Smoke gets in your eyes

Cigarette smoking is a metaphor for sex, says the author of a book on tobacco.

By David Bowman

Apr 3, 2002 | Torch singers used to sing sexy nicotine songs like "Don't Smoke in Bed" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Then the lounges became discos and the torch singers all ended up dead.

It's been years since smoking was sexy, years since a fellow would flip a Camel in the air and catch it with his lips, or a blond would lift her chin toward the moon and release her own little halo of smoke. Ancient history. Now smoking has been reduced to a sexual fetish -- some whore blowing smoke rings across a john's loins and calling that a blow job.

Iain Gately is one Brit who remembers the old days. A few years back, he abandoned the "no smoking zone" of London and expatriated himself to Tarisa, on the Spanish side of the Straits of Gibraltar. The citizens of his town still smoke like chimneys. Gately even wrote a history of smoking there, "Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World." It's a cultural history of the weed, from American Indian prehistory up to present. And seduction is the operative word.

Gately recounts the gender differences: Gentlemen once seduced women with smoke signals as if they were both Cherokees; the masculine style of smoking was to puff tersely with as little effort as possible. Women were expressionistic -- waving the cigarette in the air, puckering their lips.

And the author remembers the first time he was seduced by a woman wanting cigarettes.

"It was in Spain," he says over the phone, standing in his favorite bar in Tarisa, where I have reached him from New York. "A girl came up and said, 'Can I have a cigarette?' I handed her one and she walked off.

"One of my mates said, 'That girl is interested in you. Go over and talk to her.'

"I said, 'How do you know?'

"'She asked you for a cigarette.'"

Gately pauses and smiles. "I went over and that was true. Cheers."

I imagine Gately enjoying a post-coital smoke, considering the entire sexual history of cigarettes spread out before him like the Mediterranean Sea. Six thousand years ago, smoking was a fertility rite. A shaman would blow smoke over the loins of virgins about to be married.

"The cover of my book has got a picture of a naked blond descending from the sky with a leaf of tobacco," Gately says. "That derives from a Native American myth. There was a great famine in the land. The Great Spirit sent down a naked blond woman who sat cross-legged on the ground. Under her left hand sprung up wheat and from under her right sprung up corn, but in the damp patch where she's been sitting there came tobacco."

"The Native Americans made this up before they'd ever seen white people?" I ask.

"Yeah," Gately says. (I think I hear him lighting up.) "Remember Cortez being told that the gods had sent a white man to help them? When Europeans first got to the New World, tobacco was still associated with sex because the conquistadors caught syphilis for the first time, and they used to smoke to ease the pain of this new disease. Then monks started taking up snuff, partly to try to get the Aztecs into their churches because Aztecs associated smoking not just with sex, but with God. The monks were frowned upon back in Europe because snuff promotes sneezing and sneezing was considered the brother of an orgasm. So Westerners negatively associated tobacco with sex for a period of, say, 300 years. Until the end of the 19th century, it was more 'smoking and sexism,' than 'smoking and sex.' Normal working women smoked cigarettes, but in decent society it was frowned upon. It was a black period for the weed and seduction. You didn't find people even using smoking as a metaphor for lust."

Next Page: "Carmen" was about a very sexy cigarette seller

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