For better or worse, the capacity to do evil is often associated with strength.
The idea that strength is necessary for evil, and that we ladies are somehow deficient in strength and therefor unable to be properly evil, carries on into how people treat the victims of women in the real world. My dad was abused first by his mother, then by his first wife (who also abused my siblings) but that somehow must be less damaging, or he must be weaker than the victim of a man. An extra layer of victim blaming. I've been stalked twice. The second time was by a man (teenage boy, actually, but he and I were both teenagers) and while I couldn't get anybody to help me at the time (I later found out his family were organized crime, and nobody was helping me because they didn't want to get shot) everybody I tell the story to now gives sympathy and tells me how horrible that must have been. But it was so much less horrible than my first stalker, the sociopathic ten-to-fourteen-year-old girl, who stalked me for four years. Most people laugh at that one. Obviously, she couldn't really have done any harm, she's just a girl. I'm told by other victims of violent crime that this is a common pattern.
particularly outside the realm of fairy tales and cartoons aimed primarily at children.
Particularly inside the realm of media for children, in my view. Although there are more satisfying villainesses there proportionately, children's media catches them young, and since stories shape our understanding of the social world, the younger, the better.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-09-03 07:07 pm (UTC)The idea that strength is necessary for evil, and that we ladies are somehow deficient in strength and therefor unable to be properly evil, carries on into how people treat the victims of women in the real world. My dad was abused first by his mother, then by his first wife (who also abused my siblings) but that somehow must be less damaging, or he must be weaker than the victim of a man. An extra layer of victim blaming. I've been stalked twice. The second time was by a man (teenage boy, actually, but he and I were both teenagers) and while I couldn't get anybody to help me at the time (I later found out his family were organized crime, and nobody was helping me because they didn't want to get shot) everybody I tell the story to now gives sympathy and tells me how horrible that must have been. But it was so much less horrible than my first stalker, the sociopathic ten-to-fourteen-year-old girl, who stalked me for four years. Most people laugh at that one. Obviously, she couldn't really have done any harm, she's just a girl. I'm told by other victims of violent crime that this is a common pattern.
particularly outside the realm of fairy tales and cartoons aimed primarily at children.
Particularly inside the realm of media for children, in my view. Although there are more satisfying villainesses there proportionately, children's media catches them young, and since stories shape our understanding of the social world, the younger, the better.