Why are most villains women? …This is interesting!
Because we look fabulous while doing it.
jafar, captain hook and hades all look like the sassy gay friends in the group
Let’s be real, guys. It’s bc non-normative femininity is monstrous.
Like that is why all the villains are these amazing beautiful badass impressive feminine powers; subversive or whatever femininity in “either” gender is a threat, non legible genders and races are threats (look at the distribution of racial “others” in this picture, as well)
These badass feminine powers weren’t necessarily imagined as a good thing by their creators/writers/etc
We’re just reclaiming/reimagining them that way now
So yeah.
Monstrous femininity, bro
Yeah, the male villains are coded feminine because effeminacy in a man (see: Skyfall) is often used as an indicator of evilness or instability (unstable —> dangerous). Same goes for witchcraft (which is itself a feminine code): five of the eight characters up there use some kind of black magic, and of those five two are male. Same ratio of witches to non-witches as of female to male.
It’s always amused me that witches are assumed to be villains in fairytale adaptations, since so many fairytales have witches showing up out of the blue to be helpful for no real reason.
It’s because most Disney heroes are female.
I’ve never completely figured out what I think is going on with that, but I think it’s more complex than the ‘monstrous femininity’ argument given above, though surely that plays a part (most of these characters are literal monsters, or become monsters during the course of the story), and having supernatural powers also plays a part.
But I think there’s an element where pitting a young heroine against an adult male villain seems…unfair? Or at least creepy. In the cultural context, I mean. In the ‘boys shouldn’t hit girls’ sense, and the skeevy dirty old man sense.
And also there’s pretty clearly a coming-of-age element of young women squaring off against adult femininity. Are they defeating the ‘evil version’ of womanhood? Again, that feels too simple. It makes sense with Ursula and the Evil Queen, but Maleficent there is not some parodically hypersexualized octopus lady, or aging woman bitter over ‘losing her looks.’ There’s definitely an element of oppressive authority to all those figures, though. So it’s about defeating corrupt femininity, maybe? Maybe it’s saying that to a lot of teenaged girls, womanhood comes off a lot like a fire-breathing dragon, but it doesn’t have to be.
Anyway, I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s saying something positive and negative to young women at the same time. The message that you can stand up and fight back against corrupt authority and portrayals of womanhood you don’t like is a good one. On the other hand, the woman vs. woman motif isn’t one we need to keep reinforcing.
(But look at the differences; how the older movies are about girls, for girls, telling a girl’s story—because Peter Pan is as much about Wendy learning to grow up as it is about Peter, and 101 Dalmations is, you know, about puppies—while the newer movies have male heroes and villains and while the princesses aren’t passive dolls, they’re not the captains of their own ships either. It’s not THEIR story.)