I think it would still work with a boy, but it would have a different context. It would be more along the lines of "ha ha, aren't boys a handful? Wouldn't it be nice if they weren't, like our orange juice?" In that sense, it would be less about actually changing the child/juice container.

And I don't think the sexual meaning of "easy" would apply with a boy at all (though I'm sure someone will come along soon enough and write a comment about how sick you are for simply connecting the dots).

there is also something very specific about being conveyed about what exactly is "easy:" the girl with her back turned to the viewer suggests that she is easier to convince to engage in non-missionary (anal, or "kinky") sex than the other girl.

^^Um, riiiiiiiiight...

er...I hardly ever say a person is reading too much into anything, but...uh...benjamin, I think that's reading too much into it.

Leaving aside the pointed gender critique, I find it odd that they even chose the theme of "difficult / easy children" in the first place. I understand the relationship to parenting, but still, it's a little strange to equate people with useful objects.

A. What, exactly, is "passive" about the smile? Do you simply call any smile by a female "passive" because it serves your point, or is there actually any way of telling passive from active(?) smiling?

B. As a father to a boy, the ad will totally work with a boy, and I disagree with the first comment. Kids are kids, and girls are no less a handful than boys.

C. It is CLEAR to me that the whole cumbersome "to handle" thing was specifically added to avoid the sexual interpretation of "easy", because, for crying out loud, this is a little girl. If they wanted sexual innuendo, it would've been much easier to simply say "hard" (or "difficult") and "easy". They clearly wanted to avoid that.
You can read sexual innuendo into many of the common words in English (Hard! As in penis!), that doesn't mean whenever somebody uses such a word, the sexual meaning is what they're hinting at.

D. One wonders if Benjamin's comment is a parody or not. That this question presents itself, I'm afraid, speaks volumes on the problems of the critique often offered here.

"Easier to handle" because THERE'S A GODDAMNED HANDLE ON THE CONTAINER.

Why do people talk about kids being "handfuls"? Because they like to grope women! Duh!

There's a sickening coyness about the flower-holding girl that reminds me of the 70s ads wherein the product is supposed to make the mom as "innocently sexy" as the daughter.

"Hard to handle" when applied to a male means "sexually overwhelming"--for example, the Otis Redding song covered by the Black Crowes.

The tough-looking little girl in black looks like she's pissed off about something and she's not backing down. Lots of people find that to be troubling behavior in a little girl, and want to "handle it" in very negative ways. In this case, applied to females, it means "not easily controlled, therefore liable to make a big mess that nobody wants to clean up or deal with" versus "easily controlled (and with a Mona Lisa smile to boot), therefore likely to walk the straight-and-narrow and do exactly what's expected, no more no less."

The sexualization? Well, that over-the-shoulder gaze is a come-hither pose. It just is.

the girl on the right doesn't really look any less hard to handle. the girl on the left looks maybe bossy/winey, but the girl on the right looks totally mischiveous. like she's walking away, but pulling the thread of your sweater.

i read way too much into things, but in this case i think it could be interpreted as sexist if there was a convincing argument that there is anything not-feminine about the girl on the left. but i think she just looks angry, not boyish. so there's nothing to say, 'unfeminine girls are difficult to deal with but feminine girls are!'

i never thought about how weird it must be to be a parent and see things advertised this way. like, 'don't you wish your children were less unruly like this little angel?' and you're supposed to shake your head and say, 'oh man, do i ever!' and then they're like, well, since you are stuck with your unruly children, we made pouring juice easier*'

*is this pitcher plastic? isn't the whole point of cardboard that it's more ecologically sound, or take up less space in a landfill? haven't they sold juice in plastic pictures for 20 years?

Wow, I can't believe nobody even mentioned this. Of all the people who commented here, nobody thought to mention this:

The girl on the left = Wearing a casual-business type attire and brunette.

("Business women and brunette women are uppity" stereotype)

The girl on the right = Whitish dress + bouquet of flowers and a blonde.

