for a minute.
The real question is what would motivate a parent to let their kid hang out with drag queens?
Published in Education
I’m trying to develop a thought into a theory. I think it has something to do with beauty vs ugliness. Destroying society’s concept of beauty is essential to destroying the society.
Drag Queens are not sexy. To normal people. Or children.
Glorification of ugliness. Make them doubt their basic, almost instinctive, reactions. avoiding ugliness is a survival mechanism.
@douglaspratt, you are correct, and what you are describing is post-modernism.
One aspect of this is the propaganda power play. “Not only will we derange your children and confuse them, but we will do it in public, with many of you attending, at the public library, and you will not dare complain.”
Yeah. I totally don’t get that.
Why target kids? Because kids are naive, they’re also the most accepting. Bigotry and hatred are learned behaviors, IF they can get to the kids with a positive role model or positive experience before they learn hate on the play ground, maybe they’ll be more accepting as adults.
That’ll be their rationale, but if such things are to be permitted it should be in voluntary locations, like a the public library, where parents could take their child – or not. And should be very carefully supervised to ensure that all interactions with the children are ‘proper’.
That is absolutely not true. Bigotry and “hatred” are older than humanity. Not sure if you were filling in the leftist POV there.
Since @occupantcdn says this in the next ‘graph:
He absolutely was filling in the leftist POV.
That’s what I said in the next paragraph. “That’ll be their rationale”.
Yes, I think bigotry is a learned behavior – maybe not in the home, from family. As a boy, on the playground – there was nothing worse than being called gay (or the more spicy words for it, that we shouldn’t say anymore) … Kids would go to a movie together would leave a seat between them so nobody would think it… Never mind the urinal situation.
IF you put a bunch of toddlers in a room together they’re not going to sort themselves by race, they’ll play with all the other kids, ignoring skin color.
Evolution has equipped us with an arsenal suitable for the Savannah and the caves, and for rural life, even to some extent for city life. Strangers are dangerous, AND they do not carry your genes. Toddlers might not notice, but kids and certainly teenagers will. Why are teenagers the hottest-headed about these things? Because in evolutionary terms, they have the most to lose genetically. They are at the peak of opportunity. Those who tolerated interlopers were replaced by those who did not — and by interlopers.
I thought in the days of La Cage aux Folles drag queens were supposed to be homosexual cross dressing male entertainers who dressed and performed in a hyperfeminized manner.
Are the modern cross dressing clowns we see today now the new standard of the drag queen?
It’s a thumb in the eye of beauty.
Nailed it.
But they do dare you to complain. That’s the point. And if you don’t play, they will come out with something even more outrageous, until they get you to react. Then they pounce, casting you as an intolerant bigot.
Maybe so. Are they even homosexual anymore?
Kids are the target because if they can be corrupted, they will corrupt the next generation, and eventually corrupt the society when they are old enough to be in control of it. What is learned in childhood is hugely influential on life.
And the people in La Cage had no interest in children being at their performances; I think both Renato and Albin would be appalled by any parent who would try to bring a child to their club. They were entertainers, living a fringe lifestyle, but they were still proud citizens, in their case Frenchmen. They had no desire to upend society.
It’s more about desensitization than acceptance . . .
I think a big part of the appeal, to the left, is the subversiveness of the act. It is meant, I think primarily as an act of “owning the cons”. I think it has the benefits that BDB and Douglas Prat pointed out for the left as well, but I don’t think that is the primary point of the exercise. I think the primary point is to tweak “the establishment’s” nose. I use quotes because sadly I think the establishment as it should be properly understood is completely onboard with drag queen story hour.
Or simple confusion.
So for extracurricular school clubs we’ve got:
Boy Scouts
Gay Clown Story Hour
After School Satan Club
What’s next, Friday Child Sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli?
It’s meant to be transformative: moving the Overton window. That was the purpose of the feds hiring Samuel Brinton. which they would have got away with if he hadn’t stolen that suitcase. Also the purpose of the Balenciaga advertisement which was soft child porn.
This week’s “The American Mind” podcast has a good segment on this phenomenon.
The answer is easy. They are perverts and they know it. If they normalize perversion, they will no longer be perverts and they can portray us as the evil ones for our intolerance.
Great comment.
My only quibble is that they will still be perverts. They’ll just avoid the disapproval.
If past trends continue, once the trans-perversion is accepted, deviancy will be defined down even further.
Intolerance is the new perversion. Perverts?
And yet the goal is corrosion not beauty.
Give it ten years and the Westminster Dog Show will feature a new form of trans performance.
And all the right people will applaud
They have already succeeded. They are just shooting the wounded survivors.
That’s an excellent analogy. I have been to a drag show a couple of times and it was fun. But it would make no more sense to send my (fictional non-existent) children to be read stories by a Chippendale dancer than to have them read stories by a drag queen.