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I got myself a collection of fairy tales recently. A dozen books in my native language organized (approximately) by culture.
Book 1 is all from our own country, sorted further by age: old oral tales from before we could write first, and stuff written in the 60's and 70's last.
They also get progressively more sexist as I keep reading: the very early ones have too much "all women are either beautiful or evil" for comfort, but the last thirty pages that I'm slogging through right now are just. Ugh. "Men are just inherently dirty and lazy and prone to assaulting women, and women are just inherently nurturing and artistic and uninventive."
...like with a lot of gender essentialism, I'm not sure if men or women should be more offended by this.
Anyway, from now on, whenever someone says that society just naturally progresses from more to less bigoted as time goes on, I'm going to hand them some printouts from this book with datestamps on the stories.
Book 1 is all from our own country, sorted further by age: old oral tales from before we could write first, and stuff written in the 60's and 70's last.
They also get progressively more sexist as I keep reading: the very early ones have too much "all women are either beautiful or evil" for comfort, but the last thirty pages that I'm slogging through right now are just. Ugh. "Men are just inherently dirty and lazy and prone to assaulting women, and women are just inherently nurturing and artistic and uninventive."
...like with a lot of gender essentialism, I'm not sure if men or women should be more offended by this.
Anyway, from now on, whenever someone says that society just naturally progresses from more to less bigoted as time goes on, I'm going to hand them some printouts from this book with datestamps on the stories.
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