cliterature

Communities that center around erotica, have really interesting boundaries.  For example, erotic romance has large embraced (so to speak) gay, group and bondage.  However something quite ordinary, like bisexuality, is not much represented—and fetish and role-play remains very rare.  Even in non-romance erotica, where kink is pretty much acceptable in any form that is consenting and not harmful.  I think straight (so to speak)erotica writers and readers are more comfortable with coming across interests they don’t personally share–without feeling the need to condment them as morally disgusting.

But even fetishes move with the time.  A few years back appreciating a women smoking was about as mainstream as liking to see long legs in silk stockings.  As a modern fetish it is not all that common, and not very well known.  A lot of people are surprised to find that their own guilty pleasure is in fact shared with quite a few men.  The focus seems to be the deep inhalation and especially exhalation of smoke, its manipulation and sometime a specific interest in exactly what the woman smokes (e.g. cigars).  (I will not link to any of this adult material from this public website–but if you are an adult, Google is your friend).

Although, it does seem to be men we are talking about here, at least as consumers of smoking fetish material.  Which is odd because, as I in a previous post, in general women run very much towards liking dominant men—and the smoking fetish is closely linked to a submissive streak.  The smoking woman is seen as confident and commanding.  But smoking fetish material showing men is rare and, as far as I can see, almost entirely directed towards gay men.  In fact, in one smoking fetish forum it was asked whether a woman having smoking fetish was even possible. 

This is the point where I should make it clear that I don’t smoke and never have, and I don’t even like to be in the same room as a smoker.  But I have watched with interest as objections to smoking fetish became stronger with time, just as physical punishment fetishes (e.g. spanking) seem to have gained wider acceptance.  This is entirely logical given that a body will recovered quickly and completely from a slap, but the consequences of smoking as more severe and cumulative.  However is the moral condemnation of smoking actually impeding our ability to understand why women do it? (And therefore, if we choose to, from stopping them?)

You see, the incidence of smoking amongst the young seems to be on the rebound, especially amongst girls.  People tend to blame all the aspects of society that make the poor little girl-child a slave to their power.  That is, advertising making smoking sexy and because smoking (like any chronic toxin) helps them lose weight.  I think that it might be interested to look for some other explanations that are based on what girls want—not what they are victim to.  That is that men like to watch sexy,  dominant women smoking—and a significant minority of girls want to be sexy, dominant women (even while almost all want to seen as beautiful, submissive damsels).

How can they want to be both?  Well, women are complicated, adolescent girl-women are even more so as they “try on” different identities.  Boys routinely “try on” being tough, by speeding in cars, committing petty crimes, getting drunk, getting in fights and hanging out in gangs trying to out-macho each other.  Increasingly some girls do this too, but for the most part being female, and being a classic (masculine-style) delinquent, do not do together—especially when it comes to violence and crime.  Women (either innately, or due to conditioning, or both) typically don’t do public disorder.

So girls are left with a fairly short list of ways to rebel that are more-or-less legal and don’t necessarily harm anyone but themselves.  And so long as that remains true there will still be young girls who get off on smoking and not-so-young men who get off on watching them because they have the equally problematic and socially unacceptable issue of lusting after strong, socially-transgressive women, a.k.a. “bad girls”.  (And smoking fetish material is often a fascinating form of pornography in that much of it is un-macho-like in being “safe:–neither explicit, nor relating to activities capable of transmitting disease.)  

Perhap it is not the big bad tobacco companies who make smoking transgressive, the social condemnation does—and if this is the case the more smoking is condemned the more a significant minority of young women will want to do it to experiment with a “bad girl” identity.  The thing is, smoking will be transgressive so long as it continues to lop about 15 years off your life span.  That fact, in combination with human psychology, is going to be a public health problem for some time to come.  However, overly shrill objections to things like product placement, smoking fetish material and so forth are going to make that worse, not better.  So if the ultimate goal is to do as little harm as possible, the answer may be to live, and let smoke (between consenting adults and in the privacy of their own home).  If it becomes less of a dangerous deal, it might also become less of a turn-on in both a erotic and the general sense of the word.

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