Once upon a time, there was a fierce woman . . .

THAT'S MEN: THE OTHER week I was writing about the appeal of fierce women in literature

THAT'S MEN:THE OTHER week I was writing about the appeal of fierce women in literature. Since then a reader has pointed out that this could have something to do with the fairytales we hear hundreds and hundreds of times when we are growing up, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN

In these stories, he complained, all the best parts go to women.

It strikes me that he is right and that the influence of these stories may be far greater than we generally think.

This also gives me an opportunity to mention women and the world economic crisis which I will come to later.

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The women in fairytales are tough characters but the men tend to be quite insipid though they do get to rescue the odd woman from time to time. Even the men doing the rescuing are not exactly big, strong, fierce guys – and there is a good chance that the woman in question is asleep in a glass box with not much else going on at the time.

In Snow White, the dwarfs are friendly and helpful but without the wicked queen and the old woman with the poisoned apple, would anybody really bother with the story?

We know little or nothing about the prince who comes along in the end to wake up Snow White.

However, given her experience of man management, it can’t be long before she is running the show and the prince is wishing, perhaps, that he had let sleeping princesses lie.

Similarly, in Cinderella all the best lines go to the ugly sisters and the stepmother. The father is hardly in the picture at all. And then there’s the prince, trotting around with his glass slipper, looking for his future wife.

While Cinderella herself is a wimp, you have to wonder how long it will be before she, like Snow White, is running the kingdom with the help of the ugly sisters while the prince, banned from having any more balls, takes to the drink.

It’s the same in story after story. Men are only props – it’s the wicked women who make the whole thing work.

The really interesting thing about all of this is that while children are going along doing the things that feminists worry about – girls dressing and cooing at dolls and boys playing with laser swords – a whole other message is being drilled into them in fairytales.

That message is, let the boys play with their swords and their guns but the women are where the real action is.

All of which brings me to the world economic crisis.

The whole thing has been blamed on testosterone levels and how this caused (male) financial players to make lousy decisions and feck the whole place up.

In response, the people of Iceland seem to have taken the lessons of the fairytales to heart and put the country into the hands of women who, needless to say, have appointed other women to run the banking system. The men have been put, so to speak, on ice.

Commenting on this in the Womenomics blog, female investment manager Anne Hornung-Soukup refers to the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh which makes 97 per cent of its loans to women “because women invested the small amounts they received and then reimbursed their loans on time, while men often spent some of the money on themselves [drinking or enjoying other typically male pastimes] and therefore couldn’t”.

So my advice to the two Brians is: hand the whole mess over to the Marys and let them get on with it. It’s a womans job. Get out those golf clubs. Load up with a few cans of Dutch Gold. Relax. Now, does anybody know any sleeping beauties who need rescuing?

  • Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Thats Men, the best of the Thats Men, column from The Irish Timesis published by Veritas