The Perplexed Fetishist

Shared controlled relapse

2011-04-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

The title of this entry is intentionally chosen to indicate the tenuousness of such a dynamic.

The non-smoking (and thus, non-fetish) phase of our relationship lasted a little while. She kept her resolve and didn't smoke (save for the couple of slip-ups) for almost 3 months. And I kept my composure and, of course, didn't encourage her to do it. I did my best to discourage, in fact. But then there came a particular week where she was thinking about smoking every day. There was a mutual (though unknown to her) crescendo of obsessing occurring. Each day, without fail, I would receive a text message from her at some point during the day with the words:

"I want to smoke."

I knew that text would be coming. And because I knew it would be coming, I was always aroused in anticipation. I can almost smell the obsession in the air. Maybe you don't understand. But probably, you do. As a result of this anticipation, I was masturbating a lot that week. It's interesting, the parallel of the obsession. The more she thought about it, the more I thought about it. And while trying to remain neutral, and not say anything to her about it, to not query her about it in absence of her mention, it had created something of a frenzy in my mind. Because I knew. Eventually, she's going to smoke. And though I've seen it before, and it's honestly not a big deal, right? But because of the anticipation. All about the anticipation. I got more and more excited.

There was one day, at the end of that week. Maybe it was a Thursday. She texts me and says that she is going to smoke today. I realize that she's reached the point where the fantasizing and obsession are at the cusp of action. And here's the first time that I feel like I "intervened" in a self-serving way. I said "Can you wait until you get home?" Meaning: "I want to watch." She agreed she would wait. So now, I'm trying to find a way to get home from work as early as possible. And it seems a bit irrational that I'm shuffling my day around to try to be there for this, but it is immensely arousing, and I am on sexual autopilot. In fact, her desire to smoke was great enough that I think she was as eager for me to get home as I was.

I know I should probably go through the entire account of what it was like to watch her, but since I'm trying not to be a porn site, I'll ruin your turn-on and change topics here. Sorry.

So she smoked. Yes. And we made an agreement that she would only smoke rarely. And that agreement has been upheld, by and large. She may go a week without smoking. And then she might smoke once or twice a day for several days in a row. We have made other pseudo-agreements about the subject as well. The most recent was that she will only smoke with me. This serves an interesting multiple purpose. First, if that is something she can stick with, it means that she is less likely to let it spiral into a full relapse. Second, it means that it's something that's not just for her, but between us. It's a pretty generous recognition of the fetish, and the power it has for me.

On one occasion, shortly after the controlled relapse, there was a day where we met up in the afternoon, and I could tell that she'd been smoking without me. It was interesting, because I knew that the only cigarettes she'd had were at my house, so I assumed that she must have smoked with a friend. I called her on it, and she said she hadn't been smoking. But she doesn't realize that I have spent the last 30 years becoming more and more attuned to subtle hints of such things, and I knew she'd smoked. So I felt pretty upset that she was lying to me. Interestingly, the issue was not that she smoked. I wasn't upset that she smoked. I was upset that she deprived me of the opportunity to even hear her story about it, by denying it. After about 15-20 minutes of an awkward exchange, she finally admitted it. And she told me the story about how it had happened. Of course, I was turned on by this. In this way, she's in kind of a no-lose situation. Deep down inside, she knows that my arousal over the topic is going to trump my concerns or disappointment, or even my judgment, if there were any.

In some ways, I worry that all this creates an odd co-dependence between us. For instance, it means that if she's not feeling like being sociable, but she really wants to smoke, she might still be inclined to want to get together with me. I think that's a bit of a paranoid concern on my part, because usually we want to be together all the time. And if she really wanted to smoke by herself, she'll do it. And then she'll tell me about it, probably. And then I'll be aroused more than I'll be concerned about the "broken rule."

But it's a bit odd. It's an odd dynamic.

Of course, a smoking fetish is an odd thing, so it would stand to reason that there will be odd dynamics around it.

I still stand by the assertion that I would not want a full relapse. I don't have a good grasp of what the health risks are for someone who smokes 3-5 cigarettes a week. Especially, taken in the aftermath of having smoked regularly for 20 years of her life. I don't know, and I don't think anyone can state, on an individual basis, what the likelihood is for negative effects.

If the relapse progresses at any point, we'll have to readdress it again. For now, we're in a strange little dance of shared enjoyment of this occasional smoking thing.

Why do we like what we like? (Part 1)

2011-01-15T22:19:00.000-08:00

I was looking back at some old entries, and found one that alluded to the possibility of me someday trying to explain why it is that I find Marlboro Red ("King", not "100") to be so sexy. I also indicated that it would be quite a hand-wave for me to attempt to justify that preference.

So why Marlboro Red? Why not Merit? Or Winston? Or American Spirit? Or Camel? They all look the same, from a visual fetishist's perspective, right? But if I see the categorical "her" smoking, and I find out it's Marlboro Red, it does considerably more for me than if it were something else. Clearly I'm not the only one, because there are entire websites devoted primarily to Marlboro Red imagery (e.g. RandomSnaps). Why? Why? Why?

It would be easy to look for some sort of Freudian or Oedipal explanation. But there is not one readily available. My sister, a life-long smoker, smoked Winston when I was little (she was much older than me). My mother, who smoked when I was a child, smoked Tareyton. So it's not that obvious of a connection.

It's definitely true that, when we were growing up, Marlboro was the "popular" cigarette. It's what the kids smoked. So maybe it was just the implantation of the norm-of-the-time that lingered on forever. But I feel like there's more to it than that. There's something I associate with Marlboro Red, in particular. They're reputed to be a "strong" brand, though they are not any stronger than many other regular cigarettes, and actually nowhere near as strong as many European brands. But there's something about the image. It's almost as if it's the ruggedness of the Marlboro Man that penetrated our psyches through advertising, juxtaposed with the femininity of woman: the "yin" and "yang", if you will. There's definitely an attachment in the mind of "bad girl" associated with the brand. But why more than any other brand? Wouldn't smoking at all constitute "bad girl"?

Marlboro Red was never marketed to women, from what I recall of advertising. I'm searching for ways, reasons perhaps, that advertising might have played a role in our fetish selections. But it's not apparent.

Interestingly, there was one point in time where my preference seemed to drift to a different place. When I was between 18-20 years old, I had a temporary preference for "all white 100" and even tried to persuade a girlfriend who was smoking Newport to switch to these. Again, this is all odd to me, because I don't know why I wanted that either. I have no idea. I just wanted it. And then, at some point, in my mid-to-late 20's, I flipped back to the Marlboro Red thing again, and never changed preference from that point onward.

The current girlfriend, whom I mentioned earlier (and is a recent ex-smoker), was smoking Marlboro Medium 100. That was close (but no cigar, pun intended) to my preference (though I never talked to her about that). But even that subtle difference made me think "If only it had been Marlboro Red".

