Okay, normally this would be a subject far afield of what we usually address here, but in this particular case we’ve found a rift in society that clearly demonstrates we haven’t come as far along as we like to think. Every time we think we’ve relegated another unhealthy societal attitude to the dustbin of history, we find a way to double down in the ‘misplaced outrage’ department and the multitudes meltdown en masse.
There was a time when a photograph of a woman riding a horse astride, as in ‘not side saddle’, made her an unlady-like harlot.
There was a time when a photograph of a naked baby was considered ‘highly distasteful’, and then it wasn’t, and then for a while it was ‘pornography’, and now no one can really make up their minds about it.
There was a time when a picture of a black man kissing a white woman got people in a lynching mood. While most of society has grown up and sees no problem with it, we do still have some troglodytes (No, not linking to Stormfront. I retain enough shreds of dignity not to filthy my blog up like that) who believe it’s an ‘affront to nature’.
“Concussions remind me my virtue is intact!”
The point is this: These are all proof that as a society, we’re learning how to recognize that when what people want to do harms no one, we should let them be. If it makes us feel ‘icky’ when two guys kiss, that’s our problem as individuals, not society’s, and not the guys’ kissing.
Almost daily there is new proof that we are not learning at the rate we perhaps should be. So herein we have what used to be quaintly referred to as a ‘Teachable Moment’.
Meet Desmond Napoles, the eleven year-old drag princess:
Take a second to register and remember your first impressions of him. We’ll get to that in a bit.
Desmond is a young lad who, at an even younger age, decided he loved being ‘fabulous’. After a video of Desmond sashaying down the street in a pride parade went viral, he told his parents that was what he wanted to do as a life pursuit. They took him to therapy. The therapist said they should neither push him into doing anything, nor discourage him from doing what he wanted. So his parents chose not to be dicks and supported his pursuit. As it turns out, Desmond was not messing around. He reached out to the LGBTQ and Drag community and found tons of support for his projects. His biggest success so far? Making everyone’s heads explode.
How? This (trigger warning):
I’ll admit, my ‘ick’ response went off a little bit too. But thanks to a relatively functional anterior cingulate cortex and the ability to introspect, I was able to take a step back and look at this objectively. It’s just a kid dressing up on a stage and a bunch of adults playing along and encouraging him.
But apparently being ‘objective’ isn’t something people are good at these days…
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BYZANTINECATHOLIC • a month ago
The “parents ” should be put in jail and the child placed with someone who loves him.
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- WaterIsWet Guest • a month ago
- A millstone hung around her neck and thrown into the sea.
- eWord • a month ago
- This is a sick way of trying to normalize and profit from child abuse. In a functional society, those responsible would be charged, counselled or sent to jail.
Faith of Our Fathers • a month ago
Nothing surprising here . In fact there is one thing that surprises me is how he still kept his Clothes on . It reminded me of a Program called The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan. The only difference was once the Perverted Sodomites were finished with the Children they killed them it was sickening. And the same thing will happen to this Child also. Once he outgrows their Lust they will throw him aside like a Worthless Rag. O they may not Physically Kill him but they will Mentally Emotionally and Spiritually.
Not only does the bar need to be closed but the child also needs to be taken away from his sick parents. Clearly this is child exploitation and abuse. Disgusting.
i can’t imagine anyone looking at this and NOT thinking it’s straight up child abuse. why any parent would think it’s remotely ok for an 11 year to wear a revealing outfit and dance on stage in front of grown men is appalling. stripping children of their innocence is one of the most disgusting and vile things an adult can do
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Ummm…..
Also…
And….
“Sometimes I doubt your commitment…”
I’m not going to lie, it was cringy to look these images up because I get the same visceral response most every adult does, ‘these are children!’. The difference is that I can understand that the ONLY harm in any of it is when the parents force those children to do something they don’t want to do. It is no different when a parent forces their child to play football or join a wrestling team against the child’s will.
This is the distinction people are failing to make: There is no harm in what a child wants to do, there is only harm in what their parents force them to do… or not to do.
