Summary Of Fat Is Not A Fairytale By Jane Yolen

In today’s media, being skinny has always been the ideal beauty standard. This author fought against it by showing how being fat is pretty too. The poem “Fat is Not a Fairytale” by Jane Yolen talks about the acceptance of being fat and the media’s negative outlook on it. The poem describes the wish of wanting positive fat representation rather than anorexic, life threatening waists that are considered “pretty” to media’s standards.

A way Yolen shows she wants princesses to be fat is through making puns of their names by twisting them to be related to being overweight. For example, “Cinder Elephant, Sleeping Tubby, Snow Weight.”. She chose these words specifically to really emphasize she wants fat girls. By using words that refer to a very large person, she shows that she doesn’t accept even slight chubbiness to be considered “fat”. Yolen chose princesses specifically because it’s by social standards that princesses are always pretty. They’re shown to children as icons of beauty and if a princess were fat, it could influence children at an early age to accept fat as a beauty standard and lessen fat shaming. If the prettiest girls are fat, it would be normalized and fat people could love themselves because they’re seen as pretty.

This is a reference to media’s beauty standards, which are actually unrealistic and unachievable to a normal human without looking bony or dying. An example of this is Barbie, which has unrealistic proportions of skinny standards that people had to get surgery to achieve and could not be achieved normally. Yolen could’ve just said skinny, but she wants to put into light the fact that girls on the media are shown with an impractical beauty standards that literally uses photoshop to alter and not anything pure and natural to