Upon further reflection…
it really is only movies that succeed in portraying the coolness factor. I can’t think of a single real-life instance where I saw someone smoking and I didn’t experience some level of revulsion.
Particularly when the smoker is female.
mmm
Yeah, a cool movie star can look cool smoking.
OTOH, a middle age friend was telling my teenager daughter that one reason he still smoked was that playing with burning sticks and breathing smoke looked so cool. Pissed me off royally. Yeah, it’s just coincidence that the only time people are motivated to do breath smoke is when the smoldering sticks are full of an addictive drug.
Exactly. They made damn sure that cigarettes were included in care packages for soldiers fighting wars overseas. They invented product placement, even if they couldn’t show the brand name, they could promote smoking in general in movies and TV.
When I was growing up, and even later, smoking was promoted as something that adults did. Naturally, all the kids wanted to do it.
I don’t think it was just that. Adults married, had kids, and bought houses, and no kid I know itched to do those things. It was a combination of “I can do it because I’m an adult” but “you can’t because you’re a kid” situations with the forbidden fruit idea, which would include driving, having sex, smoking, drinking, etc. When I was young, that, strangely enough, also included coffee. Back then, coffee stunted your growth, but nobody talks about that anymore.
A huge part of the way we experience odours has to do with our associations and expectations about them, though. I have come to find the smell of burning or burned tobacco offensive, but I don’t kid myself that this has anything to do with any objective qualities of the smell.
99% of this sort of thing happens in your head. I can still remember how the smell of indian food cooking used to make me literally sick to my stomach, as a consequence of being a nine-year-old child of people who inherited the sort of casual racism that comes of being from a particularly insulated time and place and relocated to a multicultural city. The odours themselves haven’t changed, but I have a hard time reconciling them with my former subjective experience of them.
Working in residential property management, I’ve had the sublime joy of reading a series of increasingly hysterical letters from several neighbours complaining about each others’ smoking odours. (Tobacco vs. marijuana.) Not a tit-for-tat, either - just equally oblivious and having differing prejudices. One woman (a cigarette smoker) described having to have a nine-year-old visiting child “lie down on the couch with a cold wet cloth covering her face” to alleviate the suffering caused by someone smoking marijuana outside four units away. (The same woman also made several attempts to enact a “no dyer sheets” bylaw in the building, because the chemicals released into the air by them was very distressing to her. Chemicals, dontcha know?
I don’t know how old you are or if you’ll remember this, but at one time there was a big push to associate “cowboys” with smoking. This was of course the Hollywood version of cowboys, who were considered to be the ultimate in cool, especially by young boys. Tobacco companies were big sponsors of the many TV westerns that were popular in the sixties.
I think smoking was (is?) typically the first statement to your peers that you’re no longer a kid. It’s easy to obtain, it’s easy to do, and it is very visible. There is no easier way for a twelve year old to say, “yeah, I’m grown.”
As an aside, a co-worker of mine recently took up smoking at the age of 26!! How stupid is that?
mmm
I think it’s mostly just the context that makes smoking look cool. Soldiers smoking in old war photos look cool, but they’d look cool anyway. “Mad Men” era office guys look cool smoking, but it’s mostly because of their suits, hairstyles, etc. But nobody sees the trashy looking type of people who seem to be 80% of smokers nowadays - the mullet headed, shabbily dressed, poor-postured guys who ride scooters because they lost their drivers’ licenses on DUIs - nobody sees these people smoking and thinks it looks cool.
If the anti-smoking people wanted to really doom smoking forever, they would play up this growing association of “smoking” with “poor”. I doubt they’ll ever try it because it comes off as too socially insensitive, especially in the dogshit economy that we’re in right now. But the one thing that nobody ever wants to look like is poor.
Does it make you look cooler? Well this Family Circus cartoon will help you decide
Well, he did always stick his hand down the front of his pants when he sat on the couch. Oh wait, wrong Al Bundy.
At any rate, that doesn’t look very cool and makes your hand smell too.
At least he isn’t fat.
Oh, wait: being fat probably indicates “mental problems” because a fat person can’t control what he or she does, so never mind…
I don’t smoke cigarettes but I agree that it looks cool. And not just in movies. Just last night I was around someone who was smoking and I thought it looked cool. Even just flicking away the remains of the cigarette looked badass, with the little embers sort of exploding when they hit the ground.
Fire. Fire is cool.
I’m 53, and I do remember the Marlboro Man. I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, and we did (and still do, somewhat) have quite a cowboy culture around here. Smoking was seen as a huge adult vice/habit, second only to drinking. In junior high and high school we would smoke in the girls’ room and wherever we could sneak a cigarette. Since most adults smoked, a lot of the kids just stole cigarettes from their parents.
Smoking’s not cool. Now shooting up smack, that’s badass!
Funny thing is: He looks an awful lot like my loser, permanently unemployed, smokes too, Brother in law.
It’s all about context. He’s cool because you don’t know anything about him and are free to fill in the details with your imagination.
Wow, look at the list of smoking related videos on the right of that page. Am I being paranoid in thinking that cigarette companies are likely behind at least a substantial portion of them?
The movies also make getting shot and waving it off as “a flesh wound” look cool. The reality is that when someone gets shot, they either have an ugly tear in tissue and muscle that keeps spurting blood and seems like it will never stop, or it punctures something vital and they go into shock and pass out.
In real life, people smoking look pretty stupid, particularly when they’re standing out in the cold, huddled around a doorway trying to suck in toxic smoke as as fast as possible so they can get back inside.
Stranger
Smoking never looked cool to me.
I wonder, though: how is it that one person can grow up in a household of smokers and be totally repulsed by smoking, while another can grow up in a household of smokers and waste no time in taking the habit up?
Well they look cool because big tobacco spent a lot of time and effort to make it look cool. They also tried to identify it with women’s rights to tap into a new market. It worked for decades.
But now (I’m a former smoker, btw), when I see a bunch of people crowded around a dumpster on the loading dock smoking, or in one of those pathetic glass box smoking lounges in airports, it just looks sad.
