In a society unrestricted by double standards and set views about women, the origins of such beliefs might be questionable. It might come as a surprise that these dreams and standards are set and have been for centuries in the beloved fairy tales we enjoyed reading as children. In source B the author, Andrea Dworkin discusses “Onceuponatime” fairytales which many regard as a model for living and which carry a unique structural pattern. They begin with the famous “Once Upon a time” line and end with the ever so popular “happily ever after.” Many, if not all of these story types are about adventures that involve princes and princesses. There is also the themes of beauty, magic and love. Over the years, fairy tales such as Snow White and Cinderella …show more content…
More than these however, they provide valuable information as to how we should interact, male or female. According to Dworkin, fairy tales “delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes us into submission”(34-35). In a way, Dworkin reminds us that fairy tales are powerful enough to make us surrender to their teachings. Regardless of how a story is written, or what or who it is written about, the seemingly end goal is to have us, the readers, conform to its teachings, which are that men are to be seen in one way and women in another. In fact, the author explicitly mentions that we are forbidden from “any real self-becoming or self-realization” (Dworkin 34). Clearly, there is no room for questioning what fairy tales intend to teach us. Instead, we are expected to blindly follow fairy tales as “the primary information of the culture” (Dworkin …show more content…
They are at their most basic, the stories of our lives in their most stripped down forms. Apart from the themes that are reflected in the worlds of fairy tales, these stories also subject us to particular views of how men and women are expected to behave and responded to within the society they live. According to Dworkin, “if we do not become good, then evil will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending then we will drown in chaos” (35). The author is making it clear that this is the real lesson of a fairytale, and as readers, we are to follow it. As kids growing up our parents tuck us in bed and read fairy tales to us. Children make connections to such stories and almost always revere them and make them a part of their lives. The author claims that, “the terror remains as the substratum of male-female relation” (Dworkin 35). Clearly, men and women learn the skills of how to interact with each other based on what they learn in fairy tales. This is how it begins: fairy tales are influential in defining how we see each gender and try to have this definition set in stone, for as perfectly mentioned by Dworkin, “they are our childhood models” (Dworkin