I Want The Fucking Chariot
I recently learnt of the myth of Medea. For this piece, we’ll use Euripides’ play describing Medea. She is a woman who responds to profound betrayal with rage so complete it destroys everything, including her own children. She is a princess, granddaughter to Helios, the sun god. Married to Jason who later abandons her and their children for a politically advantageous marriage to a younger princess. Medea then poisons her rival and the king, and murders her own children to inflict maximum suffering on Jason. It’s a tragedy because Medea’s power, her intelligence, her capacity to act, becomes the instrument of her own annihilation. She wins by destroying, and in destroying, loses everything. The play doesn’t ask us to like her. It asks us to understand the terrible logic of her rage: when you are abandoned by the man you sacrificed everything for, when your children become the only weapon you have, what else is there to do?
Tyler Perry might have taken the Medea archetype and domesticated it. He takes that dangerous, transformative female rage and renders it comedic, contained, and ultimately conservative. The result is Mabel Madea Simmons, a figure who looks transgressive on the surface but functions as an enforcer of the very patriarchal structures that Medea’s rage seeks to destroy.
This is not a small distinction. This is ideology working through entertainment.
The Rhetoric of Healing as a Curriculum of Compliance
Perry’s films operate according to a rigid formula that my research identifies as a “rhetoric of healing.” But healing implies restoration to wholeness. What Perry actually offers is a curriculum, a prescribed set of attitudes and behaviors that Black women must adopt to achieve the specific kind of “wellness” Perry defines.
The formula is merciless in its predictability:
Step One: The Woman is Broken
She is betrayed by a man. Usually, a wealthy, professionally successful man whose material success is coded as moral corruption. He leaves her for a younger woman, or he abuses her, or both. The woman is cast into a state of victimhood and suffering. She is, in Perry’s language, ‘mad’ angry, righteous, consumed by the injustice of her betrayal.
Step Two: Madea Intervenes With Tough Love
The matriarch appears: pistol-packing, crude, violent. She validates the woman’s anger but only temporarily. She uses aggression and intimidation to shake the woman out of her “madness,” but crucially, she never validates the anger itself as justified. She validates only the woman’s right to grieve and move on.
Step Three: The Woman Must Forgive
This is the non-negotiable step. The woman must forgive the man who wronged her. Not for his sake (though the films pretend this is about his redemption) but for her own “spiritual liberation.” The films frame forgiveness as the only path to freedom, the only way to release the burden of rage.
But rage at injustice is not a burden. It is information. It is a signal that something real has gone wrong.
What Perry is teaching is that the woman’s anger, her appropriate, justified, human response to betrayal, is an obstacle to her own happiness. That she must swallow it, forgive it, transcend it through faith.
This is not healing. This is erasure.
Step Four: A Good Man Arrives
The woman is “rewarded” with a new romantic relationship. Crucially, this man is working-class, humble, Christian, and emotionally available. He represents the opposite of the man who wronged her. But the message is identical: the woman’s completion, her redemption, her ultimate happiness, all depend on a man loving her.
The films never ask: what if the woman’s happiness came from her own ambitions, her own achievements, her own choices?
Characters who pursue their own success, the lawyer, the businesswoman, the woman focused on her career, are narratively punished. They are portrayed as incomplete, as missing something essential. Their professional accomplishments are framed as hollow substitutes for what they really need: a man and a home.
This is not liberation. This is the reassertion of patriarchal control wrapped in the language of spiritual awakening.
What This Teaches Young Women Seeking Ambition, Stability, and Healthy Love
A young woman watching Diary of a Mad Black Woman learns:
Your ambition is dangerous. Helen had wealth, status, a beautiful home. And it left her vulnerable to a man’s betrayal. Her downward economic mobility, her shift from luxury to working as a waitress, is presented not as a loss but as a necessary spiritual lesson. She had to be humbled. She had to learn that material success is corrupting, that the simple life with a good man is the only honest path.
The film does not show Helen discovering herself through her own efforts, building her own life, finding her own way forward. It shows her being rescued, first by Madea, then by Orlando the mover. Her agency is not her own. Her healing is managed by others.
Your stability is not your own. It depends on finding the right man. Helen’s stability in her new life is predicated entirely on Orlando’s presence, his kindness, his Christian faith. Remove him and she collapses again. The film teaches that a woman cannot be stable on her own, she needs a man to anchor her to solid ground.
Healthy love means accepting economic downgrade as spiritual upgrade. Helen’s happiness with Orlando is coded as more authentic than her happiness with Charles because it is simpler, poorer, more humble. The message is that love is most real when it is most humble, most removed from ambition and material comfort. This is not a philosophy of love. This is a philosophy of containment; keep women poor, keep them humble, keep them grateful for basic kindness and they won’t demand more.
