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Let Them Eat Butter!
It’s not the cholesterol that will kill you. It’s the hernia from trying to hold up both ends of the conversation with a perpetually aggrieved social justice warrior. I never associated Land O Lakes packaging with genocide, sex trafficking, or Native women as sex objects. Perhaps I’m clueless, but I’ve always associated butter with a baked potato, pancakes, croissants, scones, muffins, and once in awhile a pat of butter on a steak that was cooked on a wood pellet grill.
I’m not a total Neanderthal. I do wheel out my recycle bin containing my gifts to the recycling gods, placed just so on the altar of the curb on a weekly basis. I will admit that I’m having difficulty memorizing 50 or so new gender pronouns.
From the Washington Examiner:
Land O’Lakes is retiring the iconic Native American butter maiden that has appeared on its logo for the past 92 years.
The Minnesota-based company said it was phasing out Mia the butter maiden on its packaging as it “looks toward our 100th anniversary” and will soon replace her with farm owners “whose milk is used to produce Land O’Lakes products” instead.
“As a farmer-owned co-op, we strongly feel the need to better connect the men and women who grow our food with those who consume it,” Land O’Lakes President and CEO Beth Ford said in a February press release. “Our farmer-to-fork structure gives us a unique ability to bridge this divide.”Some critics have labeled the old logo racist, including North Dakota state Rep. Ruth Buffalo, who said its image went “hand-in-hand with human and sex trafficking of our women and girls … by depicting Native women as sex objects.”
“Yes, it’s a good thing for the company to remove the image. It’s kinda like with land acknowledgments, it’s a good gesture and a step forward. But we can’t stop there. We as a whole need to keep pushing forward to address the underlying issues that directly impact an entire population that survived genocide,” Buffalo said.
You’re doing it wrong.
Doug,
Yep, that Land O Lakes Siren was luring Western Civilization to destruction. Thank Gd Beth Ford caught it in time. Once again by altering statues, paintings, brand symbols, and pronouns, we have avoided total annihilation. Our whole society is in the hands of neurotic trivial woketards.
Not to worry.
Regards,
Jim
This now reduces to only… six… the number of grocery store products featuring winsome virgins kneeling to offer up blocks of sweet salty caloric goodness for my gustatory satisfaction.
Much more of this and there won’t be any point going shopping at all.
There’s not really a stopping point, is there?
From The Song of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
They don’t teach epic poetry anymore, do they? We lose something every time a long-standing image is scrubbed from the cultural lexicon. Farewell, sweet buttery maiden.
Thank God for cigar rings.
You know what is an inappropriate sexual icon?
Creepy men, sexually dressed like women, reading books to children at the public library.
Leave the pretty girl to sell the butter. Close the freaking library.
She probably was scarred as a youth by Marlon Brando sending Sacheen Littlefeather up to the podium to deliver that speech at the 1973 Oscars, a few weeks after Brando and that butter scene showed up in “Last Tango In Paris”.
This has to be the best comment of the day! These people who are content to mess with things that don’t need to be erased. Don’t they ever think about the messes they leave behind? They worry about being erased and they’re the ones doing all the erasing! It’s better to leave iconic stuff alone. Someone needs to quarantine them forever!
Rant over.
Now I can feel good when I buy my Land O Lakes butter, given that genocide thing and all.
Sometimes you just don’t know what or who you are offending until it’s pointed out . Hey what’s with that name “Buffalo” talk about genocide!
What are the six?
Gonna buy me a 6-pack of St. Pauli Girl.
Back when my late stepson Michael was growing up, he went through a stage that many boys do (or at least they used to), when they’re overcome and confused by emerging and exploding hormones and growth spurts, they discover a fascination with the previously reviled opposite sex, they don’t really understand the boundaries of sane and decent discourse, and they can be relied on to do and say things that, even in the late 1970s, might have been considered wildly inappropriate and problematic. Most young men eventually grow out of such impulses, or at least learn to control them better; unfortunately, some never do.
Before there were Internet memes, and when their equivalent at the time could travel only through human-to-human contact, (to use a contemporary metaphor), Michael learned of a trick involving the LOL maiden, where he would take a pair of scissors, cut out her knees from one side of the box, and then paste them on to her image on the other side of the box, right over the pound of butter she was offering at about, ahem, chest level. He would then laugh himself silly at the “rude” image he’d created.
Racism and sexism had nothing to do with it. Just immaturity, self-regard, and the silliness of youth.
“Mia the butter maiden” has been a reminder to me of those episodes for more than forty years. I’ll miss her.
Too darn funny!
I guess I’m going to have to find another brand to buy. LOL has been my preferred butter for ages . . .
Name them.
I remember that.
Never mind how I know.
And yet, Men are still allowed to sexually assault Mrs. Butterworth every time one grabs a bottle off the shelf and tosses Her in the basket against Her will.
The horror!
BindersBaskets full of Butterworth….ND state rep Ruth Buffalo is a moron, of course. But the change does make sense, in that the maiden has exactly nothing to do with the company or the products. It really is a farmer-owned co-op (I had a farmer friend a few years ago who was on the board), and none of the owners would have distinguished an “indian maiden” from Bossy the cow. They should have a picture of Ralph Lileks on the label as a much more accurate representation.
Change is good only when it is an improvement. There is not improvement by deleting the maiden, so the change is no good.
How do you know?
A gentleman always just assumes, doesn’t he?
I think labeling requirements dictate that it be listed. It’s usually right after the monosodium glutamate.
Ironically, one of the illustrators who worked on the image over the years was an Ojibwe. So why is it ok to trash the work of a Native American?
If only there were a Playboy brand butter, with a little fold-out poster in every box.
Or psychotic.
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
–Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) interviewed by Jamie Glazov in “Our Culture, What’s Left of It: Interview with Theodore Dalrymple,” Front Page Magazine, August 31, 2005, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7445 (dead link)
“If Custine were among us now, he would recognize the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question.”
–Theodore Dalrymple, “How to Read a Society” in Our Culture, What’s Left of It, 2005
I was trying to make those points during the Clinton scandals, but it would have been better if I had been able to quote that.
Dalrymple is always worth reading, and many of his books are still in print. You can also find some talks and interviews on YouTube.
Doesn’t he write for Taki’s Magazine now?