(the "blondes are fun and marriage cures everything/good girls only aspire for marriage" stereotype)

I found the whole professional vs marriage (girl?) dynamic to be interesting. These girls are barely pre teens and already the ad is already putting these expectations on them.

Nevertheless, the girl on the left's face is funny. It's all fake-frowny and troll-faced.

I was going to say something about the brunette/business suit vs the blonde/bridal image, but Avi beat me to it.

It hints at darker being worse and lighter being more desirable, as well.

they should've just used the same kid in the same outfit and in one she looks pleasant and is doing something productive and in the other she looks pissed, is screaming and/or throwing things, etc. they act like if you get the girl on the left you can just trade her in for the one on the right, lol. although if i was asked to make this ad, walking dogs comes to mind. one could have like 5 huge unruly dogs and the easy one could have like 2 tiny ones. i know which situation i'd rather be in.

In case anyone was wondering, yes, this is what sociologists do all day.

@Jena: That's why the people who complain in the comments section about everyone over-analyzing the image confuse me. There are a bunch of other sites, like AdRants, that take a more casual approach. Isn't over-analyzing the whole point of a "sociological images" website?

A bottle of orange juice with a handle might be easier to handle, but I prefer a carton, it's more rewarding.

I think you are reading in a little to much in terms of the sexual references. The analogy is clearly to parenting, and the girls are prepubescent. The flowers are meant to indicate that the girl is kind going out of her way to be nice.

The only problem I really have with this one is the obvious inference that easier is better, and that therefore the 'feminine' girl is better.

I do wonder if we would have the same problem with this ad if it were a boy on the left? What do you think? In that instance gender stereotypes would still be prevalent, but the message might be slightly different.

Dubi: "Kids are kids, and girls are no less a handful than boys."

Once again, you miss the point of this whole website. Of COURSE girls are just as difficult to deal with as boys, but the ways that girls and boys are expected BY SOCIETY to act is completely different. Girls are expected not to show anger or any "negative" emotion, while boys are treated like there is something wrong with them when they don't.

I'm a little late, but I agree with Avi.

The girl on the right is also "easier" to handle because she's conforming to traditional gender roles: wearing a dress, holding flowers, smiling, whereas the girl on the right isn't: wearing pants, has her arms crossed, looks like she's irritated about something...and that's soooo unfeminine, amirite ladieez?

I worked in advertising for 10 years. Most of the designers were too dumb to understand subtext. Shallow people rule at ad agencies.

On the other hand, this ad did exactly what it intended to do. By creating controversy, it has achieved a much higher level of effectiveness, because advertising success is chiefly measured by visibility.

I definitely don't think Benjamin was "reading too much into it" (whatever that means). I support his point. It is not like the advertisers didn't give consideration to how the girls would be standing. Their clothes, postures and facial expressions weren't just spur of the moment things. Disavowing the reading that the girls are being sexualized is harmful in itself.

I think the sexual references are right - only because of our society's preoccupation with making adult women resemble prepubescent bodies (think waxing). If they were talking about parenting, they could have avoided using a term commonly used for dating/sex like "easy".

I also agree with Avi, where the girl in dark clothing is seen as difficult, where the one that is in light clothing is seen as easy/desirable.

Can everyone PLEASE stop saying that people are "reading too much into it." You can't POSSIBLY be serious - the name of this blog is SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGES. If you don't want to read into the various images/messages portrayed in the media, then why read any further?

Dubi, I have issues with your comment, so I'm going to go through a couple of your points:

"What, exactly, is “passive” about the smile? Do you simply call any smile by a female “passive” because it serves your point, or is there actually any way of telling passive from active(?) smiling?"

A smile is more than just a smile. It has everything to do with its context. And from the context of her coy, shy and passive body language, it makes the smile passive, as well. If you are so inclined, please do inform me what exactly is NOT passive about her body language.

