B2: Yogurt--Not That Sexist, but Still Kind of a Liar

FACT: Nearly 75% of the United States' 15-20 million Yoga practitioners are female. Of those practitioners, as astonishing 71% had an undergraduate degree and 44% of yogis have household incomes of $75,000 or more; 24% have more than $100,000. These figures are vastly higher than the rest of the U.S population average.

What does this tell you? The type of people who pursue yoga are generally successful women with a lot of spending power. The type of people who's lifestyle you would like to tie yourself to if you were a consumer product.

More Importantly, spending on yoga related products is on the rise, and has nearly doubled since 2008--while the number of practioners has remained the same. Companies like Lulu Lemon take advantage of this by selling millions of pairs of yoga pants for outrageous prices. However, that makes sense within the context of 'Yoga', after all Lulu Lemon makes 'Yoga enhancing products'.

But what about products that have nothing to do with actually performing yoga?

Yogurt Companies:

What yogurt companies try and do is equate the health benefits of doing yoga, with the health benefits of yogurt by trying to say that they are equal. This is attempted because 52% of yoga practitioners say that they do yoga to improve their health. Here are two examples:

This ad denotes a yoga master telling his class that you must practice yoga everyday, he then takes out a package of yogurt, eats it and says "yummmmm". The health benefits of yogurt are then explained.

What is connotted is that eating a package of yogurt is as good as doing yoga. This notion is ridiculous, it's almost saying that "if you miss your yoga session, just eat a package of yogurt, you'll be fine!". While the ad doesn't explicitly target women, two of the practitioners in the front row are women, and the only close up is of a woman.

The modality of the ad is increased by the Guru, who is telling the yoga class this. He has a long beard and seems like a very wise yoga-master: he looks like he knows his stuff.

Similarly, this ad denotes a woman trying to do yoga to improve her digestion through painful contortion. Her roommate/partner then walks in, points out that she can get that benefit much easier by just eating yogurt.

What is yogurt trying to do? Yogurt is trying to piggyback on all the health effects of yoga by pointing out the one specific health benefit of yogurt. This ploy is sort of unfair as it uses the modality of yogurt's digestive benefits to equate eating it to performing an exercise; that notion is completely ridiculous. If advertisers really are selling "concepts of normalcy" then considering eating yogurt and doing yoga interchangeable seems like an effective way to get this demographic (women who do yoga) to buy yogurt.

What is good about these commercials is that women are not really objectified in any way. The yoga isn't 'sexy' and the women aren't trying to achieve some idealistic beauty. Quite the opposite, they are doing it to help their digestion. So that's a plus. Because these commercials don't really get into objectification of women as sex objects, it is difficult to point to relevant feminist literature that they would be affected by.

Yogurt commercials are traditional advertisements which try to establish a relationship between yogurt and yoga, but do little to create a sexist fear in women that if they do not eat yogurt they will be fat or ugly and then people won't like them.