Why Does The Media Make Tall Women The VILLAINS? | The Villain Stereotype Explained

Before we dive in, I want to give a big shout out to Whitney Allison for sponsoring today's episode Tall Girlies. We all know the struggle finding clothes that actually fit and look good on us is hard enough, so when it comes to something as essential as building a capsule wardrobe, it can feel frustrating and nearly impossible. But Whitney Allison is here to change that. They design timeless capsule collections made just for us, with high quality pieces that are built to last and mix perfectly with anything in your closet, so no more compromising on style or fit. And with the holiday season coming up, now's the time to check out their vegan leather collection Fourfall at Whitney Allison dot com so you can dress how you're meant to dress. You'll find their website and socials linked in the description, and thank you again to Whitney Allison for sponsoring today's episode. Good morning, everybody. You are currently listening to a Tall Girls podcast hosted by a tall girl named India. I hope everyone who's tuning in today is doing super fantastic. Before I get into this episode, I do want to say make sure you're following me on my socials at a Tall Girls podcast on Instagram, TikTok, and pinture so that you can stay up to date on all of the latest podcast episodes and catch a glimpse of my everyday life. Also, feel free to lay your review and let me know how tall you are. I'm genuinely curious. Also, I have a monthly newsletter you should definitely subscribe to that everything is gonna be linked in the description Happy Halloween, everybody. I can't believe that an episode is actually going up on Halloween Day. I have a costume. Should I put it on? I'm about to put it on right now. See this is the episode to be watching a video version of this because I'm am I gonna make a fool of myself. I don't know. I'm gonna put my Halloween costume on, and you guys let me know what you think about it. So what do we think? Okay, if you're just sticking with the audio version for this today, I have like this little mini witch hat situation going on. Fun fact, it actually had like a little veil over it. But I mean to wear this while recording a podcast episode. I'm not gonna be able to see so I cut her off, and you know, she's kind of cute. Like, I'm not gonna lie. I have not dressed up for Halloween like in years. Okay, I'm pretty sure the last time I did that, I was like in middle school for my little school Halloween parties. I think when I entered high school that all just kind of stopped. And when you know, I actually did have Halloween spooky season activities or whatever going on. I would print out a picture of the map of India. Yes, yes, I would have put out a picture of a map of India, cut it out and tape it to my shirt. Okay, it's clever. My name is India and I'm India for Halloween, but the country, not the actual person. But you know I I nowadays I want to do a little bit more. So I literally went to the store and got like this little which hat headband thing, and we're gonna roll with it. I'm gonna probably have this on and off for the episode or should I keep it on for I'm gonna I'll keep it on for some parts and take it off for other parts. And also just want to say make sure you stay safe out there everyone, whether you're trick or treating or participating in Halloween festivities activities. Make sure you're watching your drinks, make sure you're watching your candy. Always check your candy because you never know what's gonna happen out there, So stay safe, y'all. Today's episode is actually very fitting for a Halloween day. If you're a tall girl and you need a last minute Halloween costume, you should definitely dress up as a villain or a monster. It's absolutely the most perfect idea. Okay, that sounds like a little bit bad, but hear me out. I'm gonna give you my quick little take. Tall women are monsters. Tall women are evil, Tall women are scary. This is what the media wants us to think by primarily casting tall women as villains in movies, especially those animated Disney movies. Have you ever noticed that in quite a few Disney animated movies that the women villains tend to be on the taller side, while the princesses and the women protagonists tend to be on the shorter side. Like, are we seeing a pattern here or am I just bugging now? I'm really talking more so about the older movies I can't really talk about like the newer movies. I'm talking about the movies that I grew up on, because I'm not gonna lie to you, I have not watched that much Disney in the past few years. It's also not necessarily just about them being tall. It's also about them being more plus sized or even having non beautiful features or uglier features according to society, which is like a bigger nose and so forth and so on. And this can also go for the males as well. A lot of the male villains also tend to be on the taller side, while the princes are a little bit on the shorter side. They're still tall, though just not as tall as the villains. I do want to give a quick disclaimer though, no t nochhee to Disney. Okay, I am not hating on them at all. Okay, I literally grew up on Disney. Disney is quite literally my genetics. And I'm also aware that they're becoming a little bit better in terms of diversity in their movies and stuff. Still have a long way to go, but they're getting somewhere. But I just wanted to say I'm not hating on them, and I'm not throwing shite on them, So don't go hating on Disney, Okay, but you're probably wondering, like, where is all of this talk about Disney and like tall women villains coming from. I actually stumbled across a few tiktoks over the past few weeks, and there were women who wanted to apply. Okay, so you know how like in Disney World, Disneyland, disney World, whatever it is, I'm gonna say Disney World. So you know how in Disney World that they have the actors walking and talking to the people who paid to be in the park. So they have like the princesses, the princes, they have all these characters from Disney essentially just walking around. So on these tiktoks, on these videos, I have seen that there were women who wanted to apply to be these actors. And what I say is that there was actually a height requirement for this. So there was actually one woman. She was I believe five ten and when she applied, I think she applied to be a princess, but they told her that she was too tall to