//

"It is CLEAR to me that the whole cumbersome “to handle” thing was specifically added to avoid the sexual interpretation of “easy”, because, for crying out loud, this is a little girl....
You can read sexual innuendo into many of the common words in English (Hard! As in penis!), that doesn’t mean whenever somebody uses such a word, the sexual meaning is what they’re hinting at."

Seriously? Okay.
"Hard" by itself won't elicit a response of "as in penis" by itself. "Hard" next to a picture of some sort of phallic symbol, such as a towering monument, is very likely to. Similar to how the word "easy" hovering above a female with flowers (purity) and long flowing hair smiling at the camera coyly MIGHT elicit someone to think of the sexual context.

This has LITTLE to do with the way I'm specifically interpreting it and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that females (and even very young girls) are oversexualized in the media.

//

"One wonders if Benjamin’s comment is a parody or not. That this question presents itself, I’m afraid, speaks volumes on the problems of the critique often offered here."

benjamin's critique, parody or not, is a completely valid one, and he has every right to voice his opinion about it, whether or not you agree.

You can’t POSSIBLY be serious - the name of this blog is SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGES

Right -- isn't sociology the practice of bullshit over-interpretations? If people want to worry about things like reasonableness, maybe they should study a real social science like economics. This is SOCIOLOGY, people. The whole point is that people can read into things whatever they want!

i prefer the hard one as a daughter.

When I saw this ad I felt literally sick to my stomach. It's weird and offensive.

I think I'd rather have the "hard to handle" one. She'd be better in bed anyways.

Samantha - what Jesse said.
And please stop patronizing me. I'm not a sociologist, I'm a political scientist, actually, but I get to work often enough with sociologists to know that sociology isn't all about assuming whenever there's an image of a girl everybody needs to shout "SEX!". You make sociology sound like a weird drinking game.

Here's my point of view: you need to be a non-parent to look at a six year old girl with the cation "east to handle" and think this has anything to do with sex. You need to be a non-parent to think that boys are "treated like there is something wrong with them when they don’t" show anger. For crying out loud, Ghostwax, go a daycare centre and see how boys who show anger are treated.

The problem with many of the posts in this blog is that first if shoots the arrow, and then it draws the target around it. First it assumes the stereotypes are there, and then it looks for reasons to say there's a stereotype in the picture. See, the thing is you ASSUME that girls are oversexualized in the media, and therefore you ASSUME that every image of a girl is sexual, regardless of whether or not this has any basis in reality. If you ASSUME that every image of a girl in the media is sexualized, then there's hardly any point in trying to prove to you otherwise, since you're not basing your interpretation on the actual image, you're basing it on your assumption.

There's nothing passive about the girl, for example. Again, I'm not even sure what "passive" means in this context. Maybe you can enlighten me.
Here's how I interpret the pose of the girl: she's sharing a secret with the viewer. She's obviously hiding the flowers behind her back (ready to give them to a parent, maybe?), and she's looking back at us, smiling, because she knows we can see them. So it's playful, not passive. (whoops! playful can also mean sexually. Guess I must sexually desire this girl).

And Benjamin's critique is NOT valid. It's idiotic. It's ridiculous. It's about as valid as me saying that flowers cause allergies, and therefore the girl holding them is actually abusive and irritating. It is based on nothing but his own idiosyncratic associative thought process. If I say the girl on the left reminds me of a girl I once dated who was the hottest sex I ever had, does that make my critique that it's an oversexualized representation of a little girl valid? No.

