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What if fairy tales provided food for thought? Readings of the Enlightenment as a movement of cultural hegemony are often based on a narrow view of philosophy, so much so that broadening the scope of the corpus makes their debunking even more difficult. To include fairy tales and their female authors highlights the reflection of the Enlightenment on the diversity and malleability of the human species: these fictions, which are to think with, participate within the line of reflective texts analysing such fundamental notions as the freedom to examine, or the refusal of any moral or religious authority. Reading La Belle et la Bête by Madame de Villeneuve in the light of Rousseau, Locke, Diderot and Voltaire offers a fresh look at what constitutes free and informed consent. Her tale encourages us to unpack the question of sexuality, the porosity of species and the hybridity of forms of political government. Just as philosophical tales in the 18th century offered fertile analogies for examining the world, fairy tales use allegories, symbols and spatio-temporal superimpositions as detours for assessing practical cases, reasoning through the absurd or by analogy. Villeneuve thus helps us to think differently about issues that are still relevant today, such as those of sexual consent.