Coffee and Cigerettes (Augustana)

At 13, after stealing one of my dad’s packs of cigarettes, I realized that no matter how cool the kids made it seem, smoking was not for me. That was until I saw this ad and I actually said “ I would start smoking to carry around those as accessories “. Which is what I would guess RJ Reynolds would hope thousands of other women across the world would say. I thought that the cigarette companies were supposed to keep the glamour out of smoking? But don’t think that RJ Reynolds is not getting some heat over this. And although it is obvious that they are trying to market the female smoker, there are a lot of women’s groups that feel that it is exploiting their gender. As one interviewee stated in a New York Times article “More women die of lung cancer than breast cancer, by a wide margin yet the tobacco companies still “want to increase their market share among women.” And although you are not able to legally buy cigarettes until you are 18, it seems that the advertising for them is marketing a much younger audience. Can anyone argue that this is not on purpose? If a 30 year old women who has never smoked, joked about changing her view on the idea, How much of an impression would this make on a an already easily influenced teenage girl?