Selling an Addiction

I recently read a pretty fantastic blog post by Maeli about possibly false advertising stemming from color scheme selection on cigarette boxes, and while at the time I found the idea a little bit ridiculous, today I came across this article about cigarette boxes and ads aimed (through color scheme and design) towards teenage girls. Thankfully the ads were pulled in 2008, but the long-lasting effects of specified advertising remain.

Called "Camel No. 9" (and meant to resemble Chanel No. 9 perfume), the cigarettes were placed in chic black boxes with pink trim, and marketed in magazines like Glamour and US Weekly. The company offered promotional gifts like berry lip balm and cell phone jewelry with cigarette purchases. Of course girls were going to be inclined to buy cigarettes that were advertised as "light & luscious" and offered them gifts as innocent as jewelry and lip balm.

The article not only reminded me of many of the "6 Weapons of Influence," but it also made me think of the discussions we had earlier in the year about advertising to children. Teenage girls may very well be just as easily influenced as young children, and when it comes to smoking cigarettes, our minds are easily swayed by those of our peers. Ads like these don't help at all in supressing cigarette addictions, and it's estimated that under the influence of these advertisements, 174,000 underage girls began smoking.

When we talked about immoral advertisements earlier in the year, I wrote a blog about the vulnerability of children. Looking back on that now, and noting how characters in children's ads seemed to go through a "drug-like withdrawal" when not supplied with their favorite products. I remember being absolutely appalled about that, and reading drug advertisements aimed at minors seems even worse. These corporations really are selling an addiction (at an illegal age too), and all they care about is the profit.

Daisy, Jim, Native Americans and "Chinamen"

Since the beginning of the year, we've talked a lot about groups that have been oppressed in our country. It seems that throughout our history, we as Americans have abused many of the minority and disadvantaged groups in our country, and left them with nothing. Just as Huck and Tom left Jim all alone with $40 at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after he had endured an entire adventure with him; just as we placed thousands of Native Americans in downtown Chicago during location, and just as Ludacris dumped all of his "Chinamen" in the middle of the street at the end of the movie Crash, just telling them to "go," Americans have a tendency to throw money and displacement at a minority or disadvantaged group and pretend like everything's okay.

While this trend can be easily observed among different racial and ethnic groups, there's also another "disadvantaged" group that throughout history has been frequently helpless and abandoned: single women.

This line in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby reminded me a lot of many class discussions that we've had about abandoned American cultures, all of the times that we've left disadvantaged people in the dust.

"I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms- but apparently there was no such intentions in her head" (Fitzgerald, 20).

Daisy is a fantasticly strong female character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, but there are still many things that she cannot deal with. When I read this line, at the very end of the first chapter, the only thing that I could think was where would she go? While she clearly doesn't love Tom and she resents her life with, I believe Daisy can't leave Tom for fear of having nowhere to go. He is the source of her money, her wealth, her well-being. If she were to get a divorce, she would have been just as well off as the thousands of Native Americans taken from their homes and dumped in downtown Chicago during "relocation."

Hopefully now that Daisy and Gatsby have revealed their love for each other, Daisy will feel more confident about leaving Tom, but it doesn't change the fact that women during the time of The Great Gatsby needed a man to latch on to in order to have a successful life. The marriage process turned them from "girls" into "women," no matter what their literal age was.