Patreon Membership! Merch! Book! Etc!

 Okay, so! The winning pin design was this one:

And now to discuss what we're doing with the pins. As you may have noticed, I'm really trying to improve Patreon membership and engagement for 2024. This includes a lot of new rewards for various support tiers, as well as plans to, like, actually post things on Patreon regularly.

One of our new things is that everyone who is a member on the page by January 1, 2024 gets one of these pins. This means free members, paid members, members who signed up on January 1, and members who've been here for five years. Everyone gets a free pin. (Unless you're not comfortable giving out an address, in which case I guess you don't get a pin, because how would I send it to you? I guess you can have a copy of the file so you can make your own pin at home?)

Another new thing is that everyone who's a member by January 1 is entered in a drawing for a free, signed copy of either Shards of Glass or Lindworm, your choice, with a personalized message. All free members get one entry; all paid members at all tiers get two entries. I'm giving away 5 books. (To five different people—if your name is entered twice and gets drawn twice, you only get one book. I'll draw again.) If you don't want a copy, you can waive it, or you can take it and give it to a friend.

(It is worth noting that given the current member breakdown, there are 7 people total who are eligible for 1 of 5 books, and 50% of entries go to my family members. So if there seems to be a significant bias in the drawing results, well. That's just math. Become a member to improve the math!)

https://www.patreon.com/konglindorm

Sex vs. Romance: The Cultural Shift in Folklore

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.

Donkeyskin

You are a little girl. You are a little girl, and your mother is dead. Perhaps you are a child so young, you will not remember her when you grow. Perhaps you are on the verge, already, of being a woman. Did she know what torments she doomed you to?

It doesn’t matter. I mean, yeah, I’ve always been curious, but who really cares? She’s dead. Your dad is still alive and kicking, and spoiler alert: he seriously sucks.

Now, to be fair, your mom? She had a pretty messed up last request. Normal dying wishes include, but are not limited to: take good care of our daughter, try to move on, etc., etc. Normal dying wishes do not include “Don’t remarry unless the new chick is as pretty as me.” That’s not cool, lady. I mean, of all the things to make a priority on your deathbed. Seriously?

You aren’t scared to die. You aren’t worried about how sad your husband is going to be, or about how your daughter will grow up motherless. Nope. You just wanna be the prettiest. I mean, who cares? You’ll be dead. That ain’t changing. No point in envying the living.

So. Back to you, little girl. Your mom is dead. Your dad is sad. And you? You’re growing up. And you’re getting pretty. And prettier, and prettier, every single day.

And dear old dad is not enjoying this whole widower thing, but he respects the wishes of the dead, and sadly, your mom was smokin’ hot.

And you, honey, you look just like her.

So one day, you’re just minding your own business, doing whatever princesses do, and your dad comes up to you, and he’s all like, “Hey, kiddo, let’s get hitched.”

This is where things get seriously screwy.

“Um, Dad,” you say, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Dad,” you say, “there are laws against that.”

“Dad, you changed my diapers. Do you really wanna go down…?”

Well. Daddy’s nothing if not stubborn, and he hasn’t been quite right since Mommy bit the dust. You try a different tactic. The spoiled brat tactic, specifically.

“Dad, I wanna have the prettiest wedding dress ever. I want a dress as bright as the sun, and if I can’t get married in that, I’m not getting married at all. So there.”

And Dad, impossibly, produces one. When you throw a fit about how it isn’t good enough, and demand one the color of the moon instead, he gets that too. And the one that’s all the colors of the sky.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. “Dad,” you say, “you know that donkey that poops the gold that’s the source of all our kingdom’s wealth?”

Your dad does, indeed, know that donkey.

“Well, if you really loved me, you would kill that donkey and make me an outfit out of his skin.”

And amazingly, proving once and for all that incestuous lust is indeed a more powerful force than greed, the old nutcase does it.

Only one thing left to do. You throw that donkey skin on your back, you rub some dirt in your face, and you make a run for it.

You, in your donkey suit, you take a job at the castle of a different king. Your coworkers point and laugh. Forget them. You’ve dealt with worse.

