3. Reasons for keeping this Figure so Feminized/in Shape in the SIA Business Model
3.1 Commercialization of the Singapore Girl’s Body
As its product and service differentiation strategy, SIA has utilized the highly gendered and implicitly sensuous imagery of the Singapore Girl in its advertisements via print, billboards, television commercials and online social media. This prioritization of in-flight crew, especially stewardesses, in SIA’s marketing campaigns, deviates from the traditional branding modes of emphasizing aircraft capabilities and fares. Slogans such as “Singapore Girl, You’re a Great Way to Fly” (Figure 1) demonstrate how the body of the Singapore Girl is implicitly commodified as a physical representation of SIA, instead of the physical aircraft per se. More recently, SIA’s newest branding campaign with the tagline “The Lengths We Go To” (Figure 2) reinforces the Singapore Girl’s performativity and service provision role in going her way out to serve and “deliver a special experience to customers” (SIA, 2013).
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| Figure 1: Singapore Girl "You're a Great Way to Fly" advertisement. Photo credit: http://blog.nus.edu.sg/sc2214e2abigailwoo/files/2014/03/VISU-Paul-Ross-Jones-Singapore-Airlines-Paris-to-China-u66mld.jpg |
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| Photo credit: http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/photography/2013/9/singapore_airlines_fujian_tea.jpg |
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| Photo credit: http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/photography/2013/9/singapore_airlines_glasgow_leather.jpg |
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In addition, in the 3 to 4 commercials SIA produces each year which almost always revolve around the ‘stewardess-driven service culture’ (Chua, 2010); quality and attention to detail are prioritized (Clark, 2013). Soft background music, feminine soothing voiceovers, and slow, gentle motions of the Singapore Girl set in global backdrops are repetitive elements in their cinematography commercials (Video 1). In other commercials, the perfectly groomed Singapore Girl is seen gently covering a sleeping passenger or offering meals. Indeed, SIA reproduces highly gendered notions of how an ideal woman, particularly the Singapore Girl, is expected to act – gentle, caring, amiable, with a ready smile and a willing helping hand.
Video 1: Across the World with the SIA Girl video [source: youtube]
Undeniably, some have questioned the appropriateness of SIA’s advertisements which promulgate female flight attendants as the quintessential object of male fantasies and perpetuate expected gender roles in the space of a highly feminized body – imageries and performativity that should not have stronghold in the purportedly liberal, ‘gender-equal’ 21st century.
3.2 Reasons for keeping the Singapore Girl’s Body so Feminized in SIA’s Business Model
Nonetheless, despite these criticisms, there are multifarious reasons why SIA continues to pride itself in keeping the Singapore Girl’s body as a symbolic construction and representation of the airlines. There are three main reasons: (1) practical reasons for maintaining a specific body size and weight; (2) serving on airlines is associated with the gendered roles for women; (3) commercialized, sexualized bodies can reiterate branding and stimulate sales.
3.2.1 Practical Reasons: Size Matters
Firstly, historical-practical reasons exist as to why the Singapore Girl’s body is expected to conform to such a slender frame today. Once dominated by males in 1920, flight attending almost became ‘exclusively’ female in just 16 years. Yet, body size and its correlated weight has always been a strict practical requirement by airlines to reduce overhead costs from ‘excess bodily baggage weight’. A 1936 New York Times article described the requirements:
The girls who qualify for hostesses must be petite; weight 100 to 118 pounds; height 5 feet to 5 feet 5 inches; age 20 to 26 years. (The New York Times , 1936)
Almost eight decades later, such historical gendered bodily physique requirements are still replicated even in modern-day SIA:
The Singapore Girl should be at least 1.58m, have a minimum age of 18 years old. Her Body Mass Index (BMI) should be between 19 to 22. (Yang, 2013 )
SIA has retained these bodily requirements for stewardesses, and has delegated more cabin crew jobs to females over males; as women are “15 to 20 kilograms lighter on average than men”, and “each extra kilogram costs $0.05 per flying hour” (Durston, 2013); resulting in significant cumulative cost savings with a higher stewardesses proportion. Besides cost-savings, svelte female bodies are also prioritized as they can negotiate the tight material confines of the aircraft aisles with greater ease, vis-a-vis larger men and relative ‘oversized’ bodies. Therefore, like a plethora of other carriers, SIA privileges the woman’s body in its hiring process for practical profiteering reasons and due to the aircraft’s limited mobility space.
3.2.2 Gendered Divisions of Labour
Secondly, SIA has used the Singapore Girl, and not ‘Singapore Boy’, in its branding strategy as the act of serving is a socially constituted notion of an appropriate activity for women. Such acts of serving is a gender role reproduced by the domesticity of women in the household space for centuries. She is the Other of a global modernity through which Asian women are imagined as service providers for a global hyper-masculinity (Lim, 1999). Therefore, as an airline benchmarked on service to stand out, the woman is privileged as her body is tied to hegemonic discourses and identities of “nurturing”, “providing”, “supportive” and “safe” - all of which correlate with SIA’s overarching business model of providing “impeccable service standards - service even other airlines talk about” (SIA, 2014b).
3.2.3 Her Physical Body: Selling Men’s Fantasies and Women’s Dreams
Thirdly, the Singapore Girl has been retained in the SIA business model as she is the symbolic construction of men’s fantasies and women’s dreams; and in the aviation industry, gender matters, sex sells. Positioned strategically in the upper strata of international premium airlines market (Chan, 2000), SIA has carefully curated an iconic image of a quintessential Oriental woman clad in a figure-hugging sarong-kebaya (designed by White European men), who embodies a gentle feminine mystique (Whitelegg, 2007). She is the boundary marker for Singapore, an element in a global scopophilic gaze through which Asian women are sexualized for commercial purposes (Mackey, 2000).
By capitalizing on this socially and commercially constructed ‘hyper-sexuality’ of the Singapore Girl enhanced through tight clothing, make-up and performativity of femininity (Ibroscheva, 2013); SIA is utilizing her body as a profitable commodity which satisfies all manners of fantasies (Kligman, 1996). The petite and beautiful Singapore Girl has not failed to incite the erotic imagination of the male consumer (Hudson, 2013); and her ‘slim and firm’ body valorized as being the normative aspirational ideal of womanhood, is often the envy of other women (Colls, 2006). Therefore, SIA has conscientiously used this idealistic feminized body of the Singapore Girl to reinforce and satiate consumers’ media-ingrained expectations of sexualized female beauty. The visual manifestation of the Singapore Girl’s sexualized yet classic beauty and poise, are then conflated with SIA’s market ideology of luxury, class and privilege - a highly profitable marketing differentiation strategy which has contributed to SIA having one of the world’s longest running and most successful advertising campaigns (Hudson, 2013).
photo credit at top: http://img.wikinut.com/img/1wta_x.isxk1jxyy/jpeg/0/Femininity-is-...-be-brave.jpeg
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