The response to a mother who suggested Sleeping Beauty was pulled from schools because of the messages about consent, has not been kind.

People on Twitter have called her names, the comments on online articles are mostly variations on the theme of ‘political correctness gone mad’ and in some cases it’s even got pretty nasty.

But the thing is, however traditional a fairytale might be, and however inoffensive it might seem at first look, lots of fairytales really do have their origins in rape culture.

Like, literal rape culture.


In the original of Sleeping Beauty the princess was raped while she slept, and only awakened from the deep slumber when she gave birth to his twins.



Now, would you read your four year old a story about a prince having sex with a sleeping princess to impregnate her back to life?

Probably not.

So at some point in history, someone put their hand up and said ‘Um, guys… is it a bit weird that we’re telling kids this story about a woman getting pregnant by rape like it’s romantic? Shouldn’t we maybe, y’know. Tidy it up a bit?’

Now I have no idea if people started shouting ‘political correctness gone mad’ and ‘feminist agenda’ at that person, but eventually they got their way. The story was sanitized. Which is how we got the whole sleeping kiss thing.

Stories have always been how we impart messages to children. In fact stories are the major vehicle for communicating morals to people of all ages – from fables to the bible.

Is it really so bad to have a quick revisit to this story? To ask whether it’s the version we want to tell? Given that every fairytale is hundreds if not thousands of years old and has been written and re-written a hundred times, why not have another little think about it?

So many of the stories we loved as children have been altered to be more ‘suitable’ for the current generation of children.

Cinderella’s step sisters originally cut off their toes with meat cleavers to stuff their bleeding feet into the shoes. Pocahontas was a real person who most likely experienced sexual abuse and was a victim of colonialism. Little Red Riding Hood was originally about a sexual predator and the loss of ‘purity’.

So, writers and film makers changed the narrative a bit.

In the most recent Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, which looked at the Bad Fairy Maleficent’s point of view, the true love’s kiss didn’t come from the handsome prince. It came from Maleficent herself.

Disney decided to portray a true platonic love between Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent. It was another, different take on the story. That’s sort of the point of these stories. They’re reinvented over and over again. Any literary historian will tell you that.

Personally I do find the message of the Sleeping Beauty – that a man kisses an unconscious woman he’s never met before and it saves her – a bit icky. Not so poisonous I’d ban my children from reading it, but troubling enough that I’d like to present it firmly in context.



When my children watch Pocahontas, I’ll explain that she was a real woman and that she wasn’t treated well. When they watch Cinderella I’ll explain that not all blended families are inherently broken. It’s not about banning these stories, it’s about telling the appropriate version for the time in which you are living.

Children need to be taught that it’s better not to kiss people who are unconscious if we don’t know them and we don’t know that they’ll be okay with it. They need to be taught this because adult women who fall asleep at parties find themselves with men on top of them, like some hideous parody.

Is that really so surprising if, since babyhood, little boys have been told that doing so is romantic?

Trying to educate your child about consent is a noble endeavor. It will mean that fewer women are assaulted and it will mean that fewer men make poor choices through lack of education.

So before you call a parent precious or overly politically correct, please take a moment to ask yourself what values you really want your child to have, and ask whether the stories you are telling them really fit those values.

Fairy stories have evolved and changed continuously ever since they were first written down. Let’s make consent the next chapter of that evolution.

MORE: Why we don’t need to ban Sleeping Beauty in schools

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