Book Review: Only Prince Charming Gets to Break the Rules: Gender & Rule Violation in Fairy Tales & Life

Only Prince Charming Gets to Break the Rules: Gender & Rule Violation in Fairy Tales & Life. Anne E. Beall, Self-Published, 1 October 2022, Hardback, Paperback, and eBook, 152 pages.

Reviewed by Gabrielle Robinson.

The title of Anne Beall’s book itself deserves five stars and delivers on its promise. Her book delights the reader with details of fairy tales from around the world and inspires reflection on parallels to our situation today since we are still living in a largely patriarchal society.

Beall’s main focus is on rule-breaking. Her statistical investigation shows that in fairytales, male characters break the rules twice as frequently (67%) as female characters (33%), and yet males get punished only half as severely as females; in fact, they often get rewarded for their rule-breaking with wealth, status, and a beautiful woman. Females, by contrast, are disliked and scorned for their rule-breaking as well as harshly punished. The message implicit in fairy tales is clear: rule-breaking is okay, even advantageous, for male characters, but for female characters, it has to be rigorously controlled and punished.

Looking at how contemporary society deals with rule-breaking, Beall finds similar results. Gender stereotypes prevail today as well as in the fairy tales of long ago. They can be summed up by the popular saying, “boys will be boys.” From early on in their lives, a boy’s rule-breaking behavior is tolerated, even seen as a positive, whereas a girl is punished for being unruly and not nice.

Beall mentions instances in the workplace that many of us have experienced as well. A man’s tough behavior is often seen as showing strength and entrepreneurship, while a woman’s is condemned as nasty and aggressive. Since I am a tennis fan, I was delighted by Beall’s juxtaposition of the behavior and punishment of Novak Djokovic and Naomi Osaka. Tennis fans have witnessed his angry outbursts, throwing balls at people and breaking rackets, and the COVID controversy. Nothing happened when he refused to speak to reporters about this. However, when Naomi Osaka did not want to speak to the press because of mental issues, she was fined $15,000.

In her detailed statistical presentation at the end of the book, Beall analyzes many aspects of rule-breaking, such as the most common violations, their severity, the amount of violence, violent vs. non-violent violations, the type of punishment of male vs. female characters, status and gender of characters and punishments, and more. Statisticians can have a field day with this research, and many women readers can add their own experiences on rule breaking and its punishments.

Finally, I’d like to add one further possible determinant to Beall’s astute analysis of the reasons why females receive harsher punishments for their rule-breaking than males. Until effective DNA testing, men could never be sure of their children’s paternity. So males, especially wealthy and high-status males, wanted to make sure that females were afraid to break the rules and understood the danger to themselves, especially if they planned to lie and deceive. The male paternity doubt may linger even today, if subconsciously, and asking for a DNA paternity test is problematic. At any rate, as Beall argues persuasively, whether in fairy tales or in today’s society, discrimination against women for rule-breaking is more severe than for their male counterparts.