I mean Fruit.
I was working at a restaurant a few years ago that used Tropicana orange juice. When I saw the carton I immediately saw the top portion and thought “Are you kidding me?”
Look, it’s very easy to see smashed together balls, or any spherical coupling, and think of boobs. It’s also very easy to reduce this observation as a perverted one. Then how do you explain the zipper? No one unzips a carton of orange juice, or a bag of oranges–you unzip a piece of clothing.
I thought of this strange orange cleavage during our discussion of Orange is Not the Only Fruit the past few days because….oranges. What, you expected a nuanced point there?
This does tie in with Louis Althusser, and his discussion of hailing. A team of people were designing the carton for this orange juice to appear appealing to a particular demographic, or that team was picking through designs that they thought were most appealing. My best guess is that someone saw this and said “Are you kidding me?” and then said maybe we should go with this because it would be hilarious to some people and appealing to the demographic of creepy dudes (and gals) that see orange juice and want boobs in their face.
Yes, that is my best guess.
However an important part of the process of hailing is the subjugation of hailing. When one observes the process of subjugation and of hailing, they are still a subject. As an individual seeing this carton and sharing my views with others, for example right now and back in the restaurant when I pointed out the orange cleavage, I am contributing to the marketing strategy of Tropicana (or their company overlords whatever). The average person glancing over orange juice would probably just see oranges and fail to connect it with the zipper. As a bored restaurant employee I picked up the carton for a drink and happened to analyze the label design. Also I’m obsessed with advertisement so I enjoy doing so.
For the image of this carton to stick in my mind for so long, it must have been an effective one nevertheless. I searched for an image of this particular carton and found it at the very end buried beneath tons of their new design which I guess is that stupid orange with straw wound. The cleavage picture was featured on a blog authored by someone who noticed what I noticed, and the image itself was entitled “tropicana_art_fail_2.” So good news, this was apparently a sequel, and also I’m not alone in noticing an effort to sexualize orange juice.
Meaning and Pleasure2014 
I really enjoyed this post. I’ve never noticed that the carton actually does look like boobs and now it’s literally all I can see when looking at that picture now. I think this can also be related to Mulvey and the male gaze (very loosely anyways.) Even though Mulvey is talking about the male gaze in films, I think it can be applied to advertising. Obviously there was a motive for choosing this type of carton and it can clearly be argued that it’s meant to represent boobs. I don’t think a guy would choose Tropicana over any other orange juice brand simply because the oranges look like boobs, but maybe the people that choose this carton design were like “hey, maybe guys will subconsciously lean toward our orange juice because we put “boobs” on the front of it.” And if they weren’t trying to choose this effect, then at least take away the zipper!
The male gaze exists literally everywhere. Apparently even in orange juice cartons. It’s not something that is going away anytime soon. Now I know I’m using the term male gaze out of context of how Mulvey meant it, such as it being used in film to put the viewer in the heterosexual male’s perspective, but I think that it is relevant in this situation because Mulvery would say that the male gaze is used to reduce women to objects and in this case they’re literally objects: oranges.
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Thank you! I definitely think this is a product of the male gaze–either developed by the male gaze, or with the male gaze in mind. There are many examples of strange attempts by the male gaze, for the male gaze, by companies to get consumers to purchase their foods. One I tend to think about comes from various fast food advertisements of a woman (who is always a model, and thus has the model body) opening her mouth wide for a cheeseburger.
I casually try to point these things out all the time and people assume I have the dirty mind. People design these things by committee, and you definitely don’t see men opening wide!
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Interesting post, Donovan! Don’t forget, of course, that Mulvey’s article is about the STRUCTURE of the gaze by way of filmic cuts in the development not only of the mis-en-scene, but also the plot line w/r/t women. So I’m not sure she’d go so quickly to the object in the way that you do.
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