[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by Marcus on July 10, 2006, 5:40 pm, in reply to "Re: 1977 American Cancer Society "The Decision Is Yours" Pamphlet" I am certain that for the teenagers of this decade who have grown up surrounded by massive amounts of information about the health effects of smoking, and in a society where smoking is vilified in part because of those effects, the privacy of starting and continuing to smoke is part of the pleasure they get. "Smoking: A little self destruction I do for myself." As they continue to smoke and find that other people they know are smokers, they get the added pleasure of being part of a community of people with shared self destructive desires. I definitely agree that some rabid anti-smokers have some aspect of the fetish, and that it has a dark side element. The anti in my office that I mentioned showed herself to be one of them not long ago. The office manager, a woman in her early fifties stopped smoking after forty years. She went through the classic physical changes as her lungs adjusted and began to recover--lots of wet rattling coughs, excessive sinus drainage, increased mucus expectoration, etc. The anti was fascinated by all of it and frequently made comments that the manager's lungs were, (I paraphrase), "Getting even for all the abuse" or "Trying to clean out the crud." When she noticed that the manager was no longer coughing excessively, she commented, "See, I told you you'd feel better and stop coughing up all that stuff when your lungs cleared up!" To which the manager replied, "I stopped coughing and felt better when I started smoking again."
We have made many of the same observations. I have also noticed more closet smokers or people who only smoke openly in certain social settings but hide it the rest of the time. It seems possible to me that they're more attracted to the darker aspects of the vice than those who smoke openly since they are not deriving pleasure from publicly being a smoker. In the past couple of years my office has had at least two graduate assistants who started as closet smokers, but by the middle of their first semester had "come out" and were public smokers. One of them commented that she had smoked openly as an undergraduate, but had decided to hide it when she arrived in a new town for fear that she wouldn't be accepted as a smoker. Another explained that she had never been comfortable smoking openly because she was afraid of what people would think of her since she was doing something so harmful to her health.
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