Having been a non-smoker for almost eighteen months, I’ve finally admitted to myself that, for at least half of that time, I’ve been a non-smoker-except-for-the-occasional-drag-when-out-with-other-smokers-and-of-course-an-occasional-cigarette-smoked-when-drunk-which-of-course-doesn’t-count-and-then-there-was-that-time-I-was-really-upset-and-I-just-needed-the-one-little-smoke-which-of-course-also-didn’t-count-and… So anyway, smoking is far more difficult to extricate oneself from than merely the breaking of a nicotine addiction. For me, as with many people, it’s more psychological than physical. The cigarette is a fetishised object, not necessarily sexual, but part of a compulsion I can’t quite seem to disentangle myself from.

So, on the subject of the smoking fetish, here’s part of an excellent reply from an agony column at msnbc.com:

“…In my old high school, if you wanted some idea of who the wicked girls were, you’d find out which ones snuck cigarettes in the bathrooms. These weren’t the goody-two-shoes, obey the rules, no-making-out-on-the-first-date girls, no sireee! I remember — well, never mind what I remember.  The point is that smoking and naughtiness have been linked since at least 1917 when silent film star Theda “The Vamp” Bara, billed as the wickedest woman in the world, lounged on a settee wearing a transparent gown and languidly raising a cigarette to her lips. This was five years before a woman in New York City was arrested for smoking in public. It was 11 years before Edward Bernays pulled off the most successful public relations stunt in history on behalf of the American Tobacco Company by arranging for women to stroll down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in the 1929 Easter Parade while smoking. The resulting rotogravure pictures in newspapers sent cigarette sales soaring… Why can smoking be a turn on? A 2005 paper by University of Southern California sociologist Julie Albright quotes Freud’s old saw about cigars and cigarettes being phallus substitutes: “‘To put it plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego….’ The fetish as symbol of the mother’s penis comes also to represent her desire, thereby affirming that her desire lies with him and not with the father.” Maybe, but Freud was so wrong about so much…”

Read the entire piece here.