Rewriting Fairy Tales, Breaking Stereotypes!

We have all grown up watching, listening and reading fairy tales from our childhood. Those tales, however dramatic, made us dream of a prince charming and happily-ever-after. Even so, they were equally stereotypical and gender-biased as they romanticised beauty standards and gender roles through the depiction of a utopia.

Let’s rewrite some fairy tales and break the stereotypes around them? Here we go:

1. Cinderella

A prince falls in love with a beautiful and kind girl with animal friends while her jealous step-sisters and mother plots every possible thing to keep her away from him. He looks for the foot that might fit in the glass shoe in the hope to find the girl he loves whom he has had one dance for a few hours. Typical fairy tale.

But what if Cinderella had asked for a home of her own? Or to be a princess instead? Why just ask for a beautiful dress and pretty shoes to impress a man who would fall for appearance? How about asking for books and education and a career? Why must she hide her identity when she can be known by her name and he can look to impress her instead?

How about that?

2. Beauty and the Beast

The origin of the manic-pixie-dream-girl trope was surely this fairy tale. Beast of a man needs a woman to save himself from the doom that he bestowed upon himself because of his chauvinism. Then again, she is questioned for being knowledgeable and educated and for knowing better.

Now, imagine she wouldn’t have gone back to the castle and continued to read books and searching for adventures she wanted in her life. What if she stood up to the beast for locking her up like a prisoner and left him be for her own good. She could have been living her life to the fullest instead of being put up on a display in big mansion with some wealthy brat.

Imagine!

3. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Another fairy tale featuring prince charming to the rescue of a beautiful girl who he has been searching for all over. Snow White is a victim of her step-mother’s cruelty since she can’t compare her beauty and is ordered to be killed but is later fostered by seven dwarfs in a forest. While the mother discovers that she is alive, she makes her eat a poisonous apple and she falls into deep sleep only to be rescued by a prince charming.

First of all, stop normalising women hating women for being better and stop romanticising beauty standards in the name of affection. And what is up with the prince charming kissing Snow White while she’s asleep? Do children not need to be taught conscious consent?

What if the dwarfs and the forest folk do not let him near her in the first place in order to protect her and hold the prince accountable for kissing her without her permission? Seems like a more appropriate story to tell the nurturing minds of young kids teaching them what’s right and wrong.

The fairy tales we have been feeding the young minds have been shaping their ideologies since generations. The more we teach them about casual sexism, gender roles and ">stereotypes, the more they are likely to inhabit such habits in their older years because that is what they have been familiarised with. It is time to change the narrative in order to create a better perspective.

(Views presented by the author are their own.)