UCR CHASS: Women's Studies

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Student Exhibits

Ages of Addiction
Brittany Roberts

Did you know that Tobacco is the only legally available consumer product, which kills people when it is entirely used as intended?

The tobacco industry is one of the largest in the world; supplying the population with a variety of forms, flavors, and means of ingestion and inhalation. Whether it is cigarettes, chew, snuff, cigars, pipe tobacco, or what have you, tobacco is an extremely fashionable addiction. From the gentlemen of Europe, the Victorian women in secret, and the peasants in the street to the cowboys in the west the flapper in the 1920’s and the common person today, cigarettes have grown in popularity, taking precedence in people’s lives, slowly creating an addiction throughout the ages. Even with the warning labels, the anti-smoking or “truth” campaigns, and all the information on smoking and its harmful effects on the body and mind, people continue to smoke. Knowing that with the thousands of extra chemicals and already addictive substance of nicotine in the cigarettes people smoke themselves toward a slow suicide.

Smoking has been advertised by the industry as a more “masculine habit, linked to health, happiness, fitness, wealth, power and sexual success” but in reality it only leads to major health problems, disease, “premature death, and sexual problems” (McKay & Eriksen 24). Smoking cigarettes has been looked down upon in the hands of a woman, but they have gained their freedom through years of suffrage. Even while women were considered fast, rude, and vulgar for smoking, the industry advertised to them specifically through means of design in the cigarette. For example they used menthol or longer, thinner cigarettes, usually lights because they were less harsh on the woman’s throat. As the years progressed so did the number of smoking women; in some countries the women smoke the same amount if not more than men. Women have made a statement that smoking is not, or should not, be a gendered process and therefore, can smoke equally to men, meaning in the same areas, the same brands, and in the same amount.