Why is there a whole genre concerned with making fairy tales acceptable to women?

There are so many books like this out there, from The Mists of Avalon to Ella Enchanted.

In these books, it has been decided that the women will no longer be either villainesses or silly. And in doing so, it removes a great deal of narrative force and has the tendency to turn the men into patsies.

Take The Mists of Avalon. In it, Arthur is an easily led dimwit. Lancelot is a libidinous twerp (more so than usual--libidinous in multiple directions, and a really big twerp). And, in order to make the book plausibly from the point of view of Morgan LeFay (once one of literature's great witches), she is de-clawed and New-Age-ified and Guinevere is turned into a shrew. Guinevere has always been stupid, I will grant you. But she usually means fairly well. To recapitulate: the High King of Britain is a moron, his wife is both dumb and nasty, his best friend is jackass, and his nemesis is a well-meaning hippie. Huh?

Let's move on to Ella Enchanted, a Cinderella story, and Fairest, which is something approaching Snow White, and by the same author. In these, both young ladies are insecure about their beauty, and the Snow White is actually ugly. However, the princes concerned love them for other reasons (of course) and for a long time. This would wreak havoc on the Cinderella story, because you have to have a ball where they don't know each other, but this is accomplished by a series of balls at which the young lady wears masks, even though only one is actually a masquerade. I know what you're saying--the prince has known her for years, and they corresponded regularly, and yet he is not suspicious of the girl with the hair, figure, and bearing of his true love? What a nitwit. The Snow White one has to jump all sorts of inane hurdles that don't even make sense, and we are left to believe that the prince fell in love with her "grandeur." Which makes him a liar as well as an idiot, because that is total nonsense.

I pass over The Firebrand, or Troy as told by Cassandra, in which we are so progressive that Cassandra and Aeneas have an affair. Yes, that's right, the Aeneas, the one with pius tacked onto his name.

I can't understand the urge to add depth to these stories. They are fairy tales. Everyone in them is silly. We mourn for Camelot, not because we actually care, but because we have it in our cultural memory to do so. The stories are sweet, or they're not, and it is dangerous to invest too much in them. It is especially bad to make them crapulent in the name of some ideology. I liked Cinderella when both Cinderella and the prince were sort of silly and cute. When updating Cinderella means that Prince Charming is the dumbest thing on two legs, you can leave me out.