She Wanted More

Greedy. Grasping. Never satisfied - funny, we never say that about him.

Which woman out there doesn’t want a better life?
No matter how you define better.

And just as in real life, there is a woman in today’s story who wants a better life. A real house instead of a filthy shack. Then security. Then power. Then the top job. And every time she reaches higher, the story tightens its jaw a little more, until finally it slaps her all the way back down to the pigsty to teach her a lesson.

You know her crime??

She wanted more.

Thats it. That is the whole sin. And we have been telling little kids this story for two hundred years so they learn it early:

A woman who wants is a woman who deserves to lose everything.

Meanwhile her husband, who wanted nothing, who sat in the filth perfectly content, who rode every single one of her wishes straight to a castle and ate like a king off her ambition?
He is the good one. He is the humble one. Bless him.

So, as always, let me show you how this con works.

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⚠️ Trigger Warning ⚠️

This essay discusses gendered double standards, the “greedy woman” trope, and the unequal labour of marriage.
If you have been called too ambitious, too demanding, or “never satisfied” for wanting a fuller life, and this might be triggering, please read with care.

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The story is called The Fisherman and His Wife.
Grimm.
In the original she has a name, Ilsebill, which is more than the fish or the husband get, so keep that in mind.

A poor fisherman lives with his wife Ilsebill in a run down shack, a hovel. In the oldest versions it’s not even a hovel. Its a pot. A pisspot. That is how far down they are starting.

He catches a flounder. The flounder says he is an enchanted prince, begs for his life, and the fisherman lets him go. Comes home with nothing. Tells his wife.

And she says the thing that damns her for the rest of literary history: you had a wish-granting fish in your hands and you asked for nothing?

So she sends him back. Ask for a cottage. Just a little cottage, because living in a pisspot is, you know, not great.

The fish grants it. Cosy cottage. Lovely.

But she is not done. And this is where the story wants you to start clutching your pearls.

Send him back, she says. A cottage is fine but we could have a stone castle. So he goes. Storm is picking up on the sea now, the water has gone grey. The fish grants it. Castle.

Next, I want to be king. He goes. The fish grants it. She’s on a throne with a golden crown. After that? King isn’t enough, I want to be emperor. Granted.
And the emperor isn’t enough, I want to be pope. Granted.

And finally she looks at the sun rising and the moon setting and she says I want to be like God. I want to command the sun and the moon themselves.

And THAT is where the fish says no. The sea goes black, the waves come in like church-towers, and the fisherman goes home to find the castle gone, the crown gone, all of it gone. His wife sitting back in the pisspot where she started.

And there they stay. Forever. The end. Sleep tight, my children. (What a great story to fall asleep to. No?)

Now.. what does nobody points out about that list of wishes?

She is not asking for piles of jewels. She is not asking for cake and pretty dresses and a younger husband. Look at what she actually wants.

King. Emperor. Pope.

Those aren’t greed. Those are JOBS. Those are the three highest seats of power in the entire medieval world. And every single one of them was, by law and by custom, closed to women. A woman could not be king. Could not be emperor. Could not be pope. The doors weren’t just hard to open. They were bricked shut.

So this woman, stuck in a pisspot, with a brain full of ambition and absolutely nowhere to put it, reaches for the only seats that mean anything. The ones she was forbidden to ever sit in.

And the story calls that greed.

It’s not greed. It’s a woman wanting the actual positions of power, and living in a world that built those positions with no chair for her. Of course she has to wish for it through a magic fish. There was no other route. No woman was getting to be pope on merit.

One of the oldest readings of this tale actually says it out loud, almost gleeful: “She wants to be king and pope, men’s jobs, the nerve of her. The nerve.”

Yes. There it is. The nerve of a woman to want a man’s chair.

And the problem I see? She never speaks to the fish. Not once. She can’t. The power, the access, the magic, all of it runs through her husband. He is the one who walks to the sea. He is the one who calls the flounder. He is the one with the relationship to the thing that grants wishes.

She has the ambition. He has the access. And the two never live in the same body.

So every single thing she wants has to be carried, reluctantly, by a man who disapproves of her wanting it. She’s not even allowed to make her own request to the universe. She has to send a sulking middleman who sighs the whole way there.

If that doesn’t feel familiar, I don’t know what to tell you. Women have spent centuries with the ideas, the drive, the vision, and no direct line to the power. Just a man you have to convince to carry it for you, who’ll take his sweet time and remind you he didn’t want to.

And the part that turns my stomach?

Watch who actually fucking benefits from every wish.

She does the wanting. She does the pushing. She does the reaching. And then the cottage appears, and HE lives in it. The castle appears, and HE lives in it. Lounging around the palace he did nothing to earn, eating off the throne her ambition built.

He contributes one thing to this entire operation: complaint. He drags his feet, he whines that the fish will be angry, he tells her she should be satisfied. And then he moves into every upgrade she manifests and enjoys all of it. (He could have said no? Right?)