Sociology doesn't mean you can say any damn thing that crosses your mind just because it occurred to you, and then assert that it's a valid point. Sociology is a social SCIENCE. It requires actual thought, processes, mechanisms, and every once in a while, actual proof that what you're saying has any relation to real life.
If sociology was anything like what some people here say it is, I'd vote to close our sociology department down and send the people studying it to write op-eds for niche newspapers.
(These two paragraphs are not aimed at Lisa and Wendy, who I might disagree with often, but who, I believe, hold sociology in somewhat higher regard that some of its so-called defenders in the comments).

yeah. sadly people are really reading too much into it. you're retroactively cultural meaning where originally there was simply advertising. Not that the cultural meanings discussed in the previous posts aren't in the ad, or that they're not real and true. They are. It's just that, as a fifteen year veteran of print advertising, I know that they were not intended to be there.

this is how this ad came to be:

1. Parents buy an awful lot of orange juice, so our ad should speak to them.

2. What is the angle on our new orange product about? It's easier to handle.

3. What do parents relate to in terms of ease or difficulty to handle? Kids!

4. Great! Let's make and ad that shows two kids, one hard to handle and one easy to handle, and then imply that the product is similar to the easy to handle one.

5. Problem. How do we show a kid that is hard to handle? Especially in a visual ad that will be viewed for an average of 1.8 seconds per reader? Kids, god bless 'em, are not capable of performances of that nuance. We can't cast two different kids, cuz how can a kid's face just look hard to handle?.

6. We also know that the art direction has to be simple and complete, preferably on white, so as to continue associations with the colorway of the product.

7. We'll have to do it with wardrobe.

8. OK, let's take a step back. What magazine is this in? Adbusters? No. Mother Jones? No. Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Oprah, and Reader's Digest? Yes. OK. Let's see how do those readers identify a hard to handle child by wardrobe?

9. What's that? We have a library of images searchable by keywords that have all been tested with our intended demographic? Oh, it appears that our intended demographic still largely believes that black clothes worn by pre-teens is a reliable predictor of difficulty?

10. What's that again? Our library of market research shows that parents as a whole find pre-teen girls the most difficult age of child-rearing?

11. Great. That's what we'll do. One pre-teen girl, two opposite outfits, one black and scowling, one opposite.

we show the client, the client likes. We get paid, we keep our jobs.

The ad is not seeking to CREATE and ENFORCE socio-cultural stereotypes. It's seeking to work with the ones that are already there. Business pure and simple. Fucked up, sure, but not really where the battle lies.

They should have cast a boy, not because it's better, but only because it avoids all the psuedo intellectual brain beating on this page.

Those of us that seek to combat the true cultural implications of this, had best do it with our own children, through education, volunteering with or donating to womensheart.com or gotrsd.org.

Not by piling on the blind work a bunch of ad people who are just trying to keep there own pre teen girls from ending up homeless.

I think the "semiotic" defense is facile at best, giving a philosophical excuse to once again objectify, sexualize, and degrade girls. The only good thing to come out of this excuse for an ad is the outrage and examination of the anti-female hate-fest that our violent society refuses to jettison.

actually, upon looking at this ad more closely...it's fucked up. I didn't catch the bride v. working woman implications on my first view. I thought it was simply goth attitude v. pink and flowery. what a bunch of bullshit. Someone at this agency should be fired. I can't believe no one stopped this before it went to print.

"we show the client, the client likes. We get paid, we keep our jobs.

The ad is not seeking to CREATE and ENFORCE socio-cultural stereotypes. It’s seeking to work with the ones that are already there."

I realize you now see what's wrong with the ad and the clearly anti-feminist tactic they are employing, but in your first post, you defend the company because you say it's merely doing business and trying to make profits. All's well because they are just doing their best to make money. That doesn't make it right, and you acknowledge that, which I appreciate.

BUT, socio-cultural stereotypes in the media/advertising and in society are cyclical, so they, too, are at fault. It's not a one way street. By "working with the [socio-cultural stereotypes] that are there," as you say, they ARE enforcing those stereotypes. You can't say that they're off the hook just because they are trying to make some money.

"Those of us that seek to combat the true cultural implications of this, had best do it with our own children, through education, volunteering with or donating to womensheart.com or gotrsd.org."

This is basically saying that we've no reason to be critical of the media, or to be having a discussion like this, which is wrong.

