Patriarchs are characterized in tales and legends as old and powerful men like the Old Testament God; Zeus, the King of the gods; Bluebeard, the wife killer; and the sadistic Marquis. There are no powerful patriarchal figures in any versions of "Little Red Riding Hood," or in "The History" or "The Women Men Don't see." Lulwa’s father and Don Fenton are ineffectual, both beset by circumstances they can’t control. Each story contains the pattern of predator versus prey, though the categories get increasingly fuzzy as we enter the contemporary world.
Little Red Riding Hood
There are many versions of “Little Red-Riding Hood” (Like several of our other female protagonists, Little Red doesn't seem to have a name –- she is called instead by the name of her cloak). In some versions, including Perrault’s, she is eaten by the wolf; others end more happily with her rescue by a handsome huntsman, or, my personal favorite, by a group of women who help send the wolf to an unhappy end. The story has often been analyzed as a kind of “coming of age” story –- the red cloak a symbol of the onset of menstruation and the wolf a sexual predator, not a literal hungry animal. (Wolves have a lot of undeserved bad press, but that’s another story.) Little Red’s being devoured by the wolf, then, is a story of sexual initiation, symbolically the death of innocence.
Perrault turns this rich, multi-faceted legend into a simple morality tale cautioning young ladies to stay away from all men, even those who seem benign, for the wolf can disguise his bestial nature and appear charming, but once you’re alone with him and he has the advantage, watch out! Perrault does not mean that the wolfish young men will rape and kill the ladies. The moral he attaches to the tale warns not of rape and murder, but seduction.
Angela Carter, author of "The Bloody Chamber," also wrote a version of “Little Red Riding Hood” which is called “The Company of Wolves.” 
While the less gruesome versions of the older tale in adding the figure of the woodsman split the generic lusty young man into two selves, bad guy and good guy, wolf and savior, Carter combines these two figures into one, making the huntsman a werewolf. (Wikipedia will even tell you how to become a werewolf if this is your desire).
In Carter’s version, Little Red is more enlightened than her predecessors. When the werewolf tells her his big teeth are “the better to eat you with,” she “burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody's meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing.” Her lust, as it turns out, is fiercer than his own (which would have been a surprise to Dr. Acton, the nineteenth century physician who reassured nervous young bridegrooms that women lacked sexual feelings). The story ends with her alive and asleep in his tender, loving, and thoroughly tamed arms.
In terms of women’s literature, an important dichotomy in all versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" is once again the opposition between inside and outside, enclosure and freedom. But something more has been added: the dark forest as opposed to the civilized town Little Red comes from. Once she ventures outside of the town into the forest, she is in the greatest danger, not outside in the forest, but inside, trapped in her grandmother's house.
“The History” by Patricia Sarafian Ward
In this story there is no dark forest and no young woman walking a dangerous boundary between civilization and wilderness. The forest is replaced by war-torn Lebanon. War, the ultimate in patriarchy, where groups of men and women kill each other because their leaders tell them to. Lara and Lulwa have lived with war for years, and it has taken its toll on them and their father. The story is narrated in the first person by the older daughter, Lara. She has been as psychologically damaged by the war as her sister Lulwa is physically maimed, but is aware of the complexities of her feelings.
Sayyid
Sayyid is not as self-aware as his oldest daughter. Without any male feelings of effectiveness, he is powerless to stop events. His characterization of his daughters as they grow up sees neither one whole – one becomes the angel in the house who must be protected at all cost; the other is the whore to be beaten and accused of betrayal, the bad child who is demonized, somehow responsible for her sister’s maiming, for the sexuality that enters the house with Raymond, and ultimately for Raymond’s death. Sayyid is fond of Raymond who is the son he has never had: “Raymond was my father's joy, the boy-man who bore our name.” A failed patriarch obsessed by his eldest daughter's sexuality is trying to bring order back to his shattered world by finding someone to blame for a random act: “he thinks that plans like this can be made, that we can govern fate, pay fate to do what we desire.”
Men and Women’s Worlds
In this story the gulf between men and women’s worlds is as pronounced as in any work we have read. Men understand the world; women’s sphere is the home and their stories are not important: "my father made his speeches about poverty and refugees and nationalism, omitting the most important truths, those about himself and his crazy daughter Lara, the one who when she was fifteen had bitten the flesh from her own arm to prove a point." Lara’s father treats her "like an animal in the confines of this house.” But the outside is no better. She does not want to drive around the city with her father and Raymond: “I could not imagine being confined to the back seat while my father explained the world to Raymond.”
Raymond, Lulwa, and Lara
Raymond is a young man, only seventeen, raised in peaceful circumstances and hungry for adventure. He romanticizes the fourteen-year-old Lulwa, seeing her as glamorous because of what she has experienced: “From the moment he arrived, Raymond just could not stop looking at Lulwa's scars. He fell in love with those scars." He wants to participate in the romantic life not of a soldier, notice, but of a journalist, someone who reports on wars and indeed is sometimes in danger, but from a safer vantage point than the soldiers roaming the city. He also wants to hear the exciting personal stories of survivors, his two cousins: what were they thinking as the terrible events unfolded?
