little red riding hood sex, morality, catherine orenstein
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Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked
SEX, MORALITY,
AND THE EVOLUTI{)N
OF A FAIRY TALE
Catherine Orenstein
e A MEMBER OF THE PERSEU S BOOKS GROUP
New York I .. .. ........ .. . ..... ............. ····· ·• .. ···•· . ·····•·-··•··•••· ... ····•······ ··- .J
106 • L ITTL E R Eo R101 N G Hoon UN ClOAK eo
Grimm were dead- would the werewolf h
. . , arc symbol ofEvu, or the Devil himself, get a chance at rehabilitation B h
. . · Y t e twentieth century, Its carnal desires would increasingly becorn
ea syrnbo1 of manly prowess and even a source of humor. The wcrcwo~
would become the hairy-chested Lothario of Lon Chaney, Jr.'s,
movies- horror, passion, a swooning date-while Red Riding
Hood 's dangerous foe would become a harmless, whistling dog.
Lil' Red Riding I-Iood
BY ROBERT BLACKWELL
susG •' SA" T H ' SHAM A N D™' PHARAOH S, , 966
0wooooooooo !
who's that walking in these woods?
WhY, ifs Little Red Riding Hood
HeY there Little Red Riding Hood
y0
11 s11re are looking good y
0
u're everything a big bad wolf could want- Listen to m e
Little Red Riding Hood I don't think that little big girls should
Cio walking in these spooky old woods alone
owooooooooo!
What big eyes you have The kind of eyes that drive waives mad
So just to see that you don't get chased
source: From t he a lb um UI' Red R uiin H ood • - • • •• "''"d, d by M GM , ,, 66. g by Sam ,h< Sham ,od ,h<
tro • t,,,,. Rao a,o,•c H
Oon {]Net o "I( i I) I think I ought to Wa/ k "'ith "oufi
, Ora ways
What full lips You have
They' re sure to lure so,,,.0n, bad
So until )'Ou get to grandma's place
I think I ought to Wolk ""ith You and be safe
I'm gonna keep my sheep suit on
Until I'm sure that you've been shown
That I can be trusted "'•/king ,.ith you a/on,
OW0000000001
Little Red Riding Hood
I'd like to hold you if t could
But you might think I'm a big bad wolf so I won't
owooooooooo,
What a big heart I ha11e
The better to lo11e you with
Little Red Riding Hood
Ellen bad wol11es can be good
I'll try to be satisfied
Just to walk close by your side
Maybe you'll see things my way
Before we get to grandma's place
Hey there Little Red Riding Hood
You sure are loo mg g k. ood
R BD HO H OOD
1' RIDIN G
d wolf could wont thing a big bo
'r,eVf,Y 0001 YOII 0000
owOO aaoaol I
, ,,.,,ari baa ooaooooooo. ? Boo Boaoaoo
I I I I
l A 7;',,N THe G
V V: RIMM BROT
ing Hood" . HERS turned "t ·
ences of th into a childre ' Ittle Red Rid-
e ninet n s tale for v·
embod. eenth centur ictorian audi-
ltnent of inno y, the heroine b
sexuality 11.r cence. She lost all t ecame the
. l'IOt unn racesofh
Red R'd • l the twentieth er earlier French
1 1ng H century
th h ood defrocked Was the bowdlerized
e and , so to sp k
defr k s of the legendary . ea ' and redressed. Or, in
oc ed Av anunator Te
Euro . ery brought the her . x Avery, simply
£ . pean forest to the IioU oine and her wolf from the
airy tal . YWood n · h 1
R 'd • e lllto a caricature of A . ig tc ub and transformed the
t mg Ho d tnerican court h.
0 , released in s 1P· In his Red Hot
traditi 1943, the sw h .
on-who in Perrault' eet eroine of storybook
served s seventeenth
h up a warning about th d -century original had
er own s b . e angers ofp . .
