Women in the twenty-first century boast that they’ve “come a long way, baby;” yet not only are they not on a par with men when it comes to equal pay for equal work, they continue to be objectified in nearly every way imaginable and in every medium: from reality TV to beer and car commercials, from NFL cheerleaders to beauty pageants, from the Victoria’s Secret fashion show to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. There’s Howard Stern, Playboy and pornography; while wrinkles, sagging flesh, and cellulite cause more fear in this country than global warming and the threat of another terrorist attack combined.
But sexism is becoming prominent in the cigar industry nowadays as more and more ads feature sexy women in cigar ads, both online and in print. I admire a beautiful woman as much as the next guy or gal, but my only interests in buying a cigar are the wrapper, its binder, the filler blend, and how long the leaf has been aged.
Cigar smoking used to be a male-only activity, but more women are indulging in the practice. It’s one thing to ask for a recommendation from a knowledgeable woman—someone who’s been in the tobacco business for twenty years, learned it from the bottom up from her father or a favorite uncle—quite another to buy a stick based on the body parts of the woman pushing it.
Yet the ad industry has been using sex to sell their products for years. Does anyone really buy a car because of the woman behind the wheel in the ad who asks, “The important thing in choosing a car is, when you turn it on, does it return the favor?”
These ads must work; if they didn’t business would find some other angle that does. Yet surely some consumers must find them insulting. Why aren’t more men and women outraged? Like many men, it seems that some women wrongly measure themselves against the sexuality depicted on the small screen as today’s norm.
The wisdom of marketing cigars using women eluded me for a time—then it hit me like a bale of tobacco leaf: the industry couldn’t care less about appealing to a seasoned leaf lover like me: they’ve got my dollar. Their worry is appealing to a much younger demographic, the one that will one day replace me.
I grew up watching Rob and Laura Petrie, who couldn’t be shown onscreen in the same bed together. The thirty-somethings today, Generation X, grew up on MTV. If today’s TV has desensitized the old fogey generation, what’s it done to a generation who grew up on it?
The pendulum will never swing the other way—not until women, with the help of male feminists, stand up and refuse to be used as the objects they outwardly profess to abhor, even as they inwardly—perhaps even unconsciously—seem to embrace the practice. Until that happens, expect the advertising industry to continue to use women in more and more risqué ways.
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