The old man's dream of a young girl became a fairy tale

The abduction of Europa 

Europa, the world-famous beautiful daughter of the Phoenician King Agenor, had fallen into a deep sleep in the city of Sidon, wrapped in the scent of laurel, silver-colored silks and the warm Mediterranean breeze that filled her room through her window as the blue of evening broke into night.

As the whispers of olive branches tossed in the windy moonlight wandered through the young princess's hair, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, she had a dream she could not tell was dream or reality.

In her dream, the continent of Asia and another continent whose name she did not know had taken the form of two young men, and both of these youths were striving with all their might to seduce the princess.

The princess, waking breathless, decided to go with her ladies-in-waiting to one of the beaches in Sidon to shake off the effect of the dream she could not make sense of all day. Sidon, one of the largest centers of trade and seafaring in the Mediterranean, was also one of the most important city-states of ancient Phoenicia.

The Rape of Europa-Rembrandt -1632(source: Wikipedia)

Europa, laughing with her ladies-in-waiting as she picked flowers, was of course unaware that Zeus was watching her from afar and had fallen in love with her at first sight. As Zeus watched the young girl with love, he was also looking for a way both to avoid being caught by his jealous wife Hera and to approach the innocent Princess Europa without frightening her.

After thinking for a while, Zeus, the king of the gods, had made his decision. He would take the form of a magnificent bull with sunburnt white fur and a silver guard on its forehead,.

The majestic bull, reflecting the Mediterranean's bright daylight from its sand-white fur, the silver on its forehead and its half-moon-shaped white horns, drew Princess Europa toward itself as if it had enchanted her.

First showing the ladies-in-waiting that it was harmless, the bull allowed Europa to approach it as well; the spring scent of the snowdrops it chewed in its mouth and the bull's beauty swept Europa away, and without a thought, she mounted the back of the bull that had knelt before her.

The bull, with the princess it had managed to take onto its back, began running swiftly toward the sea. The ladies-in-waiting's wailing and running about in panic were of no use.

When the bull entered the sea, the armies of Poseidon, the god of the sea, rose to the surface; the Nereids, water nymphs who rode dolphins and dived in and out of the sea, and the Tritons, who blew war calls into seashells, set out swiftly toward Crete to the sound of the waves.

Whether this mythological story is about a young woman being forcibly torn from her lands and family and handed over to an old male god, or the romantic tale of a young girl who falls in love at first sight with an old man—a theme men have often made the subject of poems and fairy-tale-like stories—is unknown.

But it is certain that this scenario, both today and in antiquity, is a story template the male world has desired with great appetite to be so.

The older man must force the young girl at first, because the girl will not willingly accept this man her father's age; games, tricks and pressure are made to seem permissible. But after some time passes, the girl will no longer be able to resist the older man's fatherly manner, the gifts he buys her and his generosity, and with her very young and tender body she will surrender herself to the gray-haired man whose sexuality is no longer even a shadow, falling in love with him in infinite devotion.

Oh, come on!!! It is truly impossible not to say it...

Is it possible that these men really believe the fairy tale they themselves invented?

They say that in time a person comes to believe the lie he has invented. For years, novels and films sang the praises of the rich older man. In old Turkish films, stories of gray-haired gentlemen and young girls who have just turned 16 are by no means rare scenarios.

In old American and Turkish films in which older white men took part as investors, the scenarios that portray the older white man as the lover of young girls his children's age reach shameful proportions.

Beauty and the Beast

And what about 'Beauty and the Beast,' supposedly a children's film that we have watched with musicals since childhood; is the young girl not in fact sold by her father to an ugly and old freak in exchange for the family's debts?

Does she not endure fearful days in the abandoned palace with the servants and then helplessly surrender to the ugly old man?

The spell that is lifted by the poor girl's tears at the end of the film is nothing other than the poor child's character, broken by desperation.

In the film that has been shown for decades, are we not all instilled with the idea that the monster king is actually a very good man and that we should all pity him?

Moreover, we also feel sorry for the poor young girl's helpless father, because the story steers the audience that way. The old father and the old husband are portrayed as innocent creatures in need of love.

Indeed, the young girl's initial defiance and resistance saddens us all; when at the end of the film she is persuaded to love the beast and runs to embrace the father who sold her, everyone relaxes in the deep reverence of having watched a happy ending.

There is only one victim in the film, and that is the poor child-girl. What no spell will change are the father who sold his daughter, and the ugly old husband who, regardless of his own ugliness and age, bought the young girl and imprisoned her in his home.

