By Madi Grant
The gendered language within fairy tales is predominantly focused towards heteronormative relationships, creating a dangerous environment for women who engage in partnerships that follow those guidelines. Understanding the ways in which fairy tales perpetuate toxic masculinity through romantic and sexual narrative structures is important because they attach harmful lessons about love and sexuality to morals that audiences are meant to replicate. Fairy tale relationship dynamics create a false narrative of mutual understanding, while in reality, relationships like the ones in these stories are detrimental to women. Some of these tales that we glorify that maintain these dynamics include “Beauty and the Beast”, “Rapunzel”, “Cinderella”, “Snow White”, and “The Little Mermaid”, all of which idealize misogynistic dynamics that were once warnings, not blueprints. The Beast forced Belle to stay in his home, asserting his dominance over her when he had no right to and then called it love. Rapunzel was twelve years old and was impregnated by a grown man, who also called this an act of love. In several versions of Cinderella(Tatar), her father cut her breasts and tongue off when she refused to marry him, actively punishing her for his own pedophilic desires. The Little Mermaid praises female passivity and introduces the idea that women need to repent for their mistakes while men are allowed to live and learn. The messages in these fairy tales that romanticize the mistreatment of women by men create space for men to be violent towards women in the real world. By examining portrayals of romance and sexuality in the fairy tales we show our children, we can gain a better understanding of how fairy tales impact audiences as well as how exposing children to sex early in life changes development. Romance narratives in fairy tales — specifically Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast,” Friedrich Schulz’s “Rapunzel,” the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White”, and Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” — perpetuate toxic masculinity by portraying male expressions of love as justification for physical possession, emotional manipulation, and dominance over women. These representations of toxic masculinity take shape in three primary ways — the male figure or prince physically trapping or controlling the female protagonist, sexuality being portrayed as liberating for male characters while simultaneously being what is deemed the root of all issues if the sexuality or desire is being presented by a woman, and the male figure essentially becoming the paramount feature of the female protagonist’s life at the end of the tale. By rewriting the narrative in fairy tales and encouraging healthy and mutually beneficial relationships that aren’t based on some guy and some girl in some three page long story, we can work to minimize the damage that these stories have had a hand in causing.
Historically, women have been unable to speak outwardly about sex and sexuality due to societal and patriarchal pressure, however there have also been ways women have been able to combat this. One example of this is storytelling, and the themes of female sexuality and how it is viewed in society are still present in the stories we tell today. Many of these stories, or fairy tales, consist of warnings for young women against the sexual pressures they would face from men as they got older(Butterworth). One example of this is Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood”(Perrault). While this tale was written by a man, it was one that was passed from woman to woman for many years before he penned it. This story contains a warning about men in high social standing taking advantage of women, or the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” trope, which is just one of the many messages like this we see within fairy tales that urge women to be wary of the men they meet. Other themes like this include women needing to be submissive for their own safety, such as Snow White’s relationship with the seven dwarves as their maid and Rapunzel’s first encounter with Prince Charming in Friedrich Schulz’s version of her story. These classic fairy tales may be based in lands far away, but the warnings they contain are incredibly important in our society, which villainizes women the same way all of these stories do. However, the warning messages have long been long forgotten, and instead the relationships in these stories are being romanticized, creating a harmful basis for what children are told is “true love”.
One issue that the audience encounters within these stories is the justification and entitlement for physical possession by the male figure towards the female protagonist. This generally takes place at the beginning of the tale, when the male figure physically traps or controls the female character, though, it can really happen at any time in the story. Three popular tales where this occurs are “Rapunzel”(Schulz), “Beauty and the Beast”(de Beaumont), and “Snow White”(Grimm). In Rapunzel, while the fairy trapped her in the tower initially, the prince traps her in the tower while she is at his mercy while also physically dominating her. When the prince entered the tower, twelve year old Rapunzel “was afraid and screamed pitifully” due to the prince’s advances until she yielded and agreed to marry him, when he then decided “he wanted to have her right away. She said yes, without knowing why it was happening and without knowing how, and she didn’t really want to know where.”(487) The prince not only trapped Rapunzel, who was a child, but he also raped her, believing that he had the right to her and her body, simply because he was the one who found the tower. This is also, probably most obviously, present in Beauty and the Beast, where the Beast forces Beauty to stay with him after her father took a rose from his garden, making her trade her life and freedom for his. The Beast shows a sense of entitlement to her and her company, as he shut her into his house and was then her only means of socialization, effectively removing her from the rest of the world. After closing her off from the rest of the world, he then believed he had a right to her and her time. Another instance in these fairy tales where this happens is within Snow White, although, it is at the end of the story. After the prince takes Snow White’s coffin from the dwarves and she becomes conscious again, she asks where she is and the prince replies “You are with me… I love you more than anything else on earth. Come with me to my father’s castle. You shall be my bride.”(101) Not only does the prince make the decision for Snow White about being his bride, but he also feels the entitlement to even make that statement specifically because he tripped and the apple happened to fall out of her throat. The sense of automatic entitlement that is displayed by these male characters in regards to the female protagonists is an issue, as it leads to real men believing that this is what is right when trying to seduce or court a woman in real life. These themes also don’t teach men how to deal with rejection in a healthy way, leading to men like incels, as written in Shannan Palma’s “Entitled to a Happy Ending: Fairy-Tale Logic from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ to the Incel Movement”(Palma), in which Palma describes the real world repercussions of not teaching men to be better than the men they read about, especially within misogynistic stories that preach and reward sexist entitlement.
