Feminist Looking Glass

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that about half of Cambodian women older than 48 chew tobacco and that, for many of them, the addiction began when they used it for relief of morning sickness during pregnancy.  In addition, the results of the survey show that midwives are the country’s biggest users of smokeless tobacco, with 68 percent chewing it, and that about half of traditional female healers chew tobacco as well.

Tragically, the culture promotes the use of chewing tobacco:  “Chewing tobacco appears to be strongly influenced by beliefs passed on by older relatives.  The behavior is seen as a rite of passage into womanhood.”  And this is hard to believe but “[s]ome women believe that when they chew tobacco, they look better.”

There appears to be no correlation between cigarette smoking and the chewing of tobacco:

As many as three-quarters of all men in some Southeast Asian countries smoke cigarettes, but fewer than 20 percent of the region’s women ever pick up the habit. While about half of older Cambodian women chew tobacco, only about 4 percent of them smoke, compared to nearly half of all men in the country.

Of course, the impact of chewing tobacco is on the child as well as the mother: “It’s very, very concerning because the impact is not only on the woman but also on the unborn child, and the risk could be quite severe.”

The U.S. is slowly making progress on tobacco.  Recent progress was made in Virginia (the birth place of tobacco in the U.S. and previously thought to be beholden to the tobacco industry) when a good but not great ban on smoking in Virginia restaurants and bars went into effect two days ago.  Let’s hope that some pressure can be put on other governments to decrease the consumption of cigarettes and chewing tobacco.

(And by the way, the U.S. still has to do something about chewing tobacco, cigars, and pipes, which have managed to elude many of the controls placed on cigarettes.)  (And another by the way: I loved The Practice TV show (at least until the final few seasons).  Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams) was my favorite character on the show and had some absolutely great story lines and scenes where she went up against the cigarette companies first and then a cigar company later.)

Filed under: Health, International Tagged: | Cambodia, Chewing Tobacco, Cigarettes