Some further thoughts on Sharron Davies and drag

 

When I was in my teens, I became anorexic and bulimic, as a result of my gender dysphoria. Starving myself and purging when I binged was a way to keep my body, which was going through 'male' puberty, from looking like the bodies of men, which repulsed me, and of making myself look more like the women I saw in magazines and on TV - which, because this was the 90s, usually meant women who were way too skinny. I mean, it's not like things on that score are all that great now, but I do see a lot more body diversity out there and in particular it seems like women's bodies are more likely to be celebrated for being physically strong (like Jamie Hayter, an encomium to whom you can find on my Patreon, hint hint) than being sylph-like these days. 

One place you could see some strong women, as long as otherwise they conformed sufficiently to the male gaze to be considered presentable, was Gladiators, which went out on ITV on Saturday evenings as part of the government's Heteronormativity Enforcement Hour, during which you, the viewer, would be subjected to at least two and, on some occasions so rare there are nostalgic Facebook memes about them, all three of the Horny Trinity of Blind Date, Baywatch and Gladiators. See, this is how I know you can't 'turn' people queer. Because every night, sat in my grandma's house, I would watch this straight propaganda wishing Doctor Who was back on instead. 

Actually I did rather like Gladiators, to the surprise of absolutely no-one reading this blog. But my memories of the show are tainted by my anorexia. You see, one of the things I would do during my starving and purging years, which overlapped my Gladiators-watching years but extended beyond them, was compare my weight to those of the female Gladiators. I never managed to get down to a point where I weighed less than, say, Jet or Nightshade, but I do distinctly remember the elation I felt one night when I realised I weighed less than Panther (though to be fair among my schoolmates Panther was regarded as one of the 'butch-er' woman Gladiators, which shows among other things that in their case at least the Heteronormativity Enforcement Hour was working according to plan). But that was one night, and I usually weighed more. And that meant I had to work harder. Eat less. Exercise more. Much more. Pop some laxatives tonight too, maybe (like most grandmas, mine was a feeder). 

And, like - I can't be the only woman who grew up in Britain during those years, trans or cis, who had that experience, right? As I alluded to above, being a young woman during the nineties was like being under some kind of weird siege. Yes, according to the guys who were selling the Spice Girls to us this was the age of 'girl power' but it was also the heyday of lad mags and heroin chic and supermodels and in a weird way the constant media insistence that we were all having the best time of our lives during all of this just made it that much worse. There are a lot of women in middle age now who can remember an adolescence spent almost cutting our hands on our hipbones trying to look like one or other of the impossible idols we had shoved down our throats in those days, and I am willing to bet that for a substantial subset of those women the woman they were hurting themselves to try and resemble was one of the female Gladiators. 

In fact, now we're all in the drawing room, let's name ourselves a culprit. 

For some of those women, that woman was Sharron Davies.

And really, isn't it interesting that, these days, Sharron Davies goes after trans women, and drag queens? I can't be the only person who thinks there's something interesting in that, right? Because here's the thing. Sharron Davies is an Olympian, and no-one can take that away from her. But there are a lot of Olympians. And most do not stay in the public eye after their sporting prowess starts to falter. And they have to decide what to do with the rest of their lives. And Sharron Davies, at some point late in her swimming career, decided that she liked the fame and attention she was getting, and who wouldn't? And so, understandably, she looked for a way to keep those good times going now that younger, faster women were passing her ass in the pool, and she found that in Gladiators. 

Or, to put it another way, to keep the money rolling in and her face in the paper, Sharron Davies collaborated with patriarchy in a way whose ill-effects are still felt in the bodies and minds of a generation of women. In an age when women were bombarded with impossible bodies digitally retouched and cosmetically enhanced to be male fantasies, she allowed herself to become one of those fantasies. One of the impossible women we half-killed ourselves trying to be. 

And so it's particularly interesting to me that she slags off drag queens, because the thing about drag is that it is the ultimate in not complying with that system of targeted illusion, which may well be one reason for the popularity of contemporary drag among young women. Queens are pretty open about the fact that they achieve their, and I mean this in the best way, cartoonishly-exaggerated figures through prosthetic trickery. Where the picture of an Olympian idol like 'Amazon' (the name Davies chose on Gladiators, I kid you not people) seduces you with the false promise that if you train your body to conform well enough to patriarchy's gaze you, too, can look like that, drag includes you by saying that, yeah, sure, you can look like that but the only way is with trickery because it's all a trick. The whole thing's drag. 

And I just, I don't know. I just think it's kind of interesting that Davies has a problem with that? Like, maybe that's kind of revealing? And like, maybe, just maybe it also explains why she really doesn't seem to like trans women? I'm just saying...

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