Cigarettes.

A response to poison.

Upon moving to New York City at age eighteen, I felt an expectation that I should be cool. Or at the very least, do my best to be cool. Part of being cool, I felt, was to not flinch during the long nights working at the club where I’d be engulfed in cigarette smoke at my post by the front door. I cooly leaned back in my chair, held my breath, and tried to disguise my coughing should it ever bubble up. One day became two weeks became three months became four years and somewhere along the way, cigarette smoke stopped bothering me. 

Getting used to male exposure followed a similar pattern. Behavior and being treated with a low type of regard that had my jaw dropping to the floor on my first day in New York evolved to only be as bothersome as a chilly gust of wind rolling down 9th Avenue. It became less of a matter in my mind of questioning why things were the way they were and more about how I was going to handle it so I could prove myself to… whoever… and excel to reach my goals. There was a mountain in front of me and I wanted to be anywhere but at the bottom of it.

This change landed me in quite a few objectively dangerous situations and had me participating in practices that didn’t align with my values or beliefs. I cooly watched prostitution get arranged. I cooly passed along hard drugs and alcohol. I cooly let myself be treated so poorly I’d be waking up in the middle of the night to vomit because the anxiety was seeping into my bones even subconsciously thinking about the next day. It was only an abrupt separation from that when I could look back and process how crazy that environment was even though back home I was praised for being so different now, so confident and well adjusted, when really I was having a bit of a crisis of conviction despite cooly retelling the tale of my quests to friends and a slightly sanitized version to family. 

Once upon a time, it was considered a fool’s errand to break the smoking habit held by collective society. From context clues, I can presume that tobacco has a calming effect on the nerves. It projects an image of maturity, sexiness, and most importantly coolness. Every American icon for generations was cooly lighting up. To this day, the graduation ceremony at the school for boys next to my school for girls has the customary smoking of a cigar to celebrate the completion of schooling, transforming the boy into the man. 

But the chickens eventually came home to… somewhat roost. Despite all the obvious studies surrounding the impact of cigarettes on one’s health, the general public couldn’t be bothered. I’m sure lobbying groups got involved which ultimately resulted in laws being placed on cigarette advertisers: They could no longer claim that this product wasn’t killing you. Of course that didn’t mean that everyone suddenly stopped smoking cigarettes, but in the United States it is now fairly unheard of to walk into any public indoor space filled with cigarette smoke. There are signs denoting how far away from the front door you must stand if you want to take a puff outside of many businesses. However for me, eighteen years old, sitting at the door of a nightclub, there were no distance rules. You simply had to go outside. And there I was caught up in the fray with my calculus homework under a flashlight, getting used to the poison and the pounding bass. 

Women have a nicotine problem. And that nicotine is rolled up into the form of a man. Many times over when separatism is brought up, I have already said that the immediate reaction is to state the impossibility. One look at the world will tell you that women will never choose in any significant numbers to detangle themselves from men, particularly because this notion of heterosexuality that says for a woman to have “intimate” proximity to a man gives her power, gives her pleasure, helps her realize her true self, and is integral to her health and happiness as a human being. However, I must emphasize that I’m not just talking about sex here even if that scores the highest on the risk scale and is thus met with the greatest sense of urgency when things go sideways. Even if you are instead drawn to women or no one at all, like secondhand smoke these ideas can follow you and manifest with their own set of justifications that keep you seated right where you won’t be posing a problem for anyone else. 

But in reality, men are bad for women no matter how much or how little or through which method they enter your lungs. Like leeches, they drain you slowly throughout a lifetime with every inhale or quickly snuff you out in the case of the criminally violent ones. “Men are dangerous” is preached to us from the moment we’re born, but it only becomes a problem to say ourselves once we hit eighteen and our purpose in the context of male society must - in its view - be realized. It is in a woman’s best interest to decline involvement with males, particularly when it is “intimate” in nature.

Nonetheless, even if a woman decides to go ahead and involve herself anyway or (more universally) is forced into varying levels of proximity with males going about daily life as is the case for 99.99% of us, I do think it should be a goal to spread the word, to lobby both within and without feminist enclaves, to make this common knowledge unoffensive to be spoken out loud with meaning rather than whispers passed between women each generation as the fragile infrastructure feminist action has built to save women from their brand of choice struggles to fortify itself against each onslaught of male derision and depravity. 

Truthfully, I don’t think we’re far off from that. I believe that almost anyone who wasn’t born yesterday knows or has a feeling. But it is outweighed by the billboards on the side of the road, by every commercial on TV, by every advertisement in a magazine that this poison is what was meant to be. It is happiness and so long as you cling to it, everything is going to be okay. 

Unknowingly, they have you right where they want you.