Abstract
In the context of concerns about the effects of secondhand smoke on fetal health and the health of children, North American health promotion interventions have focused on reducing tobacco consumption among women to a greater extent than men. This is problematic when the health effects of men’s secondhand smoke in family environments are considered. This article examines this gendered phenomenon in terms of a history of cigarette consumption that positions smoking as masculine. Furthermore, it demonstrates the value of addressing men’s smoking using a gendered methodology, with an emphasis on fatherhood as an expression of masculine identity. Garnering health promotion programs to promote a culture of masculinity that is less individualistic, and defined in terms of responsibility and care for others, in addition to the self, has the potential to render men’s smoking problematic and challenge the historic linkages between smoking and masculinity.
Introduction
Current medical literature routinely refers to the negative impact of secondhand smoke on fetal health and the health of young children. For example, a 2006 report commissioned by the Provincial Health Services Authority of British Columbia, Canada, summarized the “levels of risk” associated with exposure to secondhand smoke, also known as “environmental tobacco smoke,” as follows: Health outcomes that were causally related to exposure to secondhand smoke included abortion (Venners et al., 2004), low birth weight, sudden infant death syndrome, acute lower respiratory tract infections, asthma exacerbation, chronic respiratory symptoms, and middle ear infections. Health effects in children for which there was evidence “suggestive of a causal association” also included adverse impact on cognition and behavior including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Altink et al., 2009), decreased pulmonary function, asthma induction, and the exacerbation of cystic fibrosis (Copes & Rekart, 2006).
In the context of these concerns about smoking and its effects on fetal health and the health of young children, research reveals a far greater level of concern about the issue of women’s smoking when compared with men’s smoking (Oaks, 2000). Oliffe, Bottorff, Johnson, Kelly, and LeBeau (2009) argue, for example, that “many researchers have focused on mothers tobacco reduction” while fathers’ attempts at tobacco reduction and continued cessation during and after pregnancy have been largely ignored (p. 10). Bottorff, Oliffe, Kalaw, Carey, and Mroz (2006) confirm that “a detailed examination of [male] partner tobacco use in the context of pregnancy and parenting has not materialized” (p. 3098). In this context, fewer changes in the levels of smoking in family homes are found among men when compared with women (Bottorff et al., 2006).
This lack of focus on men’s smoking in family health (including fetal health and the health of young children) is of serious concern for a number of reasons. Men’s smoking not only endangers their own health, it also risks the health of their partner, the unborn fetus, and/or their children. Independent of the mother’s smoking status, men’s smoking is associated with low birth weight, sudden infant death syndrome, and respiratory illnesses in infants and young children (Bottorff et al., 2006; British Medical Association, 2004; Venners et al., 2004). Moreover, men’s smoking negatively influences women’s tobacco reduction attempts and continued cessation during pregnancy and the postpartum period (Bottorff et al., 2006). Men’s continued smoking has also been shown to increase the chances of their children eventually being smokers (Oliffe et al., 2009). Implicated here also are relational connections to other gendered smoking patterns whereby the initiation and frequency of tobacco use, though converging, still shows higher levels of use among boys across adolescence (Romer & Hennessy, 2007; Wallace et al., 2003), and from a treatment perspective, research suggests that women may face different stressors and barriers to quitting than men and that some treatments (e.g., nicotine replacement therapy) are less efficacious in women than in men (Fiore et al., 2000; Niaura & Abrams, 2002). In short, the lack of focus on the issue of men’s smoking in the family context, especially when compared with the scrutiny on mothers’ smoking, points to the need for an historical analysis to better understand the origins of these gender inequities amid thoughtfully considering what might constitute men-centered tobacco reduction and smoking cessation programs.
In this article, a critical examination of the dearth of health promotion foci on the issue of men’s smoking and secondhand smoke is undertaken using a historical analysis. The first section of the article discusses the historical origins of the masculine gendering of smoking. The second part, women fight for the right to smoke, examines the subsequent increase in consumption of the cigarette by female consumers. The third part, health promotion and women’s tobacco consumption, examines the overemphasis on the body of the pregnant woman. The fourth part, gendering the secondhand smoke debate, discusses the positioning of men’s and women’s smoking in the context of fetal health and the health of young children. To conclude, the findings drawn from these sections are used to discuss how historical iconic linkages between smoking and masculinity might be challenged amid developing men-centered health promotion programs.
