Originally Posted by
Cybele
Women smoking cigarettes, it’s a totally normal thing these days, in the United States and other parts of the world. But it was popularized with an experiment which was especially created to persuade women into smoking, to generate more profits for corporations.
The one who came up with the idea of the experiment was Edward Bernays (the nephew of Sigmund Freud) a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda. He realized that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally, if you link products to their emotional desires and feelings, by manipulating the unconscious.
At that time (after WWI), there was a taboo invoked by men, against women smoking in public. So, George Hills, the president of the American Tobacco Company and the client of Bernays, asked him of a way of breaking this taboo. Hills did so, because he thought he was losing half of his market.
Edward Bernays consulted a psychoanalyst to find out what cigarettes mean to women. The psychoanalyst said the cigarettes were a symbol of male sexual power. And he told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes with the idea of challenging male power, then women would smoke. Cigarettes were a symbol of the penis. Women would smoke because it was then that they’d have their own penises.
Every year, New York held a Easter Day parade to which thousands came. So Bernays decided to stage an event there. He persuaded a group of debutantes to hide cigarettes under their clothes, then they should join parade. At a given signal from him, they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically. Bernays informed the press that he heard that a group of suffragettes were preparing to protest by lighting up what they called “torches of freedom”. He knew this will be an outcry and he knew of the photographers would be there to capture this moment. He was ready with the phrase “torches of freedom”. The symbol were young women smoking a cigarette in public with a phrase that means, anybody who believes in this kind of equality, has to support them in the ensuing debate about this. Even the Statue of Liberty/ freedom was holding up the torch. So there was a mix of emotion, memory working together with the phrase he made up. The next day, that news was all across the United States and the world.
From that point forward, the sale of cigarettes to women began to rise. He had made the socially acceptable with a single symbolic act, and created the idea that if a woman smoked, it made her more powerful and independent, an idea that still persists today. The idea that smoking was actually made women freer was completely irrational, but it made them feel more independent, a powerful emotional symbol of how one wanted to be seen by others. Together, these efforts to conflate smoking with freedom and make smoking acceptable for women created a new set of consumers and reinforced Bernays’s argument that demand could be created.
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