Sun-Maid girl in 1916
I was browsing through the news when the classic image of the well-loved Sun-Maid raisins girl caught my eye. Underneath the picture a caption read: "The new Sun Maid girl's raisins are growing." Thinking it was an article on food contamination (What! But I just bought a box!) I clicked on the link. Much to my surprise, it concerns a corporate revamp.
Turns out there was a decision to change the look of the iconic character to fit Hollywood standards, because now she looks like this:
Sun-Maid girl in 2009
Linking this back to our discussion on the manipulative marketing tactics of soap companies, it does not have to do much with racism through skin color (a beautiful white female doing the labor of picking the raisins UNDER the sun? That's quite different from the ad we just analyzed), but the matter of how women should look.
White. Skinny. Big-boobed. THAT'S the ideal woman. Oh, and may I add she also has to be able to do the manual work of the house. Or farm. Like our Sun-Maid girl here, who is out picking the fruits to bring home to her man (Is it JUST me or is there something phallic about that bunch of raisins she is holding up?). Because as we all know, the media is controlled by the white heterosexual male, who loves a subservient chick for a wife.
What happened to the days when Venus of Urbino was considered so beautiful because women who had a little bit of meat on them were said or assumed to have access to luxury? They didn't have to do the work, even. Let's all go to Italy, eat all the pizza, be merry and be beautiful -- European style.
Oh, how times have changed.
You should check out the new (and improved? I wouldn't say so -- it's degrading) Sun-Maid commercial for yourself:
Sun-maid raisin girl goes to Hollywood
Hollywood really needs to be slapped in the face and realize that skinny does not necessarily equate to healthy.
Who's next in line for a revamp? The Coppertone baby?
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