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Smoking fetishism

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One of the darker fetishes, occasionally falling into paraphilia, smoking fetishism is a fascination with women smoking tobacco, usually cigarettes, though occasionally cigars or even pipes.

The smoking fetish appears to be rare enough that its existence went un-noticed until after the advent of the Internet, at which point fetishists began to meet online, trading pictures of smoking women, short stories, and reporting sightings or simply discussing their fascination on open forums. In addition to free sites, often containing scans from magazines or candid pictures, there are a number of 'professional' sites offering DVDs and VHS tapes of hired models who smoke in front of the camera.

There is also a sub fetish relating to women beeing harmed by smoking, sometimes called "the dark side" or "lung damage". Some, but not all fetishists seem to have a fascination with the addictive properties of nicotine, and its ability to cause harm. This may point to an element of misogyny in the community's psychology. Additionally, much of the literature generated by the community is somewhat pedophiliac in nature, in that it often concerns the events surrounding a teenage girl becoming a smoker. Whether or not this is true pedophilia is debatable, as the vast majority of smokers do, in fact, start during adolescence, and virtually all of the literature involves a woman making the switch from disgusted non-smoker to hopelessly addicted smoker.

The increasing intensity of anti-smoking campaigns, moreover, turns smoking into a transgressive and taboo act; eroticized images of women smoking may take some of their power from depicting a taboo being broken. Another cultural source for the fetish may be eroticized depictions of women who smoke that come from older motion pictures, especially from the film noir era.

The smoking fetish has emerged in recent years as one of the more socially un-acceptable fetishes, likely due to the rising social unacceptability of smoking itself in western cultures. For this reason, fetishists are often reluctant to admit to their fetish, and so its prevalence in society cannot be accurately estimated, save to say that it is quite rare. It seems to occur in nearly all cultures, however, with fetish websites from Asian and South American countries as well as from Western nations.