quote:
Writing in the June issue of the journal Addiction, Carpenter and colleagues said their study of tobacco company documents show a clear effort to find out what might make women want to smoke.The firms also considered putting appetite suppressants into cigarettes so they could promote them as weight control products, they said.
"How unfortunate that the industry used these findings to exploit women and not help them. Cigarette designs and ingredients were manipulated in an effort to make cigarettes more palatable to women and to complement advertising allusions of smooth, healthy, weight-controlling, stress-reducing smoke," Jack Henningfield of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues wrote in a commentary.
Carpenter's team said tobacco companies' efforts to attract women included the creation of "slim" cigarettes in the 1970s.
"These studies demonstrate that marketing strategies, especially for female brands, have contributed to the association of smoking with appealing attributes including female liberation, glamour, success and thinness," they wrote.
Does anyone know if female smoking rates are still higher than male smoking rates? I vaguely remember that in the late 90's they were claiming that teenage girls were taking up smoking more often than teenage boys. Perhaps this explains why...