Traditional fairy tales perpetuate sexist ideas

The argument

A common sexist trope from fairy tales is the evil stepmother, as seen in "Cinderella" and "Snow White". Another similar trope is the evil witch, as seen in "Sleeping Beauty", "The Little Mermaid" and "Rapunzel". These two tropes ultimately imply that women are a threat to one another and will not support each other. The existence of these tropes means that the female protagonist often has no female role model and relies on men for positive relationships. These tropes also combine sexism with ageism - suggesting that older women will become deathly jealous of younger women, and will end up ugly and alone. One very concerning sexist trope in fairy tales is romanticized sexual violence. In Giambattista Basile's "Sun, Moon, and Talia", the original "Sleeping Beauty", the princess only wakes up when she is giving birth to the prince's children because she was raped in her sleep. In the original "Snow White", the princess is kidnapped by the prince while she is unconscious. While we see a less vivid depiction of this sexual violence in the Disney versions, it is still alluded to and female characters do not consent to be kissed or touched. The final trope worth mentioning is the 'knight in shining armor', a trope carried forward from medieval ideas about chivalry and courtly love. The princess or female character is often painted as a victim who lives an uneventful life alone. They are then rescued by a prince, married, and live happily ever after. This celebration of matrimony implies that women who are unmarried are worthless, and this idea is outdated in most modern societies. Since fairy tales are meant to teach morality, they should be amended to contain messages that actually empower girls today. Otherwise, they have no use to society anymore. Some examples of modern retellings of fairy tales that send good messages to women are "The Lunar Chronicles" by Marissa Meyer and "The Bloody Chamber" by Angela Carter.

Context

There is no doubt that traditional fairy tales have elements of sexism and uphold patriarchal values. They were ultimately morality tales, and at the time they were written, women were expected to be subservient to men. This can help explain why the messages they provide are often outdated and sexist. Most of the fairy tales we knew as children were from Disney princess films, such as "Snow White," "Cinderella," and "The Little Mermaid," but the original fairy tales were largely written by the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson. The original tales were much darker than the Disney portrayals, but the same sexist ideas and tropes exist in both.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The fact that most fairy tales are named after the female characters and focus on a female protagonist shows that they are not inherently sexist and do encourage women to be the main character of their own story. The originally written fairy tales are not so much making a comment about gender, they are merely commenting on human behavior and morality. For example, the evil stepsisters in "Cinderella" are not punished because they are women, but because they are horrible to Cinderella. In "Beauty and the Beast", the princess finds love because she is a kind and loving person, not because she is forced into marriage as a woman.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The tropes are selected rather than surveyed. The corpus contains a large body of tales with resourceful female protagonists who do the rescuing, and the villains in the best-known collections are frequently male — ogres, giants, wolves, murderous husbands. Folklore scholarship also reads the stepmother figure as a product of maternal mortality and remarriage rather than as a statement about women, and the Grimms are known to have edited biological mothers into stepmothers across successive editions. [Rejecting P2] The reading is accurate for Basile's version and for several early variants, but those texts were not children's literature and are not what circulates. Depiction is also not endorsement: the older tales are frequently cautionary, and a narrative in which a woman is harmed can as readily be read as naming a danger as recommending it. "Implies unmarried women are worthless" further flattens a marriage plot that was the standard resolution of nearly all early modern narrative, including narrative written for and by women. [Rejecting P3] The premise assumes a didactic function the corpus did not uniformly have — much of it is oral entertainment, and appended morals were largely the work of later editors. It also assumes transmission without evidence: that a child absorbs a tale's social arrangements as instruction is an empirical claim, and children demonstrably read talking wolves and enchanted spindles as fantasy. The conclusion is in any case compatible with the opposing position, since retelling is how these stories have always survived; what is actually disputed is whether older versions should be replaced or read alongside.