As I was watching the film I was taken aback by the depth of the lessons that some of the stories tell you (like don't get distracted by a creep in the woods or he's likely to eat you and your family too) but also by the fact that although fairy tales usually end with a 'happily ever after', they are hella dark!
Take Cinderella. She is a victim of what we would call Modern Day Slavery. It's so much more than a young girl not being able to go to a party and meet a man (like that's the worst thing that could happen anyway! #feminism). I also realised that her prince was rather obtuse. I know she was dressed up to the nines by her Fairy Godmother and with a nice hairdo and some make up, probably looked slightly different than when she's in her usual slave attire. But does it really take a shoe to confirm that it 's the right girl? I mean, he wasn't blind right? Surely he could have looked at her face and recognised her. But no, he had to wait until the slipper went onto her foot to know that it was her. And why would she be the only woman who could fit that shoe? Almost every time I see a cute pair of shoes, they're sold out in my size. So I know that probably half of London could have fit into any shoe that I lost. Chances are, he put the slipper on the wrong woman's foot and Cinderella ended up being a servant in the castle to her foot twin. I should give him some credit, it does sound like it would have been an awesome party and some of us will know what it feels like when you can't remember who you got with the next day. At least he came up with a strategy to work it out!
Murder seems to be an acceptable thing in these fairy tales. Seriously, what are they teaching children? In Hansel and Gretel, they killed the old lady that was fattening them up before she ate them. Was that entirely necessary? Surely they could have overpowered her and put her in the very cell that they had just escaped from. I supposed in Court they would claim self defence but at that stage I think they use a disproportionate level of violence. So far, all this woman had managed to do was feed them lots of nice food. FOR FREE. Did she really deserve to be pushed into an oven and then have her home robbed?
But crime is a common theme in these stories. Take Goldilocks for instance, the face of breaking and entering. It's really not very normal to walk past someone's house, notice their tasty lunch and then just go inside and eat it. I don't know what annoys me more, the thought of someone breaking into my house to eat my lunch or the fact that she committed this crime for porridge. Porridge! If it was Nando's or TGI's then I might be more accepting of her motives but porridge! And as if that's not bad enough, she then makes herself comfortable in the bed. The cheek of it! Like she's such a badass that she's just going to hang around until you get home. If she had come to my home, she would have been woken up with a steaming bowl of porridge to her face! I'd show I could do it juuuuust right. Or maybe it was all just a cover up.
And if the men in these stories aren't molesting comatose women, they seem to be marrying evil ones instead!
I've also noticed that the women in these stories are way more accepting of the men than the other way round. I mean first of all, they marry their attackers (Stockholm Sydrome anyone?!) but I mean in the sense that they seem to accept the men as they come and then its a bonus if they break a curse and the frog/beast turns into a handsome prince. Whereas the women are already beautiful or they have to get help from a Fairy Godmother or evil witch to turn them into a princess or a human so the man will even look their way (#shallowmuch).
So as a woman, fairy tales have taught me to be pretty or sell my soul in order to change myself...and I may still end up with this:
And the morale for men is: