I think it’s fascinating, how we simultaneously sexualize
and sanitize our fairy tales. What we’re ultimately doing, of course, is
romanticizing. We move all of the sexual elements to a part of the story where
they have a point.
Fairy tales aren’t, at their core, romantic. There’s a
certain practicality to folklore—these are stories spread and shared among
poor, working class people, often women, and they’re about success and
survival, not love.
Well, familial love, perhaps, but the unions with royalty
are seldom about anything as impractical as romance. Which is why the princes
and princesses often aren’t likeable people.
Marriage in modern American culture is inherently romantic.
Which is why these stories seem so bizarre to us. He’s going to live happily
ever after with the chick who decapitated his brothers?
No! He didn’t win because he got the girl. He won because he
got one over on the girl. He outsmarted the snotty princess, and now he has
money and power. There’s no love here.
In earlier versions of the story, Snow White may be a
prepubescent object of lust and jealousy. But she is not kissed awake—the apple
is dislodged by a bump in the road. In earlier versions of the story, Sleeping
Beauty is raped, but it is not this that wakes her; it is a splinter being
dragged from the finger by a suckling child.
No women, in today’s variants, lose their virginity when
asleep or, worse still, dead. No children are lusted after. But we’ve added a
new component to the story—true love’s kiss. There’s no more senseless sexual
violence. The romantic element serves an actual point.
Understanding the original cultural context is important,
sure, but it is in the nature of folklore that the cultural context is
constantly shifting, along with the details of the story. I think it’s stupid,
frankly, to complain about the Disney-fication or whatever. Oh no! The protagonist
gets money and power, AND she gets to spend her life with someone she actually
likes! No one even got raped. How terrible! What a betrayal of the great
tradition of storytelling!
Get over yourself, man. After four hundred years, these
characters deserve a real happy ending.
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