"Fairy tales" ("Marchen" - folk takes - ) are the distilled wisdom of the human race, and like all good stories they entertain and educate.
The original, unedited ones had some nasty stuff in them. For example, in "Cinderella" the cruel, greedy and envious step-sisters cut off parts of their feet to make them fit into the slippers.
Since kids pretty much see things as black-and-white (either all-good or all-bad) that's how folk tales were structured.
When it came to parents, there was the Good or Bad father, and the Good or Bad Mother. That's pretty much it.
The Good Fathers were often portrayed as Kings, that is, patriarchs.
The Bad Fathers were portrayed as weak or absent (say, MGTOW) or sexual molesters of their own daughters (and by extension other men's daughters). - the "PUAs."
Women, however, are portrayed as being far worse than men. At their worse they're witches, cannibals and murderers, motivated by greed, hate and envy. The stepmothers are the worse.
At their best they are loving mothers and loyal wives.
Mythologically women are portrayed as either nurturers or destroyers. That is, if they don't nurture then they destroy.
Take the famous "Snow White." The Evil Queen wants to murder her out of sheer envy. "Hansel and Gretel"? The weak father lets the evil mother send her children out to die. "Cinderella"? Her greedy, cruel stepmother and step-sisters abuse and neglect Cinderella and are motivated by greed and envy.
The lesson of these tales is that probably the worst thing for children is to have a weak or absent father, and a cruel, sadistic, greedy, envious mother who sometimes try to murder their children. The implication is that when men are weak or absent the true nature of women is to be sadistic, cruel, envious and greeduy, ones who wish to murder children. At their best they are, as the Bible says, "helpmeets."
"Often men fantasize women as nurturers who are in fact predators" - John Clayton
1 comment:
The wicked stepmother in Hansel and Gretel was able to rationalize her decision to kill her stepchildren to her impoverished woodcutter husband, whose first wife had died years before. There was a famine going on and she said "there isn't enough food for all of us, so if we don't let them die, than the whole family will die, so they're going to die anyway. The only logical thing to do is save ourselves." Their father bought into her reasoning. Perhaps she resented raising another woman's children and hoped that when the famine ended, she could replace the stepchildren with her own children.
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