It’s gone just about too far this time.

In the past year, North and South Dakota were included in a group of states described as “America’s Out back” by Newsweek. As if that weren’t bad enough, both states were also left out of a Rand McNally photographic atlas. (The editors smiled urbanely, one imagines, and claimed the discrepancy was “inadvertent,” but we of the Outback, the Buffalo Commons, America’s waste-disposal lot, know better, from long experience.)

We lived through the ignominy. Sons and daughters of pioneers, we’re survivors. We hitched up old Bossy to the plow and went about our daily lives as if nothing had hurt.

But now: the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company has announced that it’s coming out with a cigarette called, of all things, “Dakota,” meant to appeal to young, poorly educated, lower middle-class women all across the country. Kind of makes you want to move here, doesn’t it?

Let us not forget that RJR has had to snuff one new product already this year: “Uptown,” a cigarette targeting black Americans. Well, that particular group of Americans happens to form a large minority that gets listened to when it complains. Complain it did, and rightfully so, claiming that the marketing gimmick was not only patronizing but deadly: young black men are among the heaviest smokers in the country. Two weeks after the news about “Uptown” hit the media, the outcry from black America was so loud that plans to introduce the cigarette went up in smoke.

But Dakotans-North and South-are a much smaller, more manipulable minority with much less clout. We’re resigned to being ignored, and used to taking a lot of ribbing, even from our neighboring states (several of whom have very little reason to feel superior), and not complaining much at all. “Dakota” cigarettes, though, may just do the trick.

The RJR marketing plan, made public by the Washington Post, offers this alluring profile of the average “Dakota” smoker: a woman with only a high school education, holding a “job” but not working at a “career.” Her interests? “Partying with friends, dancing, going to clubs and bars, cruising, watching television, and shopping at the mall.” Her live entertainment of choice? “Drag races, motocross, motorcycle races, hot rod shows, cycle shows, tractor pulls, monster trucks, wrestling, and tough-man competitions.” Her favorite television show is Roseanne. The “Dakota” woman wants to get married, but until she walks down the aisle she will spend her free time “with her boyfriend, doing whatever he’s doing.”

“How dumb do they think we are?” asked Kathleen Wiebers, executive di rector of the South Dakota Lung Association. South Dakota has the fifth lowest smoking rate in the nation, at 21. 1 percent of the adult population. North Dakota is right in there, too; fewer than one-fourth of all North Dakotans smoke.

“Our women are more intelligent than that. I don’t know where they get the idea that because we’re out here in the wide-open spaces, we’re stupid,” said Alice Kundert, a former South Dakota secretary of state who has served as Christmas Seals chairwoman for the Lung Association.

Representative Cathy Rydell, a Bismarck, North Dakota, legislator who sponsored a 1987 state law to limit smoking in public places, found the cigarette and its name distasteful, but North Dakota tourism director Jim Fuglie doesn’t mind the use of “Dakota” so long as the word “North” is absent. “Dakota,” he said, “is a word that conjures up a tough guy or Old West images.” (I don’t know about the rest of you girls, but that’s the look I try to achieve.) 

I predict that RJR will stub out this cigarette, too, before it’s ever marketed (or shortly thereafter), even though, due to the very nature of North and South Dakotans, the company won’t get the mail or public tongue-clucking on “Dakota” that it did on “Uptown.”

For one thing, “Dakota” is simply the wrong name, demographically speaking, to use in seducing a large number of women. There are millions more women in the South, for in stance, than in the Wild West, and it’s the Southern women who have a reputation, deserved or not (surely it’s not), for frequenting drag races and “professional” wrestling matches on the arm of a swaggering, toothpick-chewing stud. It would have been just as effective to name the cigarette “Grits” or “Possum Hollow” or, best of all, “Graceland,” if RJR wanted sheer numbers. But then, those names would have been too obviously patronizing, wouldn’t they?

In the second place, someone with a high school education who lives in the malls probably doesn’t know where the Dakotas are-or that they have a virile Western reputation. A cigarette named “Death Valley” or “Tombstone” would stand more of a chance of tantalizing the women in the profile; they might have heard those names on reruns.

Mostly, though, women across the country are not as stupid as the boys at RJR seem to think. Those of us who don’t already smoke probably won’t start. Those of us who do smoke most likely have a favorite brand-and have proven fiercely resistant to change. And for years the cigarette fantasy of choice for most American women has been the Marlboro man, oozing more blue-eyed, barrel-chested, leather faced virility than we can stand. Why would any of us want to pretend to be the Marlboro man?