The monstrous idea of a female beast and why gender bias, desirability politics and commercial profitability won’t let her exist.
Bathing in the aftermath of the Meryl Streep as Aslan in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia rumours and the ensuing debate on gender-switching of popular characters, I have been considering the success of past, present and potential gender swaps, or lack thereof. Having just devoured yet another Beauty and the Beast reimagining, Cassie Alexander’s dark romance, Bend Her, it was the obvious choice of tale to look closely at as one of romance’s most popular tropes and the world’s favourite Disney animations.
In the thousands of adaptations, retellings and reimaginings of Beauty and the Beast, you can count on your hand the number of times a writer has dared to make the beast a woman. In a story that is about seeing past appearances and outward grotesqueness to love someone for their soul, is it really so monstrous to conceive that a female beast could also be loved?
The gender bias as old as time
In a review of Gender Swapped Fairy Tales by Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett, Guardian columnist Zoe Williams said: “The obvious and persistent bias – and I wonder whether, also, the most life-defining – is the beauty standard, the fact that a woman is judged by her appearance in a way a man is not, that her ugliness or beauty both inform the world’s view of her and become the whole of her, excluding all other traits.”
This life-defining bias goes hand-in-hand with the timeless message to women in fiction to be beautiful, be evil, or go home, said Williams. Think Wicked’s protagonist, Elphaba Thropp, who never had a chance to become the Good Witch of the West because she was considered and thus mistreated as “ugly.” Or Snow White’s Evil Queen, who is never actually represented as truly ugly lest it make her seem less regal, but her hunt to be the most beautiful was the crux of her villainy; her perceived lack of sufficient beauty equated her to being evil. If it’s “be evil or go home”, can you blame her?
Actor-turned-musician Louise Burke says: “Women don’t often get to be physically grotesque or emotionally difficult and still be loved as they are. Male beasts get to challenge the heroine, but a female beast would challenge how much an audience is willing to accept.” A non-male beast wouldn’t make sense, because only men are afforded the luxury of not being judged by their appearance or unruly actions long enough to allow room for love to grow and hidden redeemable qualities to reveal themselves.
Unsheddable desirability politics
Of the 38 titles in an IMDB list of Beauty and the Beast adaptations, only one features a woman as the cursed “beast” character: the 2006 rom-com Penelope, starring Christina Ricci and James McAvoy. Ricci plays Penelope, a wealthy girl who must find true love to break the curse she inherited from her family. Her curse, that which makes her beastly in the eyes of the trope, is that she was born with a pig snout, but she is otherwise stunningly beautiful. Her romantic interests were unable to look past even this small physical deformity to help her break the curse, and in the end, it was her own self-love and acceptance that did the trick.
Aside from the fact that a pig snout could probably be fixed with a nose job, so minor is its monstrosity when compared to the thousands of male full-bodied beasts we see and read about, when faced with the chance to show that a male beauty could save a female beast with love and acceptance, he couldn’t do it.
Louise says: “The beast is angry, closed off, and terrifying to look at, but he’s still seen as someone worth saving. He’s not a villain. He’s a love interest. But if a woman behaves the same way or looks just as frightening, she doesn’t get the same treatment. She’s the problem, not the point.” And a problem she ends up having to solve herself.
The beast represents the object of women’s primal desires: strength, ruggedness, and unchecked masculinity that, because he is written into a romance, equates to fierce protector rather than threatening aggressor. In terms of the majority of tastes, switch this to a female beast, and you either lose the element of desire or the essence of the beast.
Ultimately…
A female beast would not sell
Romance is the juggernaut of contemporary literature and the highest-earning genre of fiction. Cassie Alexander says: “We keep the rest of the publishing industry afloat, but by and large that’s just binary, male-female relationships.” Even if queer reimaginings of Beauty and the Beast might be more comprehensible than a gender-switched couple, despite its “super hungry” market, the demand for queer romance still pales in comparison to heterosexual romance.
The 2017 live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast took $350m (£282m) around the world on its opening weekend and also had the biggest debut ever for a film with predominantly female ticket buyers at the US box office. This fact, added to the 2023 Wordsrated statistic that 82% of romance readers are women, makes it quite clear that it is what women want that feeds the profitability and design of the beast.
And women want the beast.
They don’t want to be the beast.
One Reddit user says: “In Beauty and The Beast (1991), Belle visibly has the ick. After seeing her monster boyfriend turn back into a regular human. That’s because she’s a known reader of Monster x Human romance.” There are 127.6k #monsterromance videos on TikTok, and if I were a gambler, I would match that number in a bet that none of those videos are about a female monster (unfortunately, that is a dataset well above my pay grade to gather).
Not only do beasts offer toxic-and-human-free-masculinity and monstrously sized equipment, but their mere existence presents an external threat, and thus excitement, to the romance. “Romance is about conflict, and there’s only so many types of conflict you can draw on. You can’t be on opposite sides of the political spectrum anymore, that’s not sexy in a book,” says Cassie. “Readers want the same but different; they want to take a different journey to get to the same ending. Monster romance just has a lot of different beaten paths to try out.” But a female monster or gender-switched beast would be so different as to practically become a new trope, and likely not a particularly popular one.
While women want to see themselves in the heroine, meaning not always a gorgeous brunette with a perfect hourglass figure and doe-eyes, they don’t want the books to centre on their physicality. Cassie references the rise of “curvy heroine books” around five years ago, with the plots that focused on a protagonist’s size and her insecurities receiving a lot of negativity. “A lot of readers just wanted her to be fat and amazing and get railed. So if you had a female beast that had to appear beastly, how do you tread that line between making the book about that and it dissatisfying some readers, versus it just being a character quality that comes with her but isn’t heavily referenced.”
Unless there is a dramatic shift in the desires of female consumers and subversion of gender bias, it is unlikely female beasts will make it out of the horror genre caves into multiple mainstream romance adaptations anytime soon.