Althouse: Smoking is like oral sex, the French say...

February 23, 2010

Smoking is like oral sex, the French say...

... in an ad that supposed to make you not want to smoke.

These anti-smoking ads always backfire. They always make smoking seem more rebellious.

28 comments:

mRed said...: Smoke'm if you got'em.; 2/23/10, 3:41 PM
traditionalguy said...: The "cigarette girls" was the nick name for French Prostitutes who let them hang from the lip like those pics do to advertise that they were street walkers. In the USA where tobacco was king we always only did cigars. The French started using tobacco shards chopped up and rolled in paper for poor people and we used the french name when we marketed them ...Cigar-ettes.; 2/23/10, 3:56 PM
Palladian said...: French people smoke to cover up the smell of body odor.; 2/23/10, 3:59 PM
ricpic said...: So when you do the muff dive a la francaise you not only get the sardine can, on top of that the sardines have smokers' breath? Quel dommage.; 2/23/10, 4:09 PM
Methadras said...: From the looks of it the French want to start fellatio or smoking fellatio upon their young ones.; 2/23/10, 4:18 PM
Meade said...: Sex and tobacco built this country.; 2/23/10, 4:19 PM
Anonymous said...: "From the looks of it the French want to start fellatio or smoking fellatio upon their young ones."

They've protected Roman Polanski, who admitted drugging and then raping a 13-year-old girl, for years and years, so this comes as not much of a surprise.; 2/23/10, 4:30 PM
Anonymous said...: Why is the "boss" guy in a suit in the ad with the male "slave"? Business men are queer?; 2/23/10, 4:30 PM
mRed said...: Actually sex and rock and roll built this country. Tobacco skidded the way for cool rockers and that post coitus thingy.; 2/23/10, 4:31 PM
Palladian said...: When I pop open a man's trousers I hope to find un cigare Especiale rather than une Gauloises..; 2/23/10, 4:32 PM
Jim B said...: This is exactly what I've been saying for a while - specifically with regard to the commercials put out by thetruth.org.

As an example, when they put all those baby dolls with anti-smoking messages on the street in what appears to be NYC. My immediate gut reaction was: "That's creepy."

If anything it made the morbid joke about how toddlers escape second-hand smoke (By learning to crawl.), seem light-hearted and funny by comparison.

And the commercials with the people repeating what tobacco execs said? They just seemed, for a lack of a better term, like d-bags. Not hip. Not cool. Just snarky a-holes.

How about the change your habits take. You know "You don't drive every time you smoke, why smoke every time you drive" type of ads?
Well gosh, there are lots of things people do every day which could be similarly parodied. So smoking is just like those other things? If anything, I had to laugh at the ridiculous lengths they had to go to try to find an "original" take on the subject.

Like it or not, the anti-smoking cabal is now "The Man." They can't pretend they're speaking truth to power any more. They're the establishment, and the more they try to lecture and shame people into not smoking the more they're going to drive teens to do it.

That's the price of winning the argument. Suddenly you're not the cool "rebel" any more.; 2/23/10, 4:35 PM
Peter V. Bella said...: Sex and tobacco built this country.

Sex, guns, rock and roll, and tobacco built this country. There, all fixed Meade.; 2/23/10, 4:42 PM
Jason (the commenter) said...: I wonder if any French mothers end up finding one of these posters hidden under their child's bed.; 2/23/10, 4:47 PM
Penny said...: "Sex and tobacco built this country."

It was back-breaking labor, but I was happy to do my part. ;); 2/23/10, 4:51 PM
KCFleming said...: People like the effect of nicotine. As an addictive drug, it's not one of the worst. The delivery system is what kills you.

Develop a safer and relatively cheap way to inhale nicotine and it will replace smoking cigarettes.

But that's not the point of the anti-smoking crowd.

They're all fascists, and this is just one of their points of control. In the ad shown, they want to have you in that position forever. It's not that you are a slave that bothers them; it's that you're a slave to something else that rankles.; 2/23/10, 5:26 PM
Anonymous said...: "Actually sex and rock and roll built this country."

I beg to differ.

