What Dylan Mulvaney has taught me about my womanhood

Watching a recent video in which Mulvaney tore through a Kate Spade shop like a loud, Midwestern tornado looking for the “perfect” (and costly) spring handbag, I was put off by the tone deaf, over-the-top mindlessness of “buying pretty things” in a time of economic hardship for many.

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But I was also annoyed by the idea that this is how women live — that we are empty-headed hyenas hyperventilating over purses; that we take bubble baths while wearing pearls and sipping light beer; that we skip about like 5-year-olds, exercise like Rockettes and babble in surprise about how March Madness is actually about sports.

Camp is a big part of drag and has been since Milton Berle and Flip Wilson broke that ground in the mainstream, so long ago. Nevertheless, I get why some women think of Mulvaney as a kind of giddy minstrel offering up the most harmful of female stereotypes for public consumption. Moreover, the presentment of an adult female body that looks like a child’s — or an adolescent male’s — both roils the gut and does nothing to help women who are trying to move past Madison Avenue messaging that they can never be good enough without this handbag, or that body. It is good and important for us to listen to and hear our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. But women who are offended by this need to be heard as well.

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