Katherine Dee is an Internet historian and culture critic whose 2024 essay, “No, Culture is Not Stuck,” is one of the most popular pieces we’ve ever published. Today, she writes about our lack of, and need for, modern fairy tales that warn us about the dangers of celebrity and money in the age of the Internet.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
On Valentine’s Day, a conservative influencer named Ashley St. Clair announced, via a carefully choreographed (and publicist-approved) tweet, that she had a child with Elon Musk. The news felt surreal, not only because a relatively obscure social media personality had become the latest “baby mama” to the world’s richest man, but also because the nature of their relationship was completely opaque. The child was clearly born out of wedlock, which itself is maybe mildly scandalous, though not ultimately sex scandal worthy. What was scandalous was that no one seemed confident about how to interpret her announcement, and I mean that in the most fundamental sense. It wasn’t entirely clear if they’d had an affair, if Musk was furthering his aspiration to become a modern-day Genghis Khan, single-handedly raising the global TFR, or if she’d even been pregnant. Eventually, rumors circulated about IVF and “genetically optimal” embryos and, then, naturally, the e-word: eugenics. Had the two even had sex? Nobody knew.
The reaction from other conservative influencers was equally bewildering.
Right-wing personalities like Mike Cernovich, whose brand typically includes championing “traditional family values,” lined up to congratulate Musk and St. Clair like one might any other baby announcement.
Cernovich gave his own spin on the adage “there’s never a right time to have a child”: we ought to “celebrate,” Cernovich suggested, when exceptional individuals have children in a cultural moment when family life is delayed or rejected outright. St. Clair’s announcement was met with messages of support from conservatives of all kinds. Had the father of her child been someone with less cultural influence, less money — and frankly, less proximity to President Trump — the reaction would have been harsh from the get-go. St. Clair would have been called a “slut.” The hammer of judgment eventually did fall, but only when it became clear that Musk wasn’t granting St. Clair any special status for having his child. If anything, he seemed annoyed by her, commenting “whoa” on a post by 40-something alt-right enfant terrible Milo Yiannopoulos that claimed St. Clair had been “plotting” this for a decade. If it wasn't already obvious, this was never about “different types of families,” or even extending empathy to a mother because of some inherent respect for motherhood. Whatever congratulations or kind words St. Clair received were, for the most part, a naked display of brown-nosing, predicated on what her fellow influencers assumed was her proximity to power, wealth and celebrity. When the tides changed and it seemed like Musk had declared her a nuisance, making fun of her became fair game.
For me, far worse than the influencer spectacle was watching several friends cheer on St. Clair, or, rather, applaud what they presumed her motives were. One friend, whose perspective I usually trust, argued that with billions of dollars in play, St. Clair’s decision was not just understandable (who wouldn’t be tempted, around someone as influential as Musk?) but rather, objectively the best decision she could have made for herself. To my friend, the gravitational pull of Musk’s wealth, “reality-changing,” as he put it, eclipsed even the need for a dad. Another friend suggested that even if Musk failed to provide direct financial support to St. Clair, the fame attached to having his child would more than compensate. Multiple conversations across multiple groups of people led to the same cynical conclusion: if your father is Elon Musk, his physical presence or paternal affection pales in comparison to the fact of his paternity. At some point, I thought to myself that maybe all those people I’d written off as “pearl-clutchers” weren’t entirely wrong and our moral foundations had eroded beyond recognition. It’s almost embarrassing to have to say that no measure of wealth, celebrity, or power can fully substitute having a father. I asked a few of them if they’d ever read a fairy tale. “Money isn’t everything” is one of the first lessons we learn as children, and we learn it from fairy tales. More salient to St. Clair’s situation is the fact, easily derived from fairy tales, that celebrity without the safety net of wealth is not much, either.
My friend Chris Gabriel, known for his YouTube channel Meme Analysis, argues that we live in a post-fairy tale age, desperately in need of “a myth of the Internet.” I’m inclined to agree. We don’t only need to bring fairy tales back, we also need to better adapt them for the Internet age. Conservative commentators are right to talk about the erosion of morals. But shaking fists at “that phone” and “those kids,” or sharing grim statistics, doesn’t work. Morality cannot be understood and internalized if it is not first felt, either through experience or by hearing a story.
In a Substack essay about the film Anora called “Anora’s American Dream,” rayne fisher-quann critiques the seductive and dangerous myths associated with the American dream, class ascendancy and what she calls “hetero-optimism.” Fisher-Quann argues that Anora systematically dismantles these romantic and social fairy tales by exposing the harsh consequences faced by women who buy into such myths. However, this reading risks losing sight of a simpler but, in my opinion, much more powerful interpretation of the film. Anora is a classic morality tale. The lesson is straightforward and traditional: sex is not love, money is not love, and such confusion can only lead to suffering. While Fisher-Quann’s analysis is insightful — the essay is great, don’t get me wrong — it sometimes overcomplicates the basic reason why traditional fairy tales, that is, fairy tales like Anora, resonate: their clarity. Fairy tales thrive precisely because they offer clear, archetypal portrayals of good versus evil, and cautionary lessons that cut through intellectual ambiguity and directly engage our emotions.