Historical Origins of the Masculine Gendering of Smoking
Cigarettes are a mercurial phenomenon. Small, relatively undifferentiated from one another, except through packaging and advertising, and possessing very little use-value, they nevertheless developed, as Brandt (2007) writes, into “the prototypical—indeed emblematic—product of the [20th] century” (pp. 2-3). Enabled by advances in manufacturing, distribution, and marketing, the cigarette was inextricably linked with the rise of consumer culture and its associated sense of the good life. “There are few, if any, central aspects of American society in the last century,” Brandt (2007) argues, “that are truly smoke free” (p. 3). Tobacco industry analyst Harry Wootten (1943) described the rise of the cigarette in the post–World War I period as “one of the industrial phenomena of the era” (p. 15).
As a commodity par excellence, the culture of cigarette consumption has been gendered. Cigarette consumption, that is, has functioned as a site which is shaped by gendered ideals and which, more important, plays a crucial, disciplinary role in the work of setting gendered standards and producing representations of both femininity and masculinity. The relationship between cigarette consumption and gendered identities can be traced back to 19th-century forms of tobacco consumption when, as Jarrett Rudy (2005) argues, men defined themselves as connoisseurs of tobacco and sought to demonstrate how their use of tobacco was not dictated by habit or enslavement but through the labored appreciation of the “majestic leaf.” Women, on the other hand, “did not possess the power of self control. . . . Nor did [they] . . . have the capacity to be rational economic actors and choose a quality tobacco” (pp. 4-5). Thus, only men had the capacity to purchase and consume tobacco respectably and responsibly. Women’s tobacco consumption was stigmatized and viewed by magazines such as
The distinction between men and women’s capacity to consume tobacco, based on gendered qualities of self-control, was not unique to smoking but drew on what historians such as de Grazia (1996) have argued was the pervasively gendered culture of consumption more generally. The consuming practices of men and women, that is, were widely distinguished on the basis of a masculine/feminine, rational/irrational dichotomy. Cieply (2010) asserts that gendered definitions of male and female consumption drew on medicalized views of women as nervous, hysterical, and unable to control their own passions. The unstable relationship between a woman and her commodified desires, as Mary Louise Roberts (1998) suggests, was evident in the figure of the female kleptomaniac. Roland Marchand (1985) points out that a significant proportion of interwar advertising professionals viewed the female consumer as “emotional, irrational and lacking in self-control” (p. 131) and thus requiring the disinterested guidance of advertising professionals. These “consumer instructors,” as Cheryl Warsh (1998, p. 188) describes them, were most likely male, Anglo-Saxon, less than 40 years of age, college-educated, and living in a Northeastern city, probably New York. This distinction between masculine and feminine consumption was important, as Peter Brown (1989) argues, because it highlighted men’s capacity to exercise control over others.
The emphasis on men’s tobacco consumption as a symbol of masculine self-possession and capacity for controlled and responsible consumption gradually shifted from chewing tobacco and pipe smoking to cigarettes. However, it took time for this shift to take place. As Schmitz (2000) argues, in the 1880s, the “newfangled smokes [i.e., cigarettes] were decidedly
If early cigarette advertising worked to position the cigarette in the context of an existing discourse of tobacco consumption as masculine, it was also the case that the cigarette was construed as a response to a radically transforming environment in which urbanization, industrialization, technological change, the rise of an interdependent market economy, and a culture of speed and nervous energy was preventing men striving for masculine virtues of self-control and autonomy with immense new challenges. As Jackson Lears (1983) argues, “It was not surprising that believers in self-made manhood grew uneasy. Even the privileged fretted over ‘our lost individuality’ as they pondered the coming of a mass society” (p. 9).
The chief characteristic of the cigarette, in the context of this new age, was the speed and efficiency with which it could be consumed. Rather than the time-consuming rituals associated with smoking a pipe or a cigar, or the laborious and messy processes (which included spitting) that accompanied the consumption of chewing tobacco, cigarettes were streamlined, rational, orderly, and efficient, much like masculinity itself (Klein, 1993). The cigarette, that is, represented a different relationship to things in general based on speed, efficiency, immediacy, and disposability. It changed, or at least captured a change, in the style of masculinity as a whole. Sobel (1978) writes, “A fast-moving civilization called for a quick smoke” (p. 82).