"Here’s my point of view: you need to be a non-parent to look at a six year old girl with the caption “easy to handle” and think this has anything to do with sex."

Yes, because non-parents never interact with young children and certainly don't have the insight to be able to comment on the way young girls are represented in the media. What if I were to tell you that I am a parent? Just wanted to let you know your privilege is showing.

"See, the thing is you ASSUME that girls are oversexualized in the media, and therefore you ASSUME that every image of a girl is sexual, regardless of whether or not this has any basis in reality."

Okay, so I'm just ASSUMING that girls are oversexualized in the media. Not because they ARE. Perhaps you phrased that wrong. Anyway, taking issue with the way females are represented in one ad is certainly NOT the same as assuming that EVERY image of a female in the media is sexualized.

"There’s nothing passive about the girl, for example. Again, I’m not even sure what “passive” means in this context. Maybe you can enlighten me."

You only need the vaguest understanding of body language to see that the little girl, in this context (next to the girl on the left), is clearly passive. She is quiescent, she is docile, and she is wearing a dress.

The real issue is the fact that she is wearing a dress and looking very traditionally feminine, while the girl on the left is not. The girl on the left is aggressive, due to her standoffish pose and irate face. Because they decided to dress her up in "business-casual" attire, her outfit, too, is equated as bad.

AKA, if you are NOT traditionally feminine, you are "hard to handle."
If you ARE traditionally feminine- Yay! You are "easy to handle."

Samantha,

who, exactly, is the media?

Wearing a dress is evidence of passivity? Man that's some sexist bullshit.

Jesse, did you read my entire comment?

Anyway, I guess I phrased that wrong. She is NOT passive because she is wearing a dress. The fact that they are making her out to be the passive, "easy to handle" one and she is ALSO wearing a dress is what is sexist.

I second mannequin, seeing this ad made me physically nauseous. There's nothing at all wrong with the picture of the bad girl. But the second one could just be the same bad girl but smiling and putting her arm around her siblings or something. Then I wouldn't feel so sick. There are so many gender-command-undercurrents in the juxtaposition of the two as they are that I agree with one commenter who said they should have had 5 pit bulls for the hard to handle and one chihuahua for the easy to handle. That would have been completely uncontroversial.

I'm in the middle on this. I do not think that there is any intended sexual innuendo. I do think, however, that this ad is anti-feminist. Every traditional old-fashioned parent wants there child to be feminine and permissive--and for them, a child that is feminine and permissive is "easy to handle." The girl on the left is a strong-willed girl wearing non-feminine clothes--"hard to handle". I don't like that. It encourages parents to make sure their kids are feminine and permissive.

Also, what's with the flowers? I don't think it's about the bridal thing like some have said, but I really don't get the point. If she is at a wedding (bridesmaid, flower girl...) how does that tie to being "easy"?

The orange juice ad simply acknowledges the fact that a girl of that age can be a bitch. If you see that ad and your mind automatically goes to sex appeal you need to rethink your personal life.

Did Tropicana learn nothing from the historical experience of the Florida Citrus Commission using Anita Bryant for its spokesperson?

"As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children." and "If gays are granted rights, next we'll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters." She also said, "All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God's continued help we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation."

Stereotyping isn't a good idea... but it is easy.

Is Tropicana out of its corporate mind?

Seriously, it's a bratty girl and an nice girl ones in black the other in white! It could be a boy in the exact pose and yes anyone who has kids or has ever babysat them knows that it's EASIER to handle to nice kid be it a boy or a girl... Stop reading into adds like there's some secret message that all woman are under fire, it's a playful add that had no intention of hurting your precious feeling... Next on the agenda changing the national anthem lol

So what's the solution though? What should girls be, if girls should not be feminine and "girly"?

Should girls be be little brats who throws around tantrums, like the girl on the left?

I sure as hell don't want to raise my daughter to go around throwing tantrums all the time, and being irritated all the time, for no reason at all.