Smoke and Mirrors: A Look Into Capitalist Driven Social Movements, From Cigarettes To Body Positivity

A little over a year ago, the weight-loss drug Ozempic exploded in popularity, promising a quick and easy slim-down to anyone able to get the popular prescription. Of course, when one door opens, another closes – and in this case, the door seems to be closing on the body positivity movement, as noted by Time, The Atlantic, and The Guardian.

There are (and were) many good things about the body positivity movement. Young teens and tweens who are bombarded with unrealistic beauty standards should learn that their worth is not tied to the number of visible pores on their noses or a certain waist to hip ratio. In fact, it is a good lesson for everyone – regardless of age or sex. 

In 2004, Dove launched a campaign focused on “real beauty” in which the company hired models that featured a variety of different body types. At the time, showcasing such an inclusive cast of figures was revolutionary, and the public response was overwhelmingly positive – according to the “Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Campaigns,” the campaign generated so much publicity that Dove received enough media exposure to equal around 30 times their budget.¹

Moreover, the success was understandable. A large segment of the female population felt alienated by beauty brands using models that looked nothing like their own reflections. Dove’s campaign not only spoke to the average woman, but also marketed the purchase of its goods as a way to fight back against unfair beauty standards, in a battle for a social good. 

But this isn’t the first time that a company has capitalized on women’s desire for social justice to sell a product.

Lucky Be A Lady Tonight

In 1928, eight years after the 19th amendment, women had the ability to vote but were still constrained by many societal norms. Amidst this climate, George Washington Hill, at the helm of the American Tobacco Company, faced a unique challenge: social conventions were barring women from smoking publicly – effectively halving his potential market. Seeking to overturn this, Hill enlisted Edward Bernays, a celebrated propagandist, to rebrand female smoking for the company’s Lucky Strike cigarettes as socially acceptable.

As a side note, Bernays himself is an incredibly interesting figure. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays took his uncle’s “complex ideas on people's unconscious, psychological motivations and applied them to the new field of public relations.”²

In other words, Bernays believed that individuals could be persuaded to purchase unnecessary items by tapping into their subconscious desires (such as the need for freedom or success). His book, Propaganda, is incredibly interesting and available for free online for those who want to take a look.

To fix the smoking problem, Bernays sought advice from Dr. Abraham Brill, another prominent Freudian psychoanalyst, who posited that cigarettes could symbolize their independence from male-dominated societal constraints. They even anointed cigarettes with a new name: torches of freedom.

Bernays identified Easter Sunday as the ideal occasion for his campaign, linking cigarettes with spiritual liberation. To pull off his stunt, he procured a list of fashionable New York women from a friend who worked at Vogue. Then, he had his secretary – a woman named Bertha Hunt – send a telegraph asking the society ladies to participate in a so-called feminist demonstration. Naturally, his own involvement – or that of his tobacco company bosses – was omitted. 

“In the interests of equality of the sexes and to fight another sex taboo I and other young women will light another torch of freedom by smoking cigarettes while strolling on Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday,” Hunt wrote to selected American debutantes.³

The plan went off perfectly. The women, emerging from Easter services at notable New York churches, lit cigarettes and paraded down Fifth Avenue, presenting themselves as lighting “torches of freedom” to protest against gender discrimination. This act was captured by journalists and photographers Bernays had tipped off, ensuring widespread media coverage. Two pictures of the event are below:

The following day, the New York Times wrote,

“About a dozen young women strolled back and forth between St. Thomas’s and St. Patrick’s while the parade was at its peak, ostentatiously smoking cigarettes. Two were asked which brand they favored, and they named it. One of the group explained the cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’ lighting the way to the day when women would smoke on the street as casually as men.” 

As noted by the Cultural Currents Institute, “similar reports ran in papers as far-flung as Nebraska and New Mexico.”

Within days, reports emerged of women smoking in public across the United States, from San Francisco’s Union Square to the Boston Common. Within weeks, Broadway theaters opened their smoking rooms to women. True, cultural change had happened within the space of just weeks – and it was engineered entirely by the American Tobacco Company and its PR expert.

Though Lucky Strike’s involvement remained opaque, it continued to capitalize on the association between smoking and women’s liberation. “Women are Free!” one 1929 advertisement proclaims, with the fist of “American Intelligence” holding a chain.

