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No I was not being sarcastic - more making a very wry observation of a cognitive dissonance that goes in one direction in the USA but goes in the complete opposite direction in Europe.

To be fair, there are plenty of places that agree with Conservative America’s take on camp, gay, cross-dressing and all that sort of thing. Russia, and the Islamic countries, have a hostile attitude to men dressing up as women. Down with that sort of thing! (Careful, now.)

Us Brits have grown up with cross-dressing blokes in comedy with the humour ranging from the outrageously offensive camp to Shakespearean level camp... Little Britain, Lily Savage, Kenny Everett, Dame Edna Everage, Hinge & Bracket (don’t ask). Ironically, it’s practically impossible to find any of those men being accused of pederasty no matter how filthy their stage personas were.

And didn’t America have its own celebrated cross-dessing? female impersonators even right at the beginning of the cinema industry? Like Julian Eltinge...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fascinating_Widow#/media/File:Julian-Eltinge-Fascinating-Widow.jpg

We Brits can trace the ancestry of Mrs Brown’s Boys’ Agnes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et1y2XJzKjs) thru Alistair Sim (Miss Fritton in the St Trinians films), all the way back to Will Hay (Old Mother Riley, 1945 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtP7MQCZUM). They are all different era interpretations of the exact same prop comedy routine - bloke dressed as a lady has a mishap with a thing.

In the British experience it’s actually the most apparently straight, most apparently establishment, most apparently conservative family favorites who turn out to be the worst sexual predators of all. Here, we had Jimmy Savile, Paul Francis Gadd (Gary Glitter), and Rolf Harris, pretty much got away with sexually abusing minors - amazingly, JS actually molested a girl live on camera and in front of an entire studio audience while recording Top of the Pops.

So for us, and indeed across Europe, we’re not interested in comedy camp being potentially dangerous, we’re actually interested in what IS DEFINITELY dangerous.

And we tend to think that any industry that only seems to exist to coerce underage girls into wearing age-inappropriate clothes and doing very morally questionable dances is dangerous. So, we don’t want our pre-teen girls wearing suggestive bikinis or Daisy Dukes and cropped T-shirts, we don’t want them tottering around in high heels (aka “f**k-me shoes”), and we don’t want them twerking for a pervy adult male audience. The archetypal example of that pre-teen beauty culture gone mad is the Miss Tanguita Pageant in Colombia (The “Miss Little Thong” contest).

In some conservative places in Europe, if you tried to set up a mid-Western style beauty pageant for the under-11s that would get the local child protection officers out on a full mobilisation just to make sure that the kids aren’t being put on a pervert show, but if you rang them to complain about a troupe full of camped-up transvestites doing a family show, they would tell you to stop wasting their time because there’s nothing inherently creepy about it.

MalPearce, you said: "...Good god, those pearls are getting a right good clutch from the "even in the 1970s this didn't happen" crowd. Sheesh. Get some perspective. We've had camp drag since before Shakespeare, it's not some new thing for crying out loud..."

Where you fail to see this correctly is in context.

First, "Cross Dressing Blokes" is on thing. That is NOT the issue here. Everyone has seen some Hollywood thing most famously in "Some Like it Hot". We have all seen the British version of cross-dressing in Benny Hill, and many of us have laughed at it.

It is humor, and it is meant IN CONTEXT to be humor. Even little kids get that it is humor, picking up that their parents watching it are laughing at it. It is ENTERTAINMENT and (in the past, at least, MEANT to be ENTERTAINMENT) and is treated as such. Normal kids see the kind of cross-dressing creeps on the street or the movie screen in these non-entertainment roles, and are rightfully and appropriately confused. They usually have to ask their parent for guidance, and get an explanation that helps them not be confused and to better understand what they are seeing IN CONTEXT.

Holding a child's hand as they walk past a drugged out transvestite on a city street, or even seeing them appear on television in passing in any form is a far, FAR cry from jumping in your car and making a SPECIFIC excursion with your toddler to an event, a POLITICAL event that DELIBERATELY presents this twisted and unhealthy adult sexual state (it is apparently going to become an "unhealthy sexual state for ages down to toddlers if they have their way) in context as a normal thing and a normal path in life to follow.

It ISN'T a normal thing, and it ISN'T a normal path to follow, like becoming a plumber or a doctor. Any parent that takes their child to an event like that shouldn't be allowed to raise or care for children.

When normal people point to that as "grooming behavior" (with the despicable active participation of a parent, who should be protecting their child from this twisted, unhealthy perversion) they are 100% accurate in their condemnation.
Second, you make the weird dressing up of little girls in adult makeup and clothing sound as it is an American thing all Americans know and love. It isn't. I have never-NEVER spoken to ANY adult who has an opinion on that apart from "That is just creepy." That is the cesspool that Hollywood has openly become, and people around the world make the mistake of thinking this is mainstream culture. It isn't. And it is fallacious and displays a great deal of ignorance about America and the people who are citizens of it. But it is not the first time that someone in another country sees some aspect of American in their media where it is presented as mainstream. If you think that twisted crap is mainstream American, you are ill informed.

Our anger over this isn't in your condescending and offensive assessment of it as "pearl clutching" in your words.

You make the statement in your post: "...To be fair, there are plenty of places that agree with Conservative America’s take on camp, gay, cross-dressing and all that sort of thing. Russia, and the Islamic countries, have a hostile attitude to men dressing up as women..."

How clever. Associating rightful concern with this forced indoctrination to Russia and Islamic countries. Well, we can see Russia and the Islamic countries are not the only ones who make all their judgements on the basis of Hollywood as the norm, as you do.

What Americans are concerned with (AND RIGHTLY SO) is the forced indoctrination of children in grade school against the wishes of the parents, not to mention every other aspect of this up to and including college and the workplace. This normalization of a mental illness...no, not "normalization"...OUTRIGHT ENCOURAGEMENT by the Federal Government itself with every possible trickle-down encouragement that engenders is what people are outraged about.

Do you not see the difference between entertainment (meant in the likes of "Benny Hill") and forced government mandated indoctrination, forced indoctrination as terrible as anything done in any totalitarian government in the world in history?