Smoking: From class to trash?

"It was in a little store a block from our hotel that I bought my first pack of cigarettes. The ones I'd smoked earlier had been Ronnie's -- Pall Malls, I think -- and though they tasted no better or worse than I thought they would, I felt that in the name of individuality I should find my own brand, something separate. Something me. Carltons, Kents, Alpines: it was like choosing a religion, for weren't Vantage people fundamentally different from those who'd taken to Larks of Newports? What I didn't realize was that you could convert, that you were allowed to. The Kent person could, with very little effort, become a Vantage person, though it was harder to go from menthol to regular, or from regular-sized to ultra long. All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things, they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't. One should never loan money to a Marlboro menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultralights would not only throw a wrench into the works, but make it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight, but that all came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits"

-David Sedaris, "The Smoking Section" from When You Are Engulfed in Flames

I was watching CBS Sunday Morning a few weeks back and the featured piece was one on a famous author. Honestly, I can't remember who it was, but I do remember the anchor asking his wife what it was that first drew her to her long time husband when they were students at Princeton or Yale or some other Ivy. She responded by saying that she was walking across campus and saw him leaned against a column of a building smoking a cigarette. She was immediately attracted because he looked suave, sophisticated, mature. And from that point, it was love.

Of course this budding romance began in the 1950's, when smoking was still an acceptable thing to do. Nowadays if you were to ask a girl if she is attracted to a fellow on a college campus cheefing a cig, you would very likely be met with a no. In fact if you were to ask guys or girls what their major turn offs are, I would wager to say over 75% would not hesitate to say smoking as their first.

So when did smoking become such a nasty, vile thing to do? When did it go from a normal, everyday thing to something frowned upon by the masses? Was it the health issues, the fact that it will probably kill you one day? Was it when secondhand smoke became a bigger issue than smoking itself? Did everyone just decide one day in the 80's or 90's that it was to become the quintessential sign of a classless person? I don't know, but I am curious.

If you watch Mad Men, you see that the three things that permeate every episode are sex, alcohol, and tobacco. But the former two are rarely considered as nasty in today's society as the latter.

Sex in the 1950's was as taboo as you could get. Hell, Lucy and Ricky slept in separate beds. But Ricky loved a good cigarette. So did Lucy. But now in cinema and television, the guy that gets the most girls is king while the people that smoke are almost automatically associated with being the "bad guy." I just finished a novel (Yes. Dan Brown's new one. It's entertaining. Cut me some slack.) where one of the antagonists was always mentioned to be smoking cigarettes, running her tongue over her filmy, yellow teeth. Weird how times change.

So obviously modern culture says that sex is OK. Do it a lot. With a lot of people. This is the message that MTV and other networks send to kids with their sexually driven shows and frequent condom commercials and the like. But on these same networks we see the commercials for Truth, the company seeking to obliterate the tobacco industry. Those commercials are disturbing. It makes you not want to smoke. And while I understand that condoms reduce unwanted pregnancies and STDs, do you think that when nearly every show on prime time has some sortof sexual content, that people who watch it immediately think, "safe sex?" No. They think sex.

So is sex the new, more appropriate substitute for cigarettes? Probably not. Is it more OK by today's standards than smoking? Yes. Was it the opposite in 1954? Yes. Is this weird to you? Probably.

So when the people that thrive on the sexual dominance of our culture, the promiscuous ones, the ones that aren't safe about their escapades go to the doctor for their STD check, they can likely mark non-smoker on their info sheet. Whew. No lung cancer for that 25 year old. But gonorrhea doesn't seem much better... Hmm.

Now what about alcohol?


Mad Men features a lot of scotch whiskey. Delightful. The mark of a truly sophisticated man is a glass of Johnnie Walker. On the rocks or straight? Doesn't matter. And what better accessory to that glass of scotch than a fine tobacco cigarette.

But again, in our modern society, it doesn't work the way it does in Mad Men. Alcohol is the forefront of the advertising world, not tobacco. Beer, wine, liquor, whatever. It dominates television, magazines, newspapers, etc. It drives people from high school to late adulthood. Adults crave the drink after work. College kids crave the beer every day. High school kids go out of their way to find someone to buy them booze. And this is fine and dandy with most people outside the uber-traditionalist evangelicals. But alcoholism numbers are increasing. DUI and drunk driving accident incidents are high across the country. Despite the negatives, alcohol is still something our culture drives into the heads of every person within ear shot or eye shot of any form of media. And most people don't think twice about it.

But is the Winston Cup an alright name for Nascar? No. It advertises cigarettes. Can you have a Marlboro add in the paper anymore? No. It's inappropriate. It encourages something unhealthful. Something that can kill you. Alcohol could never do such things. It's the magic elixir that society loves. Sex could never harm anyone either. It's an emotional and physical connection that rarely produces adverse effects. Cigarettes are the only thing today that can harm people. Cigarettes and driving or riding without a seat belt.

So should we eliminate advertisements for alcohol or condoms? Should we nix shows with sexual content? I don't think yes is the answer to either. Sure those things can harm people. Just like cigarettes do. But some people know how to use alcohol and sex responsibly. Unfortunately some others haven't the slightest idea.

Do you get where I'm going with this?

When a person, we'll call him non-smoker, learns that another person, smoker, is a user of cigarettes, there is a stigma that is immediately ingrained in non-smoker's mind. It's that smoker is low class, trashy, someone that wants to have his nicotine fix to make things a little easier. So how is that different than the business man who has his Dewar's everyday upon returning home from work to ease his mind? How is it different than the guy that prowls the bar looking for a one night stand to fill his emotional tank for the week?

Don't get me wrong. Cigarettes are bad. They will mess your body and life up. But won't alcohol and sex do the same thing if used improperly or too much?

To put it in perspective, my perspective, I am 100% confident that if you gave a girl two attractive men to choose from as a potential boyfriend or even husband, one that had slept with over 100 other women and one that was a smoker but had only one previous serious relationship, she would likely pick the man-whore because smoking is "so gross" in her opinion. Who knows what guy A has going on down south, but at least he doesn't have yellow teeth or smell like a cig.

Will things change? I doubt it. Smoking will be obsolete within the next 25 years or so. Mark my words. It's just something that society used see nothing wrong with that has become the ultimate sign of repulsiveness.


Note: This observation only applies to the USA. Europe is a whole different cup of tea. And don't get me started on the fact that people probably think smoking or its advertisements are worse than the violence in the media these days.