Still, it’s hard sometimes. You’re only just a girl. Sometimes, when you have time off, you lock the doors and try on the dresses your daddy gave you.  Sure, he’s a disgusting psycho, but he’s the only family you’ve got, and those clothes were pretty. You live in the skin of a dead donkey, hon. Sometimes you just want to look nice again. Like a princess. Like someone loved and taken care of.

And then you find the aviary. Pretty birds. Pretty dresses. No people. It’s such a good place to sneak away to, to feel like you again. You don’t know it’s the prince’s favorite place to hide away, too.

Of course you meet eventually. In a way. You’ve seen him before. Maybe you have a little crush. But you’ve been down this road. You know what you’re doing: nothing. Steer clear. Do not get involved in this crap again.

But the prince. You, honey, are new at this. You walk down a hallway, and then, well, you just chance to peep through a keyhole, you little pervent. And the girl you see, well, she’s smokin’ hot. She’s too smokin’ hot to just walk in on. That would be disrespectful, man.

She’s also so smokin’ hot you, like, can’t function because you’re so busy thinking about how hot she is. You gotta find out who this chick is so you can marry her or something. You ask around, and everyone’s like, “That room? Yeah, man, that’s where the donkey freak lives. I think you’re…confused.”

So you go to your room to waste away and pout, and when your mom asks what’s wrong, you say you need Donkeyskin to make you a cake.

And here you are, Donkeyskin, just minding your own business, and suddenly the prince is asking questions about you. So you make a cake, and you drop your ring in the batter, because, hey, maybe he’s not a creep like your dad, and it would be cool to be a princess again.

Dude finds the ring, and it turns out your fingers are freaking tiny, because we’ve got all this Cinderella crap going on now.

You guys get married. You live happily ever after. Your dad comes to the wedding and you forgive him, of course, because that’s what good girls do. And since this is Perrault, and he’s big with the lessons:

Moral 1: It’s better to endure hardship than neglect your duties. (And this would be the duty not to marry your dad? I guess? What about his duty not to marry you?)

Moral 2: Virtue is good. (Way to go, Donkeyskin. You didn’t try to hook up with your daughter, you didn’t look in people’s keyholes, you are rocking the virtue here.)

Moral 3: Love is more powerful than reason. (Hence the forgiveness for dear old dad?)

Moral 4: Bread and water are totally sufficient for a girl to live on. (Um…what? Are we not gonna talk about how trying to do your daughter is bad? No? Just focus on the diet? ‘Kay then. I guess we’re done here.)

!!!

I always love when Kristin from Tales of Faerie mentions me!

https://talesoffaerie.blogspot.com/2016/09/around-web.html?showComment=1475811200152#c1998881645995428249

*#@% You, Mary

This story is actually called “Mary’s Child,” or “Our Lady’s Child,” usually, and it shows up in the Brothers Grimm. And it will be a miracle if I can get through this essay without using some seriously bad language (but I’ll try, because my grandparents read this blog), because I am bursting with anger today, and the Virgin Mary deserves all I have and more.

Not the real Mary. Just to clarify. Fairy tale Mary. Fairy tale Mary deserves more anger than I have to give. I'm cool with the real life mother of God. No issues there.

Okay. So first of all, you got this baby. This baby’s dad is all broke, like everyone in fairy tales,  so one day when he’s out chopping wood, the Virgin Mary just appears all out of nowhere, like, hey man, you can’t afford to raise a kid. I’ll take her.

And this broke wood chopper dude, he’s like, yeah, okay. So the baby goes off with Mary to grow up in Heaven.

All good, yeah? Sounds fun.

Well, the crap is coming.

So the girl is like fourteen now, right? And Mary’s  gotta go on a trip. She decides—hello, Bluebeard—to leave all the keys to Heaven with this kid. Except of course one of the keys opens a door the kid’s not allowed to open.

Now this raises a lot of questions. Like, why would you leave these incredibly important keys in the charge of not only a child, but a living, human child—i.e. the only person in Heaven likely to make big with the sin and all? Or, like, where on earth does Mary have to be? Dude, you’re dead. Take a load off. Jesus came, Jesus went, your work is done. Naptime. Or, like, where exactly is God in all this? Or why are there locked doors in Heaven? Why are actual physical locks even a thing? Like, can’t the power of the Lord keep the special doors closed? And, most importantly, why is God putting up with all the crap that Mary is about to pull over the next several years of this child’s life?

