French in uproar over oral sex anti-smoking posters

French advertising companies are often criticised for using sexual images to sell everything from designer spectacles to sweetcorn. Now, for the first time, a controversy has erupted in France over the use of sexually suggestive posters as a deterrent.

A campaign to discourage young people from smoking shows male and female teenagers kneeling in front of a man, as if being forced to have oral sex. A cigarette takes the place of the man's sexual organ. The caption reads: "Smoking is to be a slave to tobacco."

The campaign, which was devised for a pressure group supporting the rights of non-smokers, has been attacked as "scandalous" and "potentially counter-productive" by feminist and pro-family campaigners.
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Marco de la Fuente, the leader of the project for the BDDP et Fils ad agency, said: "The old arguments – tobacco is bad for you – don't work any more. The message here is that tobacco is a form of submission. In the popular imagination, oral sex is the perfect symbol of submission."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french-in-uproar-over-oral-sex-antismoking-posters-1908559.html