The past it is said is a different country, where things are or rather were done differently. For example blackface performance used to be quite acceptable but today it is not. I will not of course criticise those performers such as Al Jolson who appeared on stage or on screen in blackface outfits as that was what was accepted as normal for the time. I can appreciate Mr Jolson’s skills as a performer even though his blackface stuff doesn’t sit right today.

But if appearing in blackface is not acceptable today why on earth do we tolerate and even celebrate its modern day counterpart which is ‘womanface’. Womanface is where men dress up as women and take the worst stereotypes of women as being representative of womanhood and don’t just perform the act on the stage but do so in real life and demand that people accept their act as real.

One man who does this is Dylan Mulvaney. This man has made a career out of pretending to be a woman just as some performers of the past made a career out of performing in blackface. If Mulvaney was just a knobhead on the internet it would not be so noteworthy but this nutter has influence. He’s been hired, to much chagrin and complaints from real women, to promote a make up brand and has even been invited to spend time with Senile Sniffing Joe at the White House. I very much doubt that a modern day blackface performer would be hired to make product endorsements and neither would they be invited to the White House, even though Mulvaney’s womanface is just as offensive to women as blackface is offensive to black people.

One person who has clearly pointed out this double standard between those who perform in blackface and Mulvaney’s womanface is the Twitter user WireSpy. They’ve put up a brilliant video showing Al Jolson doing blackface with Mulvaney doing womanface. The video makes it very very easy to see the similarities between these two performances.

Here’s the video.