Thus, while the cigarette drew on a preexisting relationship between masculinity and tobacco consumption, it was also revolutionary in the sense that it enabled men to continue to express a particular set of masculine values in the context of radical changes in the world around them. Thus, James Buchanan Duke, the man who most historians agree introduced the 20th century to the cigarette, was an entrepreneur in the sense described by Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus (1997). He had what they describe as “the skills for making history.” “The entrepreneurs worth thinking about,” they write, “are the ones who are sensitive to how the problem that they sense [and seek to solve] has its roots in our pervasive way of living” (p. 41).
The increase in the quantities of cigarettes consumed during the first decades of the 20th century was indicative of the extent to which it captured a change not just in tobacco consuming practices but in, as Spinosa et al. (1997) put it, “our pervasive way of living” (p. 41). In 1914, for example, slightly less than 18 billion cigarettes were produced in America. By 1917, this had doubled to 36 billion. Two years later, close to 54 billion cigarettes were turned out. Per capita consumption went from 134 cigarettes in 1910-1914 to 310 cigarettes in 1915-1919 (Sobel, 1978). Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these increases was that they were facilitated by consumption that was almost entirely dominated by men. By 1923, women were still only responsible for 5% of the total consumption (Wootten, 1941).
The extent to which the 20th-century (and 21st-century) cigarette continued to draw on preexisting gendered cultures of consumption whereby, as Rudy (2005) illustrates, tobacco was understood as an expression of a man’s masculinity (defined in terms of rationality and self-control), can be illustrated through an analysis of more recent advertising campaigns. The archetypal example of a 20th-century tobacco advertising campaign is Philip Morris’s Marlboro Man campaign. The ubiquitous presence in this campaign is the figure of the cowboy. The dominant virtue of the cowboy, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, has been his autonomy and his capacity for self-directed action (Lohof, 1969). For these reasons, the Marlboro Man as cowboy can be understood directly in terms of the long tradition in which men’s consuming practices, particularly with respect to tobacco consumption, have been defined in terms of a capacity for responsible consumption. Moreover, men’s capacity for responsible consumption has, characteristically and historically, been juxtaposed to women’s consuming practices. At the same time that men’s consumption is distinguished from women’s consumption, consumption (of tobacco) also serves to maintain existing gender identities and gender relations.
The Marlboro Man has not been the only campaign to employ imagery invoking a sense of masculine mastery over the self, over nature, and over others. Winston cigarette marketing, according to a marketing plan for 1984, was designed to “focus on the key differentiating wants of Virile Segment smokers . . . [including] rugged masculinity” (National Cancer Institute, 2008, p. 151). In the early 1980s, several advertisements for Camel cigarettes showed men (and associated “gear”) in rustic scenes, with the slogan, “Where a man belongs” (National Cancer Institute, 2008, p. 152). Similarly, in Canada, a 1988 Imperial Tobacco Limited document discussing Players, their flagship brand, stated, “In order to move Player’s Light up the on the masculinity dimension, we will continue throughout [fiscal] F’89 to feature creative [images] which reflect freedom, independence, and self-reliance in a relevant fashion for young males” (Anderson, Dewhirst, & Ling, 2006, p. 258). Another Imperial Tobacco document positioned Players cigarettes to convey a man “free to choose friends, music, clothes, own activities, to be alone if he wishes,” but not lonely, and self-reliant with “nobody to interfere” (National Cancer Institute, 2008, p. 154).
