Targets of Cigarette Advertising

Virginia Slims Cigarettes cleverly plays on this attitude as well in many of their ads. In one ad, an older, rather Victorian-looking woman is complaining about young women: "Shocking, absolutely shocking, the way young women cavort about these days," and another says, "Tsk. Tsk. Proper, decent women shouldn't have fun in the sun. In fact, they shouldn't have any fun at all." A young woman replies, "Well, shame on me, 'cause I really like to have fun." Certainly these older women are meant to represent mothers, teachers, and other adults who might advise young women, among other things, not to smoke. A rebellious adolescent thus might mistakenly interpret valid advice against smoking as an edict against having fun.

The tobacco industry is attempting to get even more mileage from this image by portraying public-health advocates as anti-smoking fanatics who want to tell everybody else what to do. It seems to be setting health officials and agencies against what it would characterize as the courageous, independent, free-thinking smoker. Thus its extraordinary public-relations campaign attempts to equate smoking with democratic freedom and the criticism of smoking with totalitarianism.

The long-running Virginia Slims Cigarettes campaign (and others similar to it) attempt to make an amazingly ironic equation between liberation and addiction, between freedom of choice and enslavement to tobacco. This equation is particularly self-contradictory, given that nicotine is the most addictive drug known to science, and that at least 85 percent of smokers wish they could quit their addiction. The only equality that smoking has brought to women is that they are now contracting lung cancer at the same rate as men are. One can consider cigarette smoking liberating only if one considers death the ultimate form of freedom.

In addition to the above techniques, ads aimed at women and girls also frequently suggest that cigarettes are a form of weight control. In this way the advertisers are cashing in on the national obsession with excessive thinness for women. A primary reason that many women start and do not quit smoking is their terror of gaining weight. Ads have been playing upon this fear of obesity for a long time. In 1928 the Lucky Strike ads said, "To keep a slender figure, no one can deny . . . Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet."

With a much more well-informed public, the advertisers probably couldn't get away with such an overt and outrageous message today. They can, however, use extremely thin models and copy that includes such words as slim and slender. Virginia Slims Cigaretts new superslims cigarette promises smokers "more than just a sleek shape." A recent campaign for Capri cigarettes features an attractive young woman and the headline, "The slimmest slim in town." This pitch is one major reason that cigarette smoking is on the increase among teenage girls, a group especially susceptible to the obsession with weight.