Your anger at injustice must be swallowed for your own good. When Helen is furious at Charles for throwing her out after 18 years of marriage, that anger is justified. She has been wronged. But the film teaches her that this anger is a sickness she must recover from. She must forgive Charles, and in doing so, she must accept that what happened to her was not really an injustice. It was a lesson. A necessary breaking that had to happen for her to find her true self.
This teaches women that their rage at real harm is an emotional problem, not a rational response. This teaches women that forgiveness is more important than justice, that moving on is more important than accountability.
Madea as the Enforcer of Patriarchal Order
The critical insight here is that Madea’s transgression, her violence, her criminality, her complete disregard for legal authority, serves to reinforce the very patriarchal structures she appears to challenge. She breaks the law, but only to restore traditional family order. She uses violence, but only to push women back into the roles Perry believes they should occupy.
Madea does not liberate women. She disciplines them. She teaches them to accept their lot, to forgive their abusers, to find happiness in humble domestic service, to prioritize faith and forgiveness over justice and accountability.
The reason Madea can be comedic is because her transgressions are ultimately harmless to the existing order. She destroys a man’s furniture, not his ability to continue harming women. She physically intimidates people, but only to push them toward Christian redemption and family reconciliation. Her rage is spectacular but containable. It never threatens the fundamental structures of patriarchy, class, or Christian morality that Perry upholds.
Compare this to Euripides’ Medea. Medea’s rage actually destroys something. It shatters the family, kills the children, leaves Jason with nothing. Her rage is tragic precisely because it is truly destructive, truly transformative. She cannot be contained or redirected because she has already decided that the only appropriate response to betrayal is annihilation.
Madea, by contrast, is domesticated into comedy. Her rage becomes a tool for moral instruction rather than genuine resistance. She is dangerous-seeming but ultimately safe. She transgresses in order to restore order.
Get Wangari Kariuki’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
This is what makes Perry’s work ideologically coherent. He is not actually challenging patriarchy. He is performing a ritualistic containment of the threat that female rage represents. Madea allows audiences to experience the catharsis of rage without any actual threat to the existing order. She is a pressure valve — she releases the steam so the system doesn’t explode.
The Curriculum and Its Consequences
Perry’s “rhetoric of healing” functions as a curriculum that teaches Black women a specific ideology:
- Your happiness is not your responsibility. It depends on finding the right man.
- Your anger at injustice is an emotional problem that must be healed through forgiveness.
- Your ambition is a character flaw that must be corrected through humbling.
- Your safety is found in humble domesticity, not in your own achievements.
- The Christian church is the ultimate authority on what constitutes healing and justice.
- Your value as a woman is measured by your capacity to forgive, to love, to nurture, to serve.
For young women seeking freedom, healthy love, and stability on their own terms, these films offer a profoundly disempowering message. They suggest that freedom comes only through accepting the right man. That stability comes only through faith and forgiveness. That healthy love means accepting economic downgrade and emotional dependence.
What they do not offer is the possibility of a woman building her own life, making her own choices, defining her own terms for happiness.
What they do not show is a woman thriving alone, or choosing solitude, or finding power in her own autonomy.
What they do not suggest is that injustice should be met with anything but forgiveness.
The Medea That Perry Refused to Make
The power of the Medea myth lies in its refusal to apologize for female rage. Medea does not forgive. She does not find redemption through faith. She does not meet her betrayal with humble acceptance. She meets it with destruction.
The classical Medea is monstrous, but she is not diminished by that monstrosity. She is powerful precisely because she refuses to be contained. She refuses to forgive. She refuses to accept a diminished life. She chooses annihilation over compliance.
Perry’s Madea is the opposite. She is powerful-seeming but ultimately complicit. She uses her power to enforce the very structures that oppress the women she claims to help. She is dangerous only in comedy, only in moments that can be laughed away.
The Medea Perry could have made would be genuinely transgressive. It would show a woman whose rage at betrayal leads her to actually challenge the patriarchal structures that enable men to betray. It would show a woman refusing forgiveness, refusing humility, refusing the curriculum of compliance.
But Perry is not interested in that story. He is interested in managing female rage, not unleashing it. He is interested in teaching women how to survive within patriarchy, not how to refuse it. Once you see the pattern, it’s impossible to unsee. The same logic, containment of women’s rage, sanctification of their pain, repeats itself in every new production. The faces and settings change, but the sermon remains the same.
