Drag Story Tellers
What in the world?
I've been amazed that libraries are presenting story telling sessions featuring drag queens. I don't mind people in drag. It's not my bag but once I went to a reception and many of the artist's friends of the artist came dressed in drag. It was pretty cool.
It's a pretty mind expanding thing to confront how much our sense of masculine or feminine depends on stuff like make-up and hairdos and costume. This was long before the LGBTQ movement came but LGB was pretty commonplace.
The custom apparently started in the San Francisco library in 2015 and has spread around the world.
I can see why conservatives are up in arms.
It's a pretty sneaky attack in the culture wars.
They don't want kids to be thinking about sex or gender at all. And here we have story tellers who are challenging gender stereotypes by their very appearance in a library.
A herring gull chick pecks at a red spot on a parents beak to cause the parent to regurgitate food for the chick.
Niko Tinbergen measured the rate at which chicks pecked when presented with models of a gull head. Turned out that the thing that stimulated the chick most was a plain wooden stick with red and white markings.
The heightened contrast of the red and white was superstimulating the chicks.
Pornography works because of superstimulation. Long ago,
when I was a kid, I remember my parents having an argument in the night about Playboy magazine (which was new and revolutionary then). Mom burst out "Those women are deformed!" I had no idea then what she meant - but she was talking about superstimulation.
Once I lived in a house where the upstairs neighbor was an esthetician. She was a professional make-up artist. She was pretty in a normal sort of way. I met her downtown one day when she was made up for work. Whew! My knees started to tremble a bit. She was pushing all my buttons. Superstimulation at work.
Drag plays with that. As a male the knowledge that I'm being superstimulated by someone who is not female adds another layer of meaning to the experience. I ponder what that would mean to kids. Looking back at that age I personally would probably have been freaked out. Heck - There used to be an old guy who would play the accordion at the entrance of to the city market and even he freaked me out.
I think that conservatives are freaked at the idea that drag would become normal for kids - they fear it will draw kids into a LGBTQ lifestyle. And that's their mistake. I don't think anybody can be drawn into a gender identity. We are what we are. I'm male. There is just no way I could be gay or bi. But I think it goes the other way too. If you are gay or bi or trans then there is no way you could not be.
What do you think?