part0024

RuPaul’s Drag Race’s main messages revolve around loving yourself, letting confidence and courage shine through when self-doubt and insecurity seep in, reminding yourself that you are loved and you have family in your community, and no matter what happens … Mama Ru loves you . We’re seeing this theme of self-love more and more, and that’s a great trend that people can talk about when we’re coming from a society that views worth in terms of acquisition of things and relationships. Self-love lets us actually take a step back from all that chaos and pressure to remind ourselves that we’re enough.

As viewers of RuPaul’s Drag Race , we can see the differences between queens who come in with a strong head on their shoulders, confident, and ready to roll with the punches—and how some queens come in nervous and unsure of themselves. Queens like Bianca Del Rio and Aquaria soared through the competition because they came in knowing and loving who they were, while other queens time and time again have let their inner saboteur get the best of them, like Jaymes Mansfield or Mercedes Iman.

Not only can we see how self-love plays a role in performance, but also how we react to loss. After being eliminated, some queens take it with grace and dignity, and are sincerely grateful for the opportunity to have been on the show, while others go out pitching a fit—or offer to bribe their competitors with their anticipated prize money.

We learn from life, we learn from love, and we need to take time and love ourselves. The self-love movement is gaining support from pop culture: from the perspective of mental well-being and our interpersonal relationships, from the standpoint of spiritual satisfaction, as well as in multiple philosophical schools of thought. Through all these perspectives, there is evidence for self-love coming before our love for another; love shouldn’t be based on the fear of being alone or unloved. Self-love is the foundation for being a fully formed individual who can have balanced and healthy relationships with others.

The idea of ‘radical self-love’ is a growing movement within the mental health profession as well. Their answer to combat the ideology of overworking ourselves in our daily lives is to learn to value ourselves and practice self-care. Self-love is a way of building self-esteem in a society that is measuring you only against either the brightest and prettiest or the failure. Erich Fromm, one of those philosophers who also ventured into human-based psychotherapy, wrote The Art of Loving and To Have or To Be ?, in which he argues that love between people isn’t the attachment or ownership of others, but the respect and care for another person as a whole and independent person.

Jealousy, then, is inconsistent with love, because love requires respect and acknowledgment of another’s autonomy and independence. People are independent and ever-growing; we are in fact able to live and flourish with or without partners. The problems of dependence, objectification, and idealization can all be thought of as issues that arise from either the individual lacking a realized sense of self or failing to realize the humanity within another.

Fromm describes love as something shared between two equals—you must become yourself and have maturity and self-esteem before truly having the capacity to love another. Love is not about possession; it’s about mutual respect and unconditional positive regard. If we believe that love is something to be gained or had, we’re viewing it all wrong. Love is an action—as you might have heard before—requiring us to care, respond, affirm, enjoy, or as Fromm himself said it best: “to love is a productive activity.”

Re-envisioning love as an action, rather than a possession, illustrates the routine surrounding love. We can see how in any relationship, there needs to be care and maintenance, rather than passive acknowledgement, but this passage is even more poignant when we read it in reference to ourselves. “Self-renewing” and “self-increasing” are exactly the effects of a loving practice with yourself; we continue to grow, and learn more about ourselves, and in turn, we can have compassion and admire the beauty in others because of how we see the beauty of ourselves reflected back at us within others and the universe.

For his approach to psychotherapy, Fromm identifies four elements of love, which are care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Care is concern for others, in terms of actions to preserve the health and wellbeing of someone else. Responsibility is responsiveness toward another person and their needs. Respect is to be able to see another person fully and sincerely as they are. And finally, knowledge is the desire to know another, to understand and respect others.

Why is it important that each element is practiced in concert with the others? They all are interconnected or build off of each other, in a way. For example, responsibility involves general care, and knowledge involves the initial respect for the person. All elements are required for a productive form of connectedness. They involve seeking to understand and care for someone else, while maintaining your own autonomy and identity.

While the main intent for these four elements of love may be to foster healthy romantic relationships, these factors apply to friendships and team-building as well. We can see these elements at play during group challenges in RuPaul’s Drag Race , especially in the All Stars seasons. When you’re working with a fellow competitor, you have to flip your mentality and see the other queen as an extension of yourself—at least if you want to win. The cliché of “the team is only as strong as its weakest link” holds some truth here. We have all seen the drama when there is one queen who has to distribute all the roles for a group challenge, and there is inevitably a queen in the group who gets salty because she thinks she was dealt a role that’s totally not her brand.

