I smoke because I bloody want to!

While mushing my way through a ton of bizarre vintage ads to post, this one jumped out at me, causing me utter disbelief. The text said: "Taste isn't the only reason I smoke. People are always telling me that smoking causes low birth weight. Talk about a win-win-win! An easy labor, a slim baby, and the Full Flavor of Winstons!" Below her cheery comment was the slogan, "Winston - when you're smoking for two".This ad seemed to be saying that back in the bad old days, mothers deliberately smoked to have smaller babies which would be easier to pop out. The idea was so extreme that I wondered if the ad had been tampered with, if it was satirical, or a blistering comment on something-or-other.

BUT. . .  then I saw this.

Mothers-to-be smoking for smaller babies

Some women keep smoking through pregnancy just because they want to give birth to a smaller baby, according to British researchers.

By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent

3:22PM BST 07 Jul 2011

Even though most women now understand there is “overwhelming evidence” that smoking during pregnancy is harmful to the developing child, they continue to do so, said Professor Nick Macklon of Southampton University.

He told the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) in Stockholm: “It is important that people who believe that a smaller baby means an easier birth take into account the increased risk of complicated deliveries in smokers, as well as the risk of disease later in life which goes with low birth weight.”

"Smoking during pregnancy is not just bad for the mother and baby, but for the adult it will grow into."

He and a team at the university’s department of obstetrics and gynaecology have now produced what he called the first “hard evidence” that women who stopped smoking upon discovery they were pregnant, could protect their unborn children from harm.

The study looked at over 50,000 pregnancies in the Southampton area, analysing the birth weight of the babies and comparing this to self-reported smoking behaviour.

Those who continued to smoke through pregnancy had lower weight babies.

The more women smoked the lighter their babies were: those who smoked more than 10 a day had babies weighing some 11oz (300g) less than the average birth weight from a non-smoking mother, of about 7lb 10oz (3.45kg).

However, those who ceased smoking at about the time they conceived were just as likely to give birth to a normal weight baby as those who had never smoked.

He said: “We can now give couples hard evidence that making the effort to stop smoking in the periconceptional will be beneficial for their baby.

“Stopping smoking can ameliorate these detrimental effects.”

This could help change behaviour among smoking mothers, which he said had hardly changed in Britain over the last decade.

Prof Macklon explained that smoking during pregnancy “affects the transportation of nutrients, especially oxygen, across the placenta”.

It was also “reasonable to assume” that some of the 4,000 or so toxins in cigarettes were harmful to foetuses.

Note that in spite of the provocative headline, this article does not come right out and directly state that mothers smoke because they want to have smaller babies: “It is important that people who believe that a smaller baby means an easier birth take into account the increased risk of complicated deliveries in smokers." The message is in there somewhere, of course, but it's politically incorrect (or something - or violates civil rights) to spell it out.

If this is true, then the world is in more trouble than I thought. Next women will guzzle alcohol during pregnancy to deliberately cause fetal alcohol syndrome, because a dumb child is easier to handle than a smart one, won't be so expensive to educate, and won't sass you back.

This Camels ad is particularly insidious. It shows a woman wearing a veil, white gloves and a sort of Jackie Kennedy flared jacket, delicately implying pregnancy. On the opposite page is the usual garbage about "what cigarette do you smoke, Doctor?" The juxtaposition of the ladylike woman "in the family way" with a doctor earnestly pushing his cancer sticks jams these two elements together in people's minds: Doc loves to smoke, particularly Camels, meaning it must be OK; so for the pregnant woman, facing coyly in the other direction, it must also be OK, and for her baby too. Doctors were gods then, and it didn't matter what sort of bilge they promoted or defended.

My scanner is busted, or I'd post another photo of a pregnant woman from The Family of Man, a very tony and pretentious photographic exhibit from the 1950s. I am sure there was no irony or censure in the fact that she very obviously held a cigarette, right out in front of her swollen abdomen, in a way which people probably thought was darling. She had a sort of dreamy, oh-I'm-just-waiting-for-it posture, "but while I'm waiting, I'll just have a smoke". Most of these "candid" shots seem very posed to me, so let's hope she did not subject her baby to second-hand smoke, on top of whatever horrors crossed her placenta from puffing on Camels.

