Natalie Portman is not just an A-list actress, she’s an outspoken advocate for human and animal rights, and most recently, a children’s book author. The Academy Award winner has authored Natalie Portman’s Fables, giving well-known children’s stories a gender equality do-over.
Illustrated by Janna Mattia, the new book features modern upgrades to the classic stories The Tortoise and the Hare, The Three Little Pigs, and Country Mouse and City Mouse.
The mother of two said the idea sparked when reading stories to her son and daughter. The stories they loved showed a discrepancy: the “boy” stories didn’t feature a feminist message while the stories for girls often did.
“I thought, ‘Why aren’t the boys getting exposed to this? It should be as much for them as for the girls,’” Portman told Canadian culture magazine q. “Then it started becoming clear to me that these kind of ‘normal’ books that I thought were just general population books had largely male characters. And I started changing the genders in those classic books so it would feel a little bit more like the real world.”
Portman also reviewed favorite stories of her youth and noticed a male-heavy narrative was pervasive there, too. She wanted to change that and help boys and girls to both empathize with how girls feel.
“What happens to both boys and girls, when they are mainly practicing getting into the male heart and mind, they’re not thinking about how females think and feel,” Portman said.
“If boys go through the world thinking how a girl might feel — ‘How might she react if I do this? How might she feel if I say this?’ — they’re practicing that train of thought, which girls are always socialized to do.”
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Portman says thinking about how our actions may impact others from a young age helps to develop empathy across a lifetime.
And empathy is important to Portman, not just when it comes to other humans, but all earthlings. In a 2018 video for animal rights organization PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), she paid tribute to the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer for using his platform to defend the rights of animals.
