I agree with you wholeheartedly as for the VD ads, but for the first anti-smoking ad, while I agree with your criticism of the representation it gives, I would just like to add something. I do not know whether "cigarette" is a feminine noun in Russian, but it is in French, and if they wanted to personnify a cigarette, maybe there was not even a second of reflexion as to its gender: the gender of the noun usually is reflected automatically in our minds in the gender of the person personifying it, as Marina Yaguello showed in "Les mots et les choses" (1978). For example, Death (masculine in Swedish) is represented as a man in Bergman's The Seventh Seal. If the Russian ad company wanted (consciously or not) to *not* create dissonance between the image and the text (where the cigarette is of feminine gender), they almost *had* to put the cigarette costume on a woman, because unconsciously, people confuse the gender of nouns (which is strictly linguistic) and the gender of the things those nouns represent.

Then again, they could very well have chosen to think about it some more, and/or have chosen another campaign and forget the "let's put a costume on a woman" idea!

The 'bag of trouble' one is perhaps the most disturbing of these. The lack of identifiable eyes tends to make the character look ghoulish. You have hit a rich seam with these public awareness ads. I'm sure there must be others online: dig for victory! might be a good start on google. You can almost trace the slogan's evolution on google images alone.

here's a "girl next door" version of the VD ads that i posted awhile back:

http://monkeysforhelping.blogspot.com/2007/05/propaganda-of-day.html

re: the Russian anti-smoking ad.

I've seen these in metro stations in Moscow a few years ago. My first thought is to suggest that the 'cat fight' stereotype is not a universal human stereotype. So it does not necessarily hold in Russia in the same way as it does in North America. This is not to say that there is no cultural motif of woman on woman violence in Russia.

Does this ad betray some cultural assumptions? No doubt. What they are is a much more complex question that requires a great degree of cultural fluency.

So I suppose this is a caveat. We are seeing more and more cross-cultural images filtered through the internet (or rather unfiltered through the internet). We should be looking more and more to culturally fluent voices to contextualize these rather than trying to read them through transcendent categories.

Cigarette (sigareta in Russia) is indeed a feminine noun. Emilie's point about noting gender is important and no doubt relevant to visual reading of this ad.

Finally, my own conjecture is that the woman/cigarette strangling the woman/smoker is a conventionally 'sexy' woman (blonde, thin, pretty features etc.) and might be read as the paradox of smoking being coded as 'sexy' and alluring while being deadly. This opens up a whole other realm of connections in the 'beautiful but deadly' category of stereotypes. Of course, as noted above this would require a greater degree of cultural fluency (which unfortunately, I don't possess).

What you failed to mention about the war VD ads was that during wartime in many countries, many women were told it was their "duty" to infect servicemen with VD. This took the men out of the frontlines or weakened them. VD was rampant, especially among American troops fighting overseas. So the imagery, in context, is entirely appropriate. (!!!!!!)

The biggest problem with Chlamydia is that most people don't even know that they have it lytiškai plintančios ligos. I had pink eye that wouldn't go away.