So. Kid has the keys. Kid is hanging out with her little angel pals, and they’re all curious. There some arguing about how that would be wrong, we shouldn’t do that, it’s a sin, but you’re dealing with a high school freshman who grew up surrounded by the Sinless, and she is way past due for some rebellion.

Newsflash, Mary: Kids mess up. They can’t all be like your first one. Jesus was a special case, Mary. This kid is normal, Mary. She may be fully human, Mary, but she sure ain’t fully God.

Door opens. Mary returns, and it becomes obvious that the door opened—kid’s finger turns gold or something. Kid tries to lie about it, so that doesn’t help. Golden fingers don’t lie, kid.

So Mary dumps this child back down on earth, and she takes her voice while she’s at it. Recap: Girl, fourteen years old. Experience with other flawed human beings, zero. Experience with the trials of real life, particularly the wilderness, zero. Voice, none.

And here she is, smack dab in the middle of a forest, a child, and her clothes are all ripped and she’s tired and she’s hungry and she’s scared. And suddenly, a king.

I mean, you know where it’s going from here, right?  It’s not the first time. Big grown up king man marries the little girl with literally nothing, not even a voice to say no. And before you know it, she’s all knocked up.

And along comes Mary, in the middle of the night right after the baby is born, and she’s all like, hey, kid. You got a confession to make? Maybe one concerning a door you totally didn’t open?

And the kid says, “Nope.” (Her voice magically comes back so she can answer Mary's question.)

Okay. So, not the brightest. Not the most honest. She’s a stubborn girl. But, okay. She’s what, fifteen, now? And she can’t talk, and aside from the whole statutory rape thing, you really can’t say no to a king, especially when you have no voice. So I don’t think it’s all that much of a leap to assume this relationship was less than entirely consensual. And she’s a little girl, and she’s all alone in the world, and now she’s a mother. And she got kicked out of freaking Heaven. She has literally nothing left, and it’s all Mary’s fault.

And just thinking about it, I’m already all like screw you, Mary. So imagine how she’s feeling. I wouldn’t be about to admit defeat in the face of this crap either.

So Mary gets all pissed and takes away the newborn baby, and the next morning everyone’s saying that our girl ate her offspring.

But the king, he’s really into this whole child bride situation, so he decides to let the cannibalism slide just this once.

A year later, along comes baby number two. Mary shows up in the middle of the night, and she asks if the kid opened the door. And the kid is down a baby and the respect and trust of her people, on top of everything else. So she’s just like, “Screw you, Mary, I didn’t open your stupid door.”

Bye bye baby number two, hello continued rumors of cannibalistic infanticide.

Fortunately, the novelty of doing it with a little girl who can’t talk back has yet to wear off, so the king lets it go. Who needs babies for kids when you already got one for a wife?

Another year passes. Deceit and childbirth, take three. Mary asks, girl lies, baby goes away to Heaven to live with Grandma. And maybe a mute seventeen year old wife isn’t quite as fun as a sixteen year old, or fifteen, or fourteen, because finally, the king is like, “Okay, enough with the baby-eating. We gotta burn this chick at the stake.”

So apparently, the fire from the stake-burning melts the “hard ice of pride” around our girl, and she’s just thinking, like “Crap, I really wish I’d told Mary the truth.”

And BAM! The voice comes back, and she admits to God and everyone that she opened that stupid door when she was fourteen stupid years old.

The fire goes out, Mary descends from the heavens, returns the babies, and FORGIVES her. Girl makes one mistake when she’s young and stupid, and Mary torments her in every way imaginable for the next three years, and then MARY forgives HER.

It’s a problem.

So, in conclusion $#%@ you, Mary.

Sleeping Beauty Part II: The Other Woman

Note: This blog post is about the second half of Sun, Moon, and Talia, an Italian version of Sleeping Beauty. You can read about the first half here.

You are a queen. You have no children. And what is a queen good for, if she’s not producing heirs?

Your husband travels a lot, these days. You see him seldom. After all, what could he be expected to do with you, as useless as you’ve proven to be?

