Fairy Tales 2010

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Sexualizing Little Red Riding Hood - A Video



This was one of the first videos I found on YouTube when searching "Little Red Riding Hood". I think it's absolutely bizarre. Created in 2007, this video blatantly sexualizes Little Red Riding Hood. Not only does it portray a vengeful, violent little girl, but it also proposes that the means for her to get her revenge is through selling her body with a striptease.

The strange masquerade is another thing to note. As a lamb, Little Red Riding Hood stays true to some of the fairy tale scholars' beliefs that these stories represent a male vs. female gender dynamic. Lambs are symbols then of the female while wolves are symbols of the male. Yet what makes the sexual relationship between the wolves and the lamb particularly questionable, aside from the fact that she's in reality a little girl who is stripteasing, is that it alludes to interspecies breeding and attraction.

Most of the attention of the video is given to the lamb's initial appearance and striptease. There's no getting lost in the woods. There's only this premeditated revenge plot to rescue the grandmother from the wolf by assuming a different identity (an allusion perhaps to the wolf stealing grandma's identity) and exploiting that identity's sexuality.

Although I'm a bit creeped out by the video, I am, at the same time, supportive that it gives Little Red Riding Hood complete agency and power in her relationship to the wolf and the situation. In this version, there's no hunter to save the day as in the Grimms', but Little Red Riding Hood must save herself.

2 comments:

  1. This video truly is some sort of "postmodern" interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood. There really is no seeming connection to the canon until it is made explicit by the appearance of the Red Hood and the saving of the Grandmother. It takes an extra step into turning Hood into a hyper-sexual being, which was largely NOT Hood's presentation except in a few obscure versions.
    The image of the lamb is very much grotesque, as the Wolf's staring at the lamb/stripper suggests that the Wolf both sees the girl as a meal and sex object. All in all, this is a very morbid interpretation of LRRH.

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  2. Wow. Yeah, that was a little...odd. I find it interesting that Little Red Riding Hood went to a bar full of wolves instead of there simply being just one "bad" wolf; she took her fate, and that of her grandmother, into her own hands. The fact that her being dressed as a lamb makes her both a late-night snack and a sexual entity brings to mind the dual nature of the LRRH story. Way to be a femme fatale, Little Red!

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