be a princess and she should try to audition or to apply to be a villain. And that was like very interesting. When I first saw that, I was like, okay, and then I stumbled across another video where there's literal height requirements for different characters in Disney. So in these height requirements in this hype chart, it said that to be a woman villain, you have to be basically five six to five ten. And I was like, oh, okay, that's interesting that the villains are five six to five ten, I guess. So I decided to do a tiny bit more digging and I found a similar chart online actually that I'm gonna put on the screen if you are watching the video version of this, and it said the same thing that the women villains is like five six to five ten, I believe. But then it said that for the princesses it's five two to five eight. And then you have tinker Bell, which is an outllyer. I mean, Tigerbell is a fairy, so obviously she has to be like super tiny because she's a fairy. But the princesses were five two to five eight. So I'm looking at all this stuff and I'm like, huh, okay, is this actually a thing? Like is this actually true? So you know, I go where I find the first pieces of information. In the first few videos, I go back on TikTok, and I'm trying to see if I can find videos of these women villains walking around the actual park and seeing if I can try to compare their height to other people walking around. And let me tell you, what I found is very interesting. They were taller than most of the people walking around in those theme parks, even the grown men. So I'm like, how am I just now realizing this? How am I just now seeing this? And I'm like, Okay, if it's like this in like the real world aspect of Disney, like in the characters that are in these parks, is it actually like that in the movies? Come to find out, I go and I try to get like little clips or like little bit like you know how you search up. So one of the things that I search up was like Cinderella and her stepmother or whatever, And then I went into the images to see if I can see a picture of them standing side by side or around each other. In some of the movies, the villains or the antagonists are actually taller than the protagonists, taller than the princesses. And I'm like, what this is actually a thing? And Disney tried to replicate this in the real world, in real life, and I literally never noticed that. And it's so interesting because these shows are targeting young people. They're targeting young children, and we're basically shown from a young age that there are certain and traits that represent good and evil. And like I said before, with women, being plus size or having like non beautiful or like what's considered uglier features, along with being tall, tend to represent the evil side. But obviously we're gonna be talking more so about being tall, because that's what this podcast is all about. So basically, small, dainty, and soft spoken is good. Those are the good features. That's what the princesses tend to have, most of them tend to have, and that's the ones that get the guy, get the prince at the end and they live happily ever after, whereas the tall, strong, commanding, and I would probably even say confident in a way women that are shown in these shows and movies are the ones who are considered evil and the prince defeats them. The prince doesn't want to be with them. They go and live really bad lives. Nobody wants to be around them, everybody hates them. So the media uses height as a visual queue to signal villain or oh that's the bad guy to the audience, and that quick association just reinforces a bunch of negative ideas about tall women, whether they mean to do that or not. Now, I want to play this video clip that I found that I think explains it really really well. They don't really talk about the whole idea of being tall, but they talk about other things, especially confidence, and I think that this can also kind of correlate with the idea of being tall, Like everything that she says can also relate to being tall and having the woman villains being taller than the princesses and the protagonists. So I'm going to roll that right now. Remember how in the two thousands, whenever there was a female character that was confident in her beauty, then she was almost always also a villain. This was true in the cheerleader character that was almost always a bully, the fum fetale that was out to manipulate men with her beauty, the old witch that was shown as old and ugly and the fact that she still cared about clothes or makeup was always ridiculed, or the core villain character that was professionally successful because she was so confident, but she also had a cold heart and was just so mean. I think it's important we talk about this because I'm quite convinced that this gave us collectively a very wrong picture of what it means to be a woman, that is, confidence in herself and in her beauty. I feel like it all gave us the idea that being a confident woman is a bad thing, because, according to the representation we had, confident women in the end get punished, humiliated, or they end up alone. And on the other hand, so many of the main characters we had, so the characters we identify with were so often unconfident, clumsy, quirky, self depreciating. For those of us who were kids at that time, we didn't have the critical mind to perceive those characters as satire or jokes. Most of us didn't realize this was TV. The lines were so blurred we thought this is what real life looks like. So we really learned life lessons from TV. And I really believe this contributed to so many women today struggling with imposter syndrome, with body image issues, struggling to feel legitimate, to feel confident. So many of us still associate being confident with being mean, being bossy, or being. Now going back to the idea of how basically the media, these movies, these TV shows are portraying height and being tall as a villainous trait all around, not even just for women but also for the men. But portraying height as a villainous trait, how do you think that's gonna make other tall girls feel? Not only is that gonna affect how other people see and treat her, but that's also going to negatively impact her self confidence. First of all, Number one, I'm not even gonna lie. I didn't even notice that, So I mean, listen, other people may, other children may or may not notice that, but I just know that I didn't notice that when I was