Hi,
I'm not sure if this is appropriate for the "addiction" forum, since it's not a topic to help people get rid of their smoking addiction.
Wikipedia defines "addiction" as "[...] the continued use of a mood altering substance or behavior despite adverse dependency consequences". But then it includes "exercise abuse", "pornography", and "gambling" in the description, which are not "substances" by themselves, but merely "behaviours".
The problem is where to place the dividing line. As a crossdresser, I have seen some sites describing crossdressing as an "addiction" as well, although it might not be very clear what exactly the adverse dependency consequences might be in this case — except perhaps for frustration and eventual depression from the lack of crossdressing and an eventual increased cost to support one's femme role.
When this definition is applied to drug usage, it seems to be less ambiguous. Or is it?
Let me explain my point. I'm not merely a smoking addict; I'm a smoking fetishist. What this means is that the mere act of smoking — besides its chemical effect, which is related to drug addiction — is a behaviour that excites me erotically. Put into other words: as a fetish, watching a woman smoking is incredibly exciting for me, and, as a crossdresser who smokes, the whole image in itself is very erotic. This, like many other fetishes, is impossible to "explain". You either are a smoking fetishist and understand exactly what I'm saying, or you're not, and the very act of smoking is simply a nasty habit.
Some types of fetishes can be traced historically. For instance, in the 19th century, women did not smoke, period — that was something only men did. When they started to do so in the 1910s and specially in the 1920s, the act of smoking became glamorous — women smoke differently than men, and their gestures when smoking were deliberately designed to increase their glamour. This, of course, is linked to a desired eroticism, which was what those women in the 1910s-20s (and of course much later) tried to achieve: they wanted to be even more sexy!
Remember, these were the days when tobacco smoking was not understood as a major cause for tons of diseases — neither was cholesterol-rich food or even alcohol (even though the negative social effects of alcoholism and opium addiction were already well known). So we shouldn't be very tough in judging our great-grandparents if they found smoking something very sexy... they didn't know better.
Women smoking, specially with holders, were considered sexy throughout the 1960s, when the first serious medical research of the dramatically negative side-effects of smoking were first publicly exposed. For a while, cigarette manufacturers just reacted by inserting cork filters to minimize the effects, but it was quickly found out that this would not make any serious difference in terms of preventing health-related issues, and, from the 1980s onwards, as we all know, smokers have been made well aware of all the bad issues of cigarette smoking, and pretty much all countries started actively to fight tobacco addiction. Smoking completely lost its sex appeal.
Nevertheless, for some of us, tobacco smoking can be still extremely sexy and glamourous, if done correctly, by taking the lead from those gorgeous women from 1910-1960. It's perhaps not surprising that the mid-century decades also introduced the concept of sexy underwear at the same time, which is still a common fetish for many of us. Sexy accessories almost all became some sort of fetish since then. It's just tobacco smoking that stopped being seen as sexy.
Now, people like me are
both addicts
and fetishists. This causes a problem. We smoking fetishists do
not wish to stop smoking, but it has nothing to do with merely enjoying the taste, or the positive side-effects of tobacco smoking: yes, there are a few, which obviously are so totally outweighted by all the bad effects that nobody really seriously defends those positive things as a "justification" to continue to smoke.
Tobacco includes nicotine, which is a natural product present in our brains, or, rather, nicotine is part of certain molecules that carry information across our neurons. It's a common misrepresentation by anti-smokers that tobacco is an "alien substance with just bad effects". In fact, it's exactly because part of the brain pretty much works because of nicotine-based substances, that tobacco smoking has the effect it has; if not, since nicotine is a poison (commonly used in the Middle Ages, for example), there wouldn't be much point in consuming it (nobody gets a rush from rat poison, for example!).
As part of over-saturating the brain with nicotine, the usual effects — besides the slight "buzz" that newcomers to tobacco smoking experience, until their brains get used to the much higher concentration of nicotine — are a slight enhancement of thought processes (which I have repeatedly read on the literature as being "not true", but at some point, one has to ask what kind of agenda is behind people writing those reports; there is not a single smoker I know who doesn't report this slight enhancement. Caffeine does the same, although using a different process), but, more importantly, it acts as a mood stabiliser. It is generally assumed that tobacco addicts get "mood swings" due to a lack of smoking (i.e. they get progressively more irritated since their last smoke...), but the actual point is that it works precisely the other way round: people who are usually prone to mood swings (and who isn't, really?), as they become regular smokers, experience a stabilisation of their mood swings while they keep their regular intake of nicotine. Of course, if levels drop — by abstaining to smoke for long periods, or letting it go altogether — the mood swings will come back to its previous levels. This is something you can observe in pretty much anyone, specially if you have known them before starting to smoke and after quitting smoke: they will become their moody, irritated, angry selves again. I have yet to find an exception, and, actually, I have seen a few unbiased reports researching that area in detail and producing the same findings.