Actually, the entire notion of "brand preference" is so strange with cigarettes, if you ask me, anyway. How do people identify themselves? Smokers will claim that it's about flavor. But certainly they haven't sampled every choice available, like you'd do with cheese or salad dressing, before deciding you prefer "cheddar" or "Ranch", for example. There's something about image, and associations, and other scarcely tangible factors. At some point, I'd love to ask my current girlfriend how she made the choices she made (she has mentioned that at various times it was either Camel, or American Spirit, or the Marlboro Medium). But I hesitate, somewhat, to get into the discussion, because a) it will turn me on, which I am at least pretending to try not to do, and b) it may make her want to smoke, which I am definitely trying not to encourage.

It reminds me of a song by Regina Spektor, called "That Time", where she sings:

Hey remember that time when I would only smoke Parliaments?
Hey remember that time when I would only smoke Marlboros?
Hey remember that time when I would only smoke Camels?
Hey remember that time when I was broke?
I didn't care, I'd just bum from a friend.

Strange juxtaposition of emotions

2011-01-06T19:39:00.001-08:00

I was thinking the other night about the question "What if my girlfriend were to start smoking again?" It might have been a slight variation on that, such as "I wonder if she's going to 'relapse' or slip-up?" The thought of that happening stirred in me, simultaneously, an eclectic mix of emotions. All at once, I felt: fear, curiosity, arousal, anger. There were a few others in my list, that have since eluded me. But the point here is that my mixed feelings about smoking, combined together with my struggles with (the illusion of) control, makes me a bit schizophrenic when it comes to the topic.

Fact: I do not want my girlfriend to start smoking again. I think it's phenomenal that she has successfully stopped, and it is a joy to have her smell like her. That, of course, on top of all the major health benefits, and lifestyle benefits, and self-esteem (since she doesn't want to be a smoker anymore).

Fact: If she "slipped-up" and smoked, I would wish that I could have seen it, and I'd be incredibly aroused by it. I would probably break my own rules and ask her to give me all the details about why she did it, how it felt, etc. (I am trying not to discuss the fetish, because I don't want to encourage her). I would rationalize this inquiry on the grounds that it's an allowance to myself, i.e. "slip-up" that is comparable in degree and nature to her slip-up. That may be fucked up logic, but I'm only human.

I'm actually proud of the fact that I have never asked her to smoke for my arousal (though, as I think I stated in previous entry, I did go so far as to ask her to hold one, while on a video chat, after she'd confessed to a slip-up previously). This probably sounds ridiculous to some of you, I realize. But it's a big deal to me to not persuade someone to relapse on their addiction. Call me crazy!

Let's look at a different example. If my girlfriend were an alcoholic, and I found it incredibly arousing to have sex after a few glasses of wine, would it be acceptable to ask her to just have a few glasses of wine with me? Now, you can tell me that alcoholism is different because it destroys people's lives. But so does smoking. It may be true that one night of reckless drinking can have a far greater impact, i.e. if you get into a car accident. But over years of chronic use, I think anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that smoking is less harmful than alcohol.

I know you didn't come here to read that kind of stuff. But I told you right at the top of this page that I'm a perplexed fetishist, not a carefree one.

If you haven't checked out LaylaMonroe, by the way, she's my favorite YouTube specimen at the moment (I figured I'd throw that in just so you don't think I'm completely righteous).

Possible cure?

2010-12-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, right off the bat, must acknowledge that the title of this blog is tongue in cheek. I don't believe or expect to be "cured" of something that turns me on. But I have come upon a circumstance that makes me think more about the fetish, and the choice I have about what role it will or will not play in my life.

I started dating someone who recently quit smoking, after over 20 years of addiction. She's had a hard time quitting, spending the past year doing the best she can, with a few relapses. It seems that the issue is really not a physiological one, so much as being about "willingness" to stay away from it. When I met her, I had no idea that she'd been a smoker, and (having met online) I assumed that she was not, since her profile had indicated "not at all." And I was honestly glad that she was not, because I have found it much easier to have an unplagued relationship with people who are firmly non-smokers (in recent years, anyway). On one of our first dates, we'd been fooling around a bit, and afterwards she sort of absently proclaimed "I really want to smoke a cigarette." This, of course, hit me like a sledgehammer, in a variety of ways. The first thought was curiosity. The fetish mind immediately wanted to know everything about it. Because Pandora's Box was being cracked open. If she'd never mentioned it, I may have never myself (or at least not for a long time). But it was out there. We had a little back and forth discussion about it. I queried obliquely with something like "Oh yeah?" which was the best I could do to mitigate the latent question of "Tell me more, please!" because I really didn't want to launch down the fetish avenue. I didn't even ask her if she'd been a smoker. I did the best I could to be neutral. She pointed out that she knew it was disgusting, to which I responded (honestly) that it was actually kind of a turn on to me. I underplayed it. But I decided that, given how hard it is for me to open up about this, I may as well take this chance to get it out there, and be done with it. The longer I wait, the harder it is to reveal. And I guess I would rather be known, and understood, than not.

The next morning, she was giving me a ride to the airport, and on the car ride, she again announced that she really wanted to stop and buy cigarettes. This, of course, turned me on, but I kept my mouth shut because I don't want to encourage it. And more importantly, I was really attracted to her for exactly who I saw her to be. It had nothing to do with smoking. And I didn't want it to morph into being "iconic" - I didn't want the fetish to become the thing that I was attracted to.

Long story short, when I was out of town, she relapsed and started smoking again. And it became clear that she was a long-time smoker, and that this was a struggle for her. When I returned, we had to navigate the fact that she was now smoking. We talked about what she wanted, and it was clear she did not really want to be a smoker again. I made it clear to her that I accepted her as she was, smoker or not. The first week or so of this, I did allow myself to watch her, and to get aroused by it. But something happened during that week, as it became (I think) evident that we were going to be more serious as a couple. I decided (and it turns out, she decided too) that we were not going to have smoking be "a thing" for us. And I stopped watching her (for the most part). And she consciously tried not to explore my interest, or probe what the fetish was all about. We did the best we could to have smoking just be a thing she does, because right now she's having a hard time with it, but not a part of our relationship.

Over the course of a few weeks, her struggle with the relapse actually (perhaps not surprisingly) resulted in her smoking even more than was acknowledging to herself. I think there was some sort of internal battle with willingness to let go of it again. I felt strongly that I didn't want be pressuring her to stop, because I didn't want it to turn into a control thing. But deep down, it was obvious that a) she didn't want to be a smoker, and b) she hadn't fully accepted that she'd returned to smoking habitually again. Finally, after a few weeks of this, I decided to have a conversation about it. Skipping the details, the end result was that she decided to quit again.

