Cinderella was a delightful young lady and I won’t hear a bad word about her. With what fortitude and restraint did she endure the bullying and arrogance of her ugly sisters! A pretty girl like Cinders could have lived in comfort and leisure had she been willing to surrender her virtue to a rich sugar daddy. But our noble heroine was determined to stay a maiden until the handsome prince came along and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. Are there many young women who would behave like that today? I very much doubt it.
I have less admiration for Prince Charming. What kind of ass attempts to identify a woman from her shoe size? If he and Cinders had been dancing cheek to cheek, couldn’t he have remembered her smell? That’s what a gorilla would have done. And why on earth would a man with eyes in his head tempt fate by allowing the ugly sisters to try on the slipper? He would have been perfectly within his rights to disqualify them on the grounds that the girl he had danced with was not a repulsive hag. It was down to sheer luck that he was not lumbered with one of those crones.
This is not to say, of course, that having an ugly mate is necessarily a bad thing. Any fan of female sporting events will confirm there is no correlation between the quality of a woman’s body and the prettiness of her face. My own research leads me to believe that most men are quite able to service a woman with unattractive facial features. There is no need for humans to couple face-to-face and many women prefer to do it in the dark anyway. What’s more, a man is much less worried about how he performs with an ugly woman, which has the paradoxical effect of improving his performance. Like a golfer or a tennis player, he plays better when he is relaxed and not thinking about what he is doing.
Had Prince Charming married one of the ugly sisters, they would almost certainly have mated successfully and produced a brood of royal kiddies. The only problem for the prince would have been his embarrassment on occasions of state when he and the princess were required to appear together in public. Having a wife with a face like a herring is like having a collection of Cliff Richard records – the music is fine once you get used to it, but you don’t want everyone to know about it.
The downside of such a development is that poor Cinders would have had to settle for a sugar daddy after all. Peter Stringfellow comes to mind as an obvious candidate for the job, in which case the fairytale would mutate into a version of Beauty and the Beast where the beast does not change into a handsome prince. Nor could she be certain that Stringfellow would leave her anything in his will. If I were Cinders’ agent, I would demand that he paid her a sizeable cash advance in return for her services as a concubine. It might just compensate her enough for being slobbered over by that hairy old dog.
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