Bad habits, smoking tales of everyday sexism

It’s been a while since I mentioned smoking in one of my blogs. I’m a reformed smoker, haven’t smoked for many years and I’m now a passionate anti-smoking campaigner. Smoking is the single largest preventable cause of death in the world. The latest data available estimates that there were 115,000 deaths attributed to smoking in the UK in 2015. This is about a fifth of all deaths. Smoking (and being exposed to cigarette smoke) causes three out of 20 cancer cases in the UK. Against this backdrop, it is good to know that the number of people who still smoke has steadily decreased since the 1970s, as has the number of cigarettes people smoke each day.

Not that we should be complacent. There are still too many people smoking tobacco. In the UK, it’s some 9.4 million people, nearly 19% of the population who still smoke cigarettes. From a public health point of view much has been done to help people quit. There is a great deal of help, information and advice available these days. Some of this is rather simple and I suspect wouldn’t help many folk wishing to give up - see this NHS website for example. Other sources are so complicated and data-rich that many non-professionals would simply give up reading - see the NHS England Smoking Cessation site for example. There are some sites that are aimed primarily at healthcare professionals, but which contain a wealth of useful information - see the RCN site for example (and I wasn’t aware of third-hand smoking problems). I think this is a great site, but I imagine that few non-nurses would read it.

Some of the smoking cessation campaign approaches haven’t always worked. Younger readers of this blog probably won’t remember the NHS 2007 campaign that used fishhooks. Here is one of the adverts used. It caused a great deal of controversy and eventually the campaign was dropped here in the UK (although a similar one was still being shown in Australia three years later). I used one of the images from the campaign in a poster I created to celebrate the 60th birthday of the NHS. The poster had 60 images, each representing the achievements and challenges the NHS faced over its 60 years of existence. 

In terms of smoking cessation campaigns, the fight goes on, but I was disappointed last week to see the latest smoking cessation campaign from the ‘Stop Smoking London’ organisation. It is a great initiative by the 31 combined London boroughs to get people to stop smoking. However, the positive message of ‘amazing things happen when you quit smoking’ is entirely spoiled by the everyday sexism of the images and associated messages. The posters, sporting images of men and women, have very different consequences for each gender – as one commentator put it: ‘MEN, give up smoking and you’ll be fitter and have more money’ ‘WOMEN, give up smoking and you’ll be more attractive.’  Have a look at the posters here and see what you think. 

Whilst not wishing to defend the campaign, according to ‘Stop Smoking London’ it has already sparked a lot of enquiries from people wanting to give up smoking. When one thinks that possibly the hardest part of stopping smoking is taking the decision to stop, and with a success rate of 50% of those who decide to stop smoking, who actually stop, every encouragement to do so must be helpful. However, there should be no reason to condone sexism, regardless of however unintended it might be.   

That wasn’t the only blatant everyday sexism in the news last week. JD Sports, the sports-fashion company with shops across the UK and around the world, including the US, Singapore, South Korea and Australia started off in a small shop in Bury, Greater Manchester. The seemed to have lost their way last week, with the launch of its range of the official Scotland Football kit. In the advertisements the men and boys were presented as athletes and posed in traditional poses, whereas the female model was featured wearing jeans with rips to the thighs and sitting with her legs apart. There was a massive social media campaign against this approach, both because of the blatant sexism of the images but also because JD Sports only featured boys and not children in their advertisement. The offending image has been taken down, but if you must see it, it can be found here in the Independent news coverage.

And if you want to find out more about the perniciousness nature of sexism in our society, you need to look no further than the regular column by Laura Bates in the Guardian newspaper. Laura is the founder of the ‘Everyday Sexism Project’, which is a collection of over 80,000 women’s daily experiences of gender inequality. I regularly dip in and are both humbled and encouraged by the stories I read. Writing back in 2017, Laura talked about the solidarity, sense of resistance and resilience found in the stories she receives, but she recognised that the problem remains immense. So, she believes, the will to fight it is greater still. There is no reason for everyday sexism or smoking. We must find ways of helping people stop both.