When looking at a lot of Disney movies it is not hard to notice how many female villains there are – I like to call this the “bitch” phenomenon. Movies like Tangled, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Enchanted, and Snow White (we could go on and on) all have female villains who are, for lack of a better term, bitches. Why is it that so many movies have this idea of the female villain who is evil and vindictive?
Male villains in Disney movies are not as black and white seeming as the female villain. They tend to have some motive to their evilness, like in Pocahontas the main antagonist wants to become rich and be praised by the king. He will get glory – he isn’t evil simply because he is evil but he is gaining something important for himself by acting this way. The main antagonist in Aladdin wants the princess Jasmine as his prize and acts the way he does for the girl. So they are definitely not good, but they are not just solely evil either.
Looking at one of the most recent Disney princess movies, Tangled, the mother and antagonist sings a song called “Mother Knows Best.” She is the one who is in charge and she is not going to have anyone against her. She is thought of to be completely selfish as her aims are just to stay young forever. She is a bitch who just completely uses Rapunzel for the magical powers her hair possesses. There is really no leeway for her motives.
So why does this pattern seem to reoccur and why are we putting these messages into our children’s movies? Do we really want to teach our children that when women have power they become evil vindictive bitches? That isn’t the message I believe we should be presenting for the children of the next generation. There is a lot more to women with power than just being a bitch who is evil.
Women with power are not bitches and we need to stop looking at them this way. When you encounter a powerful woman you should instead think that she is a woman who worked hard to get where she is and that she deserves to be there. Women in power should no longer have this label of bitch in the same way that women villains should not be so one-sided. Even villains are people and they may be the antagonist, but they do not need to be so one-sided and do not need to always be women.
I hope as Disney movies evolve we will have more movies similar to Brave, where we have a smart female protagonist and an antagonist that is not entirely clear. At the beginning it appears that the mother is the antagonist but then that story evolves to show she is not merely an evil bitch who is no fun, as we might believe in the beginning of the movie, but in fact Merida is fighting the relationship of her and her mother. This is the kind of child’s movie that we need to have for future generations, movies that no longer paste people as either black or white – there are many shades of grey, even within the “evil” characters.
Photo Credit: Mother from Tangled