Yes, some of you smartasses are already saying “What about child sociopaths who torture animals?”
If you have to compare a child who wants to dress up and wear makeup to a child who tortures animals, you have a severe inability to make crucial distinctions. Unlike dressing up and dancing on a stage, torturing animals actually is harmful and a sign that the child will move on to bigger animals.
“Do Bad Writers count as ‘animals’?”
When it comes to football, ballet, field hockey, tennis, art, drama, and Dungeons and Dragons, kids are pretty good at figuring out what they like or don’t like. But here’s one small point of interest: children are FAR more likely to be molested by a sports coach than they are a drag queen.
In fact, after researching the incidents of children molested by sports coaches, I typed “Children molested by Drag Queens” into a Google search. Google laughed and said “What, are you f-ing kidding me?” in the voice of Sean Connery, then kicked me to Jarvis, logged me out, then in again, played the Smurf song, and then permanently displayed a cascade of different derp-face images in recurring browser windows.
I’m sure they fixed it since then.
So yeah, a child is infinitely more likely to be molested by their pastor, sports coach, teacher, or creepy uncle than by a drag queen.
One of the most common elements determining whether or not a child is molested is how involved their parents are in their activities. Given that Desmond’s parents are involved, loving, and engaged, he’s in a far safer place than any altar boy on the planet.
“The Drag Queens don’t molest kids. How do we compete with that?”
So here we have an example of many people in our society who can’t gauge the difference between the harmful and the harmless, and see evil where it is not.
There’s actually a very good reason for that. People who lean conservative tend to have an overactive orbitofrontal cortex, which is in part responsible for why conservatives see threats where they don’t exist. While conservatives obviously make up the vast majority of those outraged by what is harmless but ‘different’, the fact is we’re all susceptible to the conditioning of society. I was a homophobe myself up through high school because back in the ‘80s, that was ‘normal’. Thankfully I had the fortune of having gay friends in my life, and the ability to learn that it’s neither a choice nor harmful. I grew up and got over it.
Sadly, society as a whole is a force for discouraging independent thought. It’s far easier to just agree with everyone else in the tribe than it is to risk expulsion by thinking independently. So while conservatives have a far greater tendency to exhibit tribal outrage and calls to violence, we are all still susceptible to the ‘groupthink’ that deforms our perspective.
Speaking of ‘calls to violence’:
Meet Graham Allen as he goes into an unhinged rant complete with firearms about how we need to ‘deal’ with parents who let their kids do what Desmond is doing. I’m not playing the video or driving traffic to his site (see above regarding Stormfront), but picture a T-Rex flailing around trying to wipe its own ass and you’ll have a fair idea of the visuals.
The video is rich with Allen ranting, gagging, banging on a post, and crying in the fetal position like a drama queen. No, really:
But he has some choice statements too. Here’s my favorite:
“I wanna meet the parents so we can have a true ‘come to Jesus’ meeting. That’s Christian speak for ‘I will annihilate you!’.”
Leave it to a conservative to shout “Don’t tell me how to raise my kids!” then turn around and screech, “How DARE you raise your kids that way!”. Okay, it’s not just conservatives who do that, but I’m pretty sure if I went on a conservative site and told them that they shouldn’t put their kids in football because of the high incidence of head trauma, they’d go apoplectic over it.
So what’s Graham going on about? In this instance it’s a different case that brings us this conservative snowflake meltdown. Meet ‘Queen Lactatia’;
Teenvogue.com
Yeah, I find the name a little off, but so what? Queen Lactatia is ten year-old Nemis Quinn Mélançon Golden of Montreal. Like Desmond, he decided at a very young age that he loved putting on dresses and makeup. So not wanting to stomp out a child’s dreams, his mother went along with it. Now he is featured in magazines and web pages, and has a career making puritanical heads explode. Particularly with this one photo session, the one that drove poor Graham into paroxysms and sent fainting couch stocks to the Moon:
Remember when I said, ‘Take a second to register’ the pic of Desmond? Now how are you doing? Yes, when I first saw this I ‘icked’ a little too. But again; step back and think about it.
