Can’t Buy My Love by Jean Kilbourne

Author:Jean Kilbourne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Touchstone Book

Certainly the cigarette advertisers, like the food and diet product advertisers who also spend billions on psychological research, are aware of suppressed anger in women and deliberately play upon it in their advertising. The advertisers also reflect some of the deeper issues of the culture regarding power and freedom for women. It is difficult, if not impossible, to know how much is conscious and calculated. However, another cigarette campaign seems to do very much the same thing as the Virginia Slims campaign—to turn an anxiety-producing situation, especially for women, into a joke. For years a Newport campaign featured young men and women in playful caricatures of essentially violent situations. I first noticed this about twenty years ago and was astonished when I looked at the ads one after another. The campaign has obviously been very successful—similar ads continue to run and Newport is one of the top cigarette brands.

Many of the ads are shockingly violent, especially when seen as a group. Women are buried in snow, stuffed into boxes, thrown over men’s shoulders, tied to poles, hit with snowballs, bells, a barrel of leaves, cymbals, buckets of water, and pillows. In one ad, a woman seems to be on fire. In another, a woman is seated on a basketball, about to fall onto hard pavement. Another features a woman about to be submerged in icy water, her face an odd mix of joy and terror. Perhaps the strangest one of all features a woman in a yoke, such as is used on oxen.

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