Ytn ohc opposit . ronuscwty- became
Red Hot Riding H, d be. ~ Hollywood stripper.
v· oo egUls on th
Ine, the legendary spot f L, e corner of Hollywood and
wh O ,ustory'
ere the wolf, dressed to th . . s most famous nightclubs,
an evewn f e runes lil top hat d .
g O carousing. Grand , h an tails, arrives for
the mas OUse i
corner, a penthouse apartm snow a bordelloaround
"Grand , . ent Iit up b
mas Jomt~ ome up and y a neon sign:
w · . see me " (
igglmg finger, a la Mae West in . . A neon hand with a
' vites the passe b r Y Upstairs.) And
RED HOT RIDI NG H OO D • JIJ
S . a chic nightclub that advertises "30
eat the Sunset tnp,
on stag ,, Red Hot Riding Hood steps into the spot-
eous girls, no cover,
gorg . k -up and cape-which she quickly tosses
li ht all dolled up m ma e
g ' 'th her basket. No kid anymore, this Red's a buxom
aside, along w1
ll . short (very short) red strapless number. She
bombshe m a
launches into her song and dance-"Hey Daddy, you ~etter g_et the
best for me"-which sends the wolf, seated in the audience, mto a
frenzy. He hoots and howls, claps and whistles, and employs a clap
ping and whistling machine to amplify his appreciation. "Hey
Daddy! Hi Pawl Say now Father," Red goes on, undulating her hips
and shaking her fanny. The wolf's eyes pop out (literally-they fly
across the room), his tongue unrolls like a red carpet, and he rises in
the air and stiffens into a full body erection.
As soon as Red finishes her routine, the wolf snakes a long arm
onto the stage to whip her to his table. "Fly away with me to the
Riviera," he says in a smarmy French accent. But after he follows
Red to Grandma's Joint, the tables turn. Granny, a hot old dame
in a slinky red dress, is besotted. Now she whistles and levitates
and hoots, as she chases him from door to door with puckered
lips. "That's a wolf! Whoo hoof'
"Little Red Riding Hood" was apparently Avery's favorite
fairy tale. He repeatedly returned to it, or some semblance of it,
throughout the 1930s and 1940s, transforming the tale into a
full-scale romance, told in multiple episodes. In Little Red Walk
ing Hood, the first of Avery's flirtations with the tale in 1937, he
gave Red the body of a little girl but the demeanor of a grown
woman. She trots along the boulevard, as the wolf- here a pool
hall city slicker, all oily charm and questionable intentions
drives slowly behind her in a shiny black car, throwing out pick-
I 14 • LITTLE RED RIDING Hoon UN CLOAK ED
up lines as fast as his lips can animate. She eventually •
. . . tn terrupts the narrative to comnuserate wah the women in the aud·
Jenee about lascivious male behavior.
In The Bear's Tale ( 1940 ), Avery cast Red as a smart-mouthed,
freckle-faced kid from Brooklyn. She teams up with Goldiiock,
to defeat the wolf by leaning over a split-screen line that sep,.
rates their plots: "Hello, Goldie! This is Red Ridin' Hood. I just
found a note from that skunk the Wolf. . . . "(She hands over the
note.) In Little Rural Riding Hood (1949), the last of Avery's
pseudo-fairy-tale burlesques, he drew a gangly, toothy redhead
as the country cousin of Red Hot Riding Hood. She opens and
closes doors with her long, unsightly toes, and puckers her enor
mous, almost snout-like lips.
Of all Avery's variations on this t eme, owev , . h h er Red Hot Rid-
ing Hood gave him his guiding stars. The uxom re . b dhead and the
wolf quickly outgrew the plot t at mspire ' h . . d them becomrng
recurrent characters in numerous animate s orts. d h Avery placed
d ,, d ups but also the couple not only in his "Red Riding Hoo sen - '
. Sh ;rt Cinderella in other fairy-tale cartoons. The heroine of Swing t;'
. the familiar ( 1945) is really Red Hot all over again. She appears m
. thesame nightclub set, with the same upswept red hair, gyratmg .
va-va-voom figure. She Wears the same revealing outfit, only this
time it's conjured up by her fairy godmother. (Red: "You do wave
· her first a mean wand, don't you old girl?") And of course, as m
. 'th the appearance m Red Hot R;d;,,g Hood, she is paired up w• ,
same eternally aroused Wolf, who falls into throes of ecstasy ~ her song and dance. This tirne the tune goes, "Oh Wolfie, ain t you the one!"
