	Preconceived notions are an unfortunate fact of life.  The exist to teach us to dig deeper.  Most people today believe that fairy tales are just for children; that they are cartoons you put on when you need the kids out of your hair for a bit.  However, Walt Disney did not create fairy tales.  To look for the origins of fairy tales you would have to travel back centuries.  The Brothers Grimm printed transcriptions of oral folktales made a point of adding or intensifying violent episodes.  This would make the stories interesting for an older audience, terrify a younger audience into minding, and give the next generation that decided to work with these stories even more material.  Fairy tales span across socioeconomic, cultural, generational, technological, educational, and religious schisms, thus uniting us all under their common canopy.  Regrettably, women can sometimes be left out of some of these tales, thus negating the female presence in this history. Angela Carter felt strongly about preconceived notions about fairy tales and their whitewashing.  “She argued that even though the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century aristocratic writers 'fixed' these tales by writing them down and added moral tags to adapt them into parables of instruction for children, they could not erase the darkness and the magic of the content”.  Carter, a proud feminist, was also strongly in favor or rewarding the curiosity of female protagonists instead of punishing them, including when it came to sex.  Fluffy princess dresses and knights in shining armor are fine, but it is also important to have stories where the woman rips the Big Bad Wolf’s heart out and roasts it for dinner before she hikes back home.
	The recent release of the live action Disney “Beauty and the Beast” movie has many bloggers discussing, yet again, how this isn’t an appropriate movie for young girls to watch.  They say that the Beast bribes Belle with the library, they say that he blackmails her.  Many people even say that the only reason she returns and professes her love is because of Stockholm Syndrome.  However, Beast isn’t the villain in this fairy tale.  Gaston decides that he is going to marry Belle, they are going to have lots of sons, and she had better stop that reading nonsense.  He didn’t ask he; he told her.  And didn’t listen to her repeated “no’s”.  Gaston even gets the entire town, along with his Saturday night girlfriends, to pressure her into marrying him.  He snatches books out of her hands and derides her education.  If I were a parent, I think I would rather let my seven-year-old watch a cartoon of “Bluebeard” than see Gaston abuse Belle.  Canonically, women have been abused or taken advantage of in some form or another throughout history, and it has shown in folk lore and fairy tales.  Now comes the time for writers to break that seal and show the world fairy tale heroines and villains’ who aren’t afraid to fight or fornicate.
	Children have been taught to fear the “Big Bad Wolf” since they were toddlers.   He is the Boogeyman of the woods, threatening to snatch you away if you get to close to the wooded area.  In Angela Carter’s story read “The Company of Wolves” the Wolf indeed appears, but so does her version of Little Red Riding Hood.  Things go a bit differently than they did in the book from elementary school.  Red is portrayed as a Lolita-type, in touch with her newly budded sexuality.  Seeing a handsome stranger on her way to visit her grandmother, they flirt and make a bet that if he reaches there first she will kiss him.  She of course dawdles, and naturally he goes to Grandmother’s house to eat her.  When Red walks in on him, part wolf and part man, with her grandmother’s body parts laying there, she doesn’t scream for help, or become catatonic.  She takes her clothes off and playfully talks with him.  She takes his clothes and burns them, making sure that he would remain a werewolf, then they retire to her grandmother’s bed to consummate their relationship.  “See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf”.  This is akin to Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her penchant for vampire lovers.  It can be empowering for a woman to read about being in a situation such as the one in “The Company of Wolves”.  Power is intoxicating.  Angela Carter took a child’s fairy tale that told them to never talk to strangers and to always listen to their parents, and she molded it into a story of female empowerment.  Little Red Riding Hood wasn’t chastised or met with a horrible fate because she had a healthy sexual appetite; she instead fell asleep with her Big Bad Wolf.
