I mentioned them very quickly, but I think a good example that we often use is tobacco, another piece I wanted to mention. You may remember when there was smoking on planes and may remember when we advertised cigarettes to children, in that there was cigarette smoking in kids' cartoons. Policies had to come to change that, to make it not so easy for children to buy cigarettes for themselves or on behalf of anyone else. There was decades of the industry knowing full well that it was harmful but telling everybody who was saying it was harmful that the research wasn't valid, so that there had to be a lot of research.
The industry also came to those who were first fighting against smoking, looking at this as a harm. There was Larry Cohen at the Prevention Institute in California; it had one of the first counties that started to say “no smoking” in a certain part of a restaurant. The tobacco industry came to him and offered him a lot of money to do education as long as he would stop his policy work, because they knew that education alone was not going to hurt their bottom line. It's often that you'll see alcohol companies supporting education about drinking and driving but still making sure that nobody is limiting access to the product in, for example, poorer communities, or their advertising.
Advertising policy changed with tobacco. It used to be the Marlboro Man. I don't know whether you guys had it there too, but it was the image of sexy, the image of virile. In fact, there were doctors who used to say this is healthy, this is good for you, much as in our parallel here. The policy had to change to say, “Wait a minute. We're not saying this is healthy. We see this as harmful, and we're not going to advertise it in this way, and we are not going to use children, for example.
One of the policies I would like to see, ideally applying also to women, is to say we're not going to use children as sexual objects to sell products and are going to stop the sexually exploited advertising of children, because that's part of that hypersexualization, the bleed-over that Dr. Dines talks a lot about from pornography to mainstream media.
We need to look at our advertising. In fact, there's an example in our country here from the wine companies more than 15 years ago. It was called “Dangerous Promises”. They agreed to come together and not use women's bodies to sell their wine product, and the wine ads are very different from beer ads, which are notorious for using women's bodies in very hypersexualized ways to sell their products, with a very false message that the only way to get men's attention is to objectify women.