Avery placed Red Hot and her Wolf in cartoon parodies of
RED H OT D • 11 5
R IDING Hoo
F r MGM, 1943. . is Red Hot. o
. er heroine G
Tex Avery's stnpp . . of Dan M c oo
. The Shooting Uncle ell includmg (1945), and
other genres as w ' Wild and W olfy Little Rural
. k western, he couple,
(1945), his moc ) I his last spoof on t . e fable about a
Tom's Cabana ( 1947 . n h Jean de La Font.am d ncer at the · d by t e in a a
Riding Hood, inspire . mouse, Red is aga olves: a hor-
and a city . for two w country mouse . perfornung ·t·ous urbane
b his tune superc1 1 same nightclu , t kin and a usin).
ntry bump 1 country co mone-crazed cou Red Hot's home y d transcended
£ llsfor 'ding Hoo Romeo{who later a f Red Hot Ri r were not
h racters o . . ous pursue For Avery, the c a . land her lasc1v1 d mbols of the
howgir rs an sy
the fairy tale . The s lf but the characte b ' t His wolf, stiff-
. d a wo ' . · a sex o Jee · J·ust a girl an H's herome is •s personified.
ma 1
· the peru hwnan sexual dra . ·ght of her, is . tthe s1 ·taunga ening and lev1
I 16 • L ITTL5 R
6D R101NG
Such Hooo lJN gags Were not CtoA1< po
Avery's R d unusual . e Ridin l..J
10 the car
dren. Th g qOod riffs toons of ey Were Were on! . an earli
lllain attractio £' Pre-television, sho ~ lllciden1a1Jy fi er era
n 1or a g Wn 1n th or ch·i tao, but th eneral aud . eaters b , ,
ey Were Jenee Ch 'Id efore
ists Work' an afterthough r . I ren went lhe
Ing at this t' t 10r Avery t· to lllovie
lifed11 .. · 1rne,Avery · · 1keoth s, -ing the incorpor er can
War into h . ated deta ·1 <>on,
1942, the three little . is anitnations. In Blit I s of American
now taken on the pigs face their old enelll zwo/J, released In
trademark role lpersona of Adolph 1-litl y the Wolf, Who has
as asciv• er (a br k contrast to th N . . ious nightclub . ea from his
e aZJ inte . suitor, and
Jew). Avery's S . rpretat1on of the lf a startling
wing Shif1 Wo as th
she has to fl h t Cinderella is a n d e marauding
ee t e ni h o to R •
the "sw· g tclub to be on t' os1e the Riveter·
ing Hoo:~/::~, at the Lockheed fac:: f:nher ~dnight joh the "moral " iously modeled on the .· d his Red liot Rid-
A e of World War II soldi Plll-up girls who raised
very subverted th ers.
Walt D1' e prevailing stand d sney wh ar sofan · .
h , ose Snow Wh . unat1on set by
t e first full-length fi tte and the Seven Dwarfs b eature c 1· ecame
revered the G . artoon in I
rimms' tradition A 937. While Disney
running g ' very disrupt d h ags, ridiculed fai _ . , e · is plots with
Europe with contempor ry t~le chches, and blended Old
mak · f ary America wh e tt unny (as in the tav erever he found a way to
. d ern called "Yi
nuxe and matched tal . e Old Beere Joint"). He
d es, provided pro uced self-aware h unorthodox settings and
. c aracters who fre '
narrative to COlllll)ent h quently interrupt the on t e plot or mak
ence, completely rupturin ~ a statement to the audi-
Riding Hood begins with! atrnyds'u~pens1on of disbelief. Red Hot
d h a 1t1onal Euro-D'
an t e conventional storybook 1 (" isney landscape
p ot. Good evening, kiddies,"
Reo HOT RIDIN G HOOD • I 17
rrator intones.) But then the characters rebel
be off~screen na t d th tit be done a new way. (The narrator agrees and
and deman a . . .
l be ins again.) In Little Red Walking Hood, the girl and
obUglng Y g . . . .
If spend animation to wait for a pair of late moviegoers
rhewo . su
h mselves· the fictitious offenders' "silhouettes" appear
to seat t e , rtalistlcally on the screen. Above all, Avery worked in opposi-
tion to Disney's saccharine sweetness, epitomized by the
bleached heroine of Disney's Snow White.
