If 'Maleficent' Is About Rape, What Does It Mean?

This article contains major *spoilers* for the movie Maleficent!

How on earth was I going to justify that this woman would curse a baby?
  ~ Screenwriter Linda Woolverton in Huffington Post

The recent Disney movie Maleficent tries to provide a backstory to explain the eponymous villain's mean streak.  In the original movie Sleeping Beauty, the villain shows up at the christening of King Stephan's daughter because she feels sleighted for having not been invited (and she wasn't invited because, well, she's so villainous).

The movie centers around a past relationship between Maleficent and King Stephan.  And the foul deed that starts the cycle of revenge is that Stephan cuts off Maleficent's fairy wings (in case you wondered why Maleficent didn't have wings like the three good fairies).

Stephan is only able to do this because Maleficent trusts him implicitly for friendship's sake, and Stephan, for the sake of his courtly ambition, drugs her and then, with too much compunction to kill, decides to take her wings as trophies of the pretended kill.  People have since wondered of this violation of trust is a metaphor for rape, and Angelina Jolie has reportedly confirmed that this was an intentional metaphor.  As is commonly reported, rape is very often committed by someone the victim knows, and rape also often occurs with the help of a drugged beverage.

What might presume that Stephan's ambition is a metaphor for men not feeling manly without some conquests under their belt in this post-sexual revolution, enlightened age, in fact feeling like undesirable nobodies.  Stephan's conquest makes him a somebody, and in the place of the woman who loved him he instead chooses a trophy wife.  

But here's where it really gets interesting.  Because of this violation, instead of getting back at Stephan, Maleficent goes after the child made possible by the violation.

And as you've had ample warning about spoilers, Maleficent stops seeing her rapist in the child, and instead sees a soul much like herself; she emotionally adopts the child, becomes her guardian, and repents of her murderous rage.  In the end, she risks her life to save the child's.

In the last two years, there have been stories brought up about women who have killed their babies on sight immediately after birth because of their hate for the rapist, and how traumatic this is for the mothers (strangely without considering how awful this might be for the children killed), as though this sheds some special light on abortion as a medical and social (and spiritual!) remedy.  And in this same time period Disney has given us an intentional metaphor for rape that unintentionally argues that the child should not suffer for the sins of the rapist.  Maleficent even experiences something like abortion regret partway through the film.

Which reminds me of this much ignored half of a much reviled comment:

"I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child."

The Ol' Progressive Policy Ratchet

Income tax started out as a relatively modest level and hardly effected the average person.  That's grown over time into something that I'm pretty sure was dismissed as an absurd scenario:

Citizen X:  Where will it end?  If we give in to this, expenditures will keep growing until the government is taxing the common man and taking 20%, 30%, 40% of his paycheck for the "common good"!
Citizen Y:  Listen to this nut.  He's indulging in the ol' slippery slope fallacy.

Well, that's water under the bridge ... Or toothpaste out of the tube.  It all happened so long ago that Jay Leno's Jaywalkers aren't the only ones who think that we've always had the income tax.

But the income tax is not the only story like this. ...


I've been told that we should evaluate policies only on their stated intended immediate effects.  Yes, despite the repeated finagling of progressive social engineers and misrepresentations of their goals, we should fasten the blinders to our eyes and pretend that this has never happened before.   We should take the message as it is spoken the mass of people that have been convinced to buy into the particular liberal social change, and not be worried whether there is a deeper strategy that is related to past strategies.  No, trying to foresee where things are headed are the flat-earth doings of raving conspiracy nuts.


No, dear reader.  You might as well don your tin foil hat now.  Because you must accept this dichotomy:  either you must accept the good intentions of the Progressive mob at face value or you must believe that the whole thing is all a big farce.  To the right you will see how this dichotomy is applied.  (Click on the picture to enlarge.)

And surely the Roe v. Wade decisions wasn't going to inevitably lead to normalizing 3rd trimester abortions until people would begin wondering whether we should classify newborns as 4th trimester fetuses and kill them too.  The questions 'Where is this leading?' and 'Where is it going to end?' were just not treated as legitimate questions.

And a more obvious and more recent issue has been summed up thus:

Initially, homosexual lobbyist groups said, "All we want is to be left alone."
Then, a few years later, they said, "We just want our lifestyle to be accepted."
Not long after that it was, "We want our lifestyle to be legally recognized as a civil union."
And finally it went all the way to, "We want nothing less than marriage" . . .

How many decades back would you have to go before you'd find someone scoffing at the idea that gays would lobby to break the term "marriage" away from its roots in British common law and a universal tradition? before they'd scoff at the idea that children would be taught in school that having two daddies or two mommies or a king marrying a king was as normal as anything else?  that anyone that says a negative thing about homosexuality (hate crime) would be given remedial normalcy training? that childrens' movies would have references to homosexuality?  Nobody could have seen any of that coming. (And if they did, they shouldn't have!)

Surely, the way things have turned out have really nothing to do with the specific plans in 1970s of the core gay rights groups to undermine the tradition of marriage by commandeering the traditional institution for homosexuality, so that the whole idea of normalcy could be weakened and destroyed?  That's crazy talk.  And here's why:

Lots of gay people now simply like the idea of society accepting their relationship on exactly the same terms as all the age-old male-female union we've been calling marriage for centuries.  They want society to be forced to accept same sex unions on the same terms.  Love for everyone!  Since these regular folk have no nefarious agenda, there can be no relevant agenda that we can be legitimately worried about!  It's all coincidental that the leaders in gay activism talked about completely undermining society's traditions completely rather than securing the sweet blessings of holy matrimony for themselves.  That was then, this is now.   If we seem to be going down a slippery slope, it is all just your imagination.  Move along.  Nothing to see here.  Pay no attention to the same-sex curriculum behind the curtain.

After all, there are no tell-tale signs of inconsistency, such as demanding that people accept themselves as they are if they have gay attractions and then demanding that people not accept themselves as they are if they don't like the plumbing they were born with.  It's not like they're singing "Born This Way" for one cause and not the other...  *crickets*    

As one truly dear and well-meaning advocate of social acceptance told me, the gays just want society to back their commitment to live honorably -- and isn't that good for everyone?  Just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad.  Isn't marital sanctity the opposite of perversion?   And what about the polygamists, I asked.  Aren't they entitled to society's blessings on their commitments?  Ah, that's different: that's a union of more than just two people; and besides people get weird with it and collect child brides.  

I guess not everyone's entitled to society's stamp of approval.  Certainly not those that bitterly cling to their religion. Those perverts!   Oh, maybe we won't get around to arresting them just yet, but we're sure not going to say that any of that polygamy weirdness is normal.  Weirdos.  ... And now back to Polygamist Eye for the Transsexual Guy.