Recent ethnographic research examining the relationships between masculinity and cigarette consumption in the context of fatherhood has confirmed the ways in which smoking continues today to be defined as an expression of men’s masculinity and, more specifically, men’s capacity for self-control (Oliffe et al., 2009). It is this emphasis on self-control, for example, that is at the center of what Bottorff et al. (2006) describe as a male smoking culture that espouses risk-taking, self-reliance, independence, and sexual virility. In the context of a series of interview-based studies on cigarette consumption by expectant fathers, they write, “According to the men’s descriptions, tobacco use signified and reflected their independence, physical resilience to harmful substances, and capacity to endure risk-taking” (Bottorff et al., 2006, p. 3098). Research has also suggested that the emphasis on smoking as an expression of a masculine capacity for self-control has not only informed the decisions men have made to smoke, it also affected men’s approach to the question of smoking cessation. Men, that is, often understand the quit smoking process as an exertion of free will (Bottorff, Radsma, Kelly, & Oliffe, 2009).
In the context of the relationship between men’s smoking and a masculine emphasis on individual control over smoking and smoking cessation, public health models that emphasize merely the poor health consequences of consumption are endowed with limited efficacy. Balbach, Smith, and Malone (2006) describe this as the “individual-level rational choice model,” which wrongly assumes that individuals are capable, when presented with information, of making good decisions about their health. By reinvesting responsibility in the individual to assume control, such models can be seen to reinforce the culture of masculinity that motivates tobacco consumption in the first instance.
Women Fight for the Right to Smoke
Despite the masculine gender of cigarette smoking, or perhaps because of it, women’s consumption increased dramatically in the 1920s and 1930s, rising from 5% of the industry’s total output in 1923 to just less than 25% in 1941 (Wootten, 1941). By 1964, the ratio of female-to-male smokers had risen to nearly 50%. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health published that year found that 68% of American men and 32.4% of American women aged 18 years and older regularly consumed cigarettes (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1964). More recent surveys suggest that while rates of cigarette consumption by both men and women have decreased, women’s consumption
Representations of women’s desire to smoke, as it emerged through advertising and various forms of commentary, centered on a discourse of social riskiness (Greaves, 1996). These connotations of risk were primarily a function of the inherently masculine quality of consumption. Women’s consumption of tobacco, Sharon Cook (2007) writes, “consciously encompassed both danger and promise” (p. 368). Women’s smoking, that is, was a form of cross-appropriation. As Brandt (1996) writes, “Smoking represented a culturally contentious, if not radical behavior for women” (p. 65). It was this radical quality that made smoking at once modern and desirable (Tinkler & Warsh, 2008).
Some commentators defined the relationship between women and cigarette consumption in terms of (hetero)sexual desire. Writing in the
To-day, when smoking is after all mainly a masculine amusement, [women] can still feel that they are doing something that men do and possessing something that men possess. . . . They like to be given, but not to give, cigarettes (motion = gift = penis). (as cited in Larson, Haag, & Silvette, 1961, p. 567)
Other commentators, while less adventurous than Hiller, agreed that the women’s cigarette smoking was associated with new codes of sexuality (Tinkler, 2006). In an article published in the
The majority of commentators, however, rejected the emphasis on sexuality for a more general focus on equal rights. Allan Brandt (1996) writes, “The use of cigarettes became an effective means of challenging social conventions, of deriding ideals of moral purity and the idea of women inhabiting a ‘separate sphere’” (p. 63). Brandt (1996) cites the
Particularly significant in this respect was the work of Edward Bernays, who recruited debutantes to march in the 1929 New York City Easter parade branding their Lucky Strike cigarettes as “torches of freedom.” As Brandt (2007) describes it, “The young women marched down Fifth Avenue puffing Lucky Strikes, effectively uniting the symbol of the emancipated flapper with that of the committed suffragist” (p. 85). Newspapers widely reported the exploit, touching off a national debate. Bernays (1965) had successfully reinvigorated the controversies of the previous decade, enlisting the cultural tensions over women’s public smoking in his marketing campaigns. While women’s clubs decried the fall of the proscription on public smoking, feminists hailed the change in social convention. Reports of women smoking “on the street” came from cities and towns across the nation. “Age-old customs, I learned,” wrote Bernays (1965), “could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of media” (p. 849).
