Skip to content
Home » The Snow White Disney Doesn’t Want You To Know: Dr. Jordan Peterson (Transcript)

The Snow White Disney Doesn’t Want You To Know: Dr. Jordan Peterson (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s psychological and cultural analysis of the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White, using it as a lens to explore evolutionary biology, female status hierarchies, fertility suppression, and the pathology of the “evil queen” archetype. This episode was filmed on June 24th, 2025.

Introduction: A New Approach to Fairy Tale Analysis

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: I’m going to try something somewhat new today. I’m going to read you the Grimm’s brothers version of Snow White. I picked that because I think I have some interesting insights into its meaning. But I also chose it because it’s been the target of ideologically oriented rewriting, most famously recently in the case of Disney, who produced what’s essentially a very poor movie that was also a commercial flop, by carelessly restructuring a story that either the makers of the film didn’t understand or understood all too well and decided to mess with for underground reasons of their own. I suspect a little of column A and a little of column B.

I’m going to concentrate a fair bit on the figure of the evil queen, not least because there’s no shortage of evil queen manifestation in the current social and political environment. And I’m going to draw on a body of research that has been conducted primarily by primatologists, scientists who study nonhuman primates, given that human beings are primates as well.

The Science of Fertility Suppression

The field of inquiry is called fertility suppression, and it is the marked tendency of higher status female primates to suppress the probability that subordinates in their group will successfully mate and bring offspring into the world. I think that the evil queen in no small part is a reflection of observations of fertility suppression. People started studying fertility suppression in primates because of the observation that in many primate species, dominant females exhibit higher reproductive success compared to their subordinate counterparts.

So one thing you have to understand about social animals, and this is particularly true of primates because they’re hyper social, social animals live in a tiered society. And there are marked differences in the life and success of those who are uppermost in the social hierarchy compared to those who are barely clinging to the bottom, let’s say.

And scientists who are interested in the differential reproductive success of high status females compared to low status females started to investigate the possibility that the higher status or dominant females were actively engaging in strategies that undermined the ability of the subordinates to find a mate and to reproduce. Why would they do that? Well, perhaps they do that psychologically speaking, you might say, just for the sheer sadistic fun of it.

But from a broader evolutionary perspective, the purpose is to maximize the probability of their own reproductive success, their own success of finding a mate, and also leaving their genes to propagate into the succeeding generations.

Mechanisms of Fertility Suppression

How would they do that? The mechanism of fundamental interest for our purposes, given its psychological significance, is that social stress often imposed by dominant individuals can elevate stress hormones, cortisol, for example, in subordinates disrupting their hormonal cycles and leading to delayed ovulation or reduced fertility. Females use reputation savaging and exclusion, gossip, innuendo, and well and and as I said, social isolation. And those are all ways of lowering comparative status.

That’s what gossip will do, for example, and reputation savaging, whereas exclusion is more directly and intensely stressful. So here’s some examples from nonhuman primates with regard to mechanisms of fertility suppression.

For example, in baboons, a particularly aggressive and vicious species, dominant females may physically intimidate subordinates to maintain their reproductive advantage. In species such as marmosets, dominant females actually emit pheromones that directly inhibit ovarian activity in subordinate females, preventing them from cycling or conceiving. By monopolizing food, mates or safe nesting sites, dominant females limit subordinates ability to sustain pregnancies or raise offspring as seen in some tamarind groups.

The suppression is often temporary and context dependent lifting if the subordinate status improves or she leaves the group. The goal is clear to prioritize the dominant female’s offspring by reducing competition for resources and care.

Human Examples of Fertility Suppression

Okay. Here’s some potential examples among human beings. In certain human societies, dominant females, often older women or those with higher social status exert influence over the reproductive choice of subordinates. Examples include control over marriage.

In some cultures, older women, e.g. mothers in law, dictate when and whom younger women marry, delaying or restricting their reproductive opportunities. Dominant women may enforce norms that discourage subordinate females from reproducing at certain times, such as stigmatizing early pregnancies or pressuring women to prioritize education or work over family. This social exclusion parallels the stress induced suppression seen in primates, though it’s mediated by culture rather than biology.

In modern contexts, dominant females in positions of power such as corporate leaders or senior academics may create environments that indirectly suppress the fertility of subordinate women. So here’s a thought.

You know, one of the things I’ve wondered about for years, how the radical progressive elite feminists can simultaneously criticize capitalism yet insist that there’s no higher priority for young women than to organize their lives around a career. Well, if you want an explanation, fertility suppression by elites with regard to subordinate women foolish enough to listen to such advice certainly constitutes a explanatory hypothesis, and it’s a brutal one.

The Brothers Grimm: Cultural Preservation Through Narrative

Now with that background firmly in mind, I’m going to read you the original version of Snow White. So a little background on the Brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm, they lived Jacob lived from 1785 to 1863 and Wilhelm from 1786 to 1859.

They were German scholars and linguists renowned for their collection of fairy tales. Their most famous work, children’s and household tales was first published in 1812, and it included stories that everyone knows such as Cinderella, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel. The collection was not a one time effort.