Guest post: Playing it to the hilt
Originally a comment by iknklast on Genius shmenius.
While at a play this weekend, I found myself wondering something I have wondered frequently: Why is it that men dressed as women is considered hilarious and campy, while women dressed as men can be taken seriously and not laughed at or mocked?
Besides the obvious answers about men being default, and sissy, and all that, one thing struck me in this performance that I think says a lot: The men playing women were playing it to the hilt. They were dressed ridiculously, they simpered, they had foolish wigs, they posed “coquettishly” in a very exaggerated manner. The women playing men just…played men. They put on the outfit, they did the part, they didn’t butch it up, they didn’t exaggerate stereotypical male characteristics. They just played the role.
This, I think, is another aspect of that whole misogynistic thing that happens in the entertainment world. I have long found it uncomfortable when men played women and now I realize why – because they play us like some sort of alien being who is strange and unfamiliar, and very, very silly. When women play men, I can enjoy the show (if it is good in other ways) because they do not go out of their way to make themselves “macho” or do anything to exaggerate characteristics – unless the script calls for that because a character is a woman playing a man and doing it badly.
So much of entertainment is centered around the male as the norm, the female as the outlier. The male as the doer, the female as the receiver. The male as the leader, the female as the follower. And the most exaggerated, June Cleaver-esque distortions of woman’s reality.
I have a plan, and I hope I can stick to it. If you know anyone who is a creative type, or you yourself are a creative type, please join me. Maybe we can create a website, or something, that could send this around the world (I’m sorry, I have no idea how to send this around the world; I don’t do Facebook, and I have no idea how to get the message out). I plan to write something feminist – play, poem, short story, or essay – for every single day of Woman’s History Month. Every day. An entire work (which is why I do not say novel – I can write a 10-minute play in one day, but I have never yet managed to write a novel in one day).
I think women need to assert themselves in the entertainment world – maybe even take it over. The men have been in control too long.
If anyone wants to get this plan moving beyond my own little corner in my own little room on the second story of my own little house in my own little state, feel free to promote the idea, boost it, steal it, whatever – just, if you steal it, allow me to participate. That is all I ask.
Yes. A character that is say, a male doctor is also a normal doctor in that nothing needs to be added to the things a doctor might do or say in order to make the character believable. If the doctor is female, then suddenly things need to be added to make clear that this is not a normal doctor – this one has bumps on her chest!! And so the script has adornments, female markers, where the male doesn’t and simply gets a doctor’s script.
And if the adornments aren’t in the script – the director will add them. As happened to my play script this summer. Plus another script that didn’t call for the intelligent female to have (and use) hand lotion and all sorts of perfumes and gewgaws on her desk…while the male character was a lean, mean, working machine…that was directorial.
It isn’t clear which play is being described. Certainly the current expression of ‘drag’ is more about male reactions to women than women. How is cross-dressing in Japanese theater framed?
There was a long tradition of cross dressing women in vaudeville/Music Hall performance—Hetty King, Vesta Tilley etc.. There are some recordings and film snippets. Those I’ve seen don’t include much more than costume. The mere appearance of the performer was apparently enough to make for some special tone. There doesn’t seem to be any great load of spite or cartoonish mockery involved.
John, I was describing a campy production of Pirates of Penzance. Whether that is written into the play or a directorial decision, I don’t know, because it’s the first time I’ve gone to see Pirates. Still, I am a heavy theater goer (as well as a playwright, which is what my comment at 2 referred to, a play that I myself wrote that was embellished with misogynistic tropes by the final performance without my consent – but we are told we have no control over director’s interpretation as long as they don’t change our actual words, which we are entitled to expect to be honored). I have seen this pattern frequently. Women play male roles a lot around here, because there are more roles for males than for females; people do not find that automatically amusing, and the women do not tend to overexaggrate male stereotypes such as swagger or other boorish mannerisms that are often associated with macho men. When men play women’s roles, they are played for laughs. They are over the top with simpering and swooning and prancing and posing.
My point exactly.
I do not know about Japanese theatre; my comment was not relevant to Japanese theatre, I was talking about theatre in western culture. It is possible this is not the case in other cultures. As for drag – well, it also rather supports my point, doesn’t it?