The damsel in distress and why men love it - Dissecting the eldest trope ever

Okay, first I have some minor apologies to make. Our last post was huge, so I’ll try to make this shorter, or separate it into parts to be more digestible. It’s just that the human mind has so many corners and layers I want to explore, that sometimes my fingers go wild on the keyboard. But let’s start today’s topic before even this one paragraph grows into hundreds of words.

The “damsel-in-distress” is the base story element in a lot of childhood fairy tales but it appears in much older stuff, like the myths of ancient civilizations. We can meet it as early as the Indian epic, the Ramayana, where Sita (the wife of Prince Rama) gets captured by an evil demon king named Ravana, and the prince goes on an epic quest to save her. But you can find this trope in ancient Greece, among the many folk tales made famous by the Grimm brothers and so on. A fair maiden captured by the villain and waiting for the hero to save her is familiar to anyone, who had a childhood. Little boys dress up as knights to slay the dragon and earn the hand of the princess. Whether the girls want to be princesses is another question, but we might get to that at the end of this post. Why is this so appealing to boys and men in their unconscious?

These women in tales share similar traits besides that they’re in distress and need help. They are pictured as beautiful, caring, kind, and soft, but other than those obviously appealing traits we don’t really know anything about these women. In the original fairy tale, the prince never meets either Snow White or Sleeping Beauty until the wake-up kiss, and I can’t recall that any king ever gave the volunteering knights a description about the princess beside a painting or something like that. There must be something more in it.

If you haven’t read our previous post about the system of the alpha and beta-males I suggest you do now. From the males perspective, no one wants to be beta. Alphas have the power, resources, and the females’ adoration if only for a few nights, but from the genetic point of view, that’s all they need. So men have to show they’re among these alpha males, seed children and ensure they will have a caring mother (which why the aforementioned traits of the damsel-in-distress are all we know of them).

A young male, be it an aspiring hero, a prince, or a knight who’s destined to be king one day, must show his mettle to the rest of society to prove he is worthy of the titles and position, and, more importantly, to be recognized as a warrior and an adult. Boys need an act, something big, something epic. Many tribes have their customs and requirements to acknowledge someone as a man. Hunting a mammoth for example. Or slaying a dragon. These tales are metaphors to the rite of passage: after the arduous task the boy, who is now a man not only got the hand of the maiden, a perfect woman who can be a perfect mother of their children but also their place in the top of the society.

Nowadays there are a lot of controversies about this trope. Feminists think that this objectifies women, presenting them as helpless and incapable of defending themselves, so more and more modern tales focus on competent, heroic women saving themselves and their society without the help of the aspiring knight. Personally, I like those tales, I like modern Disney heroines like Moana or Anna from Frozen, but I want to point out, that the original folk tales were never about the female at the first place.

Men find the damsels in distress so attractive, because they feel like a man, a protector – an alpha who has the opportunity to prove himself. If you as a writer want to show the competence of your male hero, give him a chance to prove himself and then give him the recognition he deserves from both the heroine and society. Give him a rite of passage.

That’s all for now, my children. Next week we move on to narcissists and psychopaths, so stay tuned!

Lory