The broken spell does not suddenly turn the old, impotent, ugly king into a young, handsome and powerful prince; the spell merely removes the young girl's desire to escape completely, guaranteeing that she will no longer try to run away.

And this is the ending the rich older man wants to see in the scenario he has invested in. The film may not mean much to a girl growing up under European conditions, but in my country, where there are girls dressed in wedding gowns at the age of 12 and sold by their fathers to pedophile monsters, films that normalize the union of an older man and a young girl have to mean a great deal to us.

But let it be known that every young woman would of course prefer to share her bed, love and heart with a young man her own age rather than with an old, gray-haired, impotent man like Zeus, even if he were a king; let no one deceive himself. No man is endowed with divine powers simply because he is old and wealthy. Yet it could be said that we do indeed see gentlemanly uncles or grandfathers around who tie a tender young girl like an accessory to the chain of their million-worth pocket watch and carry her in the pocket of their custom-made waistcoat.

Bad news! The affection none of these young girls shows these gentlemanly uncles is called love, affection or respect. 

Zeus's Wedding

Let us return to King Zeus. In the story written by the scribes of the God King, Zeus, at the end of an arduous journey, arrives in Crete with Princess Europa, whom he has abducted. The time has long since come for Zeus to appear to Europa again in the form of a god-man.

Princess Europa, enchanted by the beauty of the new lands she has arrived in, sees Zeus, the king of the gods, and forgets Poseidon's soldiers, the war sirens blown into seashells and that she was forcibly torn from her lands after being swept across the seas on the back of a bull.

Right there, the moment she sees him, she falls in love with Zeus's human form. The couple marry in Gortyna, in the south of the island of Crete, under a green plane tree whose leaves never wither.

The fruits of this love are three boys named Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadamanthus. Although there are different accounts, one of the rumors is that present-day Europe's name was taken from Europa, the eastern princess who came west.

King Agenor must not have been convinced by this happy love story, because he sends Princess Europa's brothers, and Cadmus, one of those brothers, to the lands of Crete with powerful armies to search for their sister Europa.

For some reason, the brothers do not succeed in finding their sister; perhaps that was not the main purpose anyway.

But they colonize the lands they go to. Cadmus founds Thebes, one of the important city-states of Greece, and becomes its king. King Cadmus was unable to save his sister, who had been forcibly abducted; perhaps for this reason, Artemis, the symbol of independence, freedom and control over one's own sexuality, becomes the ruin of Actaeon, the grandson of the powerful King Cadmus.

Artemis, Who Turns the Hunters of the Patriarchal Order into Prey

The talented young hunter Actaeon, while hunting near Thebes, becomes separated from his friends and from his dogs, which know his scent. Wandering in the forest, he comes upon a sacred spring where Artemis (Diana) is bathing. Actaeon has entered the privacy of the goddess and the nymphs with her.

Artemis, whose privacy has been violated, will not leave this behavior unpunished; using the droplets of water in which she is swimming, she turns Actaeon into a stag.

Actaeon, once the hunter, has been reduced to the position of prey; the dogs, which know their master's scent, find Actaeon, but because their master is in the form of a stag, they tear him apart and kill him.

In his masterpiece 'Diana and Actaeon,' exhibited at the Louvre Museum, the Italian painter Giuseppe Cesari depicts this story in all its vividness. (source: Wikipedia)

The civilizing journey of the ancient man from Zeus to Actaeon

Whether there is a lesson to be drawn from these two great and dramatic stories is unknown, but in the first story, the god-king who takes animal form abducts a young girl without ever consulting her or asking whether she wants it, rapes her and makes her bear children, while in the second story, the goddess Artemis, a woman who defends her independence, freedom and privacy, turns the male hunter who violates her boundaries into an animal and causes him to be torn apart by his own hunting dogs.

It should not be dismissed as merely a mythological story; in essence, these stories have shown a masterful success in carrying the first building blocks of the ancient world, which took giant steps on the road to civilization, down to our day through tales woven with metaphors.

Although the patriarchal world strives to keep woman in the position of victim and to proclaim itself, with only its money and power, a Zeus capable of possessing woman, the swordless Zeuses of the patriarchal world, which has fallen far behind ancient Greece, will sooner or later have to become aware of this inevitable change.

Women, who for thousands of years have been cursed as witches, killed, kept away from education and learning and had their wings broken, have now lifted their heads from the ground and long ago saw that these would-be Zeuses are nothing more than caricatured bad jokes.

What must be known is this: every woman, somewhere in the world, is fighting for her own wings. When they manage to fly, never to return, neither your bullying, nor your money, nor your wire fences, nor your walls will be enough to hold them.