I felt really good about the fact that I had taken the position of what was best for her health and self-confidence. It is a struggle for me to do that, because I'm basically saying "I'm willing to turn down the thing that turns me on more than anything else in the world, with the person whom I am most interested in being turned on by, because I love you, and I don't want to selfishly encourage you to do something that is bad for you." To a non-fetishist, this would be so obvious, but to those of you who are reading this, you probably have one of two reactions. Either 1) you think I'm an idiot - and why would I pass up the perfect situation with a great girlfriend who is a natural smoker! or 2) Wow... that's got to be hard, but it is a pretty impressive sacrifice.

Her resolve lasted nearly a month. Then, I went out of town again, and she had a brief relapse. This time, it didn't result in her hopping back on the habit. It was just an isolated few days, and she pulled it together again. I was a bit disappointed with myself though, because when she relapsed, I took that as license to get turned on by it. We were having a video chat (the first one ever), and she confessed to me that she'd smoked (which I sort of knew she was going to tell me). I sort of asked her to tell me about it, which she did. Then, I asked her if she still had any cigarettes, which she did. So I told her to get one, because I wanted to see her holding it. Of course, holding it made her want to smoke. So she went outside (no video, unfortunately) and smoked a cigarette while we were talking on the phone. And it turned me on immensely. But I felt like I'd let myself and her down a little bit. Because I did encourage her. In that moment, she may or may not have done it. But I said "Do it for me." We then talked about how it's a challenge for me, and we talked about how she doesn't really want to be a smoker anymore. And I confessed to her that I was giving myself license to show my arousal and interest, probably because of her relapsing.

The point here is that I'm trying to navigate a balance between my values and beliefs, and this primal thing that is inside of me, that I don't think will ever go away.

She knows that I will look at videos online, and she's okay with that. It's quite a powerful thing to have your partner tell you "I know there are things that turn you on that you'll think about on your own, and don't have to include me." I don't want her to be a smoker - not because I wouldn't love to watch her, and have insane passion resulting from it. And it's not that I want to deprive myself of that arousal. It's that I fucking love this woman. With all my heart. And I want her to be the healthiest, happiest version of herself that she can possibly be. And I know she feels better when she doesn't smell like smoke. And when she can breathe, and exercise without being winded. And when she doesn't have an addiction that she needs to hide from half the people in her life (and struggle with her own identity around it). So, for me, this love is recognizing that there is someone who means a billion times more to me than instant gratification.

It's a strange double standard I have about it. If I didn't really respect my partner, I might (as you've heard previously in this blog) indulge the fetish. If I knew that my partner was not in any way compelled toward addiction to smoking, but was only occasional with it, I might allow myself to indulge in the fetish. But when I think about a person with whom my whim could result in them getting trapped in a habit that's incredibly hard for them to break, it becomes a no-brainer.

I had some discussions a while back in a newsgroup where people were debating whether it is right or wrong to encourage and/or allow one's partner to be a smoker, and to engage in the fetish. There were a lot of attitudes on there that were of the variety "If she wants to smoke, then there's no reason why I shouldn't enjoy it" or "You're just denying yourself the greatest excitement imaginable because of guilt - and that's your problem - we don't want to hear about it." But I think that whether we have a smoking fetish or not, we are human beings. And there's some degree of ethical responsibility around our actions.

But that's just my opinion.

Online again... reflecting on years past

2010-12-19T09:25:00.000-08:00

I've been gone for a long time now. The partner I refer to in recent(ish) posts below is gone. It didn't work. Turns out, we weren't compatible. And, once again, the fetish ended up keeping things together longer than they would have otherwise remained, because we had something to bond through (albeit in a fucked up, manipulative, damaging way). But, what started out looking like love, ended up looking like something else. For some reason, she seemed very interested and willing to talk about and explore the fetish. I thought this made her a good partner. But I realize now, in hindsight, that she was just doing the best she could to connect with me, and some part of her consciousness probably came to the realization that there were few common denominators remaining. So she took an uncalculated risk, and it didn't play out.

In addition to being a reader of the blog, she also became an author. We didn't go very far with that; certainly not as far as originally expected. So, all you see is a fragment below. It would be interesting to see what she'd say now, a year later, if she decided to complete the previously planned series. It might actually be more insightful to see what one's perspective would be, in the absence of a bond of love or trust or whatnot. Would I like what I hear? Would you like what you hear? Would it be a kind of mirror that would feel pretty horrible? Who knows.

I know what sort of fears my inner critic has. In fact, when the relationship ended (and when other relationships have ended, where this fetish has been a component), one of my first fears is "What are they going to say to their friends about it?" I always kid myself that my partners would not talk to their friends about the fetish. But seriously. Is that a realistic thought? Women will discuss all aspects of their sex lives with one another. And you can be sure that something as unusual as a smoking fetish would make the conversation list. I don't even know if I can go there. Just the thought of being in the same room as people who have heard about the fetish from someone else. It makes me cringe, and feel naked and exposed. "Freak" is what I think to myself. Even though it's certainly no weirder than people who want a thumb up their ass, or who require some sort of dress-up, or whatever. But all those things feel solidly in the realm of the sexual. The smoking fetish feels like it's quirkier because it is not ubiquitously categorized as sexual. I really don't know, though. Maybe that makes me more interesting? I'd just like to think that what I share in fantasy world remains in fantasy world. But I know I'm kidding myself. I can be certain that when my previous partner and I ended rather abruptly (my doing) and painfully, she probably confided in anger with a circle slightly larger than the one or two people who may have been privy to the information during the good times.

Why do I care? I just do. Self-acceptance is a long road, I guess.

Still Perplexed

2010-01-12T11:28:00.000-08:00

I disappeared from this blog for about 4 months, as you probably noticed.

During that time, I had not noticed that a very generous major website added me to their list of new links. And the result was that when I randomly peeked at my "hit counter" on ActiveMeter (a great website), I was surprised to see that there was... how should I say... some activity on this blog.

I didn't abandon this blog because I ran out of things to say. And I also recognize that I never finished the story that I was trying to relate. But what happened, as has happened before in my life, is that I had another of my "pushing it back into the darkness" periods. A phase where whatever progress I have made in terms of self-acceptance, once again, is buried. And the topic goes back into the shame bucket.

I haven't told you about my current relationship, and I think the chronology of it will likely make its way onto this blog in the coming days, weeks, months; including the "special" feature that came to mind back in August when I last wrote here. What I will say right now is that the perplexed and conflicted part of me, I believe, still lies in the complete uncertainty as to whether I want to share this with a partner, or have it completely for my private self. On the one hand, there's a great allure to having a "fetish encounter". There's the sheer visual and sensational aspect of it. And there's also the knowledge that someone is doing something for me. But on the other hand, I feel like letting someone in on it is almost like allowing my own privacy to be violated. My fantasies are my fantasies. And when I ask someone to participate, they are no longer fantasies. Even if someone is trying to act out my fantasy, it's still not a fantasy anymore. It's a reality. And it starts to lose something. And as soon as that "suspension of disbelief" is itself suspended, all of the negative emotions start flooding in. The shame. The embarrassment. The feeling that I am encouraging something bad.