Avery's endless, obvious visual metaphors for sexual excite
ment earned him the scrutiny of U.S. government censors. He
was known to create salacious sequences that he knew would be
cut, hoping to distract them from the sex gags that he truly
wanted to keep-though not always successfully. In the pu blidy
released version of Red Hot Riding Hood, the wolf is driven mad
by the attentions of Red Hat's grandma and vows to kill himself
if he ever sees another woman. He shoots himself when Red Hot
appears on stage again, and his ghost rises to cheer her striptease
on. But the original version that Avery animated, struck by the
Hays Office for its explicit theme of bestiality, was much racier.
In that version, sent to Gls abroad but not shown to civilian audi
ences, Grandma and the wolf are married in a shotgun wedding
(with Red sitting in the seat of an antiaircraft gun pointed at the
wolf's back). They appear in the next scene back at the Sunset
Strip, for Red's last act, with a litter of howling wolf pups in tow.
Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood captured a changing vision of
the American woman in the 1930s and 1940s. She was not only
more frankly sexual, but also tougher and more self-reliant than
the demure woman of the Victorian era. In Avery's animations,
the roles of sex object (even stripper) and self-reliant heroine are
II8 • LITTLER
ED R IDINc Ii oo0 0 Neto
Al( Eo
TexAve , ., ry s eternal! Miss Rid. y aroused wolf
rng Hood" atth woos
not mutuall e Sunset Strip.
Y exclusive ff of his cartoons sh . is Red Riding Hood
ily able t r e appears in, can tak , no matter which
o 1end off h . e care ofhe l a snowb 11 . er suitor with a lit al rse f: She is eas-
a m L. I er cold h li h ztt e Red Walk · s oulder(drawnas
g ts-out b h. mg Hood) lam . y Itting him over the or to give his ardor a
P (m Red Hot Riding Hood) head with a nightclub table
Avery's contemporar . tured this ne y, the humorist James
(
. w street-smart gual. Thurber, also cap-
mmus Av , ity of A .
l
ery s explicit sexuality) . mencan womanhood
t e Red R.d. macartoo d I mg Hood" that . n a aptation of "Lit-
and Fa appeared m his F. b mous Poems in 1939 "It . a /es for Our Time
nowada . . is not so easy t ti ys as It used to be ,, r d h o ool little girls
' ea stem lb ora eneath hi d . s rawmg
R ED HOT R IDING HOOD • I I9
heroine arms akimbo, who regards the tongue-
of a no-nonsense ' . . . If ho waits for her 10 bed with evident annoyance.
wagging wo w . , toon like Avery's animations, reflects changes 10
Thurber s car , . f American women from the 1920s t hrough the 1940s
the 11ves o ke
d new ideas and attitudes. Among those changes:
that spar suffragettes won the vote, bras replaced corsets, and women
began wearing pants- finally following the advice of nine
teenth-century dress reformer Amelia Bloomer. Amelia Earhart
new solo across the Atlantic in 1932; the Gibson Girl gave way to
the flapper, who stepped aside for Rosie the Riveter; the "new
woman" went to work, wore lipstick, and smoked cigarettes;
and in Hollywood, female stars like Joan Crawford and Betty
Davis made names for themselves playing tough femmes fatales.
Avery's and Thurber's work capture some of the sexual and
political attitudes of this era, with its revolutionized manners.
Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood is the new leading lady-she's a
sexpot, sure, but no pushover. She's a cross between Rita Hay
worth (the market-savvy redheaded sex goddess who dyed her
hair and hid her Spanish heritage to become an ' /\nglo" star) and
Mae West, who herself trafficked in fairy tales, but also restaged
and rewrote them. West's one-liners captured the public imagi
nation and entered the language as cliches for the same reason
that Avery's cartoons became famous: because they put the fairy
tale in twentieth-century terms. "I used to be Snow White,"
West once famously quipped. "But I drifted."
