<< Egg? | Front Page | Artificial Love >>
Monday, January 12, 2009
Bye Bye Fairy Tales
It seems like I’ve been hearing about watered-down fairy tales forever. Well, it seems that they’re not cleansed enough for many contemporary todlers, at least in Britain. Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog (at the NYTimes) reports the results of a web-survey:
Of the 3,000 British parents polled by the TheBabyWebsite.com, earlier this month, 50 percent said they would not read fairy tales to their children until they were at least five-years-old. Of those, 20 percent said they rejected the oldies as politically incorrect, while close to that number, 17 percent, said the stories would give their children nightmares.
Belkin notes that many of these tales are gender-challenged:
A 2003 study out of Purdue University, analyzed how gender was portrayed in 168 Brother’s Grimm fairytales. The short answer: not well. Longer answer: these stories give the message that unattractive people are evil, women can get by on their beauty, and you never see Princess Charming swooping in to rescue the Prince. In fact “Shrek” is the only tale for children in any of the annals where the ugly girl gets the guy. And don’t even get the study’s authors started on depictions of race. (And yes, Hermione turns out to be a brain and a beauty.)
But how’d something called “Aliens Love Underpants, Claire Freedman & Ben Cort” become the 5th most popular bedtime story of 2008? The venerable “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” is number 10.