Fairy Tales and Their Effects on People Essay Example

Having survived for ages and been in our lives ever since the day people began talking, fairy tales, according to Wikipedia, “…a fictional story that usually features folkloric characters (such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, witches, giants and talking animals) and enchantments, often involving a far-fetched sequence of events… ”, are common encountered joys for children in life and the target of fairy tales is mostly young children, but when these fairy tales are told to them, are the influences of these questioned? There are researches on the effects of fairy tales and there are also articles. One of them is “ The Pervasiveness and Persistence of Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairy Tales” by Lori Baker-Sperry, an assistant professor of women’s studies at Western Illinois University, and Liz Grauerholz, an associate professor of sociology at Purdue University. This article demonstrates the idealization of feminine beauty in fairy tales and explores in which ways feminine beauty is emphasized. It also explores surviving fairy tales to figure out the cause of their popularity. The study shows that emphasizing feminine beauty has a major role on the survival of these fairy tales. This article also interprets findings with the women’s social status over the past 150 years. The other article is “The Effect of Classic Fairy Tales on Readers and Society” by Kenny Fong, a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. This article is also reveals the effects of fairy tales by giving examples from them. There are millions of fairy tales such as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, The Frog King, so on, and most of them emphasize feminine beauty in a way conditioning people to have prejudice that the beautiful are always good whereas ugly people are bad. Fairy tales also give certain roles to genders in some ways. The other concept about the effects of fairy tales is false expectations people have such as being just