How to keep smoking as Feminine as possible (Looks like part of an old magazine article)

[ismnotwasm]

[NYC_SKP]

1. Interesting that the piece alludes to how "liberating" it was that women could smoke like men!

But they'd damn well better look feminine about it.



Hey, Happy New Year, ismnotwasm!

[ismnotwasm]

2. Happy new year as well!

I wonder what the ads today will reveal about us 30 years from now?

[NYC_SKP]

3. I don't know, but with climate change and all, our love of big trucks will have to be featured.

Some say they're sexy, I think they're vulgar.

[ismnotwasm]

6. Well they are

The WWF or whatever it is these days of vehicles.

[jakeXT]

7. "torches of freedom"

Edward Bernays (1891-1995) is largely considered the founder of public relations (or “engineering consent,” as he called it) but is not known very well outside of the marketing and advertising fields. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays was the first to theorize that people could be made to want things they don’t need by appealing to unconscious desires (to be free, to be successful etc.). Bernays, and propaganda theorist Walter Lippman, were members of the U.S. Government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), which successfully convinced formally isolationist Americans to support entrance into World War I. While propaganda was commonly thought of as a negative way of manipulating the masses that should be avoided, Bernays believed that it was necessary for the functioning of a society, as otherwise people would be overwhelmed with too many choices. In his words:

Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.

[Source: Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, p. 52; available here.]

After WWI, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to start smoking. While men smoked cigarettes, it was not publicly acceptable for women to smoke. Bernays staged a dramatic public display of women smoking during the Easter Day Parade in New York City. He then told the press to expect that women suffragists would light up “torches of freedom” during the parade to show they were equal to men. Like the “You’ve come a long way, baby” ads, this campaign commodified women’s progress and desire to be considered equal to men

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smoking-propaganda/

[ismnotwasm]

12. Fascinating

“Cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power…Women would smoke because it was then that they’d have their own penises.”

I see Freud was still very much in vogue then. Oral fixation and all. Cigarettes look more like a detachable tentacle to me, but those were different times, as a famous songwriter once said.

[jakeXT]

13. He asked A. A. Brill according to the video

Abraham Arden Brill (October 12, 1874 – March 2, 1948) was an Austrian-born psychiatrist who spent almost his entire adult life in the United States. He was the first psychoanalyst to practice in the United States and the first translator of Freud into English.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Brill

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x24013p_8-progressive-edward-bernays-making-money-by-manipulating-the-subconscious-small_news

[marym625]

10. It's hilarious

What a bizarre thought. Let's teach women to look sexy smoking.

Though Lauren Bacall, well she looked sexy smoking and I am sure needed no lessons in it.

[Warpy]

4. Oh, gawd, I remember seeing that one down south

They might have started off looking like the one on the left, but they all looked like the one on the right a couple of years later despite the best efforts of those health & hygiene lectures on how to be a lady.

"Yeah, honey, you get to kill yourself with COPD and lung cancer, just don't look butch while you do it!"

Gotta love the gender role police.

[ismnotwasm]

5. LOL!

"Just don't look butch while your doing it"

Too funny

[Kalidurga]

8. I don't smoke but if I did

There is no way I would even try to look like cute doing it.

[marym625]

9. Oh my!

Thanks for this.

[SheilaT]

11. What's interesting about that

old article is that the "feminine" version of the smoker is pretty and graceful, while the other one is far less attractive and awkward in her movements.

It can be quite fascinating to look at old, say pre-1970, movies in which people are smoking. There really is a certain casual glamour that has disappeared, even when Hollywood is trying to promote smoking, because these days they have to do so in the face of a cultural ban and disapproval of smoking.

[demigoddess]

14. what is even worse are the modern movies

portraying the 40s and 50s. They have to blow smoke alllll the time, and yet it doesn't look very realistic, because they are overdoing it. I know, I grew up when everyone was a smoker. I just never had the urge to smoke, but my sister did.

[SheilaT]

16. I likewise grew up when almost everyone smoked.

What's been lost is the casualness of smoking in that era.

As I recall, official statistics are that in 1955, two thirds of all adult men, and half of all adult women smoked. However, hardly anyone over the age of 65 or so smoked, so in reality about 80 percent of men and 70 percent of women (ages 21-60 is what I'm guessing) smoked. The grandparents of that era didn't smoke much, so the smoking was concentrated in a somewhat younger age group.

It was everywhere. In hospitals, grocery stores, out on the streets. In a way it's amazing that high school teachers weren't smoking in the classroom. So different from today, when smoking is furtive, and as portrayed by Hollywood, an act of defiance against the oppressive anti-smoking forces.

Don't get me wrong. I never smoked. I think it's terrible in many ways, but since I'm as old as I am (66) I do remember how different it used to be.

[brer cat]

17. We once had a pastor who smoked while in the pulpit.

Unbelievable then, and certainly now.

[DRoseDARs]

15. I liked the part where they both died of cancer.

How DOES one cough up blood in a feminine manner? Wouldn't want to be uncouth during organ failure...