"After six hours of Magafication, I hobble home and wash off the drag. I pull off the lashes; the fake tan pools in the shower tray.... The relief is indescribable. "

 

That's Poppy Sowerby in The London Times. The experiment was performed in Manhattan — uptown on Fifth Avenue and downtown, in the East Village, where she lives.

In going Maga for a day, I expected scowls, I expected disdain — but I didn’t expect a full-blown identity crisis. The hyperfeminine glamour, which I’d spent my adult life scoffing at, had put me on the other side of an unspoken social code. Wearing the clothes of another, it is shocking to realise just how superficial we all are: those who would dismiss me offhand as a hair-shirted liberal now took me into their confidence as an ally against “sluts”; the downtowners who are normally so friendly in a smoking area closed ranks against a conformist.  And yet, days later... I’m moved by a strange affection for the Magababe — if not as a political entity, as a person. In liberal youth culture she is a genuine radical: she doesn’t care if the cool kids hate her. She is unapologetically sexy and feminine; her president is in power and so is she. Though her values are not mine, I respect her brashness as the ultimate non-conformist.