Much of the cigarette advertising directed toward female consumers in the second half of the 20th century continued to use the same tropes of freedom and liberation employed by Bernays in the 1920s. During the late 1960s, Virginia Slims developed the tagline, “You’ve come a long way, baby” (Lasch, 1979). In an analysis of competition in female-oriented cigarette advertising during the early 1970s, the Virginia Slims campaign hit the cigarette market in 1968, just as the women’s liberation movement was entering the national consciousness whereby “the cigarette is positioned specifically for today’s liberated woman with a unique, swinging image” (as cited in National Cancer Institute, 2008, p. 56). Another cigarette directed toward women that employed similar rhetoric to Virginia Slims was Liggett & Myers’s Eve, which was introduced to the U.S. marketplace in 1971. Drawing self-consciously on the Adam and Eve story, with its emphases on the feminine consumption of forbidden fruit, Eve advertisements, from 1974, suggested, “We asked her if she wanted a ladylike cigarette. She said, ‘Hell, no’” (as cited in U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001, p. 506).
These advertising campaigns are interesting to the extent that they draw on the same themes of risk, danger, and promise that characterized cigarette advertising directed toward women in the early 20th century. As such, they suggest that the growing level of cigarette consumption by women in the mid to late 20th century continued to be governed by an emphasis on masculine consumption as normal. Feminine consumption, in contrast, remained attractive and desirable precisely by virtue of its transgressive quality.
Health Promotion and Women’s Tobacco Consumption
If, as argued, representations of women’s consumption of cigarettes in advertising and various forms of commentary were governed by an emphasis on its difference to men’s consumption, a similar argument can also be made about the representation of women’s cigarette consumption emanating from health promotion literature. Indeed, tobacco advertising and health promotion literature during the 1970s and 1980s appears to have been engaged in a conversation about women’s consumption in which the two parties fundamentally agreed on the basic gendered principles governing consumption, even as they disagreed about the implications. Thus, where tobacco advertising invested the transgressive quality of women’s consumption with a desirable riskiness, health promotion literature defined the transgressive or risky qualities of women’s consumption as simply transgressive and risky and proceeded to (try to) govern it accordingly.
The most significant concern associated with women’s smoking was the effect that it might have on their capacity to bear healthy children. Many of these articles employed a range of both scientific and moral arguments to make their point, a strategy that drew ire from the medical authorities. An editorial titled “Lady Nicotine and the Ladies,” published in
The female flower of the nation . . . should bear fruit in time to come, but frequently fails to do so because the foolish consumption of cigarettes has impregnated the sexual organs with smoke and nicotine and keeps them in a state of irritation and inflammation. Such women as homely vestals should nourish a fire of quite another sort, for their mouth is ordained for other things than to be transformed into a smoking chimney and to smell of tobacco juice. (p. 249)
A. M. Campbell, in 1935, and again in 1936, expressed a similar conviction that “excessive cigarette smoking has a degenerating influence in many ways upon every woman and that it is prejudicial to her highest efficiency as a sweetheart, a wife, or a mother” (as cited in Larson et al., 1961, p. 567). Van Hoosen, in 1952, claimed simply that motherhood and tobacco were antagonistic (as cited in Larson et al., 1961, p. 567).
With the rise of the smoking and health scare in the 1950s and 1960s, the focus on women’s bodies was increasingly authorized by science. Citing studies conducted almost exclusively between 1959 and 1963, including C. R. Lowe’s (1959) “Effect of Mother’s Smoking Habits on Birth Weights of Their Children,” which found that smoking during pregnancy substantially retarded fetal growth, possibly by restricting the placental circulation and thus limiting the blood supply to the fetus, the
Women who smoke cigarettes during pregnancy tend to have babies of lower birth weight. Information is lacking on the mechanism by which this decrease in birth weight is produced. It is not known whether this decrease in birth weight has any influence on the biological fitness of the newborn. (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1964, p. 343)
It was not long after the report, as Virginia Berridge (2001) argues, that the problem of smoking came to be most-often defined in terms of “women in their reproductive role” (p. 334). “The mother who smokes,” U.S. Surgeon General Jesse L. Steinfeld said in 1971, “is subjecting the unborn child to the adverse effects of tobacco[;] as a result we are losing babies and possibly handicapping babies” (as cited in Bayer & Colgrove, 2004, p. 19). Similarly, in 1973 in Britain, when the Health Education Council employed the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi to mount an antismoking campaign, the result was an image of a naked mother smoking under the headline: “Is it fair to force your baby to smoke cigarettes” (as cited in Berridge, 2001, p. 334). This phenomenon continued throughout the next decade. Oaks (2000) suggests that the focus on women’s bodies the late 1970s and 1980s was a function of government health agencies and large health organizations (such as the American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, and American Heart Association) initiating nationwide health education and smoking cessation campaigns focusing on the fetal health risks of smoking during pregnancy.