Rock and roll built this city.

But the rest of this country has been built by illegal aliens and tamales.; 2/23/10, 6:13 PM
jayne_cobb said...: I don't know about the commercials making smoking look rebellious, but I do consider them so irritating that I want to smoke if only out of spite.; 2/23/10, 6:35 PM
Unknown said...: What built the country is up for grabs, but the Pennsylvania long rifle and the Colt six-shooter kept it free.

Meanwhile, leave it to the Euros to try to take the fun out of everything.; 2/23/10, 7:27 PM
James Wigderson said...: Bill Clinton would say they should have used cigars.; 2/23/10, 7:30 PM
James Wigderson said...: Hey, Tiger Woods, there's a patch for that now.; 2/23/10, 7:31 PM
Rick Lockridge said...: Do any of you smokers ever stop to think that maybe I don't want to control you, maybe I don't want to impose my value system on you, but that you just plain stink and look really stupid and you don't have a right to ruin my air?

It's not us, it's you: pathetic self-loathing addicts.

If they ever cure cancer, we'll just have to put up with you that much longer.; 2/23/10, 8:13 PM
Skeptical said...: Anti-smoking ads fail because they put forward an obvious big lie: that smoking is an unalloyed evil. Every smoker know that this is false. We all know the joys of the rituals of smoking, remember good times had in which smoking was a central pivot, and so forth.

You have to present it for what it is: something great that unfortunately will ruin you. Otherwise the bullshit is transparent.; 2/23/10, 8:15 PM
Jim B said...: Rick -

I'll take you on that.

Smokers have as much right to smell bad and look stupid as the ridiculous hippies shopping at Whole Foods.

As far as fouling your air, you have as much obligation to find someplace else to be as they have to remove themselves from your presence. If you don't like bars or restaurants filled with smoke, don't patronize them.

Imposing your own personal morality on others is your need to control other people, it's not based in anything other than your own obviously obnoxiousness.

I can guarantee you that I'd much rather be in a room of smokers than be subjected to your particularly toxic attitude.

Pathetic and self-loathing? WOW. Talk about projecting. Have you ever stopped to listen to what you're spewing?

Hate kills. Get over yourself.; 2/23/10, 8:42 PM
traditionalguy said...: Well said, Jim B. Free speech strikes again.; 2/23/10, 10:03 PM
exhelodrvr1 said...: If your cigarette burns for more than 4 hours, please seek immediate medical attention.; 2/23/10, 10:20 PM
Amexpat said...: The ad doesn't make me want to smoke, but it does make me want to date a woman who does.; 2/24/10, 2:46 AM
Leland said...: While I do think Rick is pompous, this response is just so much projection:

As far as fouling your air, you have as much obligation to find someplace else to be as they have to remove themselves from your presence. If you don't like bars or restaurants filled with smoke, don't patronize them.

Imposing your own personal morality on others is your need to control other people, it's not based in anything other than your own obviously obnoxiousness.

Thanks Jim for expressing your own personal morality there. I agree, it is rather obnoxious. You should take your advice here:

Hate kills. Get over yourself.

My personal morality is this. I have no problems with smokers. I think laws against public smoking places, like bars or restaurants, are assaults on freedoms. And government ads against a productive industry is a waste of money.

At the same time, tobacco smoke does stink. A large number of smokers seem to think any piece of ground is a great place to discard their butts. And a smoker can be 30 feet away from me, and I can still smell their fumes and have it ruin the nice perfume of my date or the taste of my dinner.

You bet I patronize businesses that refuse to allow smoking on their premise. It has nothing to do with personal hate. It has to do with not wanting to be annoyed.

And Jim, I totally agreed with your first comment. I'm equally annoyed by those commercials. They remind me that I have either something better to do than watch tv, or at least more channels with something better on to watch.; 2/24/10, 8:07 AM
A.W. said...: i remember an old joke on SNL, when norm macdonald was host. i think a reasonable paraphrase went like this. "Women are reportedly taking classes to learn how to smoke cigars. The classes cost nothing for women, but cost $200 per man to watch."; 2/24/10, 12:54 PM