The womyn clucked their tongues but felt no remorse. The palace and realm were theirs now. Their first official act was to dress the men in their discarded dresses and tell the media that the fight arose when someone threatened to expose the cross-dressing tendencies of the prince and his cronies. Their second was to set up a clothing co-op that produced only comfortable, practical clothes for womyn. Then they hung a sign on the castle advertising CinderWear (for that was what the new clothing was called), and through self-determination and clever marketing, they all—even the mother- and sisters-of-step—lived happily ever after.
GOLDILOCKS
hrough the thicket, across the river, and deep, deep in the woods, lived a family of bears—a Papa Bear, a Mama Bear, and a Baby Bear—and they all lived together anthropomorphically in a little cottage as a nuclear family. They were very sorry about this, of course, since the nuclear family has traditionally served to enslave womyn, instil a self-righteous moralism in its members, and imprint rigid notions of heterosexualist roles onto the next generation. Nevertheless, they tried to be happy and took steps to avoid these pitfalls, such as naming their offspring the non-gender-specific ‘Baby’.
One day, in their little anthropomorphic cottage, they sat down to breakfast. Papa Bear had prepared big bowls of all-natural porridge for them to eat. But straight off the stove, the porridge was too thermally enhanced to eat. So they left their bowls to cool and took a walk to visit their animal neighbours.
After the bears had left, a melanin-impoverished young wommon emerged from the bushes and crept up to the cottage. Her name was Goldilocks, and she had been watching the bears for days. She was, you see, a biologist who specialized in the study of anthropomorphic bears. At one time she had been a professor, but her aggressive, masculine approach to science—ripping off the thin veil of Nature, exposing its secrets, penetrating its essence, using it for her own selfish needs, and bragging about such violations in the letters columns of various magazines—had led to her dismissal.
The rogue biologist had been watching the cottage for some time. Her interest was to collar the bears with radio transmitters and then follow them in their migratory and other life patterns, with an utter disregard for their personal (or rather, animal) privacy. With scientific espionage the only thing in mind, Goldilocks broke into the bears’ cottage. In the kitchen, she laced the bowls of porridge with a tranquillizing potion. Then, in the bedroom, she rigged snares beneath the pillows of each bed. Her plan was to drug the bears and, when they stumbled into their bedroom to take a nap, lash radio collars to their necks as their heads hit the pillows.
Goldilocks chortled and thought: ‘These bears will be my ticket to the top! I’ll show those twerps at the university the kind of guts it takes to do real research!’ She crouched in a corner of the bedroom and waited. And waited, and waited some more. But the bears took so long to come back from their walk that she fell asleep.
When the bears finally came home, they sat down to eat breakfast. Then they stopped.
Papa Bear asked, ‘Does your porridge smell … off, Mama?’
Mama Bear replied, ‘Yes, it does. Does yours smell off, Baby?’
Baby Bear said, ‘Yes, it does. It smells sort of chemical-y.’
Suspicious, they rose from the table and went into the living room. Papa Bear sniffed. He asked, ‘Do you smell something else, Mama?’
Mama Bear replied, ‘Yes, I do. Do you smell something else, Baby?’
Baby Bear said, ‘Yes, I do. It smells musky and sweaty and not at all clean.’
They moved into the bedroom with growing alarm. Papa Bear asked, ‘Do you see a snare and a radio collar under my pillow, Mama?’
Mama Bear replied, ‘Yes I do. Do you see a snare and a radio collar under my pillow, Baby?’
Baby Bear said, ‘Yes I do, and I see the human who put them there!’
Baby Bear pointed to the corner where Goldilocks slept. The bears growled, and Goldilocks awoke with a start. She sprang up and tried to run, but Papa Bear caught her with a swing of his paw, and Mama Bear did the same. With Goldilocks now a mobility nonpossessor, Mama and Papa Bear set on her with fang and claw. They gobbled her up, and soon there was nothing left of the maverick biologist but a bit of yellow hair and clipboard.
