Some light magazine reading

[jlh]

Awww, Dan in NME. I <3 the ickle punka. That monkey is going to heaven, man.

So I'm sitting here waiting for something to happen at work, and to meet now local!Ruby for dinner, and so I'm reading the pride issue of Out, in which I find an essay about whether Madonna is "over" as a gay icon if not as an icon in general, and I find this paragraph:

. . . in an age when gay people have themselves long since settled down and moved to New Mexico or New Jersey, Madonna's current book-signing aura of twee-and-tweed presents problems. It's hard to shift gears from prim middle-aged author at Barnes & Noble to bust-a-move siren onstage without causing some pop-culture dissonance. And motherhood, by making direct sex appeal with her audience less believable, has removed some of her heat. Madonna used to be Mary Magdalene; now she's Mary.

EXSQUEEZE ME? What sort of Madonna/Whore (pun intended) bullshit is this? Isn't it really Madonna who might be able to finally, as a female, sexual icon, break through this bogus dichotomy and be a Hot Mama? Have you seen those pictures of her on the tour? Unimpressed, Out. The gay community--and I mean just the gay community, just the boys please--should be beyond this sort of pigeonholing of women, but I have to admit, I'm sadly unsurprised.

Comments

[weatherby.livejournal.com]

And motherhood, by making direct sex appeal with her audience less believable, has removed some of her heat.

I can't believe someone even printed that in this day and age.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

You know, I have found that gay men are frequently surprisingly conservative, even reactionary, when it comes to sex roles. Remind me when you're here to show you this essay that was in NY Magazine about the sexism inherent in drag.

Also, hello, where are you? I pinged, I missed, I am bereft and unconsolable.

[hermorrine.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with your post and what you said above about gay men being oddly conservative when it comes to sex roles. This describes to a T my one good gay friend that I've known for about 12 years. I really don't get it.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is there of course general sense of women as non sexual, and so if they don't have to deal with them they sort of don't. Despite all that cozy fag - hag stuff, the community as a whole is fairly misogynous, I've always thought.

Then there's also this really weird preoccupation with women who are really bitchy, especially in a sexual way, implying that sex is the source of all feminine power. In that sense, for them, playing with sex roles is about being able to embody female and male power at the same time. New York Magazine had a cover article some years back (unfortunately it's old enough that it hasn't been put on the NYMag online archive yet) by Charles Busch about a whole drag nation thing (prompted by RuPaul and all of that) but within it was a callout reply from a woman who said that she found drag misogynous. She pointed out that you never find men being the sort of women most girls admire, like Mary Tyler Moore or even That Girl, but rather sort of outsized queen like women. And those comments about how since women don't wear corsets and super high heels anymore, drag queens have to take up the slack--with no understanding of what giving up those corsets really meant. She made some parallels to blackface which I have to say, are likely not too far off the mark, at least in that these folks are dressing up as the Other, without a clear understanding of the cultural significance of what they're doing.

All this said, of course, my friends aren't like that, not only because I'd kick them in the damn head, but also because the real offenders tend to not have female friends in the first place anyway.