After watching all the recent, revisionist versions of Cinderella, which focus on how the heroine is doing just fine and doesn’t need to be saved, valued, or rescued from her plight by anyone (much less a man), I sometimes wonder if women would appreciate it just as much if we released some updated romances where the men felt the same about women, where they felt just as indifferent, needless, and independent?

Wouldn’t a more modern prince stop groveling at Cinderella’s feet and go off to live his own life and savor his own accomplishments and interests? Perhaps he would even realize that marriage is simply a trap to contain his independence and gain access to his wealth and labor, leading to him instead embracing a bachelor existence of self-realization and casual sexual relationships? How would women like the men in their stories to become as indifferent and critical and dismissive of their need for women as modern heroines are of men?

Get those poor guys some porn and free them from the restrictive hegemony of the relationship industrial complex! These romantic heroines are exploiting men’s need for sex and the pleasantries of femininity. Men don’t need no women. Men can do it all and have it all on their own. Modern life can liberate them. After all, you can buy or pay for almost everything women traditionally did for men. You can hire someone to clean (or just do without), you can buy food at a million places, you can buy decorations with ease online, you can find companionship among your friends. You can live a perpetual adolescent dream and never have to sacrifice yourself to the demands of the other sex.

Women, or at least our idealistic heroines, don’t need men any more. And so I assume our heroes shouldn’t need women either. In today’s world, what do you need women for? All the comforts of life are available if you have the money, and you can save a lot of money by not wasting it investing in the opposite sex. You get yours, boys. If sex is necessary, you can get it without needing to commit to a romantic relationship any more. And porn is free and scratches that same itch and requires virtually no investment or effort. Porn doesn’t demand a stake in everything you have and earn. It doesn’t make any demands of you or expect it to do anything to deserve it.

These comparisons may seem strange to women, but that’s only because they’re women. Men, I’m sure, can understand. The feelings generated by such tactics are similar no matter where you’re standing.

But all of this is rather beside the point. Cinderella is about many things, and masculine dominance isn’t one of them. It’s entirely a female fantasy. It’s a female empowerment story and always has been. All that has changed is the predominant idea of what empowerment means and how it would be good to dramatize it in a story.

Bad fortune tends to be pretty extreme in fairy tales. And reversals of fortune are just as extreme. The heroes aren’t merely slightly less well off than they could be; they’re orphans, cursed, destitute, lonely, betrayed, poor, hunted, enslaved, captive, or crippled. And they don’t just slightly improve on their circumstances, they achieve extremes. They become rich, beautiful, powerful, free, famous, blessed, and beloved.

Cinderella is a story of extremes. She’s at the bottom and she ends up at the top in an unexpected and miraculous reversal of fortune. It’s not like she was doing OK and over a period of years and gradually improved her lot. And her destitution wasn’t just economic or social, it was familial. She lost her family and had no one who was on her side. That’s a pretty big deal, and would have seemed an even bigger deal to people of the past than it is to us today. Your family was everything; your people, who were in your corner, against the world. And Cinderella had lost that, and worse, fallen into the hands of enemies.

But she has a chance to escape, to be welcomed, to be seen for how loveable she truly is, for just a single night, and along comes the most powerful family in the country, saying that they want her. The prince is her point of connection, but it’s far more than just a man that she gets. She gets justice and validation and deserved transformation from the universe itself. She goes from serving girl to princess in a moment.

Part of what the story is meaning to address is this feeling of injustice, that sometimes the world is just terribly unjust and cruel and seems to be set against you, even when you’ve done nothing wrong, even when you’ve done everything right. And that’s something that really bothers people and their moral sense, but it’s a very realistic thing to be bothered about. There is an arbitrary and unjust element to fate, as well as to the capricious vindictiveness of others. We feel that we should have people to love us, and that the people in our world, especially our family, should fulfill that need. But sometimes that’s just not the case.

People can dreadfully disappoint us, even when we do everything we can to please them. It’s terribly unjust and tragic, but it’s one of the truths of human experience. And fairy tales are usually about addressing the deep truths of human experience. If you fail to capture the nature of the story, then you fail to capture those deep truths.

And that’s where some of the modern adaptations fall down. If you blunt the suffering and injustice of Cinderella’s situation, you hobble the entire point of the story. And although there are many wonderful stories about working your way through difficult experiences, Cinderella isn’t about that. The injustice she faces is extreme, and it’s arbitrary. Maybe it’s even worse than arbitrary, because it’s not only unconnected to her own behavior, it’s almost in spite of it, it’s anti-justice. Like Jesus, she gives kindness and service and receives cruelty and destitution. She reaps a reward opposite to what she puts in.

That’s a very specific sort of problem, one that is real and troubles us and one that can’t simply be gradually worked through. Because the whole point is that even her best efforts have yielded only more suffering. Modern retellings that attempt to soften either the nature of her suffering or what her pursuit by the prince really means for her have missed the point.

The prince isn’t a man, exactly. He’s barely even a character in many tellings. He’s more like the emissary of fate, a force for moral justice that the fairy godmother serves. He’s a conveyance. He’s a means for the reversal of arbitrary or actively unjust fortune into just fortune. In a moment Cinderella gains a single means that conveys both economic, social, and familial triumph. She doesn’t just have status, she has the highest status; she doesn’t just have a family, she has the number one family; she doesn’t just have security and wealth, she has the most security and wealth of anyone in the kingdom.

A prince is just a really good way to get all that really quickly, because those are the sorts of goods a prince has and that he would be willing to give wholesale to a serving girl purely on the strength of his own personal esteem for her. Offering a girl the world is exactly the sort of thing a man would do, and exactly the sort of thing a woman would appreciate. It’s appropriate. It’s actually realistic.

