Hazy

Confusing quotation of the day:

The WHO also accused manufacturers of continuing to attract young people by "falsely" associating cigarettes with "glamour, energy and sex appeal".

I haven't seen the original context, but this report leaves me wondering how one could 'falsely' associate cigarettes with glamour and sex appeal. Surely associating cigarettes with glamour and sex appeal has the effect of actually making them associated with glamour and sex appeal.

True, it's possible e.g. to assert that 'smoking cigarettes will make you appear more glamorous and sexually appealing to $person' when in fact nothing of the sort is true of $person's perceptions; but it seems hard to expand that to a wide-scale demographic falsity, simply because the act of advertising, insofar as it results in successful associations at all, will also influence the general symbolism of the cigarette—which of course is presumably what the WHO is principally concerned about. It's as though we're being asked to entertain a form of Moore's Paradox: "I don't believe cigarettes are glamorous, even though they are."