Obviously there are other natural and synthetic substances that can keep mood swings in check which have none of the bad health consequences of tobacco smoking. So it would be stupid, nowadays, as the health effects of smoking are so well researched, for someone to pick up smoking in order to keep their mood swings in check and slightly benefit from an enhancement of their thought processes! It would be like killing flies with an atom bomb.
Tobacco smoking also has a strange evolution in terms of addiction. Most types of drug addiction tend to require more and more doses to achieve the same effect, and this obviously is true of the so-called synthetic drugs and designer drugs. The so-called "legal drugs" which have no social side-effects, they just cause health issues — caffeine and nicotine — tend to work differently. One consumes them more and more until they reach a certain level. After that level is reached, you don't need to consume it more; in fact, it either will not have any effect whatsoever (it will be flushed out by the organism), or the effect will be disappointing or undesired (like tachycardia from too much coffee!). While I haven't read many studies in this area, I seriously believe that tobacco companies are well aware of this effect, and that's why, on average, a so-called "heavy smoker" tends to smoke a pack a day. There are obviously much heavier smokers, but they're exceptions. I believe that this "average" has to do with the amount of nicotine that our brains can use to process it into the nicotine-derived molecules that enhance neuron connectivity: there must be a limit, over which the extra nicotine is just washed away by the organism and has no effect. But remember that I'm talking about averages here!
Anyway, this leads to one of the many reasons why tobacco smoking is so terribly addictive. Putting it bluntly, a smoker starting to quit will realise that they will think less clearly, pay less attention to their surroundings, and become less able to keep their mood in check, and so get easily irritated, often because they're unable to think as clearly as before. Obviously the organism will adapt, and thanks to other techniques (meditation, for instance, can definitely help to balance the mood swings and increase attention and awareness), ex-smokers will be able to compensate for the loss of nicotine in their organisms, and will start enjoying the benefits of increased health, the recovery of their smell and taste, more energy, and so forth, which will encourage them to reject smoking forever, after the benefits of not smoking are fully realized.
But if you're a smoking fetishist on top of that, things are much worse.
In my experience, most smokers I know are unhappy about their addiction. They feel they have "lost control" somehow, and are letting a substance "take over" their rational thoughts, which tell them that they're slowly poisoning themselves, and, these days, there is nobody who knows about the bad effects on health, so most smokers I know are a bit furious with themselves for being unable to stop smoking. Nevertheless, I would say that in all those cases stopping to smoke is possible at some point, because the smoker has already convinced himself or herself how bad the addiction is for them, and all they need is a push in the right direction. They're unhappy about smoking, and want to be happy. They know that all they need to do is to stop smoking. So there is good working ground to stop.
I tend to shock some of my non-smoking acquaintances by telling them that, while I'm fully aware of the terrible consequences to my health, I actually
enjoy smoking. I don't tell them that I'm a smoking fetishist, because, frankly, that is as alien to them as crossdressing
But these days people find it actually strange that someone
loves to smoke. Since, for a non-smoker, smoking is a filthy habit which smells horribly, it's impossible for them to understand why someone might enjoy it. Explaining how smoking becomes erotically charged and is turned into a fetish is totally pushing the issue in the field of science fiction: it's so completely and utterly impossible to understand, it's so far removed from their daily experience, that they can only view us smoking fetishists as beings seriously mentally deranged.
Alas, fetishes are not rational. I think that every male will feel an irrational attraction to seeing women in sexy lingerie; we all have been conditioned to develop at least a small fetish towards feminine lingerie (even though, of course, most males will not want to wear it, but just want their female partners to do so). If lingerie weren't erotic, fashion designers would not go the trouble of designing it like that — after all, female underwear before the 1910s was anything but erotic, but just as comfortable as the technology of the time allowed it.
