I enjoy his plays and movies but I’ve always felt the same as Nichole here about his portrayal of women, which is not all that great:
There is little to dispute that [Tyler Perry's] target audience is Black women, so let’s look at the message we’ve received so far from the play. A beautiful, ambitious driven woman is a promiscuous, shrill bitch and a danger to the home. A good woman doesn’t turn heads with her beauty, is soft-spoken, religious, and will wait- sexually and emotionally- for the right man to come along. We see this play out as well in the movie version of Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?
There was a time when I was blinded by the humor Tyler Perry uses to push his misogyny. He needs to begin by taking off the dress. Portraying black women as one dimensional caricatures is demeaning and reductive. He further preaches that women need to be submissive and thankful just to have a good man. All of his women are straight thus erasing black lesbians and all want to live the patriarchal dream. Perry wraps his image in God to legitimate his message but if we take the time to really examine what he is saying about women it is clear that his only desire is to maintain a patriarchal construct.