W2B-016 Smoking - Divorce-0.txt
Sex, lies and smoking

All the ash trays were removed form the hotel in the coastal town of Newcastle, Co Down, where the world's first International Conference on Women and Smoking was held last month.

The 150 delegates - 30 from women's groups in Northern Ireland - had come to share experiences and develop international, national, local and personal action plans, to counter the smoking epidemic that claims around 300,000 female lives in the world per year.

Organised by the Ulster Cancer Foundation, the Health Promotion Agency for Northern Ireland and the International Union Against Cancer, the conference was a sequel to the seventh World Conference on Smoking and Health, held in Perth two years ago.

It was, said Pattie White, co-chair of the UK's Health Education Authority, the fruit of a decade of pressure on the male-dominated tobacco-control movement - pressure from women to prove that "women smoke for different reasons from men" and should be treated and studied differently.

This was the theme of the keynote address, by Ilona Kickbusch, director of Lifestyles and Health (Europe) at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organisation. Wearing a tobacco-brown suit and flame-orange polo-neck sweater, Dr Kickbusch, with her short greying hair, resembled a super-slim cheroot.

Placing female smoking in the context of women's lack of power in society and their daily role as childminders and housekeepers, she urged an "integrated response to the notion that health is created and lived by people within the setting of their everyday lives, where they learn, where they work, where they play and where they love. All these things are relevant to smoking." She called for an emphasis on health promotion, both personal and societal, with a focus on low-income women, who smoked much more than their professional counterparts.

The combustible Ellen Gritz from the University of California was equally appropriately clothed in an ash-grey suit. Quoting WHO figures in rapid-fire succession, she delivered a paper on the Health Effects of Smoking on Women in less time than it would take to say 'May I have a packet of Virginia Slims menthol ultra lights, please'."

Dr Gritz revealed that, while trends in lung cancer mortality were levelling off among men in developed countries, for women they were "astronomically sky-rocketing"." In Scotland, Japan and the US, lung cancer had surpassed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer mortality in women. "We do not know how to prevent breast cancer, but we do know how to prevent lung cancer and for this to happen is an abomination," she said.

Grace Burnside, deputy director of the Ulster Cancer Foundation, described the extent of this "preventable tragedy" in Northern Ireland: claiming one out of every six lives, tobacco killed more people than car accidents, suicides, illegal drug use, AIDS and the 'troubles' combined. Ms Burnside called for the targeting of at-risk age groups, through community programmes such as the successful peer-led Teenagers Against Smoking (TASK) and the classroom-based Smokebusters.

Working groups on Raising Awareness and Involving Women in Tobacco Control shared a wide range of experiences from many countries. Scandinavians boasted about their smoke-free universities and hospitals. Indian delegates stressed prevention rather than cessation programmes in a context where tobacco chewing was more common than smoking and fewer than 5 per cent of women smoked. Doctors from the new democracies of central and eastern Europe spoke of the rapid growth in western tobacco advertising since the political upheavals of the late 1980s. "One of the great achievements of democracy," remarked one Polish delegate wryly.

This 'great achievement' was analysed further by Amanda Amos, a lecturer in health education at Edinburgh University. "The targeting of women entered a new stage in the late 1960s with the introduction of cigarette brands aimed exclusively at them," Dr Amos said. Virginia Slims, Caprice and Eve were a few of the brands "made with women in mind"." What they had in common was an emphasis on slimness, ultra-lightness and mildness - all perceived as desirable female attributes. She quoted the marketing chief of the company that produced Marlboro as saying: "I knew thinness was a quality worth talking about - it's an American obsession."

While advocating a ban on tobacco advertising, Dr Amos argued that this would not necessarily lead to fewer positive images of women and smoking in magazines. On the cover of a recent Italian Vogue, Linda Evangelista had posed with a cigarette under the headline 'New Look for 92', and 19 pages in the same magazine had shown fashion models smoking. This "worrying trend" was also prevalent in British fashion magazines, like Cosmopolitan and Vogue, she said.

Perhaps more worrying than the fact that cigarettes are used to control weight and suppress appetite was the suggestion by Lorraine Greaves from Canada that they were also used to supplant emotions.

A sociologist who has worked with battered wives, Prof Greaves said women used smoking more for the "suppression of negative emotions"." One woman had told her that smoking was like "sucking back her anger", so she did not cause trouble. Prof. Greaves also spoke of the vital "bonding function" of women smoking together, particularly in an environment hostile to smoking.

The conference closed with a demand for "a comprehensive, woman-centred global strategy, which will reduce the inequity women face and will unite and support them in action to prevent and reduce tobacco use among women and girls"." There were pledges to lobby politicians and decision-makers, calls for alliances with journalists and editors to ensure their magazines were not consciously or unconsciously promoting smoking, a commitment to a follow-up conference in two years, closer networking in the interim, a plethora of local, national and international initiatives and the targeting of specific age groups and classes.

No one, however, asked the surreptitious smoker who had been slyly puffing in the ladies'loo for three days to declare herself.
