Is it possible to be outraged by the outrage of others? Because I find the furor over Camel No. 9s — the pretty pink cigarette that’s just for ladies — troubling.
Most of the uproar I’ve seen — since the cigarettes came out earlier this year, and now with a direct marketing campaign – is over the cigarette’s female-specific advertising. The pack itself is pretty. Marketing materials include jewelry, makeup, purses. Camel No. 9s are the cigarettes that match your lipstick, your bag, your pretty stilletto heels. They overwhelm your silly cancer worries with their “sweeter taste” and irresistable pinkness. A candy-colored package to sell a deadly substance.
But why be outraged over this specific ad campaign, simply because it’s for young women and, worse, teenage girls? (Or superfemmy boys?) Where’s the outrage for our young men and boys, who are just as bombarded — probably more so — with tobacco ads that promise to turn them into cowboy toughguys who attract more chicks than they can handle?
That’s where this gender-specific criticism turns harmful. It skates too close to the arguments against Joe Camel, a marketing device discontinued for being too attractive to the most impressionable consumers — children. Campaigning specifically to quash ads for Camel No. 9s risks putting women in the same category: an especially impressionable class of cosumers who need to be protected from their naive urges. (“True, it causes cancer. But pink!”) Let’s keep protecting the teenage girls, but not to the exclusion of their male counterparts.
Grown women are another story. Here’s what I think most of them are smart enough to see:
R.J. Reynolds may be co-opting the Sex and the City asthetic, but look at the last 20 years. Tobacco advertisers, stuck selling such a crappy product, have always tried to co-opt something — create a tie, no matter how tenuous, to any kind of positive feeling or trend, to any kind of sexy. I still remember a Virginia Slims ad from the super-PC ’90s that dripped with topical sanctimony: Two 100-pound models, nearly identical except one is white and one is black, hang shirts on a picturesque clotheline. “Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color,” reads the ad copy. Virginia Slims: The cigarette for people who totally aren’t racist!
Purses, makeup and cuteness have just as little to do with tobacco as do decades-late condemnations of racial segregation. But hey, when your product kills people, you need a good, thick coating of cozy feelings.
So be angry at all of the cigarette ads, or none of them. Because until their ad copy starts reading “smell bad, age fast and die young,” they are all lying — to all of us.