Baby watched with astonishment. When they were done, Baby Bear asked, ‘Mama, Papa, what have you done? I thought we were vegetarians.’
Papa Bear burped. ‘We are,’ he said, ‘but we’re always ready to try new things. Flexibility is just one more benefit of being multicultural.’
SNOW WHITE
nce there was a young princess who was not at all unpleasant to look at and had a temperament that many found to be more pleasant than most other people’s. Her nickname was Snow White, indicative of the discriminatory notions of associating pleasant or attractive qualities with light, and unpleasant or unattractive qualities with darkness. Thus, at an early age, Snow White was an unwitting if fortunate target for this type of colourist thinking.
When Snow White was quite young, her mother was suddenly stricken ill, grew more advanced in nonhealth, and finally was rendered nonviable. Her father, the king, grieved for what can be considered a healthy period of time, then asked another wommon to be his queen. Snow White did her best to please her new mother-of-step, but a cold distance remained between them.
The queen’s prized possession was a magic mirror that would answer truthfully any question asked it. Now, years of social conditioning in a male hierarchical dictatorship had left the queen very insecure about her own self-worth. Physical beauty was the one standard she cared about now, and she defined herself solely in regard to her personal appearance. So every morning the queen would ask her mirror:
‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
‘Who’s the fairest one of all?’
Her mirror would answer:
‘For all it’s worth, O my queen,
‘Your beauty is the fairest to be seen.’
That dialogue went on regularly until once when the queen was having a bad hair day and was desperately in need of support, she asked the usual question and the mirror answered:
‘Alas, if worth be based on beauty,
‘Snow White has surpassed you, cutie.’
At this the queen flew into a rage. The chance to work with Snow White to form a strong bond of sisterhood had long passed. Instead, the queen indulged in an adopted masculine power trip and ordered the royal woodsperson to take Snow White into the forest and kill her. And, possibly to impress the males in the royal court, she barbarously ordered that the girl’s heart be cut out and brought back to her.
The woodsperson sadly agreed to these orders, and led the girl, who was now actually a young wommon, into the middle of the forest. But his connections to the earth and seasons had made him a kind soul, and he couldn’t bear to harm the girl. He told Snow White of the oppressive and unsisterly order of the queen and told her to run as deeply as she could into the forest.
The frightened Snow White did as she was told. The woodsperson, fearing the queen’s wrath but unwilling to take another life merely to indulge her vanity, went into town and had the confectioner concoct a heart of red marzipan. When he presented this to the queen, she hungrily devoured the heart in a sickening display of pseudo-cannibalism.
Meanwhile, Snow White ran deep into the woods. Just when she thought she had fled as far as she could from civilization and its unhealthy influences, she stumbled upon a cottage. Inside she saw seven tiny beds, set in a row and all unmade. She also saw seven sets of dishes piled high in the sink and seven reclining chairs in front of seven remote-controlled TVs. She surmised that the cottage belonged to either seven little men or one sloppy numerologist. The beds looked so inviting that the tired youngster curled up on one and immediately fell asleep.
When she awoke several hours later, she saw the faces of seven bearded, vertically challenged men surrounding the bed. She sat up with a start and gasped. One of the men said, ‘Yo
u see that? Just like a flighty wommon: resting peacefully one minute, up and screaming the next.’
‘I agree,’ said another. ‘She’ll disrupt our strong bond of brotherhood and create competition among us for her affections. I say we throw her in the river in a sack full of rocks.’
‘I agree we should get rid of her,’ said a third, ‘but why degrade the ecology? Let’s just feed her to a bear or something and let her become part of the food chain?’
‘Hear, hear!’
‘Sound thinking, brother.’
When Snow White finally regained her senses, she begged, ‘Please, please don’t kill me. I meant no harm by sleeping on your bed. I thought no one would ever notice.’
‘Ah, you see?’ said one of the men. ‘Female pre-occupations are already surfacing. She’s complaining that we don’t make our beds.’
‘Kill her! Kill her!’
