Traditional Fairytales Turn Off PC Parents

It's easy to make fun of the strange and continually evolving social experiment in national behavior known as Political Correctness (a.k.a. "cultural sensitivity"). It's a frightening yet inevitable truth of our world that a great many of the things that go horribly wrong in life are the unintended consequences of well meaning people striving to make the world a better place. PC, I believe, belongs squarely in that category. I realize that those who believe in it are trying to make the world a better place by ensuring that we refrain from giving each other offense. It's an admirable ideal. The theory merely does not bear up under the facts, two of which stand out most glaringly in this context: firstly, human beings routinely hate (and love) each other for very superficial reasons. Secondly, we habitually rally around common points of reference. We band together based on race, language, religion, history, culture, hobbies, interests, hair color, height, weight, age, ideology, visions of the future, and past experience. None of this is bad per se, it merely describes our social propensity to seek out those like ourselves in one way or another. It's human.

But another human tendency is to randomly beat the living crap out of those who are not like ourselves, frequently in large groups, often killing other humans in the process. This is generally considered a bad thing by sensible individuals the world over. PC attempts to fix these tendencies by politicizing public communication. I think that in adopting this technique, we actually make communication more difficult by creating an adversarial relationship between two or more parties where none need exist. Clearly, there are some things nobody should say in public (inflammatory speech comes to mind) but I suspect that to view every word as if it might be inflammatory is not likely to improve the situation.

So, for those of us who do not subscribe to the theory or comply with its requirements, making fun of PC and those who use it is easy. It's fun to make light of people who are different from ourselves, first because it makes us feel better about ourselves, and second, it helps us deal with the fear they might be reading the world correctly and we are not. After all, these people are trying to make the world a better place. Who can argue with that? (Actually, I can, but that's a post for another time.)

But I wonder about these parents who refuse to read certain well-known bedtime stories to their children on the grounds that they are bad for the kids. So that we're clear, let me just say that not all kids are ready for all stories at all ages. Knowing what your kids can handle and at which age is part of being a parent. (When they were younger, for example, my autistic 11-year old nephew could routinely handle stories and films that gave his "normal" 13-year old sister nightmares for weeks.) For that matter, if your stomach is strong enough, get yourself a copy of The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar and read it cover to cover. You have no clue (especially if you're an American) just how frightening these stories were a few generations ago. And that's why I'm not going to make fun of these parents. But I do question what they themselves are projecting into the stories they won't read to their kids.

The article contains two lists of books, the ten most read children's stories and the ten books least read. Briefly, they are:

Top 10 fairy tales we no longer read:

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

2. Hansel and Gretel

3. Cinderella

4. Little Red Riding Hood

5. The Gingerbread Man

6. Jack and the Beanstalk

7. Sleeping Beauty

8. Beauty and the Beast

9. Goldilocks and the Three Bears

10. The Emperor's New Clothes

You'll notice the Do Not Read column contains the more traditional works. I'm the first to admit that most of the stories in the first list are unknown to me. (When I saw the headline to the article I was worried that The Very Hungry Caterpillar had been banned on the basis of its encouraging obesity.) I will say that I'm a bit surprised The Wind in the Willows got onto the Good to Read list seeing as how Toad is a total creep who puts his friends through hell as he destroys himself and everything around him. I understand reading Winnie the Pooh to kids, but I'm not a good judge of Milne's writing for one reason: I never liked Pooh. Eeyore was and remains my boy, followed by Benjamin, the similarly morose donkey in Orwell's Animal Farm. Although there's a clear difference between the two: Eeyore expected the worst and was often pleasantly surprised when it didn't appear. Benjamin expected the worst and watched it unfold before his eyes, but he never looked away. (I'm convinced Benjamin had a library of classic Russian literature stashed in the barn somewhere.)

It's also interesting to me that Goldilocks and the Three Bears made it to both lists. I think I see why in both cases. Those parents who liked it probably thought it was a whimsical story where the naughty little girl is "scared straight" as it were, and gets away unharmed and maybe a bit wiser. But I can sympathize with parents who hated it, too. Who wants to read a story about a girl who breaks into a strange house, vandalizes the family's furniture, befouls their food, then soils the bed before being discovered and escaping justice to their kids? Not me.

