Freedom Through Smoke: From Bernays’s Torches to Iran’s Burning Images

“Torches of Freedom.” AI image

Introduction

On Easter Sunday in 1929, young women walked down Fifth Avenue holding lit cigarettes as if they were political banners. Nearly a century later, images circulate online of Iranian women lighting cigarettes from burning photographs of the Supreme Leader. At first glance, the two moments seem separated by history, geography, and political context. Yet both rely on the same striking gesture: a woman publicly inhaling smoke as a sign of defiance. One was a carefully scripted publicity stunt designed to sell tobacco; the other is an act of resistance against a repressive state. Placing them side by side exposes a deeper question: why does smoking, of all things, keep becoming a symbol of female freedom?

Bernays and the Manufacture of Emancipation

Edward L. Bernays, a pioneer of public relations and nephew of Sigmund Freud, understood that human beings do not simply respond to arguments. They respond to images that condense desire, anxiety, and aspiration. In Propaganda, he wrote that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society” (Bernays, 1928, p. 37). That manipulation reached a decisive moment in 1929, when the American Tobacco Company wanted to expand its market to women, who were discouraged from smoking in public.

Bernays consulted psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who suggested that cigarettes functioned unconsciously as phallic emblems of male authority. The solution was elegant and cynical: reframe the cigarette as a badge of emancipation. During the New York Easter parade, Bernays arranged for women to light up in front of photographers, presenting the gesture as a protest against gendered restraint. Newspapers dutifully reported on the “Torches of Freedom,” and within weeks the taboo had begun to dissolve.

Nothing about the event was spontaneous. The women were sincere, yet the script had been written in advance. A commodity had been attached to a political longing. As Brandt (2007) shows, this symbolic maneuver helped normalize a habit that would kill millions. The cigarette was no longer just tobacco; it was a story about autonomy.

Iran and the Politics of the Forbidden Gesture

 AI image

The Iranian images belong to a very different world. Women lighting cigarettes with burning photographs of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are not participating in a corporate spectacle. They are risking arrest, violence, or worse. In Iran, public disrespect toward the Supreme Leader is a criminal offense, and women’s behavior remains subject to religious and legal surveillance. Smoking, hair, clothing, and presence in public space are all sites of control.

When a woman sets fire to Khamenei’s portrait and uses the flame to light a cigarette, she fuses two prohibitions: political dissent and bodily autonomy. The cigarette becomes a visible signal that her body does not belong to the state. The gesture is not only about nicotine. It is about refusing submission.

That is why the act travels so rapidly across social media. It condenses anger, courage, and mockery into a single image. The smoke rising from the burning photograph turns the authority of the regime into something that literally fuels an act of pleasure and refusal.

The Inheritance of Symbols

Still, a disturbing question remains: why smoking? Why not simply burn the image? Why not raise a fist or cut one’s hair, as many Iranian women have done? The answer lies in the way symbols circulate through culture.

Smoking did not become a sign of independence by accident. For more than a century, advertising, cinema, and fashion invested it with connotations of rebellion, erotic autonomy, and modernity. Bernays was among the first to make that association explicit, but he was not the last. The cigarette entered the global imagination as a portable theater of defiance.

Symbols do not reset when regimes change. They accumulate. By the time an Iranian protester lifts a cigarette, the object already carries layers of meaning produced elsewhere. The act may be sincere, but the sign she deploys has a history that reaches back to Madison Avenue.

This does not mean she is being deceived. It means she is speaking in a language she did not invent.

Unintentional Harm and Political Paradox

Here the parallel with 1929 becomes ethically uncomfortable. In Bernays’s campaign, women were empowered in a narrow social sense while being led into addiction. The political victory came with a biological cost. Something similar may be happening now, though not necessarily with a marketing mastermind pulling the strings.

Young women who take up smoking as a symbol of resistance are asserting control over their bodies. At the same time, they are exposing those bodies to a substance that causes cancer, heart disease, and dependency. The harm might not be planned, yet it is real.

This is not a moral judgment against the protesters. It is an observation about the tragic structure of symbolic politics. Resistance often borrows the materials of the world it opposes. When those materials are commodities, the body pays a price.

Conclusion

The distance between Fifth Avenue in 1929 and Tehran today is vast, but the cigarette bridges it. Once designed to translate feminism into profit, it now appears as a sign of refusal against theocratic authority. In both cases, a small burning object becomes a carrier of oversized meaning. Bernays showed how desire could be engineered through symbols. The Iranian protests show how those same symbols can be reappropriated, even against power. Yet the smoke still enters the lungs. Freedom can be declared with fire, but the body must breathe what follows.

References

Bernays, E. L. (1928). Propaganda. Liveright.

Brandt, A. M. (2007). The cigarette century: The rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America. Basic Books.

Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. W. W. Norton.

Tye, L. (1998). The father of spin: Edward L. Bernays and the birth of public relations. Crown.

Metro. (2026, January 9). Iranian women light cigarettes with burning photo of supreme leader.

Firstpost. (2026). Why are Iranian women burning Khamenei’s photo to light cigarettes?