The man who wanted nothing gets everything. Carried to the top on the back of a woman’s drive, grumbling the whole way up, and the story pats him on the head for being so humble and content.

He is not humble?? Are you kidding me? He is a passenger.

And when it all comes crashing down, when she reaches one inch too high, they BOTH go back to the pisspot. He gets punished for a climb he enjoyed every minute of and lifted not one finger to build. But somehow the lesson isn’t “look at this freeloader.” The lesson is “look what happens when SHE wants things.”

This is the oldest trick in the book and we are still falling for it.

A man who wants more is ambitious. Driven. Hungry. A visionary. A go-getter. We write magazine covers about him.

A woman who wants more?? Ohhh no the audacity! She is greedy. Grasping. Cold. Ruthless. Never satisfied. A ball-buster. Too much.

The same exact desire. She wants the corner office, he wants the corner office. He is a shark. She is a bitch. And we have built an entire vocabulary to keep her in the cottage and out of the castle.

We even named the slur after her. A “fishwife” is a coarse, loud, nagging, grasping woman. I am not kidding:

A shrew with a fish basket. This story is part of how that word came to mean what it means. A woman who wants and says so out loud became an insult you could throw at any woman who wanted and said so out loud.

The research backs every bit of this, by the way.

Women who negotiate their salaries get penalised for it, marked as pushy and less likeable, in study after study, in ways men asking for the exact same raise simply are not. The ambition doesn’t read as ambition on a woman. It reads as her being difficult.

She wanted a throne. We called her a fishwife and sent her back to the pisspot instead.

And the deepest cut of all, the one this story has been hiding the whole time..

Who is this marriage actually for?

She is the engine. The drive, the vision, the wanting, the pushing him to go back, to ask for more, to reach higher, all of it is her. He brings nothing but his proximity to the fish and a long-suffering sigh. And he reaps the cottage, the castle, the crown, the full belly, the soft bed.

That is not just a fairy tale. That is the data.

We now know, fairly clearly, that marriage is a far better deal for men than for women. Married men live longer, get healthier, get richer, report being happier. They do better than single men by almost every measure. Married women, compared to their single counterparts, often do worse. One researcher who’s looked hard at the wellbeing numbers landed on a line that made a lot of people furious: the healthiest, happiest demographic is the woman who never married and never had children.

Because in so many marriages, she is the flounder-caller. She is the one managing the household, the calendar, the kids, the feelings, the in-laws. She is the one nudging him to see the doctor, apply for the better job, call his mother, be better, do more. She supplies the ambition for two. He benefits. He lives longer. He is happier.

And she gets the mental load, the second shift, and a decent chance of spending her last years caring for him before she’s finally, exhaustedly, alone.

She does the wanting. He does the moving in.

It’s the whole story. We just dressed it up with a magic fish so it would go down easy.

Wanting more is NOT a sin!

Wanting the cottage is not the limit of what you are allowed. Want the castle. Want the throne. Want the seat they told you wasn’t built for you, and want it out loud, in your own voice, without a sulking middleman to carry the message and remind you he didn’t approve.

You are allowed to be the one who wants. You are allowed to be ambitious and call it ambition, not apologise for it as if it were a character flaw.

And when someone calls you greedy, grasping, too much, never satisfied, hear what they are actually saying. They are saying you reached above the chair they picked out for you!

Reach anyway.

And the lie? The part the story really doesn’t want you to notice? The woman ends up alone in the pisspot, having lost the passive man and the borrowed castle both. The story means that as her punishment.

I’m not so sure.

A woman by herself, who knows exactly how much she wants and isn’t spending one more drop of it dragging a man who’ll enjoy the castle and still call her a fishwife?

That might not be the punishment afterall.
That might be the only free woman in the whole tale.

Until next Friday,

Want it out loud. Want the throne, not the cottage.
And stop spending your ambition on people who’ll just move in.

– Jen

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Side note, I found this image in Pinterest:

What a queen!

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!! If You Need Support !!

If this piece stirred something, if you have been made to feel greedy for wanting a fuller life, or you are carrying a marriage/relationship that takes more than it gives, please know you are not alone.

Crisis & Emotional Support

• Crisis Text Line (US/UK/CA): Text HOME to 741741

• Samaritans (UK): Call 116 123

• Mind (UK): https://www.mind.org.uk

• NAMI (US): https://www.nami.org

• Lifeline (Australia): Call 13 11 14

Survivors of Sexual & Domestic Abuse

• RAINN (US): 1-800-656-HOPE (4673)

• National Domestic Violence Hotline (US): 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)

• Refuge (UK): 0808 2000 247

• Women’s Aid (UK): https://www.womensaid.org.uk

Therapy Resources

• Therapy for Black Girls: https://therapyforblackgirls.com

• Inclusive Therapists: https://www.inclusivetherapists.com

Your ambition is not greed. Your wanting is not a flaw. The chair they told you wasn’t built for you was built to keep you out. Reach anyway. Or build the chair and table yourself!