Lara refers to the history of Lulwa’s maiming several times, once telling Raymond part of the story to satisfy his curiosity: “It's an old story. It happened when I was fifteen and she was nine, on the way home from the grocery. Lulwa might have died: no one would drag her off the street out of the fighting, it was too dangerous.” As if to distance herself from the emotional aspects of the story which she omitted for Raymond, she retells it in third person narration toward the end of her narrative: “Her sister Lara was immobilized by fear while Lulwa lay screaming on the asphalt. Blank spaces rested between these words, the story of her recovery. History would be incomplete in Raymond's notebook without the story of me on the floor of my bedroom praying to God, without the story of my father dragging me to Lulwa's room to apologize, and Lulwa crying, begging him to leave me alone, her bandages changed by the same hands that gripped my shoulders, held me in place at the foot of her bed.” Raymond, then, knows only the outline of the story, not the gruesome truth of Lara’s abusive mistreatment by her father: “Raymond's notebook was filled with writing about nothing of consequence, about pigeons and car rides, miserable little maimings that happen every day to anyone, the pathetic fears and mistakes common to every war."
That allusions to this story recur throughout the narrative is significant. Clearly it is not only Sayyid who is troubled by it but Lara herself. She wonders if she delayed responding to her sister out of unconscious jealousy—part of many sibling relationships: “...I had to bless her every minute to prevent my own jealousy from damaging her.” In a desperate attempt at atonement she tears the flesh from her own arm, a symbolic act no one understands except to brand her as "crazy."
Only three years older than Raymond, Lulwa is aware of his masculinity. “His hand brushed my hip and he said, ‘Cheer up,’ then he looked away. [....] He had just touched me, this seventeen-year old.” Even just before she abandons him at the Museum Crossing, this awareness persists: “He moved closer to me, smiled down, and then he bumped my hip with his, as if we were on a secret romantic outing. I wanted to put my arms around him.”
Seduction or Rape?
Though his death from a sniper’s bullet will not be officially blamed on Lara, it is significant that she left him to die the morning after she sees him and Lulwa in the midst of the sexual act. What kind of sexual encounter is this? Is Lara consenting? It is unclear. Her arms are only “loosely around his waist.” She is not clutching him passionately. Her shoe bangs rhythmically on the floor. Lara notes that the next morning Lulwa is uncommunicative and crying as she peels an onion, tears Lara feels are not due to the onion. Lara concludes, perhaps wrongly, that Lulwa “could not have wanted it.”
Meanwhile the city has been waiting "for the invaders to break their promises, cross the limit they drew themselves.” On the same night that Lara finds Raymond and Lulwa having sex, the invaders reach the city. To Lara both Lulwa and the city have been invaded. The next morning Lara offers to take Raymond to the dangerous museum zone, where she leaves him to his fate.
Is Lara coming to the aid of her innocent sister, revenging herself on Raymond for Lulwa's loss of innocence? Is Lara the huntsman or the wolf or both? Is Ray a male version of Red Riding Hood, the innocent adolescent who doesn’t understand the realities of war? Or is he a predator? Or is he both victim and victimizer?
The answers are not clear-cut. The story seeks to mirror life itself instead of providing neat tidy solutions or moralistic lessons. It is not comforting. It implies that if you are to survive emotionally, you must take matters into your own hands. Send the predatory foreign invader into the heart of the war that interests him and has ruined you, where the snipers will get him; even if you will endure your father’s wrath forever, at least you have ventured out of your confinement and finally done something.
James Tiptree, Jr., "The Women Men Don't See
For years, Alice Sheldon hid her identity behind two pseudonyms, Racoona (raccoons have masks) Sheldon and James Tiptree, Jr. Both won prestigious awards for their stories. The Science Fiction community was shocked when it was revealed that Tiptree was female. By adopting the persona of a tough guy narrator in "The Women Men Don't See," Sheldon is able to parody male attitudes toward women.
Don Fenton
The narrator of this story is Don Fenton, who speaks in a confident male voice and is dismissive of the two women he meets whom he calls a “double female blur.“ They are not attractive enough for him to notice, and they do not seek any attention from him. This comes to bother him. The women constantly disappoint his expectations: When the weather turns rough aboard the plane, “I look back with a vague notion of reassuring the women. They are calmly intent on what can be seen of Yucatán.” They are equally calm and practical as the plane goes down, and quick to congratulate the captain on his crash landing: "’Oh, yes! It was beautiful.’ The women are shaky, but no hysteria.”
Marooned with them and their Mayan pilot Captain Estéban in an uninhabitable swamp in Bahia Espiritu Santo, Don proves incapable of going beyond his maleness and seeing the two women as people , making incorrect guesses based on his stereotypes. “I have Mrs. Parsons figured now; Mother Hen protecting only chick from male predators.“ He can't see the situation as it is and can only interpret it by imposing well-worn cliches.
