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Does BBC’s Boy in The Dress drama signal the liberation or the emasculation of boys?

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Watching straight men in frocks in the name of entertainment is a great British tradition, but the BBC’s Christmas comedy, The Boy in the Dress, is a thoroughly modern entertainment which marks a new phase in our cultural conversation about masculinity, says Glen Poole.

The British love laughing at men in frocks.

Take the Christmas pantomime, where fairy tales are brought to provincial theatres by casts of cross-dressing “celebrities”, who subvert gender norms by casting men as pantomime dames and women as the principal boys.

When Sir Ian McKellan, the actor who is known around the world as Gandolf and Magneto, received rave reviews for Widow Twankey in Alladdin in 2004, he joined a long line of male actors who have thrown on a frock to give us all a topsy-turvy titter that’s as traditional as the Christmas turkey.

So at first glance, there was nothing remotely revolutionary about the BBC presenting it’s star-studded Christmas comedy—The Boy in the Dress—as prime time family viewing on Boxing Day.

Is the BBC promoting cross-dressing for boys?

And yet I suspected there may be something more radical being expressed in David Walliams’ frothy, cock-in-a-frock-com and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw a comment by one of my my socially conservative Christian friends on Facebook.

“I’ve seen enough,” he declared in his status update. “Now we have the BBC using prime time to promote cross dressing for kids. For pity’s sake!”

So for those who think The Boy in The Dress was just another slice of traditional, cross-dressing, Christmas fun I say: “Oh no it wasn’t!” Because there was something far more radical happening in terms of how we think about manhood in the 21st Century.

The key difference is this. In pantomime, men pretend to play female characters for laughs. It’s subversive because only women are allowed to wear dresses in public without transgressing the cultural gender norms that we collectively and unconsciously police.

We all police what men and boys can wear

In The Boy in The Dress, the main character is an ordinary boy who plays football and seems to be attracted to girls, but also happens to love dresses. He fulfils his dream of wearing a dress by creating a female alter ego—because pretending to be female is the only way it is culturally permissible for men and boys to wear dresses in public, without being policed by the rest of us.

When his pretence is discovered, he is expelled from school and (spoiler alert) is sidelined from a cup final match, right up to the dramatic climax when the entire team rebels and comes out to play the victorious second half with every player wearing a very camp dress.

It’s a brotherly show of masculine solidarity that’s not quite “I’m Spartacus”, more “I’m in a party dress!”

So why does this very silly comedy—conceived by Britain’s campest straight comedian—qualify as a revolutionary piece of “gendertainment”?

Well look at how far we’ve travelled. When I was a boy in the Seventies and eighties I captained my school football team and dressed up as one of the Nolan Sisters in front of 3,000 people as part of the cast of the Blackpool scout gang show.

Cross dressing isn’t just for girls

One of my favourite films was Gregory’s Girl, where a beautiful, blonde Scottish lass, who is brilliant at football, pretends to be a boy so she can play on the school team.

And one of my favourite comedy sketches was the Two Ronnies’ “The Worm That Turned“, a mini sitcom set in a dystopian future where women ruled and men were subjugated under the rule of a matriarchal dictatorship headed by another blond bombshell, Diana Dors.

There’s a great speech in which Dors’, the commander of the state police, reveals how the key to women’s rise power, was forcing men to wear dresses and take on the domestic duties:

“Trousers have always been the symbol of the male overlord,” declares Dors’ character in the opening scene. “Our master stroke was to insist on the change over in traditional dress. Once the men had to wear the frocks they were subjugated. As soon as we took their trousers away, they were putty in our hands.”

The cultural belief, reflected in these comedies, created in the early years of Thatchers’ first government, was that entering the masculine realm of trousers, football and work, was the road to empowerment for women, while entering the feminine realm of dresses, emotions and domesticity, would be emasculating for men.

Experiencing the feminine realm can liberate men

It’s now so normative for women to live their lives in both these “masculine” and “feminine” realms, that principal boys have all but disappeared from mainstream pantomimes. For female actors, subversion is no longer dressing up as a boy to play the male lead, it’s having Jack in the Beanstalk rewritten so that the main character is a girl.

Men have yet to go on an equal and parallel journey into the feminine realm. While pretty much everyone in Britain thinks it’s normal for women to wear trousers, play sport and create whatever life-work balance they choose; men wearing dresses, sharing their emotional experiences and putting home life ahead of career are still not considered to be mainstream expressions of masculinity.

