One common way cartoons immediately code a male character as a villain is to add some femininity (or a lot of femininity) into his gender presentation, while male heroes are almost always kept to "traditional" masculinity. The purpose of this is to make the audience uncomfortable, feeding into assumptions that any display of femininity from a man is "wrong" and "unnatural."
This isn't a recent trope, nor is it limited to cartoons. It goes back to the implementation of the Hays Code in the 1930s, which enforced a rule stating that any 'sexual perversion' (read: homosexuality), if it had to be hinted at at all, had to be portrayed in a negative way. This means that any indication of effeminacy had to be on the villains, and moreover, played in a pay designed to make the audience see it as 'wrong' and 'unnatural'. For example, in The Maltese Falcon:
It is not only male characters who fall into this trope. The tendency to code villains as not 'typically masculine male' or 'typically feminine female', while largely in the form of effeminate men, will also come up in other characters. Incidentally, female villains who fall into this categorization will still be more likely to come across as the "effeminate male" category, rather than a "mannish woman".
Literally based on Divine, a well-known drag queen.
What are some other examples of effeminate male villains you can think of ? How is this trend harmful?
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