According to Allen, the drag queen in the photo is ‘naked’. But Allen intentionally puts a ‘censored’ black rectangle over the man’s groin area in the picture to deliberately create the false impression that the child was exposed to a man’s genitals.
As you can see in this original photo, he is not. He is also not being molested. In fact, it seems that young Nemis is having a genuinely good time doing a drag shoot as Lactatia with a drag queen who is admittedly almost entirely in the buff but not doing anything at all untoward, lascivious, or otherwise perverse.
Then we look at what people on Allen’s page say….
Scott Queen I was taught not to judge others, only God can judge. But someone needs to arrange the meeting.
Vicki Mcquarrie-Lewis Hit your knees folks, this is getting close to the end of Revelations.
Donna Aziz-Lorenzo Why is this guy not in jail and why are the parents not losing custody of this kid.
Vera Nelson Don’t forget the dull ,raggedy edged bolt cutters for a neutering.
T.C. O’Neal Scott Queen all involved should be violently castrated then publicly hung!!
Alejandra B Miño Que horror😵
“But he’s standing next to a near-naked man!”
Really? Let’s look at the things that actually harm children:
– 3.5 Million sports injuries per year.
– Over 90 thousand children are poisoned every year.
– 2,000 children die in vehicular accidents every year.
– 1,300 children are killed by guns every year.
– Are we talking about emotional harm? Then the biggest cause of stunted emotional development in children is divorce.
When I search “Children traumatized by Drag Queens per year” Google says:
(I’m sure they fixed it by now.)
So, if you do ‘normal’ things like put your kids in sports, drive them around, have guns or cleaning supplies in your house, or have been divorced, you’re putting your child at greater risk of physical or emotional damage than letting them pose with a drag queen in the buff while wearing a dress and makeup.
Considering the death threats conservatives have made against Desmond and Nemis’ families, it becomes apparent who the real danger is.
But our monkey brains tell us that ‘different is bad’. All those things above are normal, so for that one insane reason we do not perceive them as a threat. What about the kids raised in nudist families? How about the various tribes that seriously don’t give a fuck about anyone’s junk hanging out? Because our culture tells us it’s wrong, we fire up the ol’ orbitofrontal cortex, hypothalamus, and hippocampus and come up with every horror we can imagine about something totally innocuous.
Here’s the real issue: “If, when you look at a picture of a child in makeup and dresses, all you can think of is ‘sex’, that’s YOUR problem.”. I, personally, do not. I see a little kid literally playing dress up. They’re children. It has nothing to do with ‘sex’ for them. So why should it for anyone else?
Desmond’s mother had something to say about that:
“Articles have been coming out claiming that my son danced half naked and stripped in a sleazy gay bar for grown men who threw dollars at him and is being exploited and forced to perform. THIS IS NOTHING MORE THAN BLATANT HOMOPHOBIA and display of the grossly outdated belief that gay men are pedophiles.”
She continued, “No one forces him to perform, performing is what he loves to do and has always loved to do…. His costumes are less revealing than a dancer’s or cheerleader’s uniform, and are always age-appropriate. While he dances, he does not move in a sexual manner.”
“I know a lot of drag fans/drag queens do not want to see kids in what they consider an adult form of entertainment or venue, but drag is changing and becoming more widespread and popular with people of all ages, genders, identities, races, abilities, and disabilities. Instead of tearing drag kids down, why not mentor them? They are the future of drag,”
Funny, but it seems that the very first thing conservatives think about when they see a child in drag is sex for some reason. They let their fear-driven psyche dream up every specter of perversion rather than let their rational brain objectively measure and conclude that no harm is happening. If you’re not a conservative but you let your visceral ‘ick!’ response dictate your perception, stop it. You’re better than that.
Meanwhile, all the people who just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that there’s no harm going on with these young, ambitious, and fabulous boys never seem to have a problem letting their own kids go to church.
“Oh, Timmy is going to learn ALL about Jesus today.”
BSBuzzsaw 