The Manipulation of Women's Smoking Choices

What if I told

you that millions of women started smoking not because they wanted to,

they started smoking because they were manipulated.

And the guy that pulled it off was not selling cigarettes, he was selling feminism.

Meet Edward Bernays,

a Jewish guy that many people call the father of PR and propaganda.

Now this guy was the nephew of Sigmund Freud,

and he believed something revolutionary.

If you can control people's subconscious desires, you can control society.

Not convince people, control them. This story starts in 1920s.

Tobacco companies had a huge problem because women were not

allowed to smoke outside.

Actually women were not supposed to smoke at all,

it was considered very inappropriate. So half of the

population was basically an untapped market for the tobacco companies,

and this is when they called Bernays.

But Bernays didn't create a cigarette campaign, he created a social movement.

Think about that, social movement for smoking.

He hired psychologists,

he studied emotion,

rebellion, status, and then he came up with a brilliant and a controversial idea.

What if cigarettes would become a symbol of female freedom?

So during New York's Easter parade in 1929,

a group of carefully selected women marched down the street and

lit a cigarette exactly at the right moment.

Reporters and photographers were already standing there, waiting.

Nothing was spontaneous, everything was engineered.

And this is what women started calling the cigarettes, torches of freedom.

And the newspapers around the world ate it up.

So the public thought they were witnessing a feminist movement,

but behind the curtains it was a PR stunt orchestrated for the tobacco companies.

The message was simple, if men can smoke, why can't women?

And suddenly buying cigarettes wasn't about tobacco anymore,

it was about identity, independence,

equality, freedom, and power.

Bernays had transformed a product into a

political statement and sales exploded by 300

So what's the moral?

Next time you think you're making an independent choice, ask yourself this question.

Who benefits from this choice that I make?

And more importantly, did I really choose it?

Or did someone like Edward Bernays engineer that feeling for me?

Now if you want to go down the rabbit hole with this, check out how diamonds

became girls' best friends.

Because let me tell you a secret,

diamonds are not rare.

It's your time to move.