I'm going to try something somewhat new today.

I'm going to read you the Grims Brothers version of Snow White.

I picked that because I think I have some interesting insights into its meaning.

But I also chose it because it's been the target of ideologically oriented rewriting

most famously, recently, in the case of Disney, who produced what's essentially a very poor movie

that was also a commercial flop by carelessly

restructuring a story that either the makers of the film didn't understand or understood all too well

and decided to mess with for underground reasons of their own.

I suspect a little of column A and a little of column B.

I'm going to concentrate a fair bit on the figure of the evil queen,

not least because there's no shortage of evil queen manifestation in the current social and political environment.

And I'm going to draw on a body of research that has been conducted primarily by primatologists, scientists who study non-human

primates, given that human beings are primates as well. The field of inquiry is called

fertility suppression, and it is the marked tendency of higher status female

primates to suppress the probability that subordinates in their group will successfully mate and bring offspring into the world.

I think that the evil queen in no small part is a reflection of observations of fertility suppression.

People started studying fertility suppression in primates

because of the observation that in many primate species

dominant females exhibit higher reproductive success

compared to their subordinate counterparts.

So one thing you have to understand about social animals, and this is particularly true

of primates, because they're hyper-social, social animals live in a tiered society, and there are marked differences in the

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