The Dark Underbelly

What is noteworthy is that both of the campaigns are good things at face value. For sure, smoking is known today to cause cancer, but that wasn’t known in the 1920s. With that mindset, why shouldn’t a woman be able to indulge in a cigarette if a man could? Similarly, it’s undoubtedly good for society that women see advertisements that aren’t just of stunning models. And it’s good for women (and men) to know that having a bit of extra weight is okay.

But the problem is that there are dark underbellies to both campaigns. Most obviously, smoking is harmful, and convincing women to smoke undoubtedly led to millions of cancer diagnoses and pulmonary issues throughout the following decades.

Similarly, as obesity rates in the United States and around the world continue to rise, Dove’s original message, which was something along the lines of “you don’t have to be a size 0 to be worthy” has become increasingly twisted to become something more akin to any discussion about weight is bigoted. 

The pinnacle of this is the “Health At Every Size” movement, in which activists claimed that the links between obesity and poor health outcomes are either fake science, or that the poor health outcomes are the result of stress from dealing with fatphobia:

“The science isn't quite as clear cut as we'd like to believe and there's not really quite a consensus yet about the relationship between weight and health . . . Obese people, and even morbidly obese people, have just as good health or better health than someone in the normal weight range,” claimed Cat Pausé, a professor of Fat Studies at Massey University in New Zealand. Sadly, Pausé passed away in 2022 at 42-years-old; her cause of death remains undisclosed.

This is not just a fringe belief: in January 2021, Cosmopolitan magazine ran a series of covers declaring “this is healthy!” that showcased obese models.

Dove does not overtly subscribe to the HAES movement. But, it has partners that do, such as NAAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. On NAAFA’s website are links to blogs and articles that promote the idea that being overweight has few, if any, adverse health outcomes. For example, one recent link argued that children should be able to eat whatever they wanted, with no limits. 

Some of Dove’s spokespeople have advanced similarly questionable statements. For example, Virgie Tovar released a manifesto decrying previously held conceptions about weight and health. Her 2018 book is titled “You Have the Right to Remain Fat.”

Of course, Dove has a right to partner and promote any belief it deems appropriate, including its most recent push for “Size Freedom.” But there is one important fact to note: Dove is owned by Unilever, which itself owns several companies selling decidedly unhealthy things. Ben and Jerry’s, Popsicle, Breyer’s, Hellman’s Mayonnaise, and Skippy peanut butter are among some of Unilever’s most popular brands.

As noted by fellow Substacker Social Justice Redux:

“In 2022, [Unilever] made more than $63 billion in gross annual profits representing a more than 2 percent increase from 2021. In other words, Unilever is one of the largest food corporations in America selling addictive products to an already overweight nation that’s dangerously addicted. It makes sense, then, that Unilever’s subsidiaries would want to capitalize on a movement to make Americans increasingly eager to buy snacks and ice cream in the name of ‘Size Freedom.’”

Even if Dove’s original mission was purely noble, it is tough to ignore that its parent company profits so greatly from embracing unhealthy eating decisions and fat acceptance. 

Final Thoughts

But now Ozempic has come, and scientists and pundits are questioning whether the drug will mark the end of obesity as we know it. But the ability for Ozempic, and its sister medicine Wegovy, to end the body positivity movement shows just how empty it was. The campaign, which spanned far beyond Dove to encompass nearly every clothing and makeup company, was almost two decades in the making. It is being dismantled in the space of months. As summarized in the Guardian article in the introduction: “the powers that be have decided they are bored of paying their desultory lip service to the fatties, and apparently, most of us have no problem following suit.”

But this echoes Lucky Strike more than anything. The torches of freedom were just as empty a statement.  At the time, women still legally weren’t able to open their own bank accounts, have their own passports if married, or keep their maiden names. Even though the Attorney General had declared it legal for women to wear pants in 1923, most establishments barred entry for those sporting trousers. Sure, women couldn’t own actual property, but they could own personal property in the form of a 15 cent pack of smokes.

What originally drew me to this topic was a question: how much is a campaign’s mission tainted when it is primarily pushed by those scheming to make a profit from its success? There’s no easy answer, but it is a good lesson to remember that companies aren’t loyal to social movements; they’re loyal to the bottom line. I won’t be holding my breath to see if Dove continues hiring plus size models ten years from now if the buying public is a sea of Ozempic obsessives.

1. https://strixus.com/entry/the-enduring-power-and-impact-of-doves-real-beauty-campaign-18095

2. https://www.npr.org/2005/04/22/4612464/freuds-nephew-and-the-origins-of-public-relations

3. https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/original-influencer