#120s

What We Share…

Once upon a time I was rather well known in the online Smoking Erotica Community under the nom de plume Vesperae Lux. I used to write a regular Dark Side column for Smoke Signals Online, and also hosted and moderated several online discussion forums devoted to the psychology and ethics of living with a persistent attraction to smoking.

The most well known and longest running in the 00s was The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking, for which I created a new editorial image design for the forum header every lunar week. The source material ranged from cigarette print and video advertising to smoking glamour imagery to public health content, all of which I juxtaposed in a variety of ways designed to evoke the inherent taboos and conflicts of smoking.

I was born in 1964 shortly after the first U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health was released, so I grew up surrounded by many attractive women smoking while also being repeatedly reminded by an endless stream of anti-smoking public service announcements and health class lectures that they were all in great danger. The result was a persistent focus on smoking that became deeply erotic for me.

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This was the manifesto of The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking:

No one is born with a craving to inhale cigarette smoke, and what is more, until shortly before the decision is made to try smoking, virtually everyone is repulsed by cigarette smoke. Every new smoker who aspires to become a "real" smoker has to overcome her innate self-preservation instincts. She has to force her respiratory tract to accept being repeatedly saturated with a toxic, irritating cloud of poisons. She has to keep forcing cigarette smoke deeper and deeper into her lungs until she eventually strangles her cough reflex. She has to coerce her body into functioning as normally as possible with nicotine and carbon monoxide constantly flooding her bloodstream.

Cigarette smoking is a behavior replete with social symbolism, because we all – smokers and nonsmokers alike – recognize on some fundamental level that in order to become a smoker, you have to be willing to intentionally transform your body into doing something that nature didn't intend for it to do. To smoke publicly is to state to the world that you have completed a particular rite of passage and physical transformation that only certain others have, and to declare that you have made a decision to indulge your psychological needs to the detriment of your physical needs.

Cigarette advertising has certainly created a rich and fascinating Mythology of Smoking over the years, and social modeling and the desire to belong to a particular group also obviously play substantial roles in the attractiveness of smoking for many. But underlying all other motivations is the persistent awareness that to smoke is to do something that is willfully dangerous and risky. For some smokers, this awareness may be buried by layers of denial and rationalization and become purely subconscious. But for many smokers, this persistent awareness not only remains important to their attraction to smoking, it is essential to the complex and psychologically dark romance that makes cigarette smoking absolutely unique among all of the sensual pleasures that a human being can experience.

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After dropping out of the online Smoking Erotica Scene for a number of years for a multitude of reasons, I decided to drift back in a few months ago under a new nom de plume. And after surfing the smoking content on Tumblr at present I had the sense that sharing some of my favorite older work might be fun for some people.