Erich Fromm, like many other psychologists, was inspired by Eastern religions and philosophy. He marks the contrast between the nineteenth-century English poet, Tennyson, and a haiku by a Japanese poet, Basho, while they each react to a flower on a walk. Tennyson plucks the flower, cherishes it, contemplates its composition and how it relates to the divine; Basho’s poem is a haiku, a short Japanese poem, which merely says that he enjoys the aesthetic consumption of the flower without plucking. Fromm remarks that Tennyson wants to have the flower and kills it in the process, while Basho’s understanding of love, to look in awe but remain with yourself, keeps the flower alive.

Not only can we approach self-love from a mental-health perspective, but also from a holistic and spiritual one. One of Buddhism’s major tenets is that attachment leads to suffering, and therefore in order to reduce our suffering, we detach ourselves from the world. And while this does sound grim when you say it like that, supposing you have to basically abandon everything in your life to reduce the suffering, there is a better way to look at it with fresh eyes.

For example, if we saw a couple that needed to know where each other was all the time, needed constant reconfirmation of their affection, and was completely terrified of being apart from one another (we all know that couple), we would hopefully be able to recognize that their behavior is unhealthy and unsustainable. It is obsessive, and potentially abusive. (See also: The Heathers in Season Three, and Ro-Laska-Tox in Season Five).

People often confuse genuine love with attachment. Attachment is expecting for a partner to make you happy, while genuine love is hoping for the other’s happiness—it’s not clinging, and it allows the other to flourish with or without you. Any relationship where we’re seeking fulfillment through another is going to be difficult, because that’s our own responsibility.

The way that we can interpret this Buddhist thought is by making it more about being at peace, having fulfillment within ourselves and then having free, unconditional love for others. We need to make space between ourselves and our egos, and we should make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves first, so that we are not jealous or overly dependent: we just live and let live. It’s not about being cold and detached, but admiring the freedom that other people have: being joyous about life, and appreciating the natural beauty of the world while it is still with us.

One way that Buddhists achieve getting to this state of mind is through meditation. We could say that Jinkx Monsoon’s narcoleptic episodes and her mantra, “water off a duck’s back,” are like moments of sudden prayer and meditation. The goal is to center yourself, to explore the architecture of your own mind, and to understand what RuPaul calls the “Inner Saboteur.” It takes being aware of the darker depths of our thoughts, and being able to wrestle with ourselves, to acknowledge how we can be sabotaging ourselves beneath the surface.

The queens on Season Ten were able to acknowledge the insecurities they had by developing the full character of their Inner Saboteurs: Eureka’s character, Eufilthior, tackled the harsh criticisms of her weight, the quality of her comedy, her personality, and what really cuts deep: “you come from nothing, and you ain’t never gonna be nothing.” It’s important to be aware of our Inner Saboteur, listen to her, because once we’re aware of her, we can see how much of a bitch she can be. We wouldn’t treat others that way, so why would we treat ourselves like that?

Practically, we can interpret these ideas as being compassionate for ourselves and others and going along with the golden rule—to do unto others as we would have done unto us. We live in a world inhabited by many others, and as a practical matter, we need to be able to navigate relationships with others. Granted, it’s not RuPaul’s Best Friend Race , but the main message of the show, and one of the most poignant ones at that, is that drag is a bigger community than just the show, and we can choose our family.

When it comes to loving ourselves, philosophically, we can start with Plato. In The Symposium , where a group of characters describe the origins and nature of love, we can look at the character of Aristophanes, who is known as a comedian and storyteller. His story may sound familiar to those who have heard “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch , a musical about a drag queen from East Berlin. Hedwig is not unlike Aristophanes—they both tell a story that’s full of trauma and heartache, but coming from a charismatic performer, it becomes more of a juxtaposition between comedy and tragedy. This story is one of many roots of the idea that love involves a fulfillment of a void or loneliness, or that love completes us and makes us whole.

Within Plato’s Symposium , seven speeches in praise of love are presented, each with a different approach. Aristophanes presents his in the form of a myth. He was known for being a successful comic playwright, which we could believe from the absurd way he begins to describe ancient humanity: in the beginning, we were round, cheeky, multi-limbed beings cartwheeling around—picture the conjoined twin challenge from Season Seven all hobbling down the runway attached at the hip.

Aristophanes goes on. There were people who seem like a combinations of two males, the children of the sun, two females, the children of Earth, and part-male, part-female, the children of the moon. Readers typically appreciate how this tale provides a basic mythos for variance in sexuality. But then, the story takes a traumatic turn when Zeus declares that he will cut these beautiful four-legged people down to somewhat lonelier two-legged people by splitting them in half. And if they don’t like it, he’ll just do it again and let people all hop around on one leg instead.