TEX AVERY'S Red Hot Riding Hood, with its wartime pin-up
girl heroine, captured a slice of American history and gave
new meaning to the fairy tale as a courtship story. It also her-
120 •
James Th 1.-urUC"r's girl is n as sh ot as easy to fool
e used to be.
aided the on set of a spccifl
In twentieth-century ic new role for Little Red Rid ' H
adult fetnal 'd pop culture she . mg ood
e I eals d ' increasin J
graphic· th . an represented g y conveyed
· e smgJ a new a d
calls her. Of the e woman. " Miss Rldin h n ,, growing demo-
Hood rema . best-known fairy-tale h g ood, as Avt'ry's wolt
prin ins unattached at tale' eroJnes, only Red Riding
ce, not even a bi, send- there's no .
fairy t I other or two. Th wedding. no
a es becam . us, overih
ideals h e increasingly de e next decades, as
, s . e develo voted to ex .
other£ . ped a slgnifican pressing feminine
at the t~1ry-tale heroines, who undce very different from that o(
tme. erwent their own transitions
R fl 1, II o r R I D I N c Hoo D • 1 2 r
Identical Prince Charmings wear matching outfits,
in Hudson Talbott's book adaptation of Into the Woods.
It's no secret that today's best-known fairy-tale protagonists
are female: Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beau ty,
and Red Rid ing Hood , to name just a few. These heroines act
amongst a cast of banal male foils. The men are simply fathers,
beuts, dwarfs or princes, all interchangeable and usuaUy iJJus
trated as one and the same from tale to tale. In Stephen Sond
heim's Broadway musical Into the Woods, the Prince Charmings
of two interwoven fairy tales swap places without so much as a
ripple in the plot. In an UJustration from the book adaptation of
the musical, they wear matching outfits in matching colors, j ust
iS they share a common name and common romantic mission.
(''l\nd how do you manage a visit?" says one to rhe other.)
In these fairy tales, the heroines make decisions that illustrate
the expectations of women in real life, while the male figures are
simply metaphors for punishment (misbehave and you' ll meet a
wolf) and reward (a prince in rhe end- Jf you're good!).
i.22 • L 'TTte R Eo R
IDJNG I.J
But Wha c:iooo UN
ta contra CtoAl<f
Past. The b st today's f e . . o
. rothers G . llllltine fau-
tw1ce as Olan nnun, Who Were . y tale is to the
tents y lllale as fetna1e J Prolific coU genre's
can befud eads. Look.i ectors
Thrushb dle the tnod ng over th . , Penned
C.U-d? Wb em reader· u __ eirtableof
an . ere have th .• .l<UJS rny B d con.
SWer: They hav . ese tales of l!lal e gehog? Kin
folkJ . e lost out . e advent g
Onst I<ay Stone ob in the ganie of edito . l l.lregone?The
only a handful served, tnost childr , na selection. As
G . , of the original ens storybooks co .
°ll'Uns complete Ch 1d .212 stories th nta1n
of those that surv· z rens and Household Tt. I at appear in the
l lve feature c a es--and
eads are als C Lelllale-dr· nearly au
o Lar .rn . iven plot Tal
White a d he ore likely to be lllad . . s. es With female
n t Seven D e lllto movies D" ,
With Cirzd~ ll . Waifs, an overnight ·. ISneysSnou,
e a lll 195 success in
lective 1 o, established th £ .
1937, along
ro e .model for every . l e auy-tale heroine as a col-
and tnoth . g1r and woznan ..
. er, D1Sney's Snow Whi . aspmng to be a wife
sprmg cleani . te gives the dwarf: ,
. ng, smging "Whistl . s bachelorpada
dishes, sweeps floors, dusts b e While You Work" as she washes
the assistance of bu-· d d co webs and scrubs clothing- . h
~ e~rabb· ~
sintila ' its and
r scene in Disney's la . other forest fauna. In a
h . ter CmcJere/ia . .
erome by sewing a gown £0 th b , llllce and birds assist the
h r e all hil
ousc and dressing her step . w e she finishes cleaning
s1sters--cho ha
as happy housewife to Prince Channin res t t anticipate her life
These two movies, like the new tw!· . fairy tale in general, captured the all nt1eth-century feminized
. . Ure of tnarr·
ticJty that became the dominant id l iage and domes-
ea for women a1i
the 1950s, the age of newlyweds dro terthewar. In pped, as did the
motherhood, and divorce rates plu"'-- ageoffirst ...... ..,.ted. Men
their jobs, and Rosie the Riveter was uroed b k . returned to
w · -e, ac into th h
1th the family as the center of American lif. e ome. e, managing the
RED HOT RIDIN G H OOD • 123
h Id became the preoccupation of women's Jives. Despite
house o new labor-saving appliances, the number of hours devoted to
housework increased. Child care took up twice as much time as it
bad in the 1920s. Joan Crawford posed for pictures mopping
floors. Ozzie and Harriet acted out an idealized version of their
real-life marriage on TV. And during this time, American culture
produced a parallel ideal in fiction: the "fairy-tale wedding"-a
romanticized union that in fact has nothing whatsoever to do
with the forced matrimonial trades behind Charles Perrault's
seventeenth-century fairy tales-which never existed before
the twentieth century.
