No Moral for "Little Red Riding Hood"

I found the discussion of Little Red Riding Hood from our textbook very interesting. The original version of the story was summed up in this simple moral: That girls and young ladies should be wary of men who come off as charming. But as the author of the chapter states, sometimes attempting to reduce a story to a single moral, theme, or a few cut-and-dried sentences takes away some of the power of the text. Morals, themes,
and the ability to identify them within the breadth of the text is certainly important, but one must remember that there is more to most texts than  moral and theme. Let's take Little Red Riding Hood as an example.
Despite the obvious moral, there are other things the reader can draw from the familar story. The author,
Charles Perrault, seems to be comdemning all men as villians preying on defenseless, innocent women.
Of course, the average reader will know that not all men are heartless predators bent on seducing and manipulating women. What's more, not all women will blindly fall into a deceitful man's clutches as Little
Red Riding Hood does. It can be very easy and very convenient to attach a moral or a theme to texts we
read, probably because it gives us an excuse to avoid thinking about the more difficult aspects of the texts.
It would be easy, for example, to say the moral of The Things They Carried is "war is terrible," but we can't
The breadth and enormity of the story is too great to simplify into a single trite statement that means nothing, particularly to someone who has been through a war. As readers we must view any text from various angles
and attempt to pull different things from it, even if the author meant for the text to convey a specific moral or theme.