The beings are split in half by the gods, and love is discovered as the feeling of wanting to be reunited with our other halves. The new humans are doomed for eternity with an unquenchable thirst for their other half, only getting fleeting satisfaction from sex, but the most tragic part of the tale is that it’s not our bodies that long to reunite most—it’s our souls. Human beings have a blissful beginning that turns irreversibly bleak after the god’s destruction of them; they are doomed to this cyclical nature of pain and fleeting pleasure for all eternity. Talk about dark comedy; it’s a plot that only a scream queen like Sharon Needles could enjoy. And that’s kind of the point here, that this supposed comedian is telling this deeply anticlimactic bummer of a campfire story.

Not only does this tale synthesize comedy and tragedy, it articulates how humans love each other, and how that experience contains both heartbreak and ecstasy. Aristophanes’s myth explains everyone’s profound loneliness and the need to grow, and this idea supports the presumption some have that we can only be fulfilled by finding our other half, or as some may interpret it, their soulmate. “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”

Aristophanes not only provides a comprehensive tale for the origin of love, but relates it to the gods; this relationship between love, gods, and humans gives love a profound, inexplicable divinity, which in some cases is the best way some can even begin to describe the experience of loving. The development of the duality between pain and pleasure expresses the realistic emotions and ever-changing quality of human relationships.

So, while this story is compelling, it is much more beneficial for us to look at this myth as a story of individuals rather than interpersonal relationships. Let’s be real: what kind of life is it to search for your soulmate your whole life? Ru herself disagrees with Aristophanes, claiming that people are mistaken in thinking that they need completion from an external source:

“People are looking to fill that void with some outside source, but that feeling can only be filled from within.”

The truth is that we need to find or create ourselves first, and if we choose to have deeply meaningful relationships, that’s just the icing on the cake. But of course, it’s not a cakewalk (Rupologies for running with the pun); it’s a journey. On some days we feel like total garbage, and other days we feel like we’re the best—and that is the duality in and of self-love. The point is that it’s better nowadays to flip this myth on its head: we’re really looking to be whole within ourselves, rather than looking for completion within another. It’s more important and more meaningful to refocus on finding oneself and loving the you that you find, which is a very feminist idea.

Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, and a feminist activist and writer. Beauvoir believed that women’s passivity and perpetuation of stereotypes were learned through society. She also believed that love is equality between men and women, rather than an unequal power dynamic. We still have some ugly and unrealistic expectations for men and women, and even in the queer community we discriminate against each other based on looks and stereotypes, but love is seeing yourself in the other.

Her work focuses on how it is necessary to acknowledge the radical freedom of others in order to recognize the radical freedom within ourselves. To embrace radical freedom and to stop living passively reflects a radical self-love; to do as you wish and embrace your complete freedom requires you to first love yourself enough to act in such a way. In other words, we’re all interconnected, as long as we can be authentic and empathetic.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity , Beauvoir offers a number of archetypes to illustrate the ways that people can behave when they ignore or misinterpret personal freedom. Her work is intended to provide a possible explanation for how humans could shift their psyche to commit atrocious acts like those in World War II. When we relinquish our free will, when we lie to ourselves saying that we have no control, like the sub-man (in this case “sub” meaning passive in a moral sense, not sexually submissive), or when we ignore ourselves and our meaning in the world, like the nihilist, we lose touch with the part of ourselves that can empathize, think rationally, and act autonomously.

These archetypes are extreme and very dangerous scenarios of the psyche, but we can see elements of them in our own lives. We can unfortunately see the self-sabotaging elements of the nihilist in some queens like Nina Bo’Nina Brown or Charlie Hides. Part of loving ourselves is swallowing the hard pill that we are responsible for our actions, which are sometimes more under our control than we think—and that can make us scared and anxious. Beauvoir claims that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” but it’s important to live authentically, and realize that we’re not victims. We have to actively involve ourselves with our free will.

The idea that we design the meaning within our lives, rather than our being designed for a divine purpose, is what the existentialists thought of as “existence preceding essence.” We can learn a lot and be inspired by artists around us, especially the artists of drag. The contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race have deliberately constructed their “essences,” their drag personas; they existed before their essences did. We have the freedom to create meaning in our lives, and as such, we can freely live authentically and challenge social constructs like gender. Winner of Season Nine, Sasha Velour (we love an academic queen), explains the fragility of gender upon further inspection in an interview for Elle magazine:

A lot of times, our ideas about what gender means are very surface: I’m masculine because I just am that way, I just look that way, that’s just what my body is—and what drag, especially drag makeup, plays with is the actual constructedness of those things: the ability to make yourself look masculine or make yourself look feminine draws a question in people’s minds about how real or natural those things ever are, because each and every one of us goes through decisions and steps in styling ourselves every morning to push ourselves in whatever direction we want to be perceived in. Drag just pushes that idea so far to an extreme that it makes natural or essential completely impossible.