You used to love each other, you think. Things were better than this, at least. But you are too old now for children; even if you had been useful in your youth, it would all be over now.

One day your husband returns, after a journey of many months, with a young girl and two infants in tow. The children have his eyes, his nose, and the girl is a child, fifteen at most. She is small and frightened and confused, but she looks at your husband like he hangs the moon.

You could feel pity for the child. You should, perhaps. She still has baby fat of her own, as well as the lingering traces of the pregnancy. You ask her how it happened, between her and your husband. She tells you she doesn’t know, she was asleep at the time.

You should feel pity.

But you have lived too many years alone, and this is not the first time your husband has chased after children to give him what you can’t. And this one, this one he brought into your home, sat her across the dinner table like it was nothing, her own gorgeous suite of rooms, a thousand beautiful jewels and dresses. All the things he gave you when you were young, as if you were not still here to stand by his side. He leaves your marriage bed cold to visit her every night. You should feel pity. Instead you feel anger. Instead you feel fear.

Perhaps you go mad. Women in your position often do; stories of it date back to the Greek tragedies. Perhaps you go mad. Perhaps you are simply evil. Certainly you are jealous. And this is Sleeping Beauty’s story—there is no room for you as anyone but the villain.

You decide to boil the children, and feed them to their father for dinner. (All right, so you’ve probably gone mad.) The cook is kinder, saner, less invested in this drama than you are. He hides the babies away, and serves your husband lamb.

For the girl herself, sleeping little girl who stole your husband’s heart, and your whole life along with it—for the little girl you take matters into your own hands. The water boils. The child screams. Foolish, selfish girl, her children have been missing for days, but it is only now, as the heat rises around her, that she thinks to be afraid. She screams; your husband comes running.

You burn. You boil. You die. Perhaps the little girl eats you, as you intended to eat her. You don’t know; you’re dead.

You’re dead. You’re dead, and your husband marries the little girl. He raises a family with her. She’ll live happily ever after, perhaps. She doesn’t know any better.

More likely, ten years from now, her husband will bring home another pretty child to replace her.

You burn, you boil, you die. She marries the man who raped her, because what else does she know to do? At least this one can bear children to keep him happy.

You die. It isn’t fair. None of it is fair.

Snow White

Here is the German version of Snow White. She is seven. She is seven, her mother dead, her stepmother cruel, her father gone or indifferent. She is seven, and she is the fairest in all the land.

This suggests things rather disturbing—is it a kingdom full of perverts? The unspeakably ugly? Why would a woman grown have such jealously for the beauty of a child?

But jealously she has, and plenty of it, enough to send the child fleeing into the woods, turning to seven strangers for protection. And is it any wonder, then, that she welcomes to her door, three times, a kindly old woman with death in her hand basket?

She is a child home alone. She learned to read last year, perhaps. She has already found kindness in seven men who gave her a home; why not in three women who give her gifts, as well? No one claimed she was a bright girl, only pretty.

And why, after near misses with the belt and the comb, would the dwarves leave her alone to accept the apple?

Here is the German version. She bites the apple. She dies. One day a prince comes. He does not kiss her—thank God for small mercies—he does not kiss the little girl. He has her carried away to his home.

Here is the Italian version. He has her carried away to his home. She is not seven now, or we are not told that she is. She is carried to his home and carried to his bedroom.

He calls her his wife, this little girl, this beautiful corpse, this stiff and quickly rotting blow-up doll. He calls her his wife.

Now dead bodies, they smell. This is not Sleeping Beauty, remember. It is not an endless nap but death. And dead bodies, they smell. So. You have met the stepmother. Now see the second villain of the piece, this wicked, wicked woman, the mother-in-law to a rotting pile of once-lovely flesh.

“Son,” she says, “this is creepy.”

“Son,” she says, “the dead belong in the graveyard, not the bed.”

“Son,” she says, “Ew.”

And this horrid, dreadful, unreasonable woman, on a day when the prince is gone, has the body carted out to the garden, or tries to. The girl is moved; the apple is dislodged; the girl is revived. A miracle. She and the prince are married the next day. She and the prince live happily ever after.

We could talk about the German pedophilia. We could talk about the Italian necrophilia. We could talk about the international insistence that the woman who opposes any prince, however unreasonable he may be, is always, always the bad guy. We could talk about a lot of things. Honestly, I don’t know where to start.