Attention to pregnant women’s smoking as a problem peaked in the mid-1980s, coincident with the period in which obstetric advances created the fetal patient and antiabortion activists intensified their campaign for legal rights for fetuses (Oaks, 2000). A number of different interventions followed in the wake of this focus on fetal health risks. These included a 1984 Congress mandate that health warnings about smoking during pregnancy appear on cigarette packs and in advertisements. By the early 1990s, pregnant women’s cigarette smoking had become one of the most-studied risk factors in contemporary obstetrics (Oaks, 2000).
Gendering the Secondhand Smoke Debate
Responding to evidence regarding the overemphasis on women’s smoking in health promotion strategies, scholars interested in the interconnections between health and gender have addressed the issue of secondhand smoke in two different ways. Feminist scholars such as Laurie Oaks (2000) have argued that the focus on the pregnant body is indicative of a gendered as well as a scientific imperative. She writes, “Health education campaigns to convince pregnant women to quit smoking cigarettes . . . reinforce fetal-centric medical, social, and moral expectations of women’s reproductive responsibilities” (p. 63). This emphasis on women’s reproductive responsibilities, in turn, confirms the relationship between femininity and motherhood, or the “myth of natural maternality,” as Nikolas Rose (1996) describes it, and works to “shore up a patriarchal order, and legitimate the infantilization of women, the reproduction of their dependency and their subordination in domestic relations, the private world of the home, and the burden of motherhood” (p. 47). In this context, feminist scholars have suggested that women need to assume greater control over their wombs, bodies, and health more generally. Oaks (2000) calls for “a more positive health education message” combined with “a devot[ion] of resources to broadscale social change” (p. 100).
A second approach to the gendered history of health promotion strategies regarding cigarette smoking and pregnancy has focused on the ways that the discussion about secondhand smoke and its effects on family health can address men’s smoking rather than, or in addition to, women and women’s smoking. In this approach, an argument is made that health promotion strategies might work to address the issue of secondhand smoke in terms of what Judith Leavitt (2009) describes as a “historically new domestic role for men” (p. xi). Thus, scholars such as Bottorff, Oliffe, and Johnson argue that interventions designed to address the issue of secondhand smoke might draw on and cultivate a “new” discourse of masculinity, celebrating “care-giving and domestic work” (Bottorff et al., 2006, p. 3105), a “father-centered approach [to masculinity]” (Oliffe et al., 2009, p. 8), and men’s “involvement with . . . children” (Johnson, Oliffe, Kelly, Bottorff, & LeBeau, 2009, p. 532).
Promoting this “new” father-centered discourse of masculinity would do three things. First, it would address the issue of secondhand smoke exposure in a more comprehensive way. Second, by promoting a sense of responsibility and care for others, it would work to destabilize the relationship between self-control and masculinity in which smoking has historically been defined as meaningful. Third, it would work to address the gender relations and power implications of the history of health promotion as identified by Oaks (2000) and Greaves (1996).
This notion of a father-centered masculinity is evident in the recent history of social marketing interventions designed by health authorities. In the United States, for example, Fathers Day has emerged as an opportunity to engage men with the issue of secondhand smoke across many of the most important national organizations engaging with the issue of smoking and health. These include the Centre for Disease Control (2011), the American Lung Association (2011), and Tobacco Free Kids (2011).
The emphasis on a father-centered masculinity as a way of engaging men with the issue of secondhand smoke has been particularly evident in Canada. In March of 2002 and again in the spring of 2003, Health Canada aired a marketing campaign aimed to inform parents aged 25 to 54 with children about the impact on children of secondhand smoke in the home (Health Canada, 2003a). In 2003, a series of television advertisements was launched about “Bob, an average Canadian,” which featured Bob’s relationship with his children. “Every time I look at my kids,” Bob told us, “I know I should quit not only for me—but for them too” (Health Canada, 2003b).