And, perhaps most of all, the feeling that I am giving up control.

The only thing that I really can control with respect to the fetish is my own decision to share or not share it. If I choose to never speak of it, and merely view the same overplayed videos on YouTube, then I have control. It's private. Mine. No one can judge me. But if I share it, then I no longer have any control over it. And I have found that, when this occurs, I start to try really hard to control it. And that makes me manipulative. And if my partner (and this has been true with every partner) does not carry out my fantasy in the exact manner that is most appealing to me, then I either want to try to "instruct" them, to which some people are more or less receptive, or I just privately wish that they'd done it differently.

With my internets, I have complete control over the programming. If someone doesn't smoke the brand that turns me on? I can just click another link. If someone doesn't exhale the way that I like? Click another link. If someone wears too much makeup? Another link. If someone acts really stupid and slutty in a way that I don't like? Link. There's really no limit. And you can always find another link. And really, you only need to find one that's good enough to have your splendid orgasm and get on with the day.

If you let a partner - a lover - a real person into this fetish, then you cannot click another link.

And after your orgasm, you can't turn your back on the thing you just did that's kind of okay and kind of not okay. It's still there. Because when the fantasy stops, your real person, whom you eat dinner with, watch movies with, take walks with, go to the gym with, ride to work with, sleep with... all those "normal" things. They're still there. And they know you. They know what you want. And I have to be there with that and be okay with it.

And though sometimes I feel I can let someone all the way in on this, eventually I retract and decide to keep it to myself. Not just because I don't feel comfortable with them knowing who I am, but also because I am uncomfortable with who I become. The controlling. The manipulation. Not necessarily control and manipulation that is acted upon, but the desire to do it.

And that's why I have been gone for 4+ months.

But now I'm back.

She Says

2009-10-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure where to begin. The idea was proposed to me some time ago (a little over five months to be exact) and I was intrigued. I had been reading this blog since the beginning. Some of what was written, I already knew. Some of it was new to me. And, like many of you, I followed the plot, characters and dialogue with interest. Most of us cannot resist a peephole into the deeper, darker personal lives of others, even those that we are already close to.

Throughout the process of writing this story, my partner has expressed doubts as to whether he is doing something that is good for him, for me and for our relationship. I viewed it as a positive thing, even when certain elements of his story caused me momentary pain or discomfort.

The proposal was this: to help finish the story by contributing my perspective on the role my partner’s smoking fetish has played in our relationship. One of us would write an entry telling a portion of the story then the other would add their perspective on what had been previously written and add a little bit more. We would continue this way, back and forth, until the “final chapter” of the smoking fetish story was complete.

That was the plan last summer. It didn’t end up working out that way.

There are a number of reasons why the ending never got off the ground. The biggest and most obvious one was that, even as the entry previous to this one was being written, cracks were forming in the relationship. The cracks were not directly related to my partner’s smoking fetish but issues surrounding the fetish certainly added to the distrust, anger and resentment that were causing a massive communication breakdown between us.

A second reason was that, at the time, I was living out of the country and was finishing the last month of a summer job. My intention was to start writing entries while abroad but stresses from the distance and the relationship itself kept interfering with my desire or inclination to do so. Every time I thought about sitting down to write an entry I just sat there feeling tired and depressed. I’m not the type of person who is a prolific writer when dealing with strong emotions. It’s like the old “Stop, Drop and Roll!” slogan for fire-drills – when under intense emotional pressure I have difficulty being productive at anything. I just sit there and wait until the situation has passed so that I can move forward again and process what has happened.

But I digress. None of you came here to read about my emotional issues – you came to read about stories, thoughts and feelings related to the smoking fetish. Some of you may be curious to see what I have to say as the partner of someone with the smoking fetish. I don’t know how much documentation there is out there on that perspective (I’m guessing not much). That’s the story I’m here to tell, so I will tell it.

Starting at the beginning:

My partner and I first met several years ago and then reconnected about a year and a half ago through a mutual friend. At the time I lived in a different state and was back home for a visit. Our mutual friend decided to play matchmaker and suggested that we all meet up for drinks. I had no clue that my partner had a smoking fetish. In truth, I barely knew him at all. My friend suggested that she and I have a cigarette (given that we both smoked socially on occasion) and I asked my now-partner whether it would bother him. He replied that it would not. It’s a bit comical to remember that my primary concern at the time was that my partner not be “inconvenienced” by our smoking or think we were unhealthy or disgusting.

We struck up an online friendship which, after some back and forth, turned into serious flirtation and then a full-on long distance relationship. I learned about his smoking fetish when he first came to visit me in my then-home state. I can’t remember why the subject of smoking came up or how. We might have even discussed the possibility of smoking together “for fun.” But at some point in time he admitted that while he was willing to smoke with me he wasn’t really interested in smoking with me. He wanted to watch me smoke.

Then he told me why. I thought – interesting.

I was intrigued. I didn’t really know anything about the smoking fetish (or any fetishes for that matter). My experience up to that point was limited to cheesy comedy routines where the shoe salesman has a foot fetish and starts drooling on the customer’s high heels. So I did some research on the internet. I didn’t find much other than some fetish websites (pictures of girls smoking in various states of dress, make up, etc.), an entry in Wikipedia and a few other websites/notes about the smoking fetish. But because it was a new romance and – I’m actually blushing writing this – I thought that smoking could add a certain amount of creativity and excitement to our sex life. I do not think of smoking as a healthy habit but in an artistic sense it has always had an appeal for me as something sexy, rebellious, exciting. Even a little bit dangerous.

Some years ago I read an article on Gwyneth Paltrow that had included photos of her with 30s or 40s style hair, dressed in negligee and smoking a cigarette. I’m not bi-sexual but I loved the elegance and the artistry of the photos so I cut one out and kept it on my bulletin board. I’m not sure that I would have found the pictures as appealing if I did not have a certain level of attraction to smoking.

So I thought that perhaps smoking and my partner’s smoking fetish could provide an additional intensity to our relationship as long as a) it was regulated (I didn’t want to become addicted) and b) we continued to communicate clearly about his feelings on the subject. This may sound naïve and thoughtless – maybe it was. I didn’t take his fetish for granted, certainly, but because I’d never been in a relationship with anyone who had a fetish (at least to my knowledge) I did not fully understand the strength of the feelings that surrounded it; how deep-rooted a sense of shame and discomfort my partner has around the topic.