younger. But it's also like that's also going into your subconscious So even though whether or not you actually realize that you're acting out what you're seeing on these things, it's like you are acting it out. And this this is one of the reasons why, this is one of the reasons why some people actually see height and being tall as a bad thing. Something as simple as having these villains, these women villains who are taller, having them taller than the protagonists and such. That is literally telling people that being tall is bad, being tall makes you a villain. Something as simple as that can say a whole lot. And you know the Queen, the Queen herself, Queen Tate, she also put that in one of her songs. It was like a lyrics. This is like, yeah, this was a lyric that in her song anti Hero. I think I'm not gonna sing it because I'm gonna sound so good, I'm gonna sound just like her that I'm gonna get copyrighted. So I'm just gonna say it. But the lyrics, these are the lyrics. The lyrics are sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby, and I'm a monster on the hill, too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city, and so forth and so on. So that was actually a very popular sound on TikTok, but it was very popular with the tall girls. The tall girls were using that sound a lot. And there's a reason why, because that resonates with us. That's how we feel. We literally feel, I'm looking back at the lyrics right now. We literally feel like everybody is a sexy baby. Okay, everybody not everybody, but a lot of our peers, a lot of other women that were around, are these small, petite, little girls, these little feminine girls. And you know, everybody thinks that they're attractive, but we feel like a monster. We feel too big, too big to hang out. See if it's too big to hang out. We feel too big to be around other people. We feel too big. I quite literally don't like that term, but too big, too tall. I want to say too tall, because I really don't like too big, too tall around a lot of these other people, especially our peers, we feel like a monster. We feel like I guess you could say it's tied with a villainous trade, a monstrous trait, because in these TV shows and in these movies, the taller people, the taller characters are the monsters. The taller characters are the villains. And you know, it's not just the Disney animated movies. There's other places too. It's a little bit more subtle, I will say, but it's also other places. So I'm just gonna give two quick examples of that. So in the media, we also have Lady Demitrescu. I'm not gonna lie to you. I don't know how to pronounce. This lady's name is from Resident Evil. She is a nine foot tall character and she is seen as predatory and terrifying in nature. Nine feet tall, terrifying and predatory. Come on, now, another example, we have Tilda Swinton. I think that's how you say her name, but essentially she's five to eleven and she played that witch in Narnia. Y'all remember Narnia, and y'all remember the which she I think she killed the lion or something, but she was always no and when she killed the lion, she wasn't wearing white, but she was always wearing white. She was part of the snow or the winter or whatever. I don't know. But the queen from Narnia, the one who's the villain, five eleven on the taller side, taller than the protagonists. I'm pretty sure in the movie as well, she was also depicted as the villain. Can't we see the pattern here? Now, I'm not saying that's whole Women should never be casted as the villain in movies and stuff like that. And it's like, yeah, oh, it could just be a coincidence and this and that and the other. But I'm just saying that there's a little bit of a pattern here, especially when we're looking at movies and animated films that are targeted towards younger children. Oh yeah, I took my head when off because she was feeling a little too tight. I'm gonna put her back on in a few though, after I let my head rest. So, in my opinion, I think we need to start reframing the situation. Okay, I think that if the media wants to depict tall women as the villains, as villainous, I think that we should start taking that as a compliment. And here's why. These tall women who are villains. They are independent. They do what they have to do to get things done, even though it means wreaking havoc on other people. But that's besides the point. We're looking at the characteristics. We're looking at the traits. They're independent, they're commanding, they're strong, they know what they want and they do whatever it takes to get it done. Okay, These tall women who are portrayed as villains are confident and powerful. So what does that say about us as tall women. We are confident, we make things happen, We can do anything we set our minds to. Even if that means wreaking havoc on other people. Yeah, let's not do that though. Listen. I love being tall. I love wearing shoes that give me extra height. I love towering over people. I love walking with my back straight and my head held high. And if that makes me the villain, if that makes me the bad guy, then so be it. As Billie Eilish once said, And I'm not gonna sing it because I don't want to get copyright, because I'm gonna sound as beautiful as her. I'm the bad guy. Duh. I don't know if that made sense in this context, but we're just we're gonna leave that in there. Wait, let me put my Halloween costume back on. There we go. Anyways, that is basically the episode. This is that's that's the end of the Halloween themed episode. I honestly, this is a very interesting topic to talk about. I want to ask you, guys, do you think that you know this is the case. Do you think have you seen the pattern that in some of these movies, and quite a few of these movies that women who are taller honestly characters in general, because it goes for the men too, characters in general, who are taller are often the villains. They're depicted as villainous, Like, how have you noticed that too? Like are there any other examples that I didn't give that you want to give, Like, let me know, let's have a conversation about this. I want to say thank you so much for tuning in. Every appreciate it, and I appreciate you. Of course, thank you again to Whitney Allison for sponsoring this episode. All of their information is going to be linked in the description, so you can check that out. And I hope you have a very happy and very safe rest of your Halloween. Good night and goodbye.