So let’s start here. Snow White is seven in the German version. This is one of only two fairy tales I have ever read that gives a specific age for the princess. The other is Sleeping Beauty, which varies from fourteen to sixteen, depending on the country of origin. Snow White is one of only two stories, and Snow White is seven. It doesn’t, in context, seem all that peculiar.

So let’s talk about age. That’s always fun. Let’s talk about children forced into a sexualized femininity they are in no way prepared for. Let’s talk about women who cease to be women when they get too old—women who become nothing but mothers, and consequently the villains opposing heroic sons—women who cling desperately to their youthful beauty because it is all they have. Let’s talk about age.

Or let’s talk about the necrophilia. Why not? I said there was a difference between sleep and death, but really, beyond the ew factor, does it matter? Either way you’ve got your little human sex toy, something you can pull into bed and play with for months before she can even think to complain, and, well, it’s too late then, isn’t it? She’s yours now, one way or another. Who else, especially in that culture, would have her?

And let’s talk about how age and necrophilia are really the same thing here, how they’re both all about women—or little girls—as objects. You have to be sexy the minute you’re born. And you stop mattering the moment you’re not. If you’re not a limp dead doll for Prince Charming to play with, well. You’re still only there for him to look at.

And this isn’t entirely fair, as far as ways to view the world go. Sorry—I’m mad today. Mostly things are a lot better than necrophiliac pedophiles. But sometimes you read fairy tales, and you expect something beautiful—I should know by now what not to expect in fairy tales—and instead you get handsome princes in bed with dead seven year olds. And I know I’m mixing versions of the story. Whatever. The point is, you try to read a fairy story and you get this crap, and then you go outside and get looked carefully up and down by a middle aged man slowly driving a Porsche past, and you’re exhausted and slightly ill in your sweatshirt and baggy jeans, and you just feel like you’re never going to be more than a pretty body, dead or alive. And then you feel like if you ever are more, maybe it’ll just be worse.

And we don’t quite sexualize second graders yet (although you should read some things that have been written on the subject of school dress codes), but we shouldn’t be doing it to thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year olds either. And there shouldn’t, ever, be a society where it’s so important to be beautiful that killing the opposition occurs to you as a solution. But people have to be pretty, or they’re not worth much. And it’s scary. I wouldn’t kill for it, but it’s scary.

So I don’t know what to say, really. I’m angry. Of course—that’s kind of the whole point of this series. But it’s a sort of vague, directionless anger, and I don’t know how to do anything about it, besides sitting here letting it build. So.  I’m angry. Let’s leave it at that.

Rapunzel

I’ve read a lot of Rapunzel stories, a lot of times. I can’t tell you when I really grasped the events leading to Rapunzel getting booted out of the tower and having babies in the desert, but I can tell you I was mad. I’m still mad. I’m more than mad. I am deeply, profoundly disturbed. And I’m terrified.

Imagine you’re a little girl, growing up in complete seclusion. You have a mother. That’s it. No friends. Certainly no men in your life. You live by yourself in a tower.

Imagine how innocent you’d be. How unprepared for the real world. I can’t tell you how old Rapunzel is, but given her isolated upbringing, let’s at least say she’s a bit young for her age.

You’re a lonely little girl. A beautiful man appears at your window. What do you do?

“I love you,” he says. “Sleep with me,” he says. “I want to marry you,” he says, “but I don’t know how to get a priest up here.”

So what do you do?

You sleep with him.

What do you know about sex? You’ve never even seen a guy before. He says people do this, says it means you love each other. And what do you know about love, for that matter? But why not? He says it’s normal. You haven’t learned, yet, not to trust people. The woman who kidnapped you never really talked about stranger danger.

There are many versions of Rapunzel. Plenty are beautiful stories. But I don’t care about those right now. Right now, I’m telling you a story of statutory rape.

I didn’t grow up in a tower, but I have been innocent, too. I don’t understand how people can do this.

I have told this version of the story many times. I have been funny, sarcastic. I have turned this nightmare into a joke to hide from the things that scare me. But tonight I have nothing amusing to say. Tonight I am only bitter.