Sistas dresses the same old ideology in contemporary fashion; sleek offices, group chats, therapy talk. But the moral remains unchanged. Professional women are punished for their ambition, love is framed as salvation, and forgiveness is still the highest form of virtue. Independence is chaos; peace comes only through submission.
Straw was an excruciating watch. All that drama, only to reveal that the woman’s daughter had died at the beginning, that she had been unraveling from the start. No thank you! I still don’t understand how people cried to that. I was freaking pissed. Perry reduces her breakdown to divine instruction, her madness to metaphor. The systems around her, the authorities, the men, the moral order, remain intact, even sanctified. He wants us to keep feeding on the narrative of endless victimhood, of never really getting better.
When critics questioned Straw and its tired dramaturgy of suffering, Perry simply said, “I say nothing to them.” That silence is the point. He doesn’t have to defend the curriculum; the ideology sells itself. His refusal to engage criticism is not humility. It is certainty. The certainty of a man who believes that pain, not freedom, is the proper condition for women’s growth.
From Why Did I Get Married? to The Family That Preys, the pattern holds. Women’s rage becomes spectacle, forgiveness becomes doctrine, and ambition becomes sin. Every circle closes with repentance, never resistance.
What This Means for Black Women
Black women have a specific historical relationship to the ideologies Perry peddles. They have been taught to be strong, to be silent, to prioritize family survival over their own wellbeing. They have been taught that their labor — emotional, physical, reproductive — belongs to others. They have been taught to forgive, to accept, to endure.
Perry does not challenge these teachings. He reinforces them while clothing them in the language of healing and empowerment.
A young Black woman watching his films learns that her ambition is suspect, that her anger is a sickness, that her happiness depends on finding the right man. These are not liberatory messages. These are messages of constraint.
Perry writes for faith-based, middle-class audiences who find validation in his moral universe. But as a faith-based individual myself, I reject the idea that God designed us to suffer as proof of holiness. Yes, suffering is part of the human experience. It shapes, refines, and sometimes redirects us. But it is not the point of our existence. Nothing about my creation suggests that pain is my purpose. I was made for abundance, for the highest form of my success, joy, and becoming. To live fully is divine. That conviction alone dismantles Perry’s theology of endurance. God did not put me here to showcase resilience; He placed me here to thrive.
His narratives are not about the liberation of Black women. They are about the redemption of the patriarchal family through the submission of women to divine will and male authority.
This is not empowerment. This is the management of trauma under the guise of healing.
The Ideology at Work
What Tyler Perry has created is a cinematic universe that functions as a morality play in the Christian tradition. His narratives are not about the liberation of Black women. They are about the redemption of the patriarchal family through the submission of women to divine will and male authority.
The Medea parallel is useful not because Madea is like Medea, but because it reveals what Perry is doing: he is taking the archetype of female transgression and power and thoroughly domesticating it. He is showing that female rage can be channeled, contained, and redirected toward the maintenance of patriarchal order.
For young women seeking to define their own paths, seeking freedom on their own terms, seeking relationships based on equality rather than need — Tyler Perry’s films offer not inspiration but a curriculum of constraint.
They teach that your freedom depends on finding the right man. They teach that your anger is a problem. They teach that your ambition is dangerous. They teach that your value lies in your capacity to forgive, to nurture, and to serve.
These are not the messages young women need to hear. These are the messages that keep them contained.
In Euripides’ play, Medea ascends in a chariot drawn by the sun; untouchable, unrepentant, exiled but free. Perry’s Madea never leaves the house. She laughs, she scolds, she stays.
But what if the chariot wasn’t about destruction? What if it was about something simpler and more radical: refusal.
A woman who doesn’t forgive the man who wronged her. But she doesn’t destroy him either. She simply stops participating in the narrative he’s written for her. She leaves. Not in rage, not in exile, but in clarity. She builds a life that doesn’t require his redemption or his punishment. She doesn’t need him to admit he was wrong. She doesn’t need the system to validate her leaving. She just leaves.
She pursues her ambitions because they matter to her, not to prove anything. She chooses solitude or partnership on her own terms, not as a reward or a rescue. She is neither Madea’s compliant daughter nor Medea’s avenging ghost. She is simply unavailable for the roles the system offers her.
This is the woman Perry refuses to imagine. Not because she lacks drama, but because she lacks a sermon. She doesn’t need redemption. She doesn’t need healing. She needs nothing from the system except to be left alone to build her own world.
I don’t want that house. I want the chariot. I want the leaving. I want the kind of freedom that doesn’t depend on forgiveness.