I don't think Snow White deserves to be on the Do Not Read list. It's not her fault the queen wants her dead, in fact, she lucked out with her escape (the hunter didn't have to let her go in the woods, you know). Beyond that she's just trying to make an insane situation livable. Granted, I'm not sure I'd want my teen-aged daughter shacking up with seven dirty old men in the middle of nowhere, but even then they never actually demand anything obnoxious from her. It seems they're happy just having a young woman around who likes to cook and clean but doesn't spit, curse, and stay out all night. She could have done worse (and in some re-tellings, I'm sure she did.)

My parents did not read Hansel and Gretel to me and my brother when we were young. I don't know if it was because the characters were Germans and we were Jews. I did grow up thinking it was normal in the Fatherland for old women to trap and eat children, or occasionally for kids to push old ladies into ovens, but . . . well, maybe it was because we were Jews. I don't remember.

Cinderella gets a bad rap because a lot of people think she's made to be a slave to the other women in the house. I don't deny she gets treated poorly, but if this story is truly offensive, it's more derogatory toward stepmothers and step-siblings. I at least understand the pathology behind the stepmother, she's favoring her own kids over the adopted one. That happens plenty in real life (it happened to both my grandfathers at very young ages.) But the stepsisters are so one-dimensionally grasping, greedy and envious of anything Cinderella comes home with (or even wants to come home with) that in the original story (or one version of it) they cut off their heels and big toes to get that glass slipper to fit. (Spoiler Alert: it doesn't.)

Little Red Riding Hood should have followed instructions, stayed on the path and not wandered off. Is that so hard? (Neil Jordan apparently thought so.) Meanwhile the Gingerbread Man was, by all accounts I remember hearing when I was six or seven, a complete jerk. The lesson seemed clear to me even then: be a braggart, look for trouble absolutely everywhere and you will get eaten by a fox. Or else John Lithgow will torture you and rip your legs off. Whatever. The point is, don't be a jerk.

I never found Jack and the Beanstalk very interesting. Jack was clearly a jock (what normal ten-year old can climb hand over hand for several hundred feet? None that I know) and to my mind suspect for that reason more than any other. He's also obviously no math whiz or future business tycoon or he'd have understood that trading up from a healthy heifer does not mean getting a handful of so-called magic beans in return. (That the beans actually were magic was a mere lucky break.) Then there's the matter of this young Mr. Universe breaking into the castle at the top of the giant plant to nowhere, killing the giant, stealing his golden egg-laying pet, then chopping down the beanstalk to cover his tracks. I hasten to add, I don't entirely blame Jack. He's a product of his genetics and environment. I think the fact that the boy's mother ripped open the goose in a fit of greed to find nothing but blood and entrails is all the defense he'll need in court. (I mean, come on, how much gold can a goose pack in her ovaries at any one time? Gah!)

Sleeping Beauty might be a poor role model for young girls, or she might not be, it all depends on your interpretation. Personally, I've always felt a little sorry for her. All she wanted to do was learn a trade (i.e., spinning cloth), and a good skill it was--Gandhi himself calculated that if even a fraction of the women in India could spin for a two or three hours a day, they would produce so much raw cloth that they would provide for their national needs and completely bankrupt the British textile industry within a year. It's also not her fault that her parents were rude to the wrong people; you'd think Old World royalty would know better. She certainly did not ask some strange man to come galloping from God knows where to behave as if he owned her just because he took advantage of her while she was indisposed. And what Anne Rice put her through was just plain mean.

Beauty (no relation to Sleeping Beauty) and the Beast made a great Disney film, mostly because Belle is the only Disney princess to have an IQ greater than 87. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all the film had going for it (the voice acting of Jerry Orbach and David Ogden Stiers notwithstanding), so I won't say more about it. Suffice to say that the French version is rather more complex.

I don't understand why The Emperor's New Clothes is on the Do Not Read list. Public male nudity perhaps? Wrecking the myth that Authority Knows Best? Observing that a five year old boy on a crowded street knows a mature wee-wee when he sees one? I never found this story anything but positive. Then again, maybe that's the problem: many of these tales are steeped in allegory and metaphor to provide cryptic messages encouraging obedience in one form or another. This one stands out because it does exactly the opposite: it instructs children that when their elders are clearly not grasping the situation, they are to tell them what's happening. Remind them that lies are still lies, no matter how scared of the liar and his minions they may be. Remind them that respect is earned and that to work it must be mutual.

Most of all, children should remind their parents that trying to protect them by stealing other people's right to speak openly and honestly in public is just not going to work.

The Rogue Scholar

Pretentious Title. Solid Info.

January 09, 2009