For awhile it wasn’t an issue for me. Smoking was part of our romantic life but we lived so far apart that most of our “together” time (via phone, email, chat) involved getting to know each other and making plans for the future that we wanted to create together. We decided that living so far apart was not a scenario that worked long-term for us and made the decision to move in together. I packed up my various possessions and moved back to our home town. That’s when things became more complicated.

I think that I will stop here and see what he has to say.

Rumors of my disappearance... slightly exaggerated

2009-08-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

I'm still here. And my story is still incomplete.

My last post sort of left a bad feeling in my gut, because I went in a direction I didn't really want to go with the blog. Into the area of laundry-listing things. I saw a value in it at the time. There was a story I was trying to tell. But I think it was really an easy sidetrack from continuing with what I came here to do, which was to tell you a story.

The story is really, really close to being complete, though. The only "relationship" left to discuss is my relationship at present. And I just don't know if I can or should go there. She reads this blog. I haven't sorted out yet whether or not it's good for us, or bad for us, that she reads the blog. I haven't sorted out whether it's good for us, or bad for us, that I write the blog. And I most definitely am not sure if it's good for us, or bad for us, that I write about us, and that she reads it. She's interested in it. Of course. I know she is. It may be just a mild curiosity, or it may be something else. She also knows that "next up" on the table of contents of my fetish life is her.

I could sit here and go on tangents from now until eternity, never getting to the point of telling you about the present. I could tell you exactly what things turn me on the most. I could name every actress over whom I have ever masturbated. I could tell you all my favorite smoking movies. I could write fantasy stories here, as so many others do. And you'd keep reading, because it would be interesting. Interesting to you. Because you share this fetish.

But that's not really what I came here to do.

What I really came here to do was to be okay with this. To get the whole story down, accurately, from start to finish. And to be okay with it. To be able to live with the fetish in my life, without hiding, and without guilt. At least in the context of my relationship. I don't expect I should be able to tell all my friends and co-workers, "I've got a smoking fetish, and I'm OK!!" Because that's just absurd. Private things are private. But I should be able to talk about it with my partner. And if it is mutually acceptable and there is good communication, it should be something that can be explored. And perhaps I should even be able to talk about it with my closest friends. The point is, I can't keep running away from who I am, or hoping it will go away.

So I need to finish this.

And I just thought of an idea...

Aside: Smoking Fetish Sites

2009-07-21T19:01:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to take a brief aside here, partly because I am getting close to the end of this history, and partly because I am procrastinating a little bit about getting to the present, which is something incredibly dear to me, and about which I still need to decide how much I want to share.

Over time, there have been a long string of sites that I have visited for indulgence in my smoking fetish. There's always the random searching for what new thing may be out there. And there are always a vast majority of sites that either suck, aren't my particular interest or, in some cases, horrify me. Just as there are a million different fetishes, and a million different sexual preferences and positions, there are also a million different ways in which the smoking fetish can be indulged or viewed. And some of them make me feel like a prude!

I've always been more of a fan of the non-sexual variety of smoking fetish. No nudity. No sex. No over-made-up or scantily dressed scenes. No additional fetish elements. Just the normal, average, pretty girl. Probably something to do with the good girl being bad phenomenon. This should probably be part of a separate entry, so I'll hold that thought.

One of the first sites I discovered, as I mentioned previously, that I found useful and interesting was the Smoking from all Sides website. There were a few reasons for this, but the two main reasons were a) it had the Female Celebrity Smoking List, which answered every question I had always wondered about movies and movie stars; it's like the IMDB of smoking! And, b) it had a laundry list of links that enabled me to branch out and find other sites with potentially interesting content.

In those early days, the first site I routinely visited was Kohary's Cove, which had a small set of clips taken from movies. The webmaster for this site was the first person with a smoking fetish with whom I'd ever had a conversation (via email). So that interaction was one of the first "validating" experiences for me. He seemed cool. He seemed "normal". And he had a smoking fetish too. So maybe I'm not a freak?

Around the same time, there also came out two similarly named websites. One was something like Celebsmoking, and the other was something like Smokingcelebs. One or both is still in existence, though one of them seemed to go heavily in the ad-supported direction not too many years after its inception, which made it less wonderful to browse. The first site had more links to movie clips in a well organized (by actress or by movie) format. The other site had a long alphabetical list with links to video captures from movies and other media. I spent a lot of time looking here. Eventually Kohary stopped updating his site, and these kept going, so that was my new one-stop shopping for fetish materials. I remember being driven bananas by slow dial-up downloads for those tiny 10 second video clips! Oh, the days.

I was never a huge fan of the paid content sites, but there were a couple that provided a fair-to-large amount of free content, and I spent a lot of time on them. One of these was, of course, Coherent Light. As I'm sure all of you know, that was a killer site, and really, in my opinion, was the first site that "got it right" in terms of understanding that the lighting was everything. The sexiest smoking style in the world is only about 20% as exciting as it can be, if you don't have the right lighting. Coherent Light only had a few models, who were a bit on the slutty side. Another site that had similarly high quality videos, with slightly less emphasis on lighting, and more focus on a wide array of attractive models, on the more "everyday girl" and less "slutty" side was the Smoking Models website. In the early days, they had a lot of free preview material, but over time, it seemed like they provided less and less, until now, where it seems like you can view one clip, or something?

With the occasional branching out to search for new material, these sites covered a good portion of my early internet years of the smoking fetish. In more recent years, things migrated away from all of those sites. At some point in time, I discovered the Random Snaps site. Since that point in time, it has been pretty much the only site that I would regularly check for updates. I never purchased a video from them, though I think that is more a product of the fact that I didn't want to pay $35 to do so. But they provided a fairly massive quantity of photos and free video clips to watch online. And Random Snaps had a few things going for it (still does). First, they understand and use much of the same lighting technique that made Coherent Light so successful. Second, they chose very attractive (mostly) models who, in many cases (though not all) were more along the natural, everyday girl look. Third, they seem to focus primarily on women smoking Marlboro Red which, for reasons I cannot explain, is more of a turn-on to me than the things that many others find attractive (all-white, holders, 120s -- not digging any of that). And finally, being that it's called Random Snaps, there was a lot of emphasis on snap inhales which, again, for reasons I cannot explain, are a significant turn-on to me.

Add to the list of recent (past several years) interests Smoking Vanessa, Smoking Sweeties, TLS Smoking-Sweethearts, and you've pretty much got the list, along with brief exploration of the Smoke Signals website, as well.