Yet if America idealized the family, behind the trimmed
hedges and driveways of suburbia the reality of mid-century life
was more complex, as scholars like Stephanie Coontz have thor
oughly documented. Despite the cult of domesticity and the
prudery of Ozzie and Harriet, the 1950s were a time of new sex
ual freedoms. Terms like "going steady" and "petting" (or even
"heavy petting") came about to describe them. Teenage girls got
pregnant, were sent away to have their babies, and came back
"rehabilitated." The number of pregnant brides skyrocketed
though with the appearance of better methods of birth control
(particularly the pill in 1960), premarital sex became Jess risky.
And alongside the glorified housewife, there was increasingly
the woman who did not go straight from father's to husband's
anns. Living on her own. she navigated the double standards of
the age. This is the demographic that Red Riding Hood, the sin
gle heroine, rose to serve•
As Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Snow White rruirched
down the aisle, mid-century pop culture depictions of Little
1 2 6 . L ITTtE R
R Eo R 10 1-.,
cd Ridin G l-lo oo U
g Hood ·' ·cto
Brown's I96 seelll as if AicEo
2 best 1J llle.1nt
the ti~ h se er ~x to illusr
s e is c and the s · rate li
.itld fa.st a.st as a felllJn fa t11g/e Grr/ I elen Gu .
., . cars. Ri e tale, h . . n adv . r1~
bnng the WolVer,e, Young "riding h awking liquo % iJlgOf
ad appca . s out," M 00d red" . r, lllaJce.
nog .in v. ax Factor p . lipstick tip
fortncd the tal , ogue lllaga.zine in rolll.ised in a Po \\•ouJd
str.itlgers O es traditional 1953 that tad · ster-sized
. n one . waroi l(:.llJy
vi.xen SllliJ side of the ng against trans..
es coyly spread a 5Peakin
On the o . as she appJie red-hooded g to
PposJte pag s a bright h ' ted-nau
coltlpazi e, a backg s ade of ed
th y of Gregory Pee Jc 1 round shot show red lipstick_
e tr~, gn .. - · OOk-aJiJc· saforest .·
-~1ng es pee · · \\1th
1-i<>od Red at COlJlically lecher ring our from beh · a
go. Your own ous grins ., llld
t.ng to be r◄ 11 sweet risk . Wear Rid·
0 owedr' · · · • We zng
~d that tu says the ad Warn you • .
. rns the mo . copy: "It's . , )ourf'
t1on." A 196.2 ad .st Jonacenr look int a rich. succu/enr
o d vertise.rn o a tan•~J· .
"e as a 1 ent in The ... lZJng invfr, _
Gr.a , ~ amorous felllll)e fat New Yorker sirnJJarJ
n4n.i s 10 her 'T I ale: this ti Y cas1
her hood Jtt e red Hertz ,, u me, on her wa\' r
now a hi h . qercaris . o
Dior; her coy g -fashion item th . a racy converobJe;
corne--b. b at .might h
identical to th it er SJU.ile and sid l ave come from
at of the M e ong gla .
notlti.ng d . ,, ax Factor n, d nee is almost
01ng sa o el And ,,
which show , ys a 1983 ad for Joh . . W ithout red,
s a wolf b nny Walk
W..ots to bu . }'passing a girl d er red labd,
I ya dnnk for bleach d ressed in White. Wh
ll pop .music, San, th Sh e goody-two-shoes? o
n("\y pop 1 e arn and the Pb.tt
hen,· , u ar Version of the tal aobs also ech~d th
Utes new avaiJ . e as a counsbi e
SJ:n.is.h h ' ability- both SOcial p dance, and the
Jt "LiJ• Red Ri and se~
the r-h ding Hood"- whi . In their 1966
cine song for M.adi cli could easuv ha
son A~nue ads ✓ ,,e btt-n
or for Avery' R s ed Hot
RED H OT R IDI S G HOOD • 1.2'"'
JiooJ-the wolfpursuesthcgirJ no t in se..rch of a~ but
RJ,ng s ofa date. Thjs time it is he who noti~s what big evcs-
jn bope th h . "b' l '' h
•on full lips--that e erome, now a 1g gir , as .
noc co menu . ,.
