Hidden Agendas and Veiled Symbolism

So I want to write a fairytale. Or several. A series of tales really. But I’m having a hell of a time with it. I’ve now taken so many children’s lit and theatre for young audience classes that I feel entirely bogged down in “what message am I sending?” and “Is that symbolism too sexually explicit?” and “is this a healthy message for young girls?” and “am I going to mess up vulnerable young psyches????”
All I see when I look at media for children, be it tales or books or tv or movies or even songs, all I can see is hidden agendas:

This book series is sending a CHRISTIAN message and that book series was written to counter-act that one and is decidedly an ATHIEST book series. This princess has an abusive-ralationship complex and stays with a man who has overt anger issues and hopes she can change him eventually and that princess can only win the man if she gives up her voice and changes everything about herself and gives up her entire culture. This story has little to do with princesses and dragons and more to do with having her first menstrual cycle and being ready to bear children. Everywhere I look I see sexual disorders and kinky messages like beastiality, necrophilia, pedophilia, fettish sex, incest, misogyny and masochism.

No as a decidedly liberal adult I find much of the above to be at least a little intriguing and believe all the legal stuff to be fine if it floats your boat, and recognize that the illegal stuff is repulsive, but makes for compelling drama and has since the dawn of storytelling.

However- should it be there in a children’s fairytale???? Can it be avoided? SHOULD it be avoided?

Something tells me that if I’m writing it all kinds of messages and naughtiness will be imbedded in the writing no matter how hard I try to neuter or child-proof it.
Well, this is all besides the fact that I mean to write with an OBVIOUS agenda too! I want to write alternative lifestyle (hate that term!) fairytales so that children can have more than hetero-normative happily ever afters. I want to teach them that you love who you love and that gender isn’t a factor in love and soulmates.
Told you I was pretty liberal.

It’s the way I plan on raising my children, and I would like there to be OPTIONS on their bookshelf. So if they are gay or bi they won’t feel marginalized from the very start. And if they are straight (even though I hope they will all identify as BI), I hope having the options there on the shelf alongside Cinderella and shit will at the very least cause them to be open-minded and not discriminatory toward other sexual orientations.

I was more than halfway through with my lesbian fairytale before I realized that her entire quest revolve around finding all the stones needed to complete a magical amulet. It was about jewlry. I mean, ok, it wasn’t ABOUT jewelry, it was about courage and problem solving and independence and friendship and responsibility and destiny and love, but for real? I was playing right into a disgusting female stereotyp without even realizing it.

Of course maybe there’s no harm in it. Maybe it isn’t as sexist as it struck me that day. Sometimes an amulet is just an amulet.

But when examing my man-friendly, lipstick-lesbian heroine and her quest for jewels (no matter how altruistic or imperitive) I suddenly felt like I was sending a very sexing-the-city message and just stopped writing.

LOL. I was afraid of what damage I might unwittingly do next when my fingers hit the keys.

So I sat down and tried to write the male-male story and ran into all kinds of difficulties. Of course the first quest object I thought of was a sword. Groan.
Then I had trouble even thinking-through the story because I would get distracted by imagining their first kiss and the playful budding sexual tension between them on their quest. It was suddenly not as sweet and innocent and innocuous as a fairytale ought to be. It was erotic and steamy and very very real. I was too turned on to write that with Mr. Rogers-like grace, so that one was aborted before it even got to the story-outline phase.

I guess the problem inherent in the situation is this: I am focused on sexuality. Sexuality is not a factor for young children. I need to bland-ify it up, not get into specifics of flirting and akward glances. In the other fairytales the prince and princess kiss, they marry, they live happily ever after-- we don't need to know how he won her heart or what about her made him fall in love it simpy IS. A matter of fact. A thing that happens, as natural as breathing.

And so the princesses wed and ruled the kingdom in peace and lived happily ever after. the end. we don't need to reconcile how or if they ever adopted children or whether or not the church ever sanctioned it and all that baloney.

And with that kiss the lowly stable-boy became a prince, the two were married and ruled the land, becoming the most beloved kings in a thousand generations. They lived happily ever after. No need to know which was the top, not necessary to know how they came out to their parents and all that. This is for kids. Its just fact. They love eachother so they get married. Done.

While the falling-in-love is vitally interesting to me, one of my favorite aspects of the human story, it is almost always reduced to basics for fairytales.

Maybe if I were writing for young adults, all twilight-style or Harry-potter, but for littles? All they need to know is: And that's the way it was!

In any case. I have two young nieces now with another niece-or-nephew on the way and my best friend is also having a baby and I feel this moral imperative to write my stories, but I am a little gun-shy.

I think I’ll brainstorm tonight and see if any of my first draft can be salvaged…

Sigh.

Maybe I’m write fairytales for adults instead… delicious.

For the record folks- Belle totally falls IN LOVE with the beast while he is a beast. It is only the last-minute co-incidence that turns him to human form at just in the nick-of-time to avoid the beastiality. She was going to marry the BEAST, not the prince.