As I’ve said, Cinderella isn’t only or even primarily about male-female relations. It’s about the relationship of struggling humanity to the whims of fortune, and the injustices that even the good must often endure, and our wish to see good be rewarded and recognized instead of punished and abused for its goodness. The prince is, as I said, a convenient and appropriate and realistic symbolic mechanism. But it’s a moral fantasy more than it is a romantic fantasy. That what gives the story of Cinderella its universal appeal. Because even if we have never been a serving girl in a household ruled by someone who isn’t our parent, we have all suffered unjustly and had good deeds and good work returned with scorn and failure. So it’s a moral power fantasy, expressed through a distinctly feminine lens.

Another way to look at the story of Cinderella is as a story of social status, and justice and injustice within the female dominance hierarchy. Regard, again, that men play a very minimal role in the story. Who is she in a struggle with? Her mother and sisters, other women in her family. Or rather, people who pretend at being her family but in no way behave like it, exploiting and abusing her and degrading her.

The people in her family should be the people preserving and defending and advancing her status and value. But she has been deemed a loser within her own intimate circle. And the most intimate circle for women tends to be other women. And they can be terrifically cruel, as well as terrifically kind. Cinderella is in a tight-knit group that forms the very world around her, but that world has judged her and decided that she is either a rival that must be removed or an insect that must be stepped upon.

That’s a rough fate. And one we can all sympathize with, men and women. We all, after all, desire the approval of the group. We want to be loved, valued, welcomed, and esteemed by our intimate peers. Often it is the deepest desire of people’s hearts and something they spend their whole lives chasing. But Cinderella has been judged and rejected by her group and has no prospects for improving her lot. If social media existed she would be getting piled on by her entire friend group. In the race for status within the feminine social hierarchy, she’s the biggest loser.

The fantasy that the prince represents is the fantasy of escape into and validation within an alternative hierarchy. One that isn’t concerned about her low status. And although there are many hierarchies, the only true alternative to the feminine social heirarchy is the masculine social hierarchy. What better answer to the censure of the feminine hierarchy than the acclaim of the masculine?

Is it just arbitrary that it’s a prince who enables this transformation? Not at all. Who you can select or attract as a mate is perhaps the oldest and most effective measure of status within the social hierarchies. It’s an easy measure of just where you ended up. And women are absolute social elitists, when it comes to mating. As much as they desire to be fair and equalitarian when it comes to children or to those they feel magnanimous toward, they are ruthlessly competitive when it comes to sexual rivalry. Not only are they in competition with one another, they are brutally selective when it comes to men, focusing almost exclusively on the upper quintile. They focus on the best because they think they deserve the best.

From Cinderella’s point of view, her virtues have been disregarded or outright punished by her female peers. She has suffered. Her value has not been recognized. But along comes a prince, a representative of the very pinnacle of the male social heirarchy. And assortative mating means that only the women of highest value will be able to command the attention of the highest value men, and vice versa. So if you’re a man and a high status woman chooses you, that really says something about you and how well you have been judged by the feminine heirarchy. And if you’re a woman and a high status, perhaps even top status, man pursues you, it means that you must be worth pursuing.

Having a prince fall in love with Cinderella is an argument that her own feminine social hierarchy can’t possibly respond to. It smashes all their conclusions and wrecks all their systems. It reveals that they were always dreadfully wrong about her, and she really was a princess all along. The job of the prince is simply to recognize that fact and pursue and realize it in spite of the arguments and even direct efforts of the feminine hierarchy to dissuade him. He will not let her go, he will not forget her, and he will not accept the efforts of the sisters to pass themselves off as the real princesses (another key part of the story). The prince is insightful, he can identify the true princess; he isn’t fooled by false appearances. He is determined to reveal the truth and find the true princess, and that princess is Cinderella. And that feels fricking good!

In this sense, proving the corrupt feminine heirarchy wrong is the crux of the story. The prince is the key person who can be convinced of Cinderella’s worth, and he is the one who has enough status and enough independence, coming from an outside heirarchy (and moreover from the top of it), to stand up to and override the system Cinderella inhabits. She’s been chosen by the top dog among the males, and that means her sisters were wrong in assigning her bottom status. So wrong, in fact, that it calls into question the whole structure, and typically in most versions of the story the mother and sisters get their just desserts and end up at the bottom themselves.

Assuming they live. There’s one version I read where they end up committing treason attempting to prevent Cinderella’s marriage and get executed for their trouble. But in either case, when Cinderella rises she takes the place she properly deserves and brings the whole feminine social heirarchy that had abused her into its proper order. Nature, or some benevolent cosmic force, seeks justice.

The prince is the mechanism, he’s something we can understand and believe in. But Cinderella in its classic form is a story about the triumph of goodness and justice in the face of both arbitrary and deliberate misfortune. It doesn’t need to be “improved” or “fixed”. It’s terrifically complex and well thought-out. And the attempts of modern storytellers to improve it so often fail because they don’t actually understand or appreciate what the story is about or why it has lasted for so long or been enjoyed by so many different people and cultures.

Cinderella tells a story we all understand, about something we all care about. It’s a fairy tale, a classic myth. And Cinderella is a hero. She always has been. A moral hero, the best of all heroes, suffering in the worst of conditions. And she wins on completely appropriate terms for a moral hero, on the basis of her own excellence. She’s a female Luke Skywalker, whose sword was not his strongest weapon, but rather his character. That’s a tale as old as time, and one worth telling.