gingerturd leftovers

As a writer keenly concerned with feminist issues, righting the wrongs of patriarchy is never far from my mind. When i take on a project like revising (or reimagining) classic fairy tales, the awareness of how steeped in chauvinism all our myths are, can be daunting. I don't want to overreach for the sake of polemics...sacrifice entertainment for the sake of enlightenment...but at what point should you just throw the baby out with the bathwater? Is it stupid to even try to improve inherently flawed product? Do you compromise too much by retaining the skeleton of the old structures, in the hopes reaching more people? It's a tricky line to walk.
What do you do with a canon of literature in which old or ugly women are virtually invisible, except when used to personify evil? How do you make women a vital force, without making them copies of brutal, amoral males? How do you turn a man's world into a human world, without coming off as a man-hater?
One method is gender-swapping - take some iconic or heroic character, and make him a her. I considered doing so with both "the gingerbread man" and "the man who laid the golden turd". Enough male protagonists! But...the rhyme scheme of the well-known "run run, as fast as you can" refrain just doesn't work with "gingerbread woman". Plus, the traditional ginger demise at the hands of a fox was easily translatable into a "foxy lady" - and would have felt forced the other way around. Still, did i pass up on a chance to make a strong point about how our society abandons single mothers? In "gingerbread woman", that would have been the straw that leads to her suicide. Would it have been more off-puttingly depressing for a gingerbread woman to kill herself?
Similarly, i considered "the woman who laid the golden turd"...but even though some of us may admire (or just envy) the male lead character i went with, there is an inescapably sleazy quality in the way he hoodwinks the town. It felt more appropriate to give that sleaze to a male. I originally made the metallurgist a male too, but realized that that might make the women seem like nothing more than a subservient harem to a male power structure. With a female metallurgist, i tried to imply that all these women might be quite content with their lives, and were nobody's slaves. In doing so, i chanced having a woman of authority too closely associated with male sleaze, but it seemed worth the risk.
I've come up against these choices in the past. On one occasion, it was such a close call that i wrote two versions - "goldilocks" and "goldilad". I thought goldilad was worth a try, because of all those female bonobos acting so sensibly sexy...and in any kind of traditional telling of goldilocks, the female lead (yay!) is rather passive and mealy (aww).
But "goldilad" didn't work quite as well as its big sister, right? Just not as entertaining.
Ah well. Such fine lines we satirists walk. Perhaps my best work in this field happens the further away i wander from the original tales' skeletons.
And i think the same fate would have befallen "the woman who laid the golden turd". Some male objectification would have been a lovely "shoe on the other foot" touch, but the overall picture would lack sharpness. Don't agree? Okay, you asked for it...