He longs to assert his traditional dual male role as both huntsman and predator: “Out of sheer reflex my arm goes around my companion's shoulder — but Mrs. Parsons isn't there; she's up on her knees peering at the burnt-over plain around us.” Then when he spends the night in proximity with her, his male urges take over. She is adept at evading him: “Mrs. Ruth Parsons has judged things to a nicety. If I were twenty years younger, she wouldn't be here. [....] Mrs. Parsons knows her little shorts are safe. " His tough guy attitude toward sexual conquest is belied by his acknowledgment that he cannot perform sexually. Instead he satisfies himself with prurient meditations on Ruth Parson's "firmly filled little shorts, so close" and "Captain's Estéban's copper buttocks pumping into Althea's creamy upturned bottom."
Ruth and Althea
As he and Ruth are temporarily stranded together on their search for water, he learns that Ruth and Althea Parsons are decidedly unconventional, women who do not need men. Ruth gave birth to her child without the father knowing and says she in turn "grew up quite happily under the same circumstances." Althea seems willing to continue the tradition. Their way of life is threatening to Don. Casting about for reassurances, he accuses her of hating men or of suffering from the trauma of rejection: but Miss Parsons tells him: “’Oh, there wasn't any trauma, Don, and I don't hate men. That would be as silly as —- as hating the weather.’ She glances wryly at the blowing rain.”
Her independence is not enough. As free as she is, she still lives in a world controlled by men: "Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world.“
She tells him further that "[w]hat women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.” Not able to qualify in Don’s world as a human being, she compares herself and her kind to small secretive animals: "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City." The women men don’t see live out of their sight, hidden even in the middle of their greatest cities.
Carrying on a matriarchal family tradition, it is possible that Ruth and her daughter have matter-of-factly sized up the Captain as good sperm donor material: “Just as I am about to suggest that Mrs. Parsons might care to share my rain shelter, she remarks serenely, ‘The Mayas seem to be a very fine type of people. I believe you said so to Althea.’ " Don is shocked: “The implications fall on me with the rain. Type. As in breeding, bloodline, sire. Am I supposed to have certified Estéban not only as a stud but as a genetic donor?” It is implied here that the decision has been made. Esteban will be the father of Althea’s child.
The Aliens
A standard image from the Science Fiction genre now intrudes on the situation – the extraterrestrial alien, used often by sf writers to symbolize the monster in us all. Here the alien is simply, as in much Science Fiction written by women, the Other. After she sees the bright light, hears the metallic twitters and the little voice saying "Eh-ep," Ruth’s behavior changes. She is nervous, waiting. This leads Don –- and perhaps even the reader -- to indulge in all sorts of fantasies: She is a government agent or a courier for a guerrilla organization. Neither of these things is true.
Like Lara in “The History,” Ruth is tired of "All the endless wars [....]All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—-" Don realizes later that in the incident of the bright light, Ruth found a device lost by the aliens and made her plans to escape. When the aliens return in search of their machine, Don sees that they are not the guerillas of his imagination. They aren’t human, and Ruth did not plan this meeting: “I look where their faces should be and see black hollow dishes with vertical stripes. The stripes move slowly....And Ruth—Jesus, of course—Ruth is terrified too; she's edging along the bank away from them, gaping at the monsters in the skiff, who are obviously nobody's friends.”
But once again he is wrong. Ruth’s terror is momentary. The “monsters” aren’t friendless. Don wants again for Ruth to play the standard female role: “Why doesn't she get over the bank and circle back behind me?” He is willing to be the guy with the gun on the cover of a pulp magazine, defending the helpless woman from the alien monsters, but in the confusion, aiming his gun at the alien, ironically, he shoots Ruth instead, for as he observes later “[s]he's as alien as they, there in the twilight.”
Even when the aliens have returned them to their downed plane, he cannot abandon trying to play his authoritarian warrior role: “The alien device is twinkling or phosphorescing slightly. I lean over to look, whispering, ‘Give that to me, I'll pass it to Estéban.’" Believing a different ethic, Ruth refuses to play his game because "[i]t's theirs, they need it!.[....]They haven't hurt us. I'm sure they could.[....] I think they're gentle."
In this story, it is Don, the aging macho tough guy, who is the would-be combination of huntsman and wolf. But he cannot win his objectives either in love or war: he fails to bed Ruth, his attempt to shoot the alien misfires. Hopelessly stuck with his male ego, he doesn’t know anything else to do but shoot. Captain Estéban, from the older and perhaps wiser Mayan culture, on the other hand, probably did better, as attested to by the moved hammock – but he is not the wolf either. If he succeeded in bedding Althea, it was with her willing cooperation for her own purposes.
Men and Women's Worlds
Needless to say, these women are not confined. It is Don who ends the story getting drunk inside a bar while Althea and Ruth explore the universe. Remembering Ruth’s words, Don can only judge her as deranged: “We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine....I'm used to aliens [...] She'd meant every word. Insane. How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say good-bye to her home, her world?” He doesn’t realize that he and his kind are the monsters and that she and her daughter are happy to leave such a world; at the end to him they are even less than human: “two of our opossums are missing.”