France Fuming Over Scandalous Anti-Smoking Ads

(Feb. 24) -- C'est scandaleux. A racy new ad campaign meant to discourage French teenagers from smoking has provoked an outcry from feminists and politicians, who say the ads are offensive.

Each of the three ads features a young person with a cigarette in his or her mouth kneeling before an older man, with the lit end of the cigarette facing the man's crotch as he holds his hand over the smoker's head. A smooth slogan completes the image: "Smoking makes you a slave to tobacco."

Gérard Audureau, president of the Association for Nonsmokers' Rights, which launched the campaign, acknowledged that the ads are suggestive, but he made no apologies.

"Yes it's crude. Yes it's daring, but in this campaign we are targeting older teenagers -- a group whose use of cigarettes is growing," he told Connexion, a French magazine, on Wednesday. "The health arguments do not get through to them because they think they are immortal."

The unmistakable allusion to oral sex, however, is not what angered many critics. Instead, on blogs Wednesday, many said they were upset by what they saw as a callous treatment of sexual abuse. Jill of Feministe, a women's blog in the United States, was disturbed:

"The vice-president of the advertising firm that created the ad says it intends to portray smoking as 'an act of naïveté and submission.' Which is apparently what oral sex is? Complicating the issue is that the teenager with the cigarette in his/her mouth looks scared; the person with the cigarette in their pants has a hand on the teenager's head; and the whole situation looks more like abuse than sex (or naïveté or submission, for that matter)."

Wednesday, one commenter took to the Association for Nonsmokers' Rights' Web site to complain that the "campaign trivialises sexual abuse" and "implies guilt on the part of the abused," The Telegraph reported.

There was criticism from more traditional quarters of French society as well. French Family Minister Nadine Morano said Wednesday that the ads ''might constitute an affront on public decency."

But the sharpest anger could be heard in the blogosphere and among women.

Antoinette Fouque of the Movement for Women's Liberation bristled at the suggestion that engaging in oral sex is the equivalent of subservience. "As far as I know, practising fellatio doesn't cause cancer," she told Le Parisien on Tuesday.

In the French newspaper Journal du Dimanche, Florence Montreynaud said the ad campaign is "sexist" and "shows the marketers' creative poverty. Each time they have a failure of ideas, they again trot out the idea of sexuality."