Simone de Beauvoir’s partner and colleague, Jean-Paul Sartre, would likely love the expression of pure freedom in doing drag: something that truly fulfills the sense of identity, and isn’t falsely limited by social bounds of gender, race, body shape, or sexuality.

The art of drag goes a step further because not only is it free from social boundaries, it directly opposes, challenges, and distorts our typical notions.

In terms of feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir and bell hooks both offer more contemporary interpretations of love. African-American author, activist, and feminist, bell hooks, wrote All About Love: New Visions , where she describes the issues surrounding love that she has come across in our modern society. Her thoughts include the idea of love as a verb and acknowledging the ways our patriarchal society and gender roles have influenced her past relationships.

bell hooks’s introduction strikes a chord that RuPaul also described in her book, GuRu : the fear and helplessness that come from abandonment. They both recount how they felt abandoned in their childhood, and how that experience repeatedly caused them heartache. RuPaul wrote, “Time and time again I have recreated that victimhood in my life, in love, in all kinds of storylines that made me feel the way I felt as an abandoned child. For years, I built my identity around that little boy who was left behind … because if I was a boy who could be left behind, then why love myself … I had to learn to let go of that boy so I could start to love.” Until you have the sense of mindfulness and compassion for yourself to let that grief run its course, you can’t move on from that loss. hooks wrote, “I was still mourning—clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased, I was able to love again.” If we do not love ourselves actively and fully, then we can get lost trying to validate ourselves, looking to the external world to fix the pain we have in our hearts, when we need to heal from within.

In hooks’s chapter entitled, “Commitment: Let Love Be the Love in Me,” she goes into depth about self-love in what she admitted was the most difficult chapter to write—she saw that we’re uncomfortable with the idea of self-love because we associate it with narcissism or selfishness. But ironically, self-love is a necessity to have meaningful, deliberate, and fulfilling relationships with others, the relationships that we dream of having. From childhood, hooks says we may have experiences that lead us to believe that we are “not worthy, not enough,” that we’re “crazy, stupid, monstrous, and so on,” but usually we need to acknowledge those past experiences, examine how they have shaped our inner thoughts, and reframe our image of self-love. It is important that she notes it is not easy; this essay up to this point has been filled with mantra after mantra that it’s just a shift in perspective, but it is really a journey:

Using a working definition of love that tells us it is the action we take on behalf of our own … provides us with a beginning blueprint for working on the issue of self-love. When we see love as a combination of trust, commitment, care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility, we can work on developing those qualities or … we can work to extend them to ourselves.

Similar to the four elements of love outlined by Fromm, hooks formats her chapter around Nathaniel Branden’s work, Six Pillars of Self-Esteem , which are: “the practice of living consciously, self-acceptance, self-responsibility, self-assertiveness, living purposefully, and the practice of personal integrity.” These elements are center stage on RuPaul’s Drag Race and are all facets that make up a winner.

Living Consciously: Jinkx Monsoon knew that she could let the comments from her the judges and her peers get to her, but she was mindful, self-aware, and she won. Self-Acceptance: Sharon Needles knew her brand, and she accepted her niche, and everyone (except maybe Phi Phi) accepted her because of it, and she won. Self-Responsibility: Violet Chachki and Aquaria both have a certain standard of quality and aesthetics that they constantly uphold, they never fall short of the standards they set for themselves, and they both won. Self-Assertiveness: Alaska (might be a little controversial … but hey) stuck up for herself, she knew what she wanted, was willing to do anything to make sure that she got it, and she won. Living Purposefully: Sasha Velour serves highly intentional drag, operates as an intellectual for gender-bending as well as an ally for cancer survivors and their families, and she won. Personal Integrity: Bianca Del Rio not only nailed every challenge like a professional, but she won the hearts of the world by helping Adore and giving tough love to the girls on her season, and she won.

No wonder we love these queens so much! While hooks touches on each pillar of self-esteem, the pillar that incorporates her insightfulness in the realm of feminism is “self-assertiveness.” She recounts an instance of a woman hesitant on furthering her education and returning to work, who nevertheless gained personal power and self-esteem when she did so. It can be intimidating and nerve-racking for women to stand up, be loud, and take up space when we’re groomed as girls that we are expected to be kind, demure, and quiet.

Society shames women for speaking up, but bell hooks endorses the idea that self-assertiveness is a positive quality, a gift we give to ourselves regardless of gender. We all need to take care of ourselves first. If we let our lives revolve around the satisfaction of our friends, family, or loved ones without living authentically and seeking fulfillment and joy for ourselves, we become instruments. It’s important to have a comprehensive sense of self-love, including self-assertiveness and self-responsibility.