i'm a slave for you...not.

Am I the only one who thinks this photo is about 47 different levels of wrong?

 

Apparently this is what passes for an anti-smoking ad in France.  I can't even begin to tell you how much it angers me just to look at it.  The campaign loosely translates to read. "To smoke is to be a slave to tobacco." Ok, I get that.  But at what point did people start equating being a slave to tobacco to being a sex slave.  Yes, I know, I'm reading too much into it, but you tell me what they're trying to imply with people's heads at crotch level, a hand on the back of their heads as if to guide it, the glances upwards...now, I'm no religious expert, but I'm pretty sure they're not praying.

I get that the point of the campaign is trying to show young people that smoking is, for lack of a better term, really fucking stupid.  I can almost appreciate the fact that the VP of the advertising firm that created the ads is aware that young people (she says with the age and wisdom of 34 years on this planet) like to push their limits and see how far they can go. I'm still a little unclear as to how the ads show that smoking is an act of naivete and submission, or how they decided that the only logical way to show this naivete and submissiveness, was to show a young girl and boy being forced to go down on a middle-aged pedophile. 

Um, WHAT?!?!

Smoking is bad for you but smoking is a choice. The ads are telling teenagers that if you choose to start smoking you are choosing to become a "slave to tobacco" and thus, choosing to submit to its influence.  Right on. On the other hand, sexual abuse is so far from being a choice it's not even on the same planet as the word 'choice', and as such someone who is forced to perform oral sex did not choose to be in that submissive role, so to even imply that they are the same thing is just disgusting.

(steps off soapbox)