Advertisement Analysis Selling Women on a King's Length

In the January 2001 issue of Vanity Fair, Virginia Slims released a fold-out four page ad for their then-new prototype of longer cigarettes, the "Kings" version. This ad well deserves to be analyzed, because it seems to make a strange variety of false and even absurd claims for the cigarettes based purely on the non-related advertising imagery.

This ad is obviously targeted at the modern upper/middle-class women, with all that implies. Readers are assumably white, college educated, heterosexual, with decent disposable income. Vanity Fair appears to be aimed at both single women (including many tips on dating and sexual liaisons) and attached or married women, who are often assumed to be employed.

The ad itself does not seem to have a particularly different audience. It addresses the educated and upper-class nature of its readers through its interest in Egyptology and association with the aristocracy of Egypt; it also addresses their modernity and feminist employment by featuring a "woman who would be king."

The first of the four page layout shows what is implied to be a royal Egyptian male standing opposite an Egyptian woman wearing or ornate headdress and carrying a Pharoanic, surrounded by various hieroglyphic phrases. (One appears to refer to the reincarnation of the soul, though it would take a great deal of work to translate them and they may in fact be nonsensical) Between these two figures English letters read "Some women have always known their place." The subsequent page features a photograph of an Egyptian female statue with the label: "Hatshepsut...

This is followed by another blaze of bright red font reading "see yourself as a KING." The opposing page advertises the new Virginia Slims Kings, "A whole NEW SLIMS in the LENGTH you enjoy." The box of cigarettes pictured is accompanied by a slender silver lighter with hieroglyphs on it. The bright colors (the background is green with golden and blue egyptian images and bright red font) in complementary colors speak of power and attraction, and the antiqued looks of the page and graphics ads to the seeming classiness of the product.
The advertisement makes a number of claims, on a variety of subjects. On the surface of the ad, it merely claims that the new cigarette type is longer and also enjoyable. This is probably true for smokers. The ad also implies strongly, by association between the cigarettes and advertisement context, that the use of these cigarettes make women more kingly, powerful, and masculine (Hatshepsut was a cross-dresser in a man's world), and in fact suggests that these cigarettes can replace the woman's missing penis.

There are a number of various obvious propaganda devices in this ad, the most obvious and amusing of which is the blatant non-sequitor at the heart of the ad. In essence, this ad says, "one a woman was a Pharaoh and so you should buy our cigarettes." There is absolutely no logical link between the fact that Hatshepsut became a king and that Virginia Slims Kings cigarettes are enjoyable.

This connection between the…