men and women

[Leslilake1 at aol.com]

Smoking is also a class issue.  If you look through old magazines (as I used 
to do as a teenager when my wonderful local library had collections of 
magazines on the shelves going back to the teens and 20's), you can see that 
cigarettes were originally advertised with pictures of upper-class 
sophisticated twits (old films similarly).  As time went along, the people 
portrayed in ads were increasingly middle/working class, and more people 
started smoking.  In the 50's, "most" adult males smoked (can't remember the 
statistics, but if it wasn't half, I think it was pretty close.)  I'd 
speculate that the rejection of smoking by upper class sophisticates started 
before the health downside was widely known - by way of an unconscious 
rejection of an attribute that had increasingly come to seem ordinary or 
lower-class.  

Today, less of the US population (I think it's about 25%) smokes, and they're 
overwhelming the "lower/lower middle classes" - at the hospital where I work, 
it's the kitchen aides and the floor aides who are smoking in the parking 
lot, almost exclusively. 

My anecdote about smoking and class:  I was in San Miguel de Allende (a 
pretty Mexican city with a colony of well-off Americans) in the early 80's 
with my Japanese husband.  We were in our 30's and traveling in the low 
budget manner.  We met an American couple who owned a large and lovely home 
there.  The husband invited us over and we were sitting on their terrace 
chatting.  My husband asked if he could smoke.  The wife turned to the 
husband and said "I knew we'd have trouble with them!" rather viciously.  My 
husband said of course, he did not need to smoke if it was bothersome.  But 
the afternoon was no longer so delightful, and we left soon after.         

  

In a message dated 01-09-07 14:35:50 EDT, you write:

<<  is pure, unadulterated SHIT: the past, present and future, perfect

 and imperfect. So they hang out smoking outside, alone. Or by the vending >>