The above ad looks like it should be for Johnson and Johnson or Gerber or Pet Milk, but it's not. Disgusting of Big Tobacco to claim they take just as much pride in their lung-rotting lethal weapon as you do in your newborn infant. It's all the same to them. Birth. Death. Note also (in the text below) how in a hundred-word ad, the brand name appears FOUR times, as does the term "gentle/gentleness" - and what the FUCK does that have to do with a cigarette?

Born gentle

Proud mothers, please forgive us if we too feel something of the pride of a new parent. For new Philip Morris, today's Philip Morris, is delighting smokers everywhere. Enjoy the gentle pleasure, the fresh unfiltered flavor, of this new cigarette, born gentle, then refined to special gentleness in the making. Ask for new Philip Morris in the smart new package. NEW Philip Morris. . . gentle for modern tastes

BLOGGER'S UPDATE. I got my scanner working, and though this is a bad representation of that photo from The Family of Man, you can see what I mean. The subject's expectant dreaminess is completely wrecked by that cigarette, though I doubt if it had much impact back then, except to make people think: "Lucky her. She'll have an easy labor, a "slim" (read: premature) baby, and her Winstons too. Win-win-win!"

I'm pregnant again (it just can't be so!)

This can either be seen as a sociological treatise - and God knows, I've written more than my share of those - or just a headshaking, gasping peek at life in the mid-1960s.

I don't for a minute think this song was meant to be serious, and the video is even less so. Most likely it was a sendup of Roger Miller's huge hit King of the Road.  Never mind the sexy and semi-glamorous images in the video: the lyrics bespeak domestic drudgery, shabbiness and unquestioning self-sacrifice. (I was sort of hoping they'd dramatize all that, rather than go with all this bustier/leg-lifting stuff.) The acrobatic flips of - who is that guy, the ice man? - help jazz it up a little, and to me the guy looks uncannily like a pre-Star-Trek George Takei.

This song/video sprang from a specific genre, probably beginning with the jaw-dropping 1950s TV program Queen for a Day. Four broken-down housewives would come on the show each week and pitch their tale of woe, after which the audience would determine who was most worthy of financial rescue using an applause-o-meter. This always looked rigged to me, but it was considered sufficiently accurate to determine which horror story was ghastly enough to warrant an array of Lovely Gifts.

There are snippets of this horror on YouTube, jerky, smudgy old kinescopes that look like something out of a bleary dream. People actually took this show seriously and wanted to be on it, desperately. No doubt many of the sob stories were fabricated, but the point is, the show proved to us all that, just like every dog, even the everyday housewife could have her day.

The genre of the downtrodden yet celebrated matron of the house took many forms, including the dreary Loretta Lynn song, Pregnant Again:

Pregnant again oh where will we go
Pregnant again it just can’t be so
But I never could count when the lights were down low
And I’m pregnant again (pregnant again)

There goes the new washer we needed so bad
There goes the vacation that we never had
There goes the new TV I thought we’d enjoy
Oh honey who cares I hope it’s a boy

Now THAT'S a save, embracing noble martyrdom in the very last line (in case anyone thought for a minute she was considering
the last refuge of many an overburdened mother-to-be).

The other one that pops into my head is even more melodramatic. I think Glen Campbell sang it. I remember my mother being quite angry about this one. "What does he mean, 'the good life'?" she would cry. "This IS the good life!" Obviously, her conditioning, positively Orwellian in nature, had taken, and taken completely.(I don't think it's a coincidence that she was also a heavy user of those little yellow pills.)

She looks in the mirror and stares at the wrinkles

That weren't there yesterday
And thinks of the young man that she almost married
What would he think if he saw her this way?

She picks up her apron in little girl-fashion
As something comes into her mind
Slowly starts dancing remembering her girlhood
And all of the boys she had waiting in line

Oh, such are the dreams of the everyday housewife
You see everywhere any time of the day
An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me

The wrinkled old drudge who stares into the mirror like something out of that bleak Auden poem ("O look, look in the mirror/O look in your distress") once was a fair flower just ready to be plucked by some handsome young man, a man of class and means, and instead - ? He doesn't spell out how ghastly her life is now, and what kind of loser she got stuck with, probably by getting pregnant. 

