The Beauty and the Beast Story Explains why Women Shouldn’t Vote
Falling in Love with the Monster
It is a familiar trope that the beautiful and good maiden falls in love with the monster and her love redeems him and guides him back to his humanity. Women find this an attractive story because we understand on a deeper level that a man who is capable of monstrosity and violence, but tempers it for the love of a woman, is far more attractive than a meek man who has no monstrosity to temper at all.
On some primordial level, women understand that the world is violent and dangerous and in order to protect herself in this world, she must win the love of a man who can meet that violence and danger in equal measure. If the monster can temper his monstrosity, but only for her, it also shows her a kind of immutable loyalty that women desire from men they love ardently; he will not be kind to anyone else but her. Everyone else must behave well toward him or suffer.
This is the underlying psychology of the “beauty and the beast” fantasy for women. For men the fantasy is compelling because it suggests that there exists such a woman whose goodness and beauty is so perfect that it can make him calm his bestial nature, in a way that does not castrate him, but gives it a worthy telos. The monster who has something to fight for, suddenly becomes a hero.
The Beauty and the Beast is a type of fairy story. Fairy tales are old and their original authors are very difficult, if not impossible, to determine definitively. Fairy tales were often distributed orally, and each iteration, in different cultures and generations, employed its own changes and twists to the stories to make them more relevant and understandable. Despite these changes, the types of stories are fundamentally preserved and these types are organised the Aarne-Thompson Uther index (ATU index), originally published by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne in 1910. It has been amended by folklore scholars over the century. The ATU catalogues some 2500 plot types that recur in fairy stories. The Beauty and the Beast story is catalogues as ATU 425C.
However there is a serious danger in this story type, the consequences of which today affect geopolitics, social infrastructure, immigration and criminal justice. We watch how women en masse behave in relationship to political and social issues to “empathise” with the worst monsters humanity has ever produced, and put themselves, and the most vulnerable among us, in grave danger.
Naturalists would have us believe that an animal will always behave in its self interest first. But modern women, by and large do not. The answers to these questions are not found in biology, but in the arts, where the peculiarities of human nature, as distinct from animal nature, are investigated most thoroughly, most honestly. And there are some frightening conclusions to be made.
This article is a deep dive into the different types of beauty and the beast stories and what they can reveal to us about female nature. Nowhere do human beings reveal themselves more nakedly than in matters of desire and we must understand female nature if we are to contend with her vices effectively.