The controversial psychoanalyst and author of The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim, made at least one good point in his checkered career. He recognized that fairy tales speak to core human anxieties like abandonment, inadequacy, isolation and mortality, precisely because they bypass intellectual resistance. Similarly, the great C.S. Lewis believed fairy tales uniquely “steal past those watchful dragons” of skepticism by situating common moral questions in imaginary worlds. In these imaginary worlds, conventional wisdom, cultural biases, and pre-conceived answers don’t hold sway, and we can see the moral questions more clearly for what they are.
The decline of fairy tales can’t be discussed without also talking about the decline of traditional narrative structure. The stories we tell are fragmented, whether it’s because they’re delivered on social media, or because the screenwriter hasn’t read Save the Cat. Thus, while they may have artistic value, and they may continue to make powerful statements about life, they lack the ability to impart a strong moral lesson. Just look at mainstream movies or television: they increasingly abandon traditional storytelling for disconnected, more easily shareable plot lines. Art films tend towards slow, meandering “slice of life” stories. Indeed, what’s interesting about Anora, which won a slew of Oscars, is that it bucked against this trend. The most successful movies of the last decade have all been outliers in this regard. Say what you will of a movie like Get Out, for instance, but it had a masterful script and a masterfully structured three-act plot.
Fairy tales — and most three-act stories — excel at teaching values because they tap into our emotions with a dramatic structure of crisis, struggle, and resolution. We unconsciously identify with the hero’s trials, feeling the story’s conflicts as if they were their own. This is why movies and plays following a three-act structure are so effective: the form allows us to experience both the tension of conflict and the relief of resolution. In fairy tales, the resolution provides what Bettelheim calls a “safe victory,” a moral triumph in a contained, symbolic space that feels personally meaningful rather than preachy or detached. The simplicity of this structure ensures lessons are felt rather than stated — it’s one of the first tricks you learn in film school.
Slice-of-life tales reflect the ambiguity of daily life, leaving moral tensions unresolved and thus less useful for moral instruction. They prompt reflection but rarely provide the same cathartic closure. They cause the mind to meander, and so slice-of-life stories are important in one way: they offer a canvas for projection. Fairy tales, by contrast, are both a canvas and a map.
Traditional three-act stories are among the most effective ways through which societies transmit shared values. Social science bears this out, especially research about folklore and cognitive development. For example, Ngô Thị Thanh Quý and Lương Thị Phương write in “The Importance of Fairy Tales in Communication, Education, and Cultural Preservation” that “folk tales serve as a means to transmit cultural values to future generations,” encapsulating “the collective knowledge and experiences of an entire society,” and encouraging “a sense of cultural continuity.” Storytelling is how cultures convey “moral teachings, ethical standards, and social customs,” particularly to young people. In the world of child development, it is practically a truism that storytelling — and and all imaginative play — is how we learn to make sense of the world as children. Research on brain activation patterns during storytelling supports its unique power in shaping cognitive and emotional development. Miyuki Yabe et al., in their research on children’s brain activity, found that storytelling “had more sustained brain activation,” suggesting storytelling’s superior capability in engaging and sustaining cognitive and emotional processing in children.
Stories shape our internal worlds, informing us of who we are, who we might become, and what we value most, not just as individuals but collectively as societies. In this way, stories are more than just entertainment. All this to say stories — particularly structured ones, like fairy tales — shape our internal worlds by helping us understand not only who we are individually, but also our collective identity, deeply influencing community bonds.
Of course the question arises: how do we determine which morals are the “right” ones? It seems like a dangerous topic to even broach. We live in a world that oscillates wildly between implicitly suggesting there are infinite ways to live a good life, and that there is only one morality, though the goal posts are often moving as to what values that morality is meant to be composed of. One strategy is this: our moral compass must emerge naturally from fundamental human desires. Not “desire” in a hedonistic sense — sex, drugs, food — but even more ground-level than that: secure attachment and meaningful relationships. We long for recognition not absent of love, love not absent of respect, and meaning not absent of happiness. The things we see most often are reflected in fairy tales.
Let’s revisit the Musk–St. Clair situation. What is going on there, stripped of the tabloid element? What are the most emotional — the most human — parts of that story? Is money and power more important than having a present dad who knows and loves you personally? Pertinently, why does it feel so “boring” or even borderline misguided to promote values like familial love, a boredom I myself feel even as I write this exhortation?
We may never know exactly what was going on with Musk and St. Clair, but let’s assume the worst, as it’s the worst that informed people’s reactions. Those reactions, the ones that so blatantly privileged wealth and power over family and love, were revealing: we’ve forgotten what is truly worth valuing. The solution isn’t to moralize or preach or bemoan the decay of our society. It’s to revitalize the stories that help us understand what’s worth valuing.
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My son needed fairytales, so I made him some fairytales, told them, and turned them into an illustrated storybook:
https://www.amazon.com/Book-CRAZY-MONSTER-STORIES/dp/1549983539/
Many of these stories are about very modern things - Pokemon, smartphones, media, celebrity (there's even a nod to terrorism, in the guise of a fable). The stories are simple, but so is the morality: Be true to yourself, look after your loved ones, be wary of greed and fads, stand up to bullies, don't walk alone into the dark forest.
i read the uses of enchantmrnt bc of this