There are gazillions of fetishes (and even a few schools of thought saying that "anything can be turned into a fetish"), and none of them make any sense to someone who hasn't got the same fetish. While some fetishes have probably been in existence for millennia — like feet/toe fetishes — others are the product of a certain culture and/or a result of something that became available and, for some reason, triggers the fetish in certain people. A fetish for high heels only developed when high heels became available; but there is also a link to the fact that specially attractive women are always depicted as wearing high heels (and this has been the case for at least some 70 years or more). So it's reasonable to understand how this fetish develops: by viewing just the high heels, some males can project the whole erotic experience on that object (the definition of a fetish), and don't even require a "woman" to be wearing the shoes: the high heels by themselves are enough to trigger the erotic effect. This is one reason, for example, why so many fetishists attached to certain aspects of a woman's attire or behaviour don't mind if the person they see is not a genetic woman at all — their fetish is towards those clothes, accessories, or behaviour, and not towards the person using/wearing them or behaving in a certain way.
Long hair, for instance, is an ancient fetish (that's why for millennia nuns have been required to shave their hairs). A crossdresser with long hair who learns how to flip and play with their hair is extremely attractive to anyone with a hair fetish, and it's highly likely that a vast majority of males have that fetish as well — it's one of the most common ones.
While several heterosexual males tend to say that what excites them most is a naked woman, who doesn't need to do "anything", this is not exactly true. They are also excited by "the whole package": the way they walk on high heels, the way their hips swing and their boobs bounce, the way they flip their hair, the way they purse their lips, the poses they strike, the accessories they wear, the styles of clothes they wear — revealing "just enough" to be enticing, but "not too much" — and so forth. Eroticism, the art of driving someone to desire and lust just with clothes, accessories, and behaviours, is as powerful as "pure porn" — watching the mechanical act of fornication. (That's why good porn will feature both!) But I believe that this is because everything that is "erotic" is a trigger to a form of fetishism, even a mild one. In fact, I think that the difference between finding something "erotic" or "a fetish" is one of quality, of intensity, and not really of a degree. Obviously not everybody reacts in the same way.
"Smoking as a female" — a lost art, but which was prevalent at least between 1910 and 1960 — was not merely an addiction, a "filthy habit". It was deliberately done with certain gestures designed to be enticing and erotic. For some, of course, this developed into a form of fetishism. But for others, specially between 1910-1960, it just meant adding to the erotic behaviour that a woman was able to fit into their array of "seduction tricks". This is, I believe, the main reason why education to prevent kids from starting to smoke focuses on saying that "smoking is not cool" — sort of pre-emptive brainwashing! — because we had half a century of images and movies showing smoking as an art form to induce eroticism. No wonder, though, that Puritans want to erase smoking from the old movies (many have already been subjected to such censorship!) — they don't want the younger generation to have even the slightest inkling that something like smoking — a vicious habit, a filthy addiction, which will ruin your health — has, in the past, been strongly connected to eroticism, leading to pleasure. Puritans are all against pleasure which doesn't derive from God, of course.
But even not-so-Puritans, who are rational beings, try to pass the message that something that might have been seen as "erotic" in the past is now known to have seriously damaging consequences to one's health. So by conditioning the youngsters to see smoking as being uncool, they encourage people to stay away from the addiction, showing that there are much safer ways of being erotic without damaging one's health. I personally think that this is rather positive for our society in general — which has less and less smokers, and, as such, is more healthy — and cannot blame the "de-programming" that has been done, which has been reasonably successful so far.
The trouble is, some of us had already watched those movies and seen those pictures of a more glamorous past, have become addicted to the glamour — in other words, became smoking fetishists! — and, like most fetishes, you cannot de-program them easily: they become part of you. Even in a world that might, one day, completely ban smoking, I will still feel strongly attracted to women smokers, specially the ones that are still able to keep the old art of sexy female smoking alive. Probably they will need to ban all those videos, movies, and pictures as well!
