Do you miss the good old days when comedians dined out on mother-in-law gags and snickered at women’s bodies? Rejoice. They’re back. Only now sexism has had a drag-style glow-up.

Knockers, the latest from “LGBTQ+ entertainment” streaming platform World of Wonder, revives the sexist atmosphere of the Eighties working men’s club circuit. The premise makes the average Carry On film look like Coriolanus: “straight dudes” strap on grotesquely inflated breasts and compete for cash and prizes. It is fronted by Jimbo, a self-styled “big-titted drag clown”, best known for appearances on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Promotional clips show the 43-year-old performer, real name James Insell, giggling as he jiggles “comedically” large prosthetic breasts adorned with pink tassels. The bulbous rubber rack is his trademark; in one BBC-aired Drag Race skit he pounds them until cream spurts out, before unzipping his PVC outfit to fish out a cherry. This grotesque caricature of the female body is met with hoots of approval from an overwhelmingly gay male audience.

Sadly, this is not the first time I have encountered this performer. He set the scene for a chapter in my book Pornocracy, which examines how pornography underpins the idea that “women” are a costume to be worn by men, whether for humor or as the fulfillment of a sexual fantasy. As my co-author Robert Jessel and I argue, while drag has always had a woman problem, its latest porn-saturated iteration makes no pretense of being anything other than the monetized sexual humiliation of women.

Today’s drag is a world away from the caustic wit of performers such as Lily Savage. What remains is entertainment stripped to its lowest common denominator: visual shock, bodily exaggeration, and clips engineered for frictionless circulation on social media. In this, it borrows not just the aesthetic of pornography but its logic too.

And yet drag remains beyond reproach. Whether in libraries or on prime-time television, gay male culture has been flattened into “drag”, and a notably American form at that. Criticism is waved away as puritanical, faintly homophobic, embarrassingly unsophisticated. It is low-status to notice that such performances are about as enlightened as the The Black and White Minstrel Show was anti-racist or that, like their more sober cousin transgenderism, they rest on crude, sexist stereotypes.

But sexual indifference to women is not the same as respect. As Gareth Roberts notes in his book Gay Shame, some gay men harbor a resentment towards women, who are perceived as having their pick of men. What better way to get revenge than by ridiculing the female body under the guise of entertainment?

That gay male misogynists should take up the baton from the club comics of old is not entirely surprising. Bigotry is readily excused when it comes from those deemed to be on the right side of history.

You can see the same reflex elsewhere. Parts of the contemporary Left now make common cause with Islamist groups whose views on women and homosexuality would once have been considered anathema. The reasoning is simple: those expressing such views are classified as oppressed, and so are held to a different standard. Once, that would have been understood as the definition of bigotry.

In these cases, prejudice is waved through under the protective cover of identity politics, where who is speaking matters more than what is being said. The result is not progress, but a double standard so blatant it would be funny were it not so corrosive.

And so we return to the same tired gag: women’s bodies as public property, ripe for ridicule. But who cares? After all, it is only nasty, frigid feminazis who fail to get the joke.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of Pornocracy.

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