Children trust beautiful men who tell them they love them. Children have more children, and don’t understand.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. The world sucks. People take advantage of each other. People take things from little girls and boys who didn’t even know they had them to give.

I can’t do this. I really can’t. I don’t know what to say. 

This, maybe: For the grown up Rapunzels, you’re allowed to forgive. You’re allowed not to, too. But know what you’re forgiving, if you do. You do not have the magic tears to heal the blindness of a man who can’t see what he did to you was wrong. You can’t heal people, you can’t fix them, you can’t transform them with your love. Sorry. Maybe, in his blind journeys, the prince will learn some things. But this is Rapunzel, not Beauty and the Beast, and you can’t teach him not to be a monster.

For the ones still safe in their towers: Don’t let strangers climb your hair. Tell your mother of your guests before your clothes grow too small.

And for Mother Gothel: Don’t keep your child locked up in a tower. It isn’t safe. Sooner or later, the real world will find Rapunzel, and it’s only more painful that way.

I’m angry. I’m so angry, and I don’t know where to go from here. Rapunzel was just a girl. She gave up everything—her youth, her home, her family, everything—without ever knowing that there was even a risk. The charming prince hurt her. He took things he had no right to. He destroyed her life. And by the end of the story, she still doesn’t realize how much he hurt her. He has left her with nothing else in the world, so she can only stay and trust him.

I have seen Rapunzel too many times in real life.

Awesome People Are Reading My Writing And They Have Nice Things To Say (I'm So Excited I Might Die)

On the off chance that you have somehow managed to get this far in life without hearing about the awesomeness of Tales of Faerie, you should definitely get on that asap, but in the meantime you should just know that it's a magnificent blog about fairy tales, which I have been totally in love with since sometime in high school.

Now, this happened way back in May, before I was even on Blogspot, but I didn't notice at the time because I was too busy taking finals, and then helping Io with Beast (Buy Iona Gale's awesome book here!).

But, anyway, she talked about me. Kristin, the awesome amazing wonderful lady who runs my favorite blog ever, wrote a blog post about my blog post about "Beauty and the Beast," and she said nice things about my blog (the old one on Tumblr), and basically this is the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me. Like, okay, I'm a published poet and I'm currently studying abroad in Paris. Those are fantastic exciting things. But I don't even care right now, because Kristin talked about me on Tales of Faerie.

You can read it here!

Beauty and the Beast

We all talk a lot about Beauty and the Beast—especially me. Of all the fairy tales I’m obsessed with, this has always been my favorite. And right now, I think the Beast is an excellent way to continue this discussion on rape.

What do you know about him, you who grew up on Disney?

The Beast was a jerk, right? He was mean to some fairy, so she turned him into a monster as a well-deserved punishment.

My favorite version of this story is La Belle et le Bete, a novella by a Madame Villeneuve. It’s the version of this story type that our current version is most directly descended from. And it doesn’t focus a lot on this aspect of things, but here is what I have always taken away from this story: The Beast is the victim.

He’s young. Young enough that he can’t be left home alone when his mother the queen goes off to war. So they leave him with a fairy woman.

The fairy falls in love. The Beast—future Beast—doesn’t feel the same way. That—not wanting a romantic relationship with his guardian—that is what he’s being punished for.

So we’ve got a young man, sexually harassed, at the very least, by a woman he trusted to take care of him. He gets tossed into some new body, monstrous and unfamiliar. But wait!

There’s more. Part of the spell is that he must seem as stupid as he is hideous. You’ve got this child, abused, tortured, transformed, and not even able to properly express himself—able to think just as he normally does, but unable to express those thoughts, unable to communicate effectively, unable to even let the Beauty get to know him as he really is.

I’ve read a lot of weird, intense, depressing fairy tales, but I’ve never encountered a character I felt more sympathy for than the Beast.

Now, let’s talk about what we’ve done to this story over the years, and what it says about us as a society.

This awful thing that happened to the Beast was his own fault, naturally. A very young man is sexually abused, essentially, by an older woman who is supposed to be taking care of him, and we change this into the story of an unpleasant young man being justly punished by a good woman. And then—then we do the exact same thing Beauty spent the entire story learning not to do. We immediately assume that ugliness of body must signify ugliness of spirit, and we adjust the story accordingly.