In January 2005, Health Canada launched another secondhand smoke campaign, again aimed at parents aged 25 to 54 with children at home. It was anchored by two television advertisements, “Target” (February 2005) and “Not Much” (December 2006). The punch line of both advertisements was “Don’t let your children be a target. Make your home smoke-free.” Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these campaigns was the way they worked to articulate a culture of parenthood that inculcated men as well as women. They did this by endowing parenthood with many of the qualities and moral virtues historically attributed to the public sphere. These included an emphasis on the complex negotiation of alternative viewpoints, an emphasis on rights, an emphasis on the fostering of democratic participation, and an emphasis on self-management. The role of the good parent, that is, starts to resemble the role of the responsible citizen. In January 2006, Health Canada launched another secondhand smoke campaign in the form of a brochure subtitled: “A guide to protecting your family from secondhand smoke” (Health Canada, 2006). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this campaign was the way it worked to articulate a culture of parenthood that inculcated men as well as women through an emphasis on monitoring, managing, security, and responsibility. The campaign did this by endowing parenthood with many of the qualities and moral virtues historically attributed to the public sphere. These included an emphasis on the complex negotiation of alternative viewpoints, an emphasis on rights, an emphasis on the fostering of democratic participation, and an emphasis on self-management. The position of the good parent here resembles the traditionally masculine role of the responsible citizen. The booklet represented the family as an “open and honest” environment composed of individuals “working together” via negotiation, cooperation, and dialogue to achieve “agreed” goals (“family projects”/“family pledges”). These agreements were made at “family meetings” organized at appropriate times, when everyone was available (Health Canada, 2006).
A more recent intervention, this time aimed specifically at fathers who smoke, also employed the figure of the “new father” as a way of encouraging fathers to engage with their own smoking practices. Here, smoking/not smoking is defined as the point at which a traditional or more distanced culture of fatherhood is transformed into a more intimate culture of fatherhood. Smoking is seen to remove fathers from the practice of parenting in a number of ways. This removal is primarily spatial. Smoking takes men away from their family. After returning home from a day’s work, some fathers remove themselves from the family environment multiple times during the course of the evening to smoke cigarettes. When they return they are conscious about
In contrast to the figure of the smoker, the figure of the nonsmoker, now represented as the
Conclusion
This article demonstrates the value of addressing men’s smoking using a gendered methodology with an emphasis on fatherhood as an expression of masculine identity. Overemphasis in the tobacco reduction and smoking cessation health promotion literature on women’s smoking in the context of family health highlights the potential for history to repeat itself to some extent. Given the dangers of secondhand smoke, as well as the capacity of male partners’ smoking to affect the tobacco consumption of female partners, the discrepancy in this literature is deeply problematic. In putting forward the argument that the overemphasis on women’s smoking can be explained in terms of the historically constructed gendering of tobacco consumption important background is afforded. Men, that is, have been invested with a greater capacity for controlled and responsible tobacco consumption than women. Hence, women’s consumption has been defined as more problematic and has been the subject of a greater level of surveillance and judgment.
Researchers have recently argued that health promotion interventions need to work to promote a culture of masculinity which is less individualistic and which is defined in terms of responsibility and care for others, in addition to the self. The implication of this shift is that it situates men’s smoking in the context of a social environment where it is rendered problematic. It challenges the notion of responsible masculine consumption.
This shift to promoting masculine ideals of responsibility may be key to advancing family health and well-being. However, it is also important at a broader level where the association between controlled, responsible consumption and masculinity has operated to suggest that individuals can and should take responsibility for their own consumption of tobacco. This emphasis on personal responsibility, in turn, as Balbach et al. (2006) suggest, may function to support powerful corporate interests. In particular, the emphasis on personal responsibility supports tobacco companies in their ongoing attempts to abdicate their own responsibility for the harms and damages caused by their products. The promotion of a different culture of masculinity, in which tobacco consumption is rendered problematic rather than meaningful, makes a contribution toward the long-term project of holding the tobacco industry itself, as opposed to individual consumers, accountable.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Christina Han for her editorial assistance in finalizing this article.
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research and article was made possible by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (Grant #62R43745). Career support for the second author is provided by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar Award.