There are people who fear that giving everyone equal access to the masculine and feminine realms, will breed a generation of girls who are butch or laddish and boys who are effeminate or gay. And yet there is a great deal for both women and men to gain from experiencing aspects of life that were traditionally restricted to one gender or another.

What is worth celebrating about The Boy in the Dress is that unlike The Worm That Turned thirty-odd years ago, it doesn’t present the feminine realm as a space that will emasculate men and boys, it presents it as a place that can liberate us by allowing us to express our masculinity however we want to.

Does this mean all men and boys should start wearing dresses? No! But this very camp, very British, very silly slice of “gendertainment” does present the opportunity to ask ourselves, what opportunities are men and boys missing out on by our continued failure to make the “feminine” experience of life equally available to all human beings.

 —Picture Credit: BBC

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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Why men should complain to the BBC about Domestic Violence documentary

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The BBC’s Panorama programme completely misrepresented the reality of Domestic Violence  and men should speak out and complain, says Nick Langford.

This week the BBC broadcast a Panorama programme purporting to cover the issue of domestic violence (DV).  I have made a complaint to the BBC about this programme and would encourage you to do likewise: a larger number of complaints will make it more likely they will be taken seriously.  This is why I have complained.

Panorama claims to feature “investigative reports on a wide variety of subjects”, it is the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme and has been broadcast since 1953.  It has made some remarkable programmes including Martin Bashir’s 1995 interview with Princess Diana and the 2006 exposure of the Vatican’s suppression of child sexual abuse scandals.

Last night’s programme involved no journalism, investigative or otherwise, despite being produced and directed by award-winning journalist Joe Plomin.  It said nothing new about DV, despite professing to present a “real understanding of what it is” and presented no solutions, coping strategies or general advice to victims.  It was a 30-minute state-sponsored fund-raising propaganda video for the feminist lobby group Women’s Aid which is currently running a campaign to criminalise “coercive control”.

Panorama depicted DV as perpetrated only by men with women as victims, and children as incidental victims.  Women were presented fleetingly as perpetrators only in same-sex relationships and there was no mention at all that men could be victims or that fathers might sometimes need to protect their children from DV.

Panorama entirely misrepresented the reality of DV.  Perhaps the best source of accurate data is the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) which reports that 28.3% of women are perpetrators and 21.6% of men; over a lifetime 23% of women and 19.3% of men will be victims, meaning that men represent 45.6% of victims.  Any male victim of DV watching would have felt, yet again, that he was invisible and irrelevant; that his license fee was being used to promote a disgraceful lie.

The only DV support organisation referenced was Women’s Aid, of which Julie Walters, the narrator, is a patron.  There was no mention of any other women’s organisations, and certainly none of support groups for men.

I feel particularly aggrieved for the very brave women featured.  No doubt they felt that allowing the cameras to intrude into their lives, recording their horrific injuries, would raise the profile of DV and help other victims come forward and escape abuse, but I believe they have merely been exposed to further exploitation and victimisation by the BBC.

Sandra Horley, chief executive of Women’s Aid’s sister group, Refuge, famously said, “If we put across this idea that the abuse of men is as great as the abuse of women, then it could seriously affect our funding”.

Domestic violence is big business, attracting a great deal of funding, chiefly from our taxes.  The victim of DV is a cash-cow, and if anyone were seriously committed to ending DV they would stop misrepresenting it as a gendered issue, come clean about the reality and seek to understand why some people abuse intimate partners and how they might be helped to stop.

—Picture credit: Flickr/Steven Depolo

You can buy Nick Langford’s new book, An Exercise in Absolute Futility: Whatever happened to family justice? from Amazon. Nick has also co-authored a handy guide to family law in the UK, with his wife Ruth, which is also available on Amazon.

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The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of the insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to to join the conversation about men, masculinity and manhood. Our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

Is it acceptable for the BBC to say this about men?

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Is the BBC guilty of sexist double standards in the way its presenters speak about men, asks Glen Poole?

Can you imagine if Mary Berry turned to an Asian contestant on the Great British Bake Off who was licking freshly whipped meringue mixture off the end of her finger and quipped: “I know, Pakistanis have a lot of perverted desires but yours is the sickest”?