And nobody really talked about what a bomb pregnancy could be for a young woman then, an explosive that could blow her life and her dreams to bits. The expression "she had to get married" used to puzzle me, along with an even more incomprehensible term, "shotgun". 

Which, when you think about it, has some pretty ominous connotations of its own.

(Blogger's note. I made these gifs from an old YouTube clip from Queen for a Day. The winner, looking morose even in her supposed victory, was a clear choice because her husband had been paralyzed in a hunting accident and had to lie on his stomach, completely immobile. She won some sort of fancy bed that cranked up and down and a week's stay in a luxury hotel, a dubious prize for someone forever chained to a man who couldn't move.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Half-alive in the barren land of publication

This isn't the clip, oh no, this isn't the clip  I wanted at all. If you've ever watched this big lumbering thing on TV - and for some reason I do, every year at Easter time, even though the story of Moses has nothing whatsoever to do with Easter - you'll know that the good part comes AFTER this scene. In which Moses crawls on his belly on the scorching sand, while Cecil B. deMille says stuff like "pitiless days, forlorn nights, only the scorpion and the cobra for his companions", while it just gets better and better as Moses squeezes his wineskin or whatever-it-is (canteen?) into his mouth for the very last drop of water. Then he sort of collapses and all these women come after him, but we won't be bothered with that.

In short, it's about an ordeal in the wilderness, a test of endurance and faith.

It's also all about a certain email I received today, a certain message, not a surprise, mind you, the only surprise was in the timing, but the timing was quite a surprise, yes, quite a surprise indeed.

For it was a rejection of a manuscript I submitted to a literary press, oh, some time ago.

Try JANUARY 2011.

Yes. That is how long it took to get my "no". In the interim I made several inquiries, mainly because I had been wildly excited when they expressed interest in seeing my work.

They asked for it. They asked for ME!

Then came the trek, the miserable trek, the long and miserable trek that nearly dried up my brain, let alone my hope.

This was the biggest press who had ever shown serious interest in me. Maybe it would work out! All I had to do was deliver the manuscript in person (none of this electronic nonsense, no sir, and who trusts the mail anyway?) across 20,000 miles of uninhabitable desert. Sounded fine to me. I love hot climates. 

But just in case, I wrapped one of those thingies around my head to keep the sand out of my ears.

The desert was pitiless, my friend, just like Moses' Land o' Cobras and o' Scorpions. It was a long hard ride as I tried to balance myself between reality
and hope. 

Pretty damn hot out there, but luckily Fulton the Camel was more than willing to carry the immense burden of paper (all 12,000 pages).

Along the way, Omar and I met some pretty weird types who had been out in the sun too long. This guy who forgot his clothes, and speaking of Moses, there was this guy who was looking at a burning BOOK!

My horse got tired after a while, so I had to find a suitable mount. He moved kind of slow, but didn't seem to mind the heat.

What can I say? Shit's shit. It took nine months to deliver the thing there, and nine months to get home again. Exactly a year and a half.

That's two pregnancies, back-to-back.

Why was I so surprised when the answer was "no"?

I wasn't. Surprised, I mean. Just devastated. Nothing like a hard punch in the gut after two pregnancies' worth of hope.

I mean, don't we all know it's better to rip the bandaid off fast? Must it be stretched out to a year and a half?

The only good thing is that I made a new friend, and he hasn't eaten me yet, maybe because he's made out of some alloy or something.  And Abu ben Adam (may his tribe increase!) has become my best bud, even though he insists on borrowing my lipstick and sunglasses.

I may make fun of all this, because it's the only way I can keep profound depression at bay and try to stifle the dreams I've nurtured for more than fifty years. It sort of works. No it doesn't, but the really stupid thing is, I haven't given up hope even though I KNOW I should have, long long ago.

Meanwhile, my manuscript, fading from yellow to brown and lying perfectly camouflaged in the desert, awaits discovery and spectacular success in the publishing world. . . after I die.