"()WOO! Lirtle Red Riding Hood-you sure ue looking good!
As Sam rhe Sham and the ads of Madison Avenue suggest . t ht""
D'!W grown-up Red Riding Hood has a suitor · in de-ed. she may
!,ring out as many wolves as she plea~- but s.he is defined by
her independence from them. Brown's Sn an.i tr.e Single Girl,
which described the prototype of the Cosm o Girl, offers ,m
in.sight into the son of woman who might purd use Max F.1c-tor 's
ripe young "riding hood ~d" lipstick. Bro~ .. rn·s advice, though in
opposition to some of the coming ideas of feminism. ne\-cn hdess
stands in stark contrast to the dich6 of 195os gender s tereo
types and epHomizes the son of po\",.-er th.at at the time was a,·.iH
able to single women- as "gold-diggers" ,md flins. During .a
woman's best years, Brown counseled, "You don' t nttd a hus
band," just a man, and men "arc often ch~p<'r emotion.illy .1nd .a
lot more fun by the bunch ." She advised flirution ,,dth butcb~rs
to get a better side of beef. and counsded single women against
having an affair with only one m1rried nun-though t.bc~ ~'aS
nothing wrong with dating many.
F AST-PORWA~D to the end of the l\,'t"ntieth century, when a
1998 television spot cnfted by Luc &sson for Chanel No. 5
perfume updates the heroin<''s conunctci.lJ sex .1ppal. This timc,
Red is a Parisian beauty (model Estelb W.irrcn, s.bown in cos
tume in the opening un.ige of tbl' introduction to lhis book) wh 0
c.tlls htt own shots. She S.J:Shays through a nunsion in a red 5.ltin
bustier-.uid-prtticoats numbcr---remlniscent of the outfi t worn
128 • LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD UNc LOA KEO
by Avery's Red Hot. In her vault bottles of Ch ' anel No fume, stacked ceiling high and wall to wall l'k b . · 5 Ptr-. ·r I e ricks of gold sigm Y her incredible stock of sex appeal, here d fi d •
. e ine as sceni After dabbmg her pulse points, she dons a shiny red . · satin cloak and heads for the door, where she turns at the last rn ornent and places a finger to her lips to shush a howling wolf- h h
er ouse pet. Subdued, he sits obediently as she flips her hood over her head and with a smile heads out the door to the Paris skyline for a night on the town with a different set of wolves. "Share the fantasy," exhorts the legendary Chanel tag line.
In just thirty seconds the Chanel ad inverts the tale's traditional message: The admonition to obedience has been redirected- now he is tamed-and instead of the womanizing wolf, this time it's the heroine who goes on the prowl. But has the message really changed? Although Chanel's "Little Red Riding Hood" has tamed her wolf, her implicit lesson is hardly different from that of Max Factor's femme fatale in 1953: namely, that sexual appeal-or lack thereof- is the source of female power and value, whether in the perfume vault or in the open market of dating and mating.
The sultry single woman has been one of Little Red Riding Hood's great twentieth-century roles, whether Red H ot or "ripe, young" or just a fantasy in a perfumed red dress. Chased by a pack of smitten bachelors in the cartoons of Tex Avery, the croonings of Sam the Sham, or the ad copy of Max Factor, by mid-century our heroine emerged as an icon of feminine availability: the image of woman as man desires her, distinguished by her ability to turn his head (or make him levitate, steam, and lose h is eyeballs) and always desirous ofa romantic romp.
H OT RI DI N G H OO D R ED
• I 29
arable of . of the tale as a p ular understanding . version of the story
while tbe pop he present day, this n and tbe sut es into t Luc Besso , }ove endur men like Avery, w ith the way p1.1pPY crafted by trasts sharply .
as a romance, dison Avenue, con _ ntury retold t he fairy-e.xecutives of Ma half of the twentieth ce . ists cast Red Riding
. tbe latter d ames, f eIJllil women ill tic fun an g inister light. from roman lfin a far mores tale. far with the wo ao0d's encounter
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