"Indeed, women, the poor, and “primitive” colonial subjects were all conveniently constructed as porous and leaking “mouth-breathers” driven by primal desires, while elites were rational, well-contained, and ultimately decoupled from the body and its practical functioning. "
"Public health campaigns have never been about protecting everyone. They are, rather, about protecting the most privileged citizens from the dangerously contaminating poor."
See: Typhoid Mary, disembodied, infected body parts on cigarette cases.
Most smoker are poor people, so this is a way to stigmatize poverty without being so overt.
Anecdotal evidence: "I recently saw a woman brandishing the Mercedes Benz of strollers walk through a sea of idling traffic toward a smoker only to say the smoker was “murdering her baby” by polluting the air. Such an act has nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with venting bourgeois malaise by attacking powerless people whom state authorities have constructed as abject and undeserving of respect."
This is hypocritical because there are giant corporations polluting the air, water, and soil, and the same people who complain about smoking stay quiet about that.