The BBC switchboard would light up with disgruntled calls from unamused cake fans quicker than you could say “my spotted dick has got a soggy bottom”.

How about Bruce Forsyth turning to Bruno Tonioli, the gay Italian judge on Strictly Come Dancing, and responded to a comment about “loving a nice tight rumba” with the words: “Darling, I know homosexuals have a lot of perverted desires but yours is possibly the sickest”?

The liberal media would be calling be for his toupéed scalp long before he’d grabbed Tess Daly to close the show with the words “keep dancing”.

Has political correctness gone mad?

So what about if The Fixer, Alexi Polizzi, said to one of the struggling business owners she was trying to rescue, after he had showed her his shiny new plant machinery: “I know, darling, I mean, men have a lot of perverted desires but yours is possibly the sickest”.

What would happen then? Well this is exactly what Polizzi said to the male owner of a Devon microbrewery this week and nothing happened. The BBC broadcast this comment on 1st September 2014, during the opening episode of the latest series of The Fixer and I have yet to spot a single raised eyebrow amongst the nation’s self-appointed guardians of moral correctness.

Let me pin my colours to the mast here. I’m not an anti-liberal traditionalist who thinks that political correctness has gone mad and needs to be chucked in a straightjacket and locked in a padded cell for its own safety. I happen to have great respect for the good intentions (you know, those things the road to hell is paved with) behind attempts to promote worthy concepts like equality, diversity and tolerance.

What I can’t tolerate is hypocrisy.

I’m not a fan of UKIP, for example, but if Godfrey Bloom had said to a female acquaintance “women have a lot of perverted desires but yours is possibly the sickest” it would have been front page news. Yet when a woman says it about men, nobody bats their hypocritical little eyelashes.

I’m not a regular Top Gear view, but if Jeremy Clarkson had travelled to Mexico to meet a collector of  Triumph Dolomites and told him: “Mexicans have a lot of perverted desires but yours is possibly the sickest”, there’d have been complaints from the Mexican embassy, opinion pieces in the liberal press and left-wing comics would be performing acerbic satire about the issue. Yet there are no ambassadors, columnists or comedians talking about the woman who labelled men as perverts.

I’m no apologist for sexist sports commentators like Andy Gray and Richard Keys, but if they interviewed a gay couple from Fulham who supported Fleetwood Town and concluded: “lesbians have a lot of perverted desires but yours is possibly the sickest”, they’d be in for the high jump, the sack an the firing squad all in the same day. Yet when a woman says it about a man, she’s not even subject to a gentle verbal warning.

Does equality mean treating people equally?

If you believe in people being treated equally then one of two things is happening here, either we’re being oversensitive about what we can say about women, black people, gay people and so on, or we’re being under-sensitive about what we can say about men.

Taking the view that it’s the latter, let’s consider why it wouldn’t be appropriate for a BBC presenter to say that women  or blacks or gays “have a lot of perverted desires”. The reason, quite simply, is that while “some women”, “some blacks” and “some gays” may well “have a lot of perverted desires”, it clearly isn’t the fact that “all women”, “all blacks” or “all gays” are perverts and to say so is not only inaccurate, it’s also offensive.

So why is it okay for the BBC to suggest that all men are perverts? It can only be for one of two reasons. Either the BBC believes it is factually accurate to say “men have a lot of perverted desires” or they simply don’t think it’s offensive because men and boys, unlike women, gay people, black people and every other “special interest” group you can imagine, are not worthy of protection or concern.

Under the Equality Act, the category “sex” (and that includes men as well as women) is a “protected characteristic” and the BBC has a duty to protect men from being treated unfairly because of their sex and to foster good relations between people of different characteristics, eg men and women, different ethnic groups and people of all sexualities.

It may never be possible or desirable to treat all people equally, but we should expect the BBC to treat all people equitably. By tolerating the inequitable treatment of a group as large as men and boys (which includes males of all ages, ethnicities, sexualities, religions and disabilities), the BBC is fundamentally failing in its duty to foster good relations between men and women (both those who have perverted desires and those who do not).

Have your say:

Readers who have access to BBC iplayer, can view the comment here (it’s at the nine minute mark) and decide if you want to notify BBC complaints. If you see examples of casual sexism against men in public life or popular culture that you think we should write about please let us know at insideMANeditor@gmail.com.

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Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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