‘Please, no!’ she cried. ‘I have travelled so deep into these woods because my mother-of-step, the queen, ordered me to be killed.’
‘See that? Internecine female vindictiveness!’
‘Don’t try and play the victim with us, kid!’
‘QUIET!’ boomed one of the men, who had flaming red hair and a nonhuman animal skin on his head. Snow White quickly realized that he was their leader and that her fate rested in his hands. ‘Explain yourself. What’s your name, and why have you really come here?’
‘My name is Snow White,’ she began, ‘and I’ve already told you: My mother-of-step, the queen, ordered a woodsperson to take me into the forest and kill me, but he took pity and told me to run away into the woods as far as I could.’
‘Just like a wommon,’ grumbled one of the men under his breath, ‘get a man to do her dirty work.’
The leader held up his hands for silence. He said, ‘Well, Snow White, if that’s your story, I suppose we’ll have to believe you.’
Snow White was beginning to resent her treatment but tried not to let it show. ‘And who are you people, anyway?’
‘We are known as the Seven Towering Giants,’ said the leader. Snow White’s suppression of a giggle did not go unnoticed. The leader continued. ‘We are towering in spirit and so are giants among the men of the forest. We used to earn our living by digging in our mines, but we decided that such a rape of the planet was immoral and short-sighted (besides, the bottom fell out of the metals market). So now we are dedicated stewards of the earth and live here in harmony with nature. To make ends meet, we also conduct retreats for men who need to get in touch with their primitive masculine identities.’
‘So what does that involve,’ asked Snow White, ‘aside from drinking milk straight from the carton?’
‘Your sarcasm is ill-advised,’ warned the leader of the Seven Towering Giants. ‘My fellow giants want to get rid of your corrupting feminine presence, and I might not be able to stop them, understand? My men, we must speak our hearts openly and honestly. Let us adjourn to the sweat lodge!’
The seven little men scampered out of the front door, whooping and stripping off their clothes. Snow White didn’t know what to do while waiting. For fear of stepping on anything that might be scurrying about amid the debris on the floor, she stayed on the bed, although she did manage to make it without ever stepping off.
Snow White heard drumming and shouts, and, soon after, the Seven Towering Giants came back into the cottage. They didn’t smell as bad as she thought they would, and thankfully they all wore loincloths.
‘Agggh! Look what she’s done to my bed! I want her out of here! I want to change my vote!’
‘Calm down, brother,’ said the leader. ‘Don’t you see? This is just what we were talking about: contrasts. We can better measure our progress as true men if there is a female around for comparison.’
The men grumbled among themselves about the wisdom of this decision. But Snow White had had enough. ‘I resent being kept around like an object, just a yardstick for your egos and penises!’
‘Fair enough,’ the leader said. ‘You’re free to make your way back through the woods. Give our regards to the queen.’
‘Well, I suppose I can stay until I work out a new plan,’ she said.
‘Very well,’ said the leader, ‘but we have a few ground rules. No dusting. No tidying up. And no rinsing out underwear in the sink.’
‘And no peeking in the sweat lodge.’
‘And stay away from our drums.’
Meanwhile, back at the castle, the queen rejoiced at the thought that her rival in beauty had been eliminated. She pottered around her boudoir reading Glamour and Elle, and indulged herself with three whole pieces of chocolate without purging. Later, she confidently strolled up to her magic mirror and asked her same, sad question:
‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
‘Who’s the fairest one of all?’
The mirror replied:
‘Your weight is perfect for your shape and height,
‘But for sheer OOOOMPH!, you can’t beat Snow White.’
At this news, the queen clenched her fists and screamed at the top of her lungs. For years, her insecurities had been eating away at her until now they turned her into someone who was morally out of the mainstream. With cunning and malice, she began to devise a plan to ensure the nonviability of her daughter-of-step.
A few days later, Snow White, to be sure she didn’t touch or rearrange anything, was meditating on the floor in the middle of the cottage. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. Snow White opened the door to find a chronologically gifted wommon with a basket in her hand. By the look of her clothes, she was apparently unfettered by the confines of regular employment.
