How the Fairy Tale Got Its Spots
Posted by Jew from Jersey
8 December 2021Prince Charming of fairy tale legend is of course a mythical creature. No such man has ever existed nor will ever exist except in the minds of women. Actual princes in real life are a disappointment. And of course, dwarves are purely mythical as well. It may surprise you to learn however, that dwarves, too, exist in the minds of women and are just as necessary.
The appeal of the fairy tale prince is obvious. But note that in the fairy tale, the dwarves appear first, and they are instrumental in helping Snow White secure the prince. They also perform many mundane tasks no prince could or should be expected to do, and they perform these acts with no expectation of recompense. No less important, they are clearly and permanently identifiable as dwarves. Tiny in stature and grotesque of countenance, they could never be mistaken for normal men, let alone princes. They are perfectly happy to heigh-ho off to work every day and are also completely and permanently asexual. None of them will ever make a pass at Snow White and if by some bizarre coincidence one of them did, she would know not to take him seriously since he is so unmistakably and obviously a dwarf.
This is the idealized state of affairs women like to imagine. In real life, men are not clearly marked as princes or dwarves because in fact they are neither, they are just men. This is a constant source of grief and consternation for women and so fairy tales never lose their appeal. The real life prince is eventually revealed to be an ordinary man. He has bad days. He smells bad. Even worse, he is boring. In real life, dwarves too are revealed to be ordinary men. In particular, they are just as willing and able to impregnate Snow White as the prince is.
A dwarf who is revealed to be a man is not seen by women as a man being just a man after all, he is seen as a trickster who with malice aforethought impersonated a dwarf for his own evil designs. Women can be very cruel to such men because they see them as manipulative rapists. The best way for a man to avoid this fate is to always be as openly sexual with women as possible, so as to avoid being seen as a dwarf in the first place.
Women may be no less jealous of their dwarves than they are of their prince. Snow White loves her dwarves, she’s just not “in love” with them. In other words, she wants to continue to receive non-sexual services from them. A dwarf is punished not only for displaying any sexuality but also for offering his non-sexual services to other women. Other bitches need to know he’s her dwarf. Men whose wives will not sleep with them are often astounded at how ferociously their wives react when they show interest in other women. You might think the wife would be relieved, but that’s never the case. It’s probably true that the less a woman desires her husband, the more jealous of him she is, demanding he lower his gaze in public, etc. A woman who truly loves her husband will not do this, and a woman who actually believes her husband is the prince may not even mind if he sleeps with other women, so long as he makes it clear that she is the princess and the other women are the evil stepcritters. In fact, the prince himself doesn’t really matter much. Remember that the story of Snow White begins not with the prince but with the intrasexual competition between Snow and her evil stepmom.
Every character in the fairy tale universe corresponds to some idealized relation in an ordinary woman’s scheme of things. Once a prince is revealed to be an ordinary man, he is likewise not forgiven and can expect no sympathy. He is treated as an evil imposter. And if he is her legal husband, he is also her jailer, keeping her locked in his depressing tower away from her true love. Women do not like being married to ordinary men and do not like to even admit to having entered into such marriages willingly. The husband must be a monster who cast an evil spell. But the real prince must be out there somewhere. There is never an ogre or a fire-breathing dragon without a knight in shining armor on his way. A woman who cheats on her husband doesn’t see herself as an adulteress. The knight is her true love who will break the ogre’s evil spell. The best way for a man to avoid this fate is: demonstrate to your wife that she’s no princess in the first place. And if you catch her riding off on someone else’s white steed, cut the rope to the drawbridge.
Note that the monster who imprisons the princess always smells bad. The dragon breathes fire. Every woman who’s ever cheated on or divorced her husband tells a tale of woe and abuse. She even comes to believe it herself. But the first thing she will complain about is his stench. She will think up the capital offenses later, but she had to endure his body odor, farts, snoring, and fiery bad breath every night for all those bitter years.
For centuries, unhappy women have told these folk tales to their children, sublimating their woes in creative fantasy. You might think that in this day and age, when no woman ever has to do anything she doesn’t like and the law and public opinion will gladly punish and extort any man who displeases her, these stories might have lost their appeal.
Walt Disney was a terrible cartoonist. Mickey Mouse is one of the least interesting and most poorly drawn cartoon characters. Disney’s genius was realizing women’s enduring unhappiness in the modern world and reviving the fairy tales that encapsulated their preferred state of affairs on the big screen.
But Disney’s even greater achievement, whether he intended it or not, was convincing the entire western world that this resurrected female primal fantasy was the very epitome of monogamy. In fact it is nothing of the kind.
Remember what the primal fantasy for males is: all women easily accessible and willing. In a sense, hardcore pornography is male fairy tales. It’s often seen as some kind of deviant obscenity, instead of what it really is: the ordinary fantasies of normal men. In any case, absolutely no one mistakes it for monogamy.
But all that princess stuff is just the female version of porn. Remember that the female primal fantasy is actually the same scenario as the male one, just seen from the woman’s point of view. The gaze is not on all the willing women, but on the one man who has the easy access to them. The prince is by definition desired by all women. The scenario is every bit as non-monogamous.
There’s less of a difference between porn and fairy tales than meets the eye. Women tend to engage in enthusiastic sex with men they’re in love with, while men tend to fall in love with women they’re having enthusiastic sex with. They’re really just two sides of the same coin. The difference is that men usually think of the sex, while women think of the falling in love aspect of it. Consider also that even the most monogamous men still fantasize about numerous other women, while women who fantasize only of “the one” usually end up having sex with different men who all get to be “the one” at different times. A woman who is “following her heart” actually has a lot more in common with a man who is following his penis than is usually assumed.
It’s important to realize that fairy tale princesses are already married when the stories begin. The sleep that Snow White or Sleeping Beauty awake from at their lover’s kiss is how married women experience affairs, as if suddenly coming alive after years in the deathlike torpor of marriage.
The fairy tale princess is not monogamous: she is not loyal to a man as a man, but only to a prince as a prince, as the prince. A princess is not a cheater if she betrays a man who is not the prince. She would be betraying her sacred quest if she didn’t cheat on him once the “real” prince shows up. The imposter prince must then be slayed or at least be castrated and disfigured and made to take his rightful place as an obedient dwarf.
This is perhaps the female counterpart to the “Madonna-Whore complex” and might be called the “Prince-Dwarf complex”. It denies men their humanity, casting them as either superhuman or subhuman, or first one and then the other in rapid succession.
Think of what Iceberg Slim said: “It thrills [whores] when the pimp makes mistakes. They watch and wait for his downfall. A pimp is the loneliest bastard on Earth. He’s gotta know his whores. He can’t let them know him. He’s gotta be God all the way.”
Think of the cheating wife who tells Michelle Langley that “she just knew she would lose all sexual desire if she ever saw [her boyfriend] taking out the trash.” According to Langley, this is very common.
But every pimp must occasionally not be God. Every lover must occasionally take out the trash. Actual monogamy for women is not like being a fairy tale princess. It is something more like the Rifleman’s Creed: There are many men like him, but this one is mine...
Fairy tale romance only looks like monogamy if you look at it very closely as a moment frozen in time, just as a circle may look like a straight line if you stare intently at a very small segment of its arc. The least we can do is to call it out for what it is, not pretend that it is monogamy. Mr. Disney has convinced us that circles are the true straight lines, and anyone who says otherwise must be some sort of misogynist. If we build a society on these fantasies, it is no surprise that it will not be a monogamous society. We might as well build a society based on porn. In fact, we have, and it’s kind of the same thing.