Sometime in the past 5-10 years, maybe only 5-6 years, I made the discovery that You Tube (or, similarly, Daily Motion) was a viable location for discovery of smoking fetish material. For awhile, it seemed like the library of available items on there was growing and growing. And over the past 1-2 years, it actually seems like that library is shrinking. I am not sure why. There are probably readers of this blog who can answer that question for us. I could hypothesize that people discovered that they could make money, so they've taken it to another forum. Another possibility is that You Tube is trying to block certain types of content when they get wise to them. Smoking Fetish could be in a gray area, because of the quasi-sexual nature of it.

(I'm really going on a rabbit-hole tangent here)

Like I said, I am not into the sex plus smoking stuff. I flat out don't like "porn". Never have. Never will. Not sure why. And even nudity is distracting, when it comes to the fetish. The only thing that's quasi-sexual that I would re-watch are the tiny number of videos that involve a couple of women smoking and kissing each other. That, I cannot help. I'm sorry. And there are like 3 good videos of it, on the entire billion terabytes that are "The Internet". You'd think that people would be making lots of these videos. Wouldn't you? But nope. There's three. And you probably know which three I'm talking about. Two of them are really good (one was from Coherent Light), and the other one is really so-so. Okay, maybe there are 4 of them, total.

But other than smoking girl-girl kisses, I don't want to see people having sex while smoking. I don't want to see people doing bondage while smoking. I don't want to see people being disgraced, or being treated like slaves. I don't want to see giant breasts, or 4 inch finger nails, or men dressed as women. I don't want to see leather. I don't want to see insane amounts of makeup.

So, those restrictions pretty much exclude about 85% of what's available online. But such is life.

In the You Tube world was where I discovered clips of people such as... Vanessa, whose smoking style is actually not really up my alley, but her videos are decent enough to warrant watching when all other options run out... Ms Inhale, who doesn't do it for me at all, though she seems to be quite prolific on there, so someone must be watching her... And then, much as I hate to acknowledge it, I had quite the thing for the one who calls herself MissAssSnatch (what a name!), in spite of the fact that she gives the impression of being a slightly twisted individual, in a variety of ways. In the past year, it seems like she's pulled most of her material off You Tube and now has the apparent promise of a personal website, which one would assume will be a pay-site, though it has had nothing but a splash screen since she first announced it long ago (last I checked). One other that I'll mention, though I don't even know her name (real or fake) was a woman who had only two videos of her smoking posted by either a friend or boyfriend. The poster's handle was "mattcos". I liked these videos because the lighting was stellar -- I'd go so far as to say it even surpassed Coherent Light -- and because it captured the very much "everyday girl" profile -- blue jeans and a t-shirt, in a setting that didn't feel staged, or ridiculous. Those videos show the difference that great lighting can provide. There are subtle things that I imagine you'd rarely observe in the real world, even, that were visible in his couple of videos.

Occasionally, I have become a follower of a certain person's videos on You Tube, not because I found them particularly attractive or even good at smoking, but because their videos were either entertaining, or curious to me. One example I can think of was this girl Mary Ellen, who was apparently a non-smoker who needed to learn how to smoke, using herbal cigarettes, for a role she was going to play in a short independent film she was making with her friends. The series of videos diaried her progress in learning to smoke. And she never got very good at it. But it was entertaining enough that I kept watching. Then, there was another girl who is so-so, and not a great smoker, and sits on her bathroom floor and basically vlogs (video blog). She's moderately amusing. Not sure why. I'd probably be friends with her. And there are others who have prominently posted themselves all over You Tube. Many of them are attractive, and actually have decent smoking style, but suffer from horrible lighting. Then, some of them are kind of scary, but you find yourself watching them anyway. So the pursuit of the fetish online is not always entirely about finding the sexiest thing you can find, to stimulate the precise elements of the fetish that turn you on the most. There can be a bit of channel surfing. And sometimes, during the surfing of fetish sites, you occasionally find yourself watching the equivalent of FOX News.

There are only two places from which I have ever paid to view smoking fetish materials. The first was the Smoke Signals website. I never spent much time there, because of the absence of free viewing. But then I discovered that, for a small monthly price, there was a large quantity of unlimited download material. So a couple of times over the past few years, when I was single and horny, I joined for a month. I would download a whole bunch of stuff. Look at it. Um... masturbate. And then, after a few weeks, cancel the membership, and delete all of it. I don't know why I deleted it. It's not that I expected it would no longer be interesting to me. I guess I just didn't want it hanging around on my computer, because it would mean that I had a porn collection of sorts. If it's all on the internet, then it's not my collection, and somehow that feels less seedy. I'm being somewhat facetious, but obviously there's a nugget of honesty in that assertion.

And besides Smoke Signals, I purchased (and again, eventually deleted) maybe a handful of clips from the Smoking Sweeties website, because they're cheap (five or six bucks each) and they're reasonably long videos, depicting, in some cases, a style that I was interested in watching. The thing is, they're not really that cheap, but in Euros it sounded cheaper. So bad on me for being incapable of multiplying by 1.38, and good on them for knowing how to get Americans to give them money! The dialog in some of those videos was laughably asinine. One of the lines was so funny: "When I inhale, it's like the smoke is massaging my breasts, but from the inside". That is so patently idiotic. And she said it repeatedly, so someone must have thought it would be a turn-on. Ugh.

Really, that's about the size of it. Fifteen years of browsing the internet to indulge a fetish. I considered including the hyperlinks to all of the sites I referenced. But seriously. You all know how to Google or Bing. Don't you?

After the shame, things went back to "normal"

2009-07-19T22:54:00.000-07:00

Whatever that means.

I spent over 8 years feeling secretive and ashamed of the fetish as a result of that relationship, where the fetish, my feelings, and the dynamic did not allow for me to engage in comfortable open communication. As I said earlier, it's not that my partner didn't try. It's just that our dynamic pushed us both further apart romantically. And the fetish was a wedge topic.

After that, I dated someone for about a year. Why bother even giving her initials? It really doesn't matter. Shortly after we met, she'd mentioned that at one point in her life, she and her coworkers used to smoke at work, because they could, and because there was really not a whole lot to do at work, other than goof around. This was in another country, as she was foreign-born. Her openness about the fact that she had smoked, and the fact that I knew she was from a culture where it was not a taboo, made it easy for me to tell her that it was something that turned me on, prior to there having ever been a situation where the smoking would have occurred, since it was not something she was currently doing. Plus, having stifled the fetish for almost 9 years, I probably was eager to have an opportunity to experience those feelings again, with a person, instead of the internet.

When I told her about it, she said "I can do that for you. That's no problem at all". She didn't seem particularly intrigued or not intrigued, and she was not needing to delve into the details of "Why?" or the subtleties of what it meant to have the fetish. She just said "Sure. Whatever."