‘Help a wommon of unreliable income, dearie,’ she said, ‘and buy one of my apples.’
Snow White thought for a moment. In protest against agribusiness conglomerates, she had a personal rule against buying food from middlepersons. But her heart went out to the economically marginalized wommon, so she said yes. What Snow White didn’t know was that this was really the queen in disguise and that the apple had been chemically and genetically altered so that whoever bit it would sleep forever.
When Snow White handed over the money for the apple, you would have expected the queen to be gleeful that her plan for revenge was working. Instead, as she looked at Snow White’s fine complexion and slim, taut body, she felt alternating waves of envy and self-revulsion. Finally, she burst into tears.
‘Why, whatever is the matter?’ asked Snow White.
‘You’re so young and beautiful,’ sobbed the disguised queen, ‘and I’m horrible to look at and getting worse.’
‘You shouldn’t say that. After all, beauty comes from inside a person.’
‘I’ve been telling myself that for years,’ said the queen, ‘and I still don’t believe it. How do you stay in such perfect shape?’
‘Well, I meditate, work out in step aerobics three hours a day, and eat only half-portions of anything placed in front of me. Would you like me to show you?’
‘Oh, yes, yes, please,’ said the queen. So they started out with 30 minutes of simple hatha yoga meditation, then worked out on the step for another hour. As they relaxed afterwards, Snow White cut her apple in half and gave a piece to the queen. Without thinking, the queen bit into it, and both of them fell into a deep sleep.
Later that day, the Seven Towering Giants returned from a retreat in the woods, elaborately decked out in animal skins, feathers and mud. With them was a prince from a nearby kingdom, who had come on this male retreat to find a cure for his impotence (or, as he preferred to call it, his involuntary suspension from phallocentric activity). They were all laughing and back-slapping until they saw the bodies and stopped short.
‘What has happened?’ asked the prince.
‘Apparently our house guest and this other wommon got into some sort of catfight and killed each other,’ surmised one giant.
‘If they thought that by doing this, they could make us slaves to our weaker emotions, they’re wrong,
’ fumed another.
‘Well, since we’ve got to dispose of them, let’s practise one of those Viking funerals we’ve read about.’
‘You know,’ said the prince, ‘this might sound a little sick, but I trust you chaps. I find that younger one attractive. Extremely attractive. Would you fellows mind … um … waiting outside while I … ?’
‘Stop right there!’ said the leader of the giants. ‘Those half-eaten apple pieces, that filthy costume—this has all the earmarks of some sort of magic spell. They’re not really dead at all.’
‘Whew,’ sighed the prince, ‘that makes me feel better. So could you chaps take a break and let me … ?’
‘Hold it, Prince,’ said the leader. ‘Does Snow White make you feel like a man again?’
‘She certainly does. Now, could you chaps … ?’
‘Don’t touch her! You’ll break the spell.’ The leader thought for a minute and said, ‘My brothers, I see certain economic possibilities arising from this. If we kept Snow White around here in this state, we could advertise our retreats as impotency therapy.’
The giants nodded in agreement with this idea, but the prince interrupted, ‘But what about me? I’ve already paid for my retreat. Why can’t I, um, take the cure?’
‘No dice, Prince,’ said the leader. ‘You can look but don’t touch. Otherwise you’ll break the spell. Tell you what, though. You can have the other one if you want.’
‘I don’t want to sound classist,’ said the prince, ‘but she’s not high enough calibre for me.’
‘That’s pretty big talk from a man shooting blanks,’ said one of the giants, and everybody but the prince laughed.
The leader said, ‘Come on, brothers, let’s lift these two off the floor and decide how we can best display them.’ It took three giants for each female, but they managed to get both bodies aloft. As soon as they did, however, the pieces of poisoned apple fell from the mouths of Snow White and the queen, and they awoke from the spell.
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories Page 3