Love in terms of porcupines, fairy tales

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, love seems to be filling the air and relationships have become a hot topic. It was therefore to an eager audience yesterday evening at the Penn Bookstore that authors Catherine Orenstein and Deborah Luepnitz expressed their opinions on how feelings, emotions and values shape intimacy and relationships. Luepnitz explained that the title of her latest book, Schopenhauer's Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas, came from her favorite Schopenhauer parable in which the fabled porcupines suffer from loneliness when too far away from one another but suffer from being poked by each other's quills when too close. This, she claimed, resembled the trends in many human relationships. Luepnitz, who works for the Penn School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry, explained, "People come to therapy for all kinds of reasons, but what always gets affected in the end is intimacy." In her book, she explains the various factors that affect a human's intimate relationships, including the unique therapist-client relationship. Luepnitz read excerpts of her book in which she described the struggles of herself and her patient as the patient targeted the problems that developed because of past abuse, molestation, homelessness and eating disorders. The patient, whose life Luepnitz described as having been "a train wreck," suffered from intense depression, and Luepnitz frequently felt frustrated during her 14 years of providing therapy for her. "Sometimes people ask me whether a therapist has to love or like a patient in order to treat her. The answer is no," Luepnitz said. In addition, Orenstein, a Harvard graduate who is now a freelance writer, explained that her book Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale addressed intimacy from a different angle -- from how it has been partially shaped by the changing influence of fairy tales. "Fairy tales shape our ideals of love and sex, and they permeate reality. Few realize what fairy tales are really about," Orenstein said. "For many of you who want a 'fairy-tale wedding,' you haven't read the original fairy tales by Perrault, [in which] the husbands were abusive and often murderers." Orenstein explained that the ideals for relationships, gender roles and domesticity have been introduced to many children in Disney movies such as Snow White, in which Snow White is whistling and singing as she cleans the house for seven men. The fairy tale that interested her most, Orenstein revealed, was the original "Little Red Riding Hood," written by Charles Perrault in the late 17th century French court to caution young girls about doing their utmost to protect their chastity. "Originally there was a sexual undercurrent to this story," she said. "In French, the saying for a girl who had lost her virginity was 'she had seen the wolf.'" More recently, however, Red Riding Hood spinoffs are used in alluring ads which promote products that women can use to "bring out the wolf" and used even in pornography. "The story changed from 'protect your virginity,'" Orenstein said, "to 'bring out the wolves.'"

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