The other day I watched the newest live action Beauty and the Beast with Emma Watson. I noticed a poignant example of how the media misconstrues history to portray women as victims of some malicious patriarchy.

In the beginning of the film, Belle is frequently chastised for reading, many of the men outright saying that women shouldn't know how to read. A little research shows this is completely inaccurate.

First of all, most people couldn't read in 18th Century France, but numbers were rising thanks to the Enlightenment. Men did have a somewhat higher literacy rate, but still, by the beginning of the 18th Century, 30 percent of women could read and 48 percent of men. That's nearly a third of women, so a literate woman would not be unheard of. In fact, it's safe to say a middle class woman would have been more likely to be literate than a peasant man.

But here's the real kicker. Beauty and the Beast was written by a woman. And considering it was written contemporaneously and portrays the heroine as well read in contrast to her dimwitted sisters, the culture of the time clearly wasn't discouraging women from reading. It was encouraging it.

But in the 21st Century, Disney wants to portray a historical falsehood that women have been denied literacy in Western society for ages. This false victimhood is used to justify their destructive policies.

Can you think of any other political movements that have used a false victimhood narrative to justify their agenda?