Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA

Definitely! Back when that ad was made, though, probably cigarettes were still being advertised as "healthful" for you, with doctors recommending them. Gullible, gullible, gullible people.


The history of sexism in industrial ads is also interesting, jibber. In the 70s or so, back when few scientists were women, ads for lab equipment like centrifuges sometimes had women draped over them seductively...rather like you see with cars today.

I remember being shocked when I saw some of these old ads in a lab where I worked. These days, all the ads/catalogs made by big science corporations...Fisher, Sigma, etc....portray people very professionally and respectfully, regardless of gender or ethnicity, thanks to the fact that there are a lot more women such as myself in science who would never buy any product from a company treating women in a derogatory fashion.

Speaking of women's bodies being used to sell stuff, I was also shocked when I went to England ten years ago and saw people reading newspapers with photos of a bare-breasted woman on the third page: The Sun's "Page 3 girls." Page Three - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I was shocked that something I see as so demeaning toward women is so commonplace and apparently accepted in British newspapers and newspapers around the world.

If the newspapers are committed to going the soft-porn route, I felt they should at least treat women and men equally by having both a nude woman AND a nude man pictured. Just showing a topless women, but not a topless man, makes women seem like sexual commodities, while men are not. If newspaper execs are willing to put women on display in newspapers, then they should be darn ready to put naked men out there, too, on their infamous Page 3.

Ideally, they'd just write good news reports without needing to gain or retain readers by trying to titillate them.