The version of Sleeping Beauty we’re most familiar with today is based on an edition of the story by French author Charles Perrault (the same story adopted by Disney in its beloved 1959 film).

It sees a lovely princess put to sleep when she pricks her finger on a spindle. She sleeps for 100 years, until a prince kisses her to wake her up. They live happily ever after.

If this scenario worries Hall and other parents, the original tale is far more worrying.

Written by Italian poet Giambattista Basile in 1634, the first edition of Sleeping Beauty is bleak indeed. In it, a prince does not wake the sleeping girl, known as Talia, with a kiss. Instead, a married king rapes her. The scene even contains the line, “As he tried to wake her, she seemed so incredibly lovely that he began to grow hot with lust.”

Talia gives birth to two children and one sucks her finger, eliminating the curse that sent her to sleep. Inexplicably, she then falls in love with the king, but the king’s jealous wife kidnaps their children and orders the cook to kill them and feed them to the king. The jealous queen also threatens to burn Talia to death, but the king has his wife burnt to death instead.

Yep. Hardly surprising Disney didn’t leap to adapt this gruesome tale, is it?

It just goes to show that however innocuous stories like Sleeping Beauty appear on the surface, there are often more sinister themes lurking underneath. Hall and others with similar concerns are right. We should be scrutinising the material that we expose young children to. It’s not extreme or ‘political correctness gone mad’ to suggest doing so.

The more we instigate dialogue around sexual consent and how it’s represented at all levels of society, the closer we get to changing an insidious culture of entitlement. And that can only be a good thing.

Does Sleeping Beauty promote a dangerous message about sexual consent?