And she did indeed buy cigarettes and smoke for me. She saw that it turned me on, and I think she enjoyed it well enough that it was not a conflict for her. Nor did she have an addictive personality, so there seemed to be little downside to having the fetish be available in the relationship as something that could please me. She had even said "I would be happy to do this for you every day", which we both understood to mean "maybe once" or "probably not every day, but sometimes".

And it sort of went that way. There was never much conflict around the smoking. She was interested and willing to do it. But it wasn't a topic of intimacy. It wasn't bringing us closer. It was just a fetish, with her indulging it. I think that in some ways, from her culture, there were certain things she was planning on expecting or demanding from me, because I was "The Man", and in return for those things, there would be certain things that she would deliver, as "The Woman". But understanding it was not a critical matter for her. There were one or two conflicts we had around the subject, which related more to the downside of her smoking, and which I actually don't want to write about, because they are not relevant to the core of this blog, which is the fetish. The conflicts were really just communication and intimacy wars that were brewing between us, over other issues, that ended up manifesting themselves in the realm of the fetish, and smoking, as well.

There was definitely an element of manipulation in the relationship. But I am not sure how much of it was with conscious will, versus not. I don't think she would have ever smoked another cigarette in her life, before meeting me, if she hadn't know it would turn me on. And because of that, it always felt like it was something that I was either trying to get her to do for me, or something that she was trying to do for me to get me to do something for her. It became a tool.

I suspect my hindsight is not 20/20.

The positive, with respect to the fetish, that came out of that relationship, I suppose, was that it was not a matter of intense conflict or guilt. It was just something that was occasionally part of the courtship, and didn't even fall into a realm of being a problem. But the downside is that the relationship itself had massive problems and the fetish ended up being, even if only occasionally, a kind of duct tape that was holding together something that had very little cause to be held together in the first place.

Getting closer to the present

2009-07-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

This blog has a finite duration to it.

I suspected that when I started writing it. A history goes from then to now. And because I don't want this to be a daily diary, telling you of every detail of my life, it's pretty much a foregone fact that I won't be writing it forever.

Up to now, I'd been telling you pretty detailed accounts of one relationship after another. And there was a goal, which was to give you a sense of the way my fetish was integrating into my life. The comments that I have received on here led me to believe that, largely, the fetish has been somewhat dissimilar in terms of its role, compared to other people out there in our fetish community. I don't feel alone. I don't feel unaccepted. I don't feel unacceptable. But I recognize that my guilt and duality around the subject is not the majority case. It's a fraction of the community.

So relating every detail of these relationships, while interesting, maybe didn't provide you much more than an interesting read, and perhaps something to think about with respect to your own set of circumstances, whatever those may be.

I want to do a little bit of glossing over things, with the goal of not providing more attention than is necessary, to details that are not really providing useful context. The original purpose of this blog was to help me deal with my own feelings around the subject. I am fast realizing that having open communication in a relationship with my partner about the fetish, and perhaps discussing it with a therapist, are ultimately more effective.

But I still have story to tell. And I wanted this to be a history that took me from then to now. So I will tell this story.

Life after the longest relationship

2009-07-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

After EB, I decided to try online dating. I had never done it before. In fact, I don't even know if there was any significant online dating to speak of back in 1997, when EB and I started seeing each other. Probably, there was. In fact, definitely yes! Because I remember that before we started dating each other, we'd joked about helping each other write a Match.com profile. I think I went so far as to compose a profile, but never actually posted it. So there.

When I started doing the online dating, filling out the question and answer parts, there was that decision about what do I search for in terms of the topic of smoking? And the reality was, again, that I didn't want to date a smoker. I think that some of that might have related to the fact that the people who acknowledged being smokers on the dating sites were probably people from a different demographic than myself. That's not to say that there are not women from the same demographic as me that are smokers, or occasional smokers. What I'm asserting is that a lot of women from the same demographic as me would lie about smoking on those sites.

Nonetheless, I always did my search with the criteria that they should be either non-smokers, or social smokers. That was when I was thinking about someone with whom I would have a relationship. But if I were bored and horny and just trying to tease myself with fantasy possibilities, I would go on Match and just start searching only for women who said they were smokers, so I could see what they looked like, and see what sort of profiles and personalities they appeared to have. By and large, I always ended up feeling like I was not the kind of guy that any of these women would be interested in! They had tattoos, or they wore really funky clothes, or they were the other category of sort of townie types that I would get the shivers thinking about. And I don't mean the good shivers.

But the thing that is interesting to me, looking back, is that I always toyed with the question of whether I should be actively seeking out women who were smokers, or not. And regardless of the fetish, and its obvious presence in the foreground of my sexual fantasies, I still ultimately turn away from it when it comes to "mate" selection. That is absolutely not to say that I am not either secretly, or overtly pleased if my partner turns out to be a rare or occasional smoker. But for me, it would not be a rewarding experience, and would in no way constitute an "indulgence" for me to date a full-time smoker. The only one I ever dated, as you may recall, was DR, the travel agent. And it didn't do anything for me.

I notice a lot of people posting on the boards that they would only ever date a smoker, or marry a smoker. Or they talk about how they previously had dated non-smokers and it caused nothing but challenges, conflict, or longing for things they could not have, and that they'd never again go back to those days. And so on. But I have never felt that way. And I don't think it's that I am trying to repress my identity or my desires. I think it's truly that I don't want to be in a relationship with someone who is "a smoker". And I am not sure how many sessions with Freud himself I would need to have, in order to determine if this is some desire to put myself in a state of eternal inner conflict, or if it just reflects an acceptable duality in my nature. Namely, I have a fetish that involves sexual turn-on from watching a woman smoke. But I also have a fundamental belief system involving wanting to live a healthy, clean, addiction-free life with a partner who shares my values and takes good care of herself, exercises, stays young, and all that good stuff.

So, I guess when I started looking at the ads for the women who were smokers on Match.com, I was really just browsing my own version of "soft porn" as a window shopper.

Recipe for disaster, or "Why friends shouldn't date"

2009-07-09T21:13:00.000-07:00

Remember I told you about EB? She was the good friend who inadvertently sniffed me out for my "role-playing" in the early days of the internet back in 1992. In that earlier blog, I told of the shame that I felt, and even the violation of having someone catch me in my covert activities. She didn't mean any harm. Though it is, was, and always has been in her nature to be a bit more of a detective than her own good would dictate she should be.

