{"id":9262,"date":"2014-12-05T09:00:08","date_gmt":"2014-12-05T14:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=9262"},"modified":"2017-07-09T00:43:52","modified_gmt":"2017-07-09T05:43:52","slug":"girls-should-be-easy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/12\/05\/girls-should-be-easy\/","title":{"rendered":"Tropicana Ad Says That Girls Should Be “Easy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sally R. sent in a two-page Tropicana ad she found in her morning newspaper.\u00a0 The ad features, as Sally puts it, a “hard (bad) surly girl in pants and [an] easy (nice) girl in a dress with a flowery gift and passive smile…”\u00a0 The first is labeled “hard to handle” and the second “easy to handle.”\u00a0 The new orange juice container is supposed to be more like the “easy” girl.<\/p>\n

On the face of it, this ad is about parenting.\u00a0 But there is so much more going on that makes the ad work.<\/p>\n

Notice how easyness is communicated with symbols of femininity.\u00a0 The message is that girls are, ideally, accommodating and passive.\u00a0 Girls should be like objects, easy to “handle.”\u00a0 Would the ad work quite the same way if the child was a boy?\u00a0 Do we hope\/expect that our boys will be completely passive and convenient to handle?<\/p>\n

Sally also notes the “double meaning of easy” which, combined with the girl’s coy pose and smile, sends a sexual message.\u00a0 The sexual promise that the ad makes (it\/she is “easy to handle”) works despite (or because of?) her age.\u00a0 Consider how similar the image is to these examples in which women and girls are simultaneously sexualized and infantilized with the use of passive<\/a>\u00a0poses <\/a>and\u00a0symbols<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0youth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This conflation of object status, femininity, being female, and being well-behaved is obnoxious. It’s insulting to both boys and girls\u00a0and\u00a0affirms the false gender binary. It’s dangerous, too. It\u00a0contributes to the idea that girls are objects to take advantage of who are misbehaving if they assert themselves. It’s disturbing to see it reproduced for something as trivial\u00a0as an orange juice carton.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. Sally R. sent in a two-page Tropicana ad she found in her morning newspaper.\u00a0 The ad features, as Sally puts it, a “hard (bad) surly girl in pants and [an] easy (nice) girl in a dress with a flowery gift and passive smile…”\u00a0 The first is labeled “hard to handle” and the second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65020,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,2124,55,2099,2096,120],"class_list":["post-9262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-foodagriculture","tag-gender","tag-gender-childrenyouth","tag-gender-femininity","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2009\/05\/3.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9262"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70405,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9262\/revisions\/70405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}