Hi again;
I loved going to the cinema when I was a child: the anticipation about the movie, the crowds of children and families filling the cinema hall, the joy of becoming someone else for a few hours.
I loved the adverts, too.
I remember a frequent one, from a tobacco company: it would show beautiful sunny expanses of landscape and some sweaty cowboys driving cattle over fields and across a river. They smoked cigarettes at the end of the advert.
I found it thrilling: It looked like another section of the Western I was about to see.
I thought then that smoking was part of growing up.
…
Nowadays I no longer remember that advert so fondly: It was beautiful but it was also a means of promoting a deadly product.
It makes me wonder about the people behind the industry. Not just the tobacco corporations, but also about all those ordinary people who, going about their business, contributed their small part to millions of deaths.
Among them were also the creatives, designers, printed media, actors, logistics, transport, retailers of tobacco products …
And all those people who bought into the idea (the marketing ploy) that smoking was their right, whether indoors or not, around children or anywhere else.
…
It baffles me to think that at the time I started going to the cinema (70s) the world had known for years that tobacco caused cancer and death.
Did all those people not realize they were contributing to a deadly industry? (6 million deaths each year, worldwide, directly linked to smoking)
They perhaps didn’t know better: Tobacco brought business. It paid taxes, it contributed to the economy, to people’s livelihoods. (In the way poison may do too)
Or perhaps they thought it was up to individuals to exercise their choice freely.
Even though… they advertised tobacco to six-year-old children.
….
I’ve been doing some more reading about feminism and inequality, and how so-called ‘free markets‘ have been instilling ideas into the public (you and me) in order to promote sales.
….
I used to think that smoking was part of growing up. I wonder what other opinions of mine have been engineered as part of a marketing ploy:
“From the 1920s, the business of engineering public opinion had itself become a sector of the economy.» (Rowbotham, P 168)
….
But wait: That was just the adverts. What about the movies themselves?
I’ll save my ponderings and readings (patriarchy, consumerism, white supremacy etc) for some other blog post.
….
I’m still getting to grips with this one.
…………
Further reading:
Sheila Rowbotham Dreamers of a new day. 2010.
Other feminist books