Another main issue with so many of these stories is the normalization of emotional manipulation and its close proximity to sexuality. In these tales, sexuality and desire for men is shown as something that frees them, and they are alternatively used as a way to villainize women, either saying that female desire is something that is the root of all the issues within the tale, or saying that desire is something women have to repent for. This hypocrisy and manipulation is prominent within “Rapunzel” and “The Little Mermaid”(Anderson). In “Rapunzel”, there are several times when female desire is villainized throughout the entire tale. Initially, Rapunzel’s mother wanted the food from the fairy’s garden, which ended in her child being taken away. Then, the fairy puts Rapunzel in the tower when she begins puberty, showing that her blossoming sexuality and womanhood is something that is dangerous, and after that, the fairy blames Rapunzel and casts her out of the tower after the prince raped and impregnated her. The emotional manipulation by the prince towards Rapunzel happens all throughout this. First, when he forces her into marriage and then takes her body from her, and then it happens again after he finds her at the end of the story, when she cures his blindness and they go live “happily” in his castle. While Rapunzel’s (not even) sexuality got her into trouble, the prince’s manipulation and violation of her body ended happily for him. In The Little Mermaid, she trades her tail and voice for legs, even though she would be in immense pain every time she took a step, so that she could be with the man she “loved”. Her desire is immediately punished by the sea witch with these curses, however, once she is on land, the prince spends every waking moment with her. He is rewarded with her presence through her suffering. At the end of the story, the prince is rewarded further by getting married to a beautiful princess while the little mermaid dies and is forced to travel on the wind for 300 years in order to gain a human soul as penance for what she did while she was living. The message of praising female domesticity and passivity when it comes to their relationships with men is incredibly toxic, as it encourages young girls to rely on men in real life, while they should be making decisions for themselves. The villainization of female desire is also another major issue, as it furthers the narrative that women should not want things for themselves, instead they should work to make the men in their life happy.
The final big issue with fairy tales is one that comes at the end of each tale. While the male enforcing his dominance over the female protagonist is something that happens throughout each of these stories, the male figure becoming the paramount feature of the female protagonist’s life is something that always waits til the end, usually rearing its ugly head in the phrase “happily ever after”. This happens in almost every fairy tale that features a female protagonist. In “Snow White” the prince takes her after she wakes up and immediately marries her, taking her to his castle, where she’ll live out the rest of her life, most likely popping out heirs to the throne. In “Beauty and the Beast” the beast threatens to kill himself if Beauty doesn’t return (talk about emotional manipulation) and he almost dies before Beauty saves him. She then decides that she’ll marry him to save him from himself, even though she only ever felt friendship towards him. Beauty lives with the Beast forever, giving up her life in her village with her family in order to protect her captor. In “Rapunzel”, she becomes pregnant with twins and then has to raise them on her own for years while the prince is wandering around like a dumbass in the woods until she saves him. Then, she commits to going to live in his castle and, like Snow White, will probably just get bred like a prized animal, as is what happened to real royalty. In The Little Mermaid, she loses her life and has to pay for loving the prince, making him the ultimate deciding factor in her existence. All of these instances of men asserting their dominance and women losing their individuality after submitting is a toxic dynamic that no one should base their relationships off of or romanticize.
There is a danger that comes with idolizing one dimensional characters in any capacity, if it lines up with sexuality or anything else. In this specific instance, however, girls are taught that they have to be submissive to men for their own safety, and boys are shown that the way to win someone else’s affection is through these toxic behaviours. The characters in these tales have no depth, and while it’s healthy for children to identify with fictional characters, it isn’t healthy if they have no development or only display the toxic gender roles reflective of the time when they were written. A fairy tale from the seventeenth century should not hold the same weight when it comes to learning about yourself and others or learning about identity as current franchises like Percy Jackson, or even Star Wars, which feature more modern and more complex characters that children can identify with in healthier ways, as opposed to wanting to be “beautiful” or “helpful” like the female protagonists in these fairy tales or “manly” and “charming” like these toxic male figures. There is also the issue of consent or lack thereof within these tales. The narrative of men taking what they want and that making them manly or heroic is absolutely detrimental to women’s health and safety as well as the mental health of the men who are exposed to these gender roles and don’t want to abide by them. Setting up these rigid guides for what men and women “should” be is toxic in and of itself and leads to children having identity issues(Brown). The narratives in these stories need to be rewritten to reflect the time we’re currently in. As gender roles continue to shift and change, as do the stories and the morals we teach our children about how to act towards others. Yes, be kind, be helpful, and be brave, but also, be whatever makes you happy, don’t live based on what other people tell you to do, especially if it’s because of your gender.
