The Fairy Tale of Fairy Tales
...lations that the average person goes through in every relationship. In fact you can almost say they leave out the man. Most fairy tales just gloss over the man and just insert him when there is trouble. In the real world, however, we have to deal with men every day. We have to see the good and the bad and we have to accept and live with it. You can’t imagine just how dangerous this is. It makes us discard good men when they make mistakes and fall for bad ones who deceive us with lies and pretty things. Also, the tales portrayed that only a man can save a woman when she gets into trouble. For example, in Cinderella this girl takes everything that is thrust at her with a smile and never a complaint. She lets her stepsisters push her around and use her as a human doormat. In one of the versions of the fairy tales, the stepsisters actually rip the dress Cinderella is to wear to the ball to shreds. She is completely helpless until she gets married to the prince. What a miserable way to live! These stories made me believe that a “good” girl would never question authority no matter how badly I was being treated. It also made me believe that if I ever got into a spot of trouble some man had to save me or I would suffer that plight forever. It made me believe that a man who I had never met could give me my first kiss and bring me back to life (Snow White and the seven dwarfs). How ludicrous is that?! The underlying meanings in these harmless fairy tales get many young women in trouble. They marry the first man who shows them a little kindness, saying it was love at first sight, and do not bother to check who he is or what he is like. On careful reflection the subliminal messages in fairy tales may be the reason divorce rates are so high. Because women believe that this man is their one true love, they stay with their abusive husbands. See, fairy tales don’t tell us what happens after Cinderella and her prince get married or Snow White and her beau ride off into the sunset; it tells us how they met. Not one mentions the trials and tribulations of marriage. So we fashion our weddings and lives after them, forgetting the story is not complete. And since we fashion our lives after the untrue, we are surprised when things don’t turn out in roses and sunshine. Then we get frustrated and leave. Maybe the people who wrote the first fairy tales knew what marriage was like so they conveniently left it out. For me, the most dangerous thing about those fairy tales is that they were written in a culture that I didn’t belong to. As such I couldn’t identify with them. It made me believe that beauty and love were out of my reach because I did not look like the girls in the pictures. I did not have skin as Snow White’s smooth white skin, or Rapunzel’s endless blond hair or even Cinderella’s dainty feet. I was just plain old me. The stories built in me a fear that I could never be loved because of what I looked like. In those years where my sisters were planning their marriages to whoever caught their fancy that week, I had already given up on love. In the little dramatizations that we had, I was never the doting mother or the loving wife; I was, by my own choosing, the rich businesswoman with never a moment to spare, no husband, no kids, no family. It made me want to build a life where I was completely independent of others so if in the case my prince didn’t come I wouldn’t be at a complete loss. Now people may say that this drive would help me become a successful person. That may be true, but it would also make me a very lonely one. For not only had the stories made me lose my faith in love; they also made me lose my faith in men. Gone was the trusting girl who was waiting to be swept off her feet; in her place was the wary woman who could only believe that love was in fairy tales. Now many people who had been read fairy tales as a child would object saying, “My parents read fairy tales to me every night for four years and nothing ever happened to me.” It is very possible that this is true. But the horrible thing about this is everyone is different whether it is emotionally, physically or mentally. Even identical twins have different personalities. Some people are not as affected by some things as other people are. We can never know for sure if our child is the kind that will be affected by the stereotypes in fairy tales. If we cannot know for sure, then why gamble with their minds? It makes more sense to wait till a point where they are advanced enough that little things don’t affect their developing personalities as much. There are other things tha...