Some of you may know that the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales are a little more,
um, gruesome and terrifying than good ol’ Walt has led us to believe. I’m not
talking about the paradoxically life affirming kind of terrifying that we get
in those classic slasher films like, I dunno, Friday the 13th or Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (has a nicer ring to it than New Jersey Weedeater Manslaughter, but only if you’re not from New
York). I’m talking about the ucky, existential terrifying that you get after
you realize that the Middle Ages were packed so full of woman hate, they must
have eaten it for breakfast. Like, you could stop at any Olde Taverne and get
some dirt stew, a spoonful of plague and a heaping side of misogyny. There was
so much it that it simply has to be
ground up in your DNA and you will never get rid of it, no matter how much
Virginia Woolf you read. I submit to you Sleeping
Beauty as an example. It begins like you would expect, beautiful girl, witch
not invited to the christening, spinning wheel blah blah blah, but when the
handsome prince discovers her sleeping he doesn’t exactly stop at a kiss, and
she doesn’t wake up. He just does his thing and goes on his merry, and she
wakes up nine months later after she gives birth and her baby sucks out the
splinter in her finger that made her fall asleep. The moral of the story? Lucky
people are always lucky, even when they are asleep.
What?!
Feminists get all upset at Disney because in their
version, the princess isn’t empowered and she just kind of sits there waiting
for the prince to rescue her. In Grimm’s
she’s the exact opposite if empowered; they celebrate her abuse! “It’s a good
thing that witch cursed you,” they say, “Otherwise the prince never would have
given you a rape baby and then where
would you be?!” Relatively speaking, Walt Disney is a veritable bastion of
equality and progressive thinking.
So the old Grimm’s
are terrible, but in this last semester I learned that modern interpretations
of old folktales are somehow worse. Impossible, you say? Oh you poor, sad naïve
soul, you underestimate the perversions of liberal academia. I submit Little Red Riding Hood for your, uh,
well, “pleasure” isn’t the right word unless you have some pretty weird kinks,
and “edification” doesn’t quite fit either. I guess “education” is going to
have to work, and you can see what you are missing by not getting a liberal
arts degree.
You know the story. Wearing her new cloak, Red skips off
through the woods to see grandma and gets stopped by the Wolf, and he is erm,
big, if you get my meaning. And bad, he’s also bad, and he chats with her a bit
and learns where she’s going. He then takes a shortcut through the forest, eats
grandma whole, then gets dressed up in her clothes because no one will ever know! In
the meantime, Red takes the long way and says hi to the woodsmen/man because
foreshadowing! then arrives at grandma’s cottage. This is where the old
versions take a turn for the slightly bizarre. Big Bad “Grandma” Wolf asks Red
to take off her clothes and snuggle because “I’m so cold.” Right. Red complies,
then starts the infamous “what big (insert body part here, if you get my meaning) you have” dialogue culminating with the “better
to eat you with” line, and then the tale can vary. Sometimes a woodsman busts
in just in time to save Red and cuts grandma out of the wolf’s belly. Sometimes
there is no woodsman, and the wolf eats up Red if you get my meani- oh
screw it, it’s about penises ok? The whole thing, according to Professor P., is
about sex, and anything that is vaguely shaft like or even roughly associated
with masculinity is a phallic object. The woods are phallic, the wolf is
phallic, the woodsmen are phallic, their axes
are phallic, and if you think it ends there you are so pathetically wrong. The
wolf’s ears, nose, tongue, tail, and especially teeth are all phallic too*. He’s
just this big ol’ penis monster, and there’s nothing you can say to convince us
otherwise. When you think about it, at all makes sense.
Ever wonder why the hood has to be new and red? Because it
represents her first menses, that’s why. This girl is a woman now, and she is
headed off to her sexually mature grandmother’s to get a Little Talk about how
the birds and the bees ate the cabbage. The Wolf represents a sexual predator
that wants to take Red’s innocence. By cutting ahead to grandmas and eating her
up, he removes Red’s access to sexual knowledge so that he can easily take
advantage of her. Asking Red to take off her clothes is not as symbolic as you
think it is, he just wants to see her nekkid. Red complies, and then she starts
making comments. Not the pertinent comments she should be making like, “You
sure don’t look like grandma” or “Grandma, you sure are acting kind of pervy.”
Instead she comments on the size of “grandma’s” ears, nose, teeth, tail, ey-
wait, tail? Red notices that grandma has a tail and still doesn’t act like she
knows what’s up. That’s because she kind of already knows what is going on and
she secretly wants it. She’s kind of suspected what the wolf was after since he
started hitting on her in the penis woods, and she could have notified the
woodsmen that she met in the interim, but she’s sexually curious so she’s going
along with it. When the Wolf discards his “disguise” that nobody was buying and
makes his attempt to destroy Red’s innocence, she doesn’t save herself because,
truth be told, she’s not all that interested in being saved
There you have it, with a great meta-twist I have stolen
your innocence, and Little Red Riding Hood will never be the same.
*the Wolf’s eyes are not phallic, that’s too big a stretch
even for English instructors. Instead, the Wolf uses his eyes to visually objectify
and “devour” Red, much like the camera does to women in many Hollywood films,
but that’s a lesson for another day
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