Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body- by Riane Eisler

Author:Riane Eisler [Eisler, Riane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062030757
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-03T08:00:00+00:00

The Girl, the Prince, and the Body

Like some of our religious myths, many fairy tales still contain traces of earlier times. In fact, unlike most of our religious myths and literature (which, except for romantic novels and other “women’s market” specialties, generally have male protagonists), the central characters in some of our best known fairy-tales are female. Not only that, some of these female figures, like the good fairy in “Cinderella” and the wicked sorceresses in “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty,” can even perform magic—that is, feats associated with supernatural power. But despite these traces of prehistoric traditions, the primary message of the fairy tales we tell our daughters and sons is not one of female power, but of female powerlessness.

In some cases, we can actually trace the transformation of these stories over time. For example, the folkloric anthropologist Alan Dundes tells us that it was not until three hundred years ago that the story we know as “Little Red Riding Hood” was made by the French writer Charles Perrault into a moral fable warning girls against listening to strangers lest they be gobbled up by a wolf (an image with some possible sexual symbolism, since sexually predatory males were as late as the 1950s known as wolves).5 According to Dundes, in earlier folklore the story’s protagonist had been an inventive girl who triumphed over the villain.6 But by the time the story was again refashioned by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1812 to become the version we have today, she is swallowed up whole (red hood and all) on top of her equally helpless grandmother by the wicked wolf. And even when she gets out, it is not through anything she does, but because a brave woodsman cuts open the wolf’s stomach.

This rescue of passive females by active males is also the theme of “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Only in these stories the relationship between the hero and the heroine is sexual, since in both the heroine eventually marries the prince. But once again, it is a marriage very different from the ancient sacred marriage in which the female was imbued with divine power and the sexual union of female and male was central.

To begin with, in these stories there is hardly any touching, except for a dance or a kiss. Moreover, the emphasis is on the girl’s physical attractiveness, and not on anything even remotely associating female sexuality with spiritual or temporal power. On the contrary, the central message of these fairy tales is once again that the male has all the power—either because he has some kind of magical potency (as when the prince awakens Sleeping Beauty with his kiss) or because he is the temporal ruler of the realm (as in “Cinderella”). So that all a girl can do is wait for Prince Charming to find her, and hope that he will find her attractive enough to be chosen.

Thus, despite her misery, Cinderella has no other plans, or even ideas, except that a prince will marry and save her.

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