Okay, so now that the TV thing is out there....

One of my favorite children's television shows is Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child, on HBO Family. I LOVE the "Rip Van Winkle" episode (a shout out to my Fairy God Mentor, Valerie!). It's a show about modern/multicultural spins on classic fairy tales, narrated by Robert Guillome.

The other morning, I saw that they were going to be airing the "Three Little Pigs" episode, which was supposed to be a feminist twist on the well-known story. I was looking forward to it.

Egad, was I ever surprised! The premise of the story is that three pigs were sent to Camp Piggywood to get fat and dirty, because that's how pigs are supposed to be, after all.

Okay. I get that it was supposed to be a spoof on camps where women go to get thin and massaged. Women don't need to be a size 2 or wear expensive perfume to be attractive and worthwhile, and they don't need beautiful jewels, and they don't need to eat to feel good about themselves.

I don't know, but something about the idea of comparing weight-conscious women to pigs seemed distasteful, to both the pigs and the women. First of all, pigs aren't filthy and they're not really fat. On the other hand, the irony of comparing women to pigs is likely to be well over the heads of most children, given the common pejorative use of the term in the vernacular.

I am sure the Women as Meat subtext was either explicitly intended or at least considered. The image-obsessed, gullible pig-women in the story who were waiting to be devoured by the slick and wily Wolf(gang).....part of me sees some animal rights subtext there, and part of me has this visceral reaction to the idea that even if this were the case, that there was a pro-pig message somewhere, few people watching were likely to catch it. I found myself thinking about a talk I saw some years ago by Carol Adams (author of The Sexual Politics of Meat) and wondering what her reaction would have been if she had been sitting in my living room.

Maybe I'm overthinking the whole thing, but really, that's what I like about this show. It gives me the chance to think about children's television. I think that's kind of the point. In the end, I'm not really sure why I had such a negative reaction to this particular plot line, and I will concede that I didn't even watch the resolution because I found it so bothersome.