Drew Barrymore is a highly successful actress, producer, director, talk show host, and businesswoman.  She is an icon and a household name.  She is probably one of my favorite actresses, and I own most all of her movies.  My two daughters love her movies just as much as I do, and we often sit down to one of her movies to enjoy some mom/girl time.

I have always appreciated that she was never overtly political — that is, until I recently viewed a segment from her talk show, The Drew Barrymore Show.  What I witnessed offended and shocked me to my core.

The show's segment featured a person who goes by the name of Dylan Mulvaney.  Mulvaney is a gay male Broadway actor who decided one year ago that he wanted to know what it is like to live as a girl.  Every day, he makes a social media video of himself dressed as a girl and behaving how he thinks girls behave.  He is basically performing like a racist in blackface in a minstrel show.  He overly exaggerates and appropriates womanhood.  He treats the experiences of women's lives as a joke and something to be mocked.  He is the epitome of misogyny, in womanface and designer heels.

In the segment, Mulvaney tells Ms. Barrymore how he copes with being a woman as he feigns a horribly effeminate voice and talks about reading mean social media comments.  It is at this point that Ms. Barrymore gets on her knees in front of this ridiculous man, grasps his hands, and bows down before him as if he were an idol to worship.

As I sat there in front of my computer screen, I was in complete disbelief.  Here is a successful woman prostrating herself in front of a man in a dress!  Mr. Mulvaney has become rich and famous because of people like Ms. Barrymore.  He has received thousands of dollars from corporations like Kitchenaide, to be a brand ambassador.  He has had special treatment and private meetings with President Joe Biden, and has had celebrities fawn over him, all because he likes to make fun of women and girls.

Ms. Barrymore, how dare you invalidate the experiences and lives of women and girls by uplifting a man who has stolen and degraded what it means to be a woman?  A woman is more than a feeling, a woman is more than acting like a clown, and a woman is more than just make-up and dresses.

I have two daughters whom I am raising to be confident and strong in their character, and Ms. Barrymore is telling them that their lives as girls don't matter by promoting this farcical man.  She is enabling a movement that paints women as ridiculous, self-absorbed ditzes whose worth lies only in what they wear and how well they put on make-up.

Dylan Mulvaney doesn't need sympathy or validation; he needs to be told he is a man and that he is hurting young girls by degrading and demeaning them.  He has no clue what it is like to be a girl or a woman.  He doesn't know what it is like to get a period, or have a baby, or go through menopause.  He doesn't know what it feels like to nurse a baby and have cracked nipples and be so exhausted that you want to drop, but you keep pushing through the day because your kids need you.

Women and girls are under attack.  The rights we have fought for are being eradicated by men who are thieves.  They have stolen our sports and our private spaces, and now they want to eradicate us by becoming cheap grotesque imitations of us.  Many women are afraid to speak out and stand up for their rights because these men in dresses threaten and dox them.  Our government, public institutions, and corporations have sided with these twisted men.  Now we have one of the most famous and successful women in the world kowtowing to them.

As a society, we have to stop letting these insane, perverse men destroy our daughters, mothers, sisters, and friends.  Women are not a costume, and we are not a joke.  Talk about toxic masculinity...

Image: Drew Barrymore.  Credit: Caroline Bonarde Ucci via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 (cropped).