What's up with fairy tales?

We're all familiar with classic fairy tales and nursery rhymes, those little songs and enchanted stories that we were more than willing to learn and repeat in our youth. We took the morals and lessons for granted, just happy to be on the same reading comprehension level as our classmates.

But think about it - some of those stories are really screwed up. While some fairy tales are about friendship and believing in oneself, more often they include disturbing ideas that would not fly by modern society's standards.

First, let's talk about the victimization of little children. I guess fairy tales were originally created to teach small children a lesson, but this is the kind of stuff that ends up on "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit."

Take "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" or "Little Red Riding Hood" - two stories that end with the gruesome exploitation of children that makes you think, "who writes these things?"

At least Red Riding Hood had a safe destination. Her mother might have said to herself, "This is a low-crime area, my mother's house isn't too far away, and besides, I have to finish hanging up the laundry. She's getting to that age where she needs her independence. Oop, there goes the roast on the spittle."

That may have been what Little Red Riding Hood's mother was thinking. With Goldilocks, there isn't even mention of a parent. Here comes a raucous little girl skipping through the woods, bored out of her mind because no one is making sure that she gets to school on time and stays out of trouble. She breaks into someone else's cottage due to immoral upbringing.

Her parents are too busy shooting heroin and watching Jerry Springer to provide their child with food. The hungry child eats the porridge that's sitting on the table. Her lack of supervision causes her to break all the furniture in the house before she finds a bed that isn't infested with fleas or her mother's boyfriends. Then when the bears come home, the author places all the blame on the child, when Goldilocks is really nothing more than a product of a broken home and bad parenting.

Fortunately, her street smarts help Goldilocks escape with minimal bruising at the end of the tale. But the whole thing is really tragic. I wish the bears could have adopted her and perhaps reversed the harsh and shattered life that Goldilocks would inevitably face.

Or how about the old woman who lived in the shoe? She pops out all these kids, goes insane, and beats them and starves them before bed. There isn't mention of any sort of father figure. I mean, what is the message of that rhyme? Abstain from premarital sex? Use contraception? Get your tubes tied? And really, who lives in a shoe? I'd take a mud dwelling over someone's smelly discarded boot any day.

I guess the whopper of them all is Grimm's fairy tale, "Hansel and Gretel." Again, the children are starving because of the dire economic situation of the time, and they want to help their poor woodcutting father out by finding some food for the family.

They enter a witch's house made of candy. She tries to pull a Michael Jackson, tricking the children to enter the oven so she can roast and eat them. The children outsmart her and pull off an equal act of violence, burning her alive and taking her jewels. It's like a mad free-for-all at Kmart.

But I mean really, who thinks of putting children in an oven? And is this really the best way to go about the Atkins diet? Scary Germans. Maybe the insanity of such authors came from starvation. I guess writing fairy tales is a good way to bring home the bacon. It beats woodcutting. And journalism.

Maybe the real lesson from these fairy tales is that you have to be street smart to survive in this world. Get creative. Don't let fear hold you back. Either that, or be an aesthetically pleasing princess who, if the conditions are right, can be saved by a man of royal standing.

And that's another thing: princesses. Call me a feminist (well, don't), but some of the princess-deluged fairy tales are really behind by today's standards.

Take "The Princess and the Pea" by Hans Christian Andersen. A girl comes to the door, soaking wet, and they don't believe she's a princess because of her shoddy appearance. She has to feel a pea under a Freudian boatload of mattresses. I mean, the two concepts aren't even relevant. What is the lesson here? That you need to bruise easily in order to have class?

Give me Danielle De Barbarac in "Ever After" any day.

You can be as fanciful and creative in storytelling as you want, but you still have to retain some ethics. You can't just throw helpless characters into a harsh world of corrupt rules. Except maybe for the boy who cried "wolf." That little snot got what was coming to him.