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Like all feminist mums out there, I struggled with parenting and how I did. The other night over dinner as we were discussing the state of women in the world, my 20 something daughter posited she felt prostitution was always exploitative and women who were in it was due to a lack of options or abusive relationships with men and not because they wanted to do it.
Needless to say, I was delighted. For all the rubbish in the world being thrown at young women and despite her being a voracious social media user as well as for better or worse conventionally very attractive, she knows the score. She had a very, very brief short skirt disco stage in secondary school that lasted for a blink of an eye. I allowed her as a teenager to safely (with limits) explore her feelings and terrible wardrobe choices in a world that hates women and encourages things like Only Fans as a legitimate career option. To say I'm relieved she has arrived at this view when it is so popular for young women to nonchalantly profit off their bodies is an understatement.
I just had to share with like minded women. It is sad I feel I need to celebrate this.
The Little Girl and the Wolf
One afternoon a big bad wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl coming along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. 'Are you carrying that to your grandmother?' asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.
When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a night-cap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.
Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls as it used to be.
James Thurber
(This is a fairy-story. No-one is advocating for actual violence here. We're not transgender powerlifters, after all. But I see this as the little girl starting as a libfem and ending as a radfem.)
Interesting. Thurber published this "updated" version of the tale a few years after WW2, so I wonder whether "little Girls were less easy to fool" partly as a result of the WW2 Rosie the Riveter legacy.
A good immersive lesson in cultural history can be had from considering exactly what was the "before" picture—the place now occupied by libfemmery, making little Girls easier to fool—at that time.
There are quite a few semiautomatics that make good purse pistols, like the Glock 19 and its cousins, but this little Girl goes hard on Her Second Amendment rights if She's toting a full auto—so, basically a machine gun—around in Her picnic basket😀
I think that even US usage wobbles a bit on this one. I've heard 'automatic' used when technically it's semi. (Says the woman who last time she held a gun in her hand won a goldfish.)
I’ve thought about Red Riding Hood being a warning about men and their predatory and gaslighting ways. What about the Huntsman who cuts the wolf’s heart out? I just don’t think there are that many protective men around. Would it be better or would it be unrealistic if Red Riding Hood saved herself through cunning by somehow tricking the wolf?
What about the Huntsman who cuts the wolf’s heart out?
In Your reading of the story, this is probably best taken as a somber reminder that Women—and civilized society itself—ultimately depend on a critical mass of good men to keep the bad men in check.
Along the same lines as the "good men stay out so bad men stand out" principle underlying the importance of maintaining robust social norms underlying single-sex spaces, over and above maintaining the existence of those spaces themselves.
Without a doubt, that folk tale is a warning to girls about men, but I have absolutely come to believe that it is specifically abojt AGP and possibly about the connection between AGP and serial killers.
Yes I've been thinking the same these last few weeks. Children's folk stories are some of the most profound stories there are, like Peter and the Wolf (don't lie) and Baba Yaga (young girl only becomes strong once she faces the witch)
They’re so useful in understanding human nature and in conveying deep time stories and truth.