Fairy tales full of gender restrictive roles

Dubai: Golden-haired, weak princesses with no ingenuity or punch. These ‘role models’ are in the very tales most parents have been reading to their children for generations.

In story after story, fairy tales may be spinning a more sinister world than expected — one that perpetuates stereotypes. And they have a very real impact.

Vidya Rajeev, a Dubai-based mother of one, reads to her five-year-old daughter every night.

She said: “My daughter loves fairy tales. She is so involved in the stories, she thinks they are real. She often says she wants coloured eyes and blonde hair. Once, she asked me what she could do to get it. I told her to eat more fruits and vegetables.”

In a Gulf News Twitter poll, 38 per cent of poll respondents said fairy tales’ limited view of beauty was the most damaging stereotype for young readers.

For Shraddha Bhandari-Mehta, a mother of two daughters, based in Fujairah, the stereotypes were more detrimental for girls, than boys.

She said: “I have a habit of reading to my five-year-old daughter every night. We’ve gone through all the usual fairy tales, like Cinderella and Rapunzel. However, recently, I read one called ‘Merida’ to her, where the girl doesn’t end up marrying the prince. My daughter stunned me by saying, ‘but if they don’t marry the prince, what else would they do?’ I discussed it with her, telling her that girls can grow up to be anything they want to be — not just wives.”

Bhandari-Mehta says she is now looking for books that have stronger female characters.

“I started reading to her to encourage the love of reading, but now I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. My daughter is obsessed with beauty — she is always checking herself in the mirror. In most stories, a beautiful princess is always described as fair-skinned; she can only wear gowns, not pants, and so on. This gets reinforced in young girls’ minds.”

Dubai-based reader Assad Shaikh had a unique solution to battling stereotypes in stories. On the newspaper’s Facebook page, he wrote: “Sometimes I tend to do a gender swap and reinvent the stories when I read them out to my eight-year-old daughter.”

He has conveyed the whole Harry Potter series to her, and Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage. With regard to fairy tales, Shaikh said he turns them completely on their head.

“In my version of fairy tales, there would perhaps be a boy doing the house work, while the princess rescues him. Why not? I don’t want my daughter to have these prejudices in her mind — that she needs a saviour. I became more cognisant of these gender discriminatory themes when I first began to read to her. It never occurred to me, otherwise.”

For Rajeev, a solution is to read a variety of books to children.

She said: “When I was little, my grandmother would read stories with morals to me. Now, I try to do the same with my daughter. I think they are much better for children.”

She mentioned Aesop’s Fables, a collection of stories by a storyteller from ancient Greece, with a message at the end of each tale, such as The Tortoise and the Hare, and The Lion and The Mouse.

Other popular stories with morals include the Panchatantra, an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in verse and prose.