From housekeeper to status-oriented consumer and hyper-sexual imagery: images of alcohol targeted to Italian women from the 1960s to the 2000s

‘As Long as It Comes off as a Cigarette Ad, Not a Civil Rights Message’: Gender, Inequality and the Commercial Determinants of Health

“…Gendered messaging is a longstanding feature of both tobacco [22,25] and alcohol marketing [26,27]. Smoking and drinking were historically presented as masculine behaviours, associated with male 'mastery' [28]-including mastery of women [29]-while women were often trivialised and/or hypersexualised in advertisements [30,31].…”

“…Marketing campaigns targeting women (in high-income countries) started much earlier for cigarettes [25] than for alcohol [26,27]; yet both played on concerns with body image, as in the Lucky Strike "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" campaign [32] and commercials for lower-calorie alcoholic beverages [33]. Companies subsequently sought to link their products with aspirations of sophistication, independence and attractiveness [26,32], deliberately displacing traditional connotations of women's smoking and drinking as "louche and libidinous behaviour" [25] unsuited to the feminine ideal.…”

“…In the 1980s, for example, both tobacco and alcohol advertising referenced the women's liberation movement by associating their products with aspirations of female emancipation and realisation. Such referencing can be seen in Philip Morris's "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" campaign [35] (Figure 1) and consonant advertisements presenting women's alcohol consumption as a marker of their independence [26,27]. Corporations thus "recirculat[e] traditional gender messages in new ways" [21], appearing to celebrate female empowerment while actually subverting it to associate a product with its fulfilment.…”

Feminine Appeals on Cigarette Packs Sold in 14 Countries

“…For example, in India brands like Platinum, a cigarette that explicitly targeted women and their preference for silver jewelry, was less successful than other cigarette brands that used more subtle, indirect cues to link smoking with a woman's sophistication and sexual allure in billboard and magazine advertising [34]. Additionally, there has been a global shift toward marketing gender-neutral ("dual-sex" [20]) cigarettes to women in Western, high-income countries [18,20], and a general reactance against the use of traditional femininity and female independence to market products directly to women [52][53][54][55]. It may be that a similar trend toward less explicitly feminine and more gender non-specific branding and technologies (e.g., flavor capsules) that contain features that appeal to men and women equally is also taking place in the LMICs included in this study.…”

The gendered relationship with drunkenness among different generations in Mediterranean and Nordic countries

“…Indeed, though quantitative studies show that the prevalence of drinkers, the amount drunk and the frequency of drinking are more similar for both genders today than in the past, this does not necessarily mean that drinking styles, drinking habits and drinking norms have also become more similar ( Demant & Törrönen, 2011 ; Simonen et al, 2014 ). Nor should we fall into the error of interpreting the changes in female drinking as a mere imitation of male patterns, since gender identities are constantly and actively constructed and deconstructed through normatively regulated consumption behaviours, and men and women express both traditional and innovative, masculine and feminine aspects when drinking ( Beccaria, Rolando, Scavarda, & Torronen, 2017 ; Measham, 2002 ), which may also be blended ( Törrönen, Rolando, & Beccaria, 2017 ). Thus, it should be recognised that male drinking styles and attitudes toward alcohol have also changed ( Beccaria & Scarscelli, 2007 ; Callinan, Room, & Livingston, 2014 ; Kobin, 2013 ), influenced by cultural, social, and situational factors ( Olsson & Törrönen, 2008 ; Simonen, 2013 ; Törrönen et al, 2017 ).…”