THIS YEAR marks the three-hundredth birthday of Little Red Riding Hood, and these days she's a whole new girl, or make that grrl. Dominating the action with humor, bravado and libido more than equal to the wolf's, she's outgrown the fairy tale most of us have known by heart since nursery school. But the very fact that she can pull off a brassy punchline about oral sex is telling, given that Red began her literary life as part of a crusade to control female sexuality and ostracize sexual transgressors. This dark fairy tale -- wide open to bastardizations in a way that most fairy tales aren't -- seems particularly captivating to audiences today, the devotees of sordid tabloid scandal and psychotherapy.

Charles Perrault, a poet, essayist and member of the French Academy, first published Le Petit Chaperon Rouge in 1697 with the intent of subduing the female libido. Basing his story on a bawdy oral folk tale, Perrault purged all elements of the plot that would have shocked his well-powdered audience: gory violence, a reference to cannibalism, and a rather saucy strip tease in which Red removes her clothing item by item, probably enlivening hours of peasant story-telling. In their place, he admonished high-society women of the court of Louis XIV to remain chaste:

Little girls this seems to say Never stop upon your way; Never trust a stranger-friend; No one knows how it will end. As you're pretty so be wise; Wolves may lurk in every guise. Handsome they may be and kind, Gay and charming -- nevermind! Now as then 'tis simple truth; Sweetest tongue has sharpest-tooth!

Perrault published Little Red Riding Hood along with seven other fairy tales -- Cinderella, Puss-In-Boots, Blue Beard, Ricky of the Tuft, The Fairy, Sleeping Beauty, and Hop O' My Thumb -- in a collection of "Tales With Morals" that leave a durable blueprint of the ideal seventeenth century lady. Red Riding Hood illustrates the case for chastity. Cinderella is beautiful, obedient and patient. Sleeping Beauty is even more accommodating: she waits 100 years for her Prince to awaken her. The heroines move through unmemorable male foils who often appear to be one and the same from tale to tale, and who serve as metaphors for punishment (misbehave and you'll meet an ogre, a wolf or some other beast) and reward (a prince in the end -- if you're good!).

Little did Perrault know that while the rest of his life's work would fade into the oblivion of dusty volumes and forgotten shelves, his fairy tales, which he recorded in the final years of his life, would become some of the most important and beloved written stories of all time, the foundation for Western children's moral education. Anxious not to destroy his reputation as a serious intellectual, he attributed the fairy tales to his teenage son Pierre Perrault d'Armancour and for added insurance called them "Tales of My Mother Goose."

As Red Riding Hood aged, her tale absorbed new, timely morals: she must be obedient, incurious and, in an age where women were seen as children, she needed a man to save her from her follies. In 1812 the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm penned the German version of the tale that most people know today, inventing the fatherly woodsman who rescues Red from the beast's belly. With "Victorian" prudishness, the Grimms stripped the tale of all erotic suggestion, but their PG-rated version is still rife with suggestive peculiarities left over from lives past. Why does Red invite the beast to Granny's house? And how can she possibly mistake his hairy snout for Granny?

By the 1990s Little Red Riding Hood, once a lesson in chastity, was tutoring in sexual techniques. Today a porn star stage-named Red Riding Hood offers S&M instruction in the video store, or is punished for your pleasure on an Internet bondage page. By contrast, the erstwhile macho wolf has come to question his virility. A 1989 Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson has our villain on a psychiatrist's couch. "You know," he says, "it was supposed to be just a story about a little kid and a wolf, but off and on I've been dressing up as a grandmother ever since."

Little Red Riding Hood is about archetypes -- good and evil, human and beast, male and female -- that we are constantly and collectively updating, reconfiguring. What's most interesting about Red is that 300 years after her royal debut she's still riding the cutting edge of the moral forest, tracing those ideas about women which western society seeks to shore up and those it seeks to hide. In traditional yarns she embodies the would-be chastity of the French courtesan, or the presumed naivete of the Victorian lady. But now there is a righteous equal-opportunity Red who defies the original date rape, eats the wolf and trades in her hood for a wolfskin coat. There is Red who teaches women's self defense classes and patrols the woods with a six-shooter in her knickers, a virtual Take-Back-The-Night poster girl. And there is also the Red who delivers a deft one-liner about cunnilingus and in a flash obviates the centuries-old need for either seducer or savior.

Of course, where there's movement, there's backlash. One version of the story circulating on the Internet takes its cue from the Bill Clinton-Paula Jones snafu. Enter the woodchopper in medias res, who gangs up with the wolf to dispatch Red Riding Hood and then complains that the high-maintenance heroine has given him a bit of a headache. "I feel your pain," says the wolf, and gives a little belch. "Do you have any Maalox?"