Please note that I'm obviously very, very biased, being both a smoker (and happy about it!) and a crossdresser with a smoking fetish. For us smokers, what we feel is that society has done a bad job in attempting to turn smoking into something relatively healthy and safe. Before you get shocked about reading this, consider the market for "healthy food". It all started in the 1980s or so, when studies showed quite clearly that most processed food had incredibly damaging consequences for our health. An alternative would have been to ban unhealthy food products, but this would be rather hard, as they were too widespread. Instead, what was done was to encourage "healthy food" as a new trend. Companies jumped into it because they could marketeer "safer, healthier food" — which would be more expensive — and launch new products which weren't as damaging to one's health. This, in turn, led competition to do the same; and by competing within the area of healthy food, prices began to drop. As soon as healthy food became more generally available, governments started legislating against production of unhealthy food, demanded that companies announced what they used in their products, and started to educate the population about the benefits of consuming healthy food. We still have a long way to go, but recently I've been made aware that the European Union is considering things like a tax on cholesterol (which is now the first cause of death, far surpassing tobacco consumption). In cosmetics, a similar trend has started a decade or two ago, and you can really notice a difference between products — at the higher end (but which is not so dramatically more expensive!), cosmetics are far safer and healthier to use than the low-end products, specially those manufactured in countries with little or no concern about adverse health effects.
Even alcohol has been regulated that way: while you can still get drunk and become an alcoholic very easily, the current generation of alcohol-based products is far more regulated and contains far less unhealthy products (required for its manufacture). Sure, alcohol by itself is harmful enough, even if all else is controlled. But the point here is that we have moved away from the extremely unhealthy products of the 1940-60 and slowly working towards much better ones with less side-effects. It's a long road, and we're not at the end yet.
Not so with tobacco products. Instead of focusing on making "healthier cigarettes", governments have banned advertising. By doing so, it means that potential developers of a "healthier cigarette" are unable to market it like that, thus being unable to recover the costs of researching into that area. So obviously tobacco companies don't bother: they still manufacture cigarettes in the same way than they did in the 1960s — i.e. using extremely health-damaging procedures. A lot of those procedures could be avoided — we have the technology to do so — but that research is expensive, and, as a result, those "safer cigarettes" would be far more expensive. Of course,
if tobacco companies could promote a more expensive product as being "safer", then they would be able to invest in order to get a clear advantage over their competitors. But they're not only forbidden to advertise, but they're even prevented to
hint that their cigarettes are slightly less harmful. In my country, for instance, it's forbidden to launch a brand which has the name "light" or "soft" or "suave" or whatever conveys the illusion that the cigarette is less harmful than others. Even the choice of colours — light blue being typically used to convey a cigarette with lower nicotine and tar percentages — is somehow frowned upon. This obviously means that tobacco companies have no way to market safer products, even if they wished to explore that market, and cigarettes remain as unhealthy in 2012 as they were in the 1960s.
I have a slight hope that e-cigarettes might "swing the tide", because, so far, they have carefully avoided being on the limelight. While I personally am not
that fond of them (yes, I've tried several brands), I see that they have a huge amount of advantages over normal cigarettes. The first, of course, is that they don't smell, so they are more tolerated by non-smokers (the anti-smokers, being Puritans, will still object to anyone having pleasure, so they won't be impressed). The exhales are just water vapor, so there is no passive smoking, nor pollution, nor any nasty side-effects (like walls turning yellow from nicotine). And the e-cigarette consumer is basically just taking in water vapour (totally harmless) with nicotine (harmful, but not as much as any of the other 5000 components of a typical cigarette, all of them absent from the e-cigarette) and some industrial flavouring (totally harmless, they're absolutely safe products to add to industrial food processing). This, of course, is raising a lot of eyebrows. Tobacco companies are not really "threatened" by e-cigarettes: the best nicotine is distilled from good quality tobacco, and they can compensate the loss of sales from regular cigarettes by selling the excess tobacco to nicotine distilleries (which are high-tech companies working for the pharmaceutical industry).
But it's soon to tell how things will swing. I believe that we are somewhere at the crossroads of the delicate balance between the tobacco-smoke haters and the addicts. The hate levels increased by the late 1990s and early 2000s, and government response to abolish smoking has been heaviest during that period. However, taxes from cigarette smoking are important for the cynical governments (like taxes on alcohol). "Safer" cigarettes that can be as socially acceptable as moderate alcohol or coffee consumption is would mean more taxes while not threatening the health of the citizens in a dramatic way. If this gets somehow sorted out — as said, e-cigarettes point the way, but IMHO they're not the "final solution" yet — we might get to see smoking as glamorous again. But we will also need to "retrain" all those women who lost the art of erotic smoking :-) (specially if the old movies are censored!) So I'm keeping that flame alive... as long as I can :-)