This is meant to be a story about a girl learning to see past appearances—about Beauty becoming a better person. Instead it’s become the exact opposite—Beauty helping the Beast to become better. It’s a redemption story now. The Beast never needed to be redeemed. He needed to be rescued.

I love Beauty and the Beast, in all its versions. I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with the version we tell now. It’s a good story, if a different one. What I am saying is that the way the story has changed over the years can be connected in interesting ways to how we handle the issues it contains in real life.

How many times have you heard the words “Men can’t be raped?” We have this bizarre inability to accept the idea of the guy as the victim in any situation. Anyone who gets raped, our society tends toward the mindset of “They deserved it.” Or we pretend it didn’t happen. And in the meantime, we’ve got all these people suffering the way the poor Beast does.

Imagine how traumatized he must have been. Imagine going through that, and having everyone siding with the evil fairy, everyone saying you deserved it, everyone assuming that because you’re big and ugly, you couldn’t possibly have been a victim here, and in fact, you were probably the perpetrator.

Let’s think less about magic flowers, and more about the incredible abuses of power at play here. The Beast is magnificent. And so many people are going through the real-life equivalent of his problems. We need more Beauties to see the worth in the people we push off to the side. No one real should ever have to suffer like the Beast.    

Sleeping Beauty

Let’s talk about Sleeping Beauty. No, let’s talk about Talia. “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” published in Giovanni Batiste Basile’s Il Pentamerone. Let’s talk about consent. Let’s talk about all the little girls who never had the chance to say no.

I could write an analytic paper about all the themes and elements in this story. I could get cute and ranty and give you a snarky list of reasons why it pisses me off. But I’m too upset, right now, for that kind of rant, so let’s skip straight to the part where the story gets interesting.

It doesn’t say how old Talia was when her story begins. Let’s assume that she’s a child. An unmarried Italian princess from a story recorded in the 1600s? Let’s go ahead and assume she’s a little girl. Let’s say fourteen. That’s how old I was, the first time I read this story. I was innocent at fourteen. Naïve. Clueless. More innocent than most fourteen year olds ever get the chance to be. I read this story three times before I realized it was about rape.

She falls asleep. Talia falls asleep, like Sleeping Beauty does, and she wakes up a mother.

Let’s talk about the kind of despicable person who does this kind of despicable thing to some defenseless girl.

He was a king. He was married. He found a comatose child in the woods and had his way with her.

He went home and forgot about her, and she woke to find herself utterly alone with two infants. It was several months before he thought to stop by and check in on his human blow up doll again, and when he found her awake, he took her home.

I could talk a lot about how this scumbag’s poor wife is the villain of the piece, but let’s save that for another day. All you need to know is that she dies in the end, and Talia marries the king and, of course, lives happily ever after.

Let’s talk about young women being manipulated by older men. Let’s talk about the number of girls who were raped while unconscious last year. Let’s talk about the number of girls who were raped, period.

Let’s talk about the number of viral videos the rapists have made about it.

Let’s talk about how children, who have been hurt in one of the worst ways imaginable, who have been violated in the cruelest possible way, are afraid to tell people what happened. Let’s talk about how many real life Talias have been blamed for waking up with two children, and let’s talk about how many of them would go home with the king because they’re afraid to do anything else.

Let’s talk about how this story, in which the rapist gets to live happily ever after with his victim, is four hundred years old. Four. Hundred. Years. Kingdoms have risen and fallen. We’ve gone through slavery, and suffrage, and we’ve done all these things that are supposed to make the world better—we have made the world better, in some ways, but something that was acceptable in fiction four hundred years ago still happens in real life, like it’s no big deal, every single day.

Lives are destroyed. People are hurt in so many ways, people lose their agency, people get pregnant and get STDs, and no one cares enough to stop it.

Newsflash: when the newspaper reads like seventeenth century Italy, you’re doing something wrong.

I will defend fairy tales to the death, but I won’t pretend they don’t have issues. So let’s take this opportunity to learn something. Forget about the monsters. Kill Prince Charming.

This isn’t a fairy tale. This is real life. And the rapist lives happily ever after in both.