EB and I had been good friends since around the time I'd been 24 years old. During that time, I'd dated a few different people, and she'd moved to Colorado and back again. For some reason, around 1997, we were both single, and the idea suddenly struck us that maybe we should be in a relationship. We were great friends, enjoyed one anothers' company, and she sort of needed a place to live. We'd been hanging out more and more. We got along great. Why not? Well, there were a lot of good reasons why not, which included a complete lack of chemistry, along with some inherent character traits that were destined to make neither of us ever feel fully safe with the other. Alas, we went into it anyway. Of course, I did not need to tell EB about the fetish, because she knew about it from the years past. Furthermore, she'd been a sideline observer of the relationship with SH, and she therefore knew that SH was a smoker, and there was no shortage of "observations" she would make. She would say things like "I'm not sure why you're interested in her, but I guess she does smoke, so that must be the allure for you". These comments could have been amusing, and probably were true. If I had been more accepting of myself, or more open-minded, I would have realized that EB was just "telling it like it is". But those observations invariably made me defensive. I didn't want to be cast in such a light.

When EB and I became involved, there had been at least some discussion around the fetish. This stemmed, if I am not mistaken, from some sharing on my part, and some snooping on her part. The sharing involved me reading excerpts to her from my personal diary that I had been keeping on my computer. There had been an archive of some of these matters, dating back to around 1992. I was focused on sharing relationship and self-exploration details but, in there, along with that, was some of the stuff around the fetish. But the bigger reason that the fetish had come to light was because of this thing we all know about called the cache of Internet Explorer. Yep. You all know about it. And it's a fair bet that many of you, like myself, had a period in your lives where you, perhaps, neglected to clear your cache, resulting in people finding things you'd rather they didn't find. And then, perhaps, you had a period in your lives where you were obsessively clearing said cache, to cover such trails. And then, hopefully, you finally came to a period in your lives where you no longer felt the need to clear your cache, because you and whomever else was in your life were okay with this trail of breadcrumbs. Or maybe not.

EB had discovered via my cache that I'd been viewing a lot of pictures of people smoking. Actresses, models, complete strangers who had posted their pictures on the internet. This, of course, was "intriguing" to her. And the manner in which it was brought to my attention, of course, aroused much defensiveness in me.

When we first started dating, EB decided, probably as some sort of honest effort in bonding, that she needed to get to the bottom of this fetish. She wanted to understand it. She probably was not inherently thrilled with it but, because she was open-minded, she was willing to explore. When she'd been a teenager, she was apparently a regular smoker, but had stopped around age 18 or 19 and never gone back to it. But she was not strongly opposed to it, other than having made a choice against doing it. At one point, in the first few months of our relationship, in what she had probably considered to be an effort to be generous, she actually bought a pack of Marlboro Reds and gift-wrapped them, giving them to me as a partial fulfillment of my birthday present. It was entirely her idea. She said something like "These are for your discretion, and can be used whenever you wish". She was trying to be a part of the fetish. It was an honest effort. But it made me very uneasy. I didn't like the fact that it was out in the open. Like a gift. It was all on the table. It probably made me feel like I wasn't in control, but I wasn't enlightened enough to see it that way at the time. And because of what she'd known about the fetish, and the deep private knowledge she'd gleaned without my permission, I really didn't feel safe letting her into my world. There were only a few occasions where we partook of that gift. The smoking part itself and the fetish part itself were not a problem, but the personalities and dynamics behind it were such that I felt subtly judged, evaluated, or patronized. Especially because in non-romantic moments, she would embarrass me about the topic. She didn't fully understand what made me tick, and I was completely unwilling and unable to let her all the way in to that ticking machine.

I will provide you one example.

There had been one occasion where something resembling romance had taken place (and I should note that was a very rare occurrence). Afterwards, as a "surprise", she had grabbed a cigarette and immediately lit it. The intention of this had been to satisfy my fetish. But, unfortunately, it had the exact opposite effect. It made me incredibly uncomfortable, and turned off. What she didn't know was that, at least at that time, because of my extreme bipolar feelings about the fetish, smoking had this effect of going from a massive turn on while aroused, to a massive turn off afterwards. All the feelings of arousal would crash into guilt, shame, and even disgust. My response to her effort was perceived by her as a lack of interest in her. And I was not willing or able to communicate these details to her. I just didn't want to, or feel comfortable doing it. In fact, at the time, I had a paranoid feeling that she was doing it that way specifically to make me uncomfortable! It was truly paranoid, and completely inaccurate. But I believed that she was more omniscient than she actually was.

So, her efforts to explore the fetish hit a brick wall. It became a taboo in our relationship, quite quickly. And the lack of romantic compatibility was exacerbated by this barrier that was formed. We explored it no more. Instead, she began expressing judgmental, hostile feelings about my private internet indulgence, whose tracks I always tried to cover, but about which she always found out anyway. She likened it to a previous boyfriend's hardcore pornography addiction. She had said the issue was not about what the pornographic material was, but about the secrecy and deception. Sadly, she was right. I didn't feel safe, and I kept it from her, and excluded her. The fetish did not need to be indulged in the relationship. That is not a requirement for a healthy relationship, and could even be a detriment if too much focus is put on it (as discussed in other entries). But the completely segregation of the relationship from the fetish was equally, if not more damaging.

The subject of the fetish came up subversively with snide, passive-aggressive remarks, even in public settings; remarks that she knew that only I would understand: "PF (author) has a crush on Drew Barrymore". That was my favorite remark. She had once found many pictures of Drew Barrymore in my internet cache. Smoking pictures. And she had claimed from then on that I had "the hots" for Drew Barrymore. The fact is, I didn't. I don't think Drew Barrymore is attractive, and I actually didn't even think she was a sexy smoker! But she'd seen those things in the cache, and she believed I was either lying or being defensive, and she also knew it got a rise out of me. So it was quite an effective assertion. If we saw an attractive woman, or even an average looking woman, smoking somewhere, she'd always give me this "knowing" smile, that would make me squirm. Or if I said that I liked a certain movie (e.g. "Fight Club"), she'd say, "I know why you like that movie!" The fetish had become bigger in her mind than it actually was in my mind, and probably understandably so, because of her exclusion from it.

Furthermore, the complete lack of intimacy in the relationship meant that I turned fully and privately to the fetish for all of my sexual gratification. I never cheated on her, and thus my only respite from complete celibacy was the fetish.

Instead of breaking up, we kept going for eight years. Because we were best friends. And when we finally broke up, we stayed very close friends. And if there's an attractive woman smoking when we're out someplace, she still gives me that knowing smile.

Such is life.

Therapeutic cures not to be found

2009-07-08T19:28:00.000-07:00

I cannot remember exactly when the first time was that I told a therapist about the fetish. I think that it was during the KH relationship aftermath. I had a pretty serious meltdown at that time, and it was the first time that I think I did therapy for real. I did not get very far with the therapy, and I cannot remember why I brought up the subject of the fetish. But it was difficult to discuss, obviously. My therapist was a woman in her 50s and I was never particularly comfortable talking to her anyway. To make matters worse, I recall having a dream in which the therapist was smoking. Not surprising from any sort of psychoanalytical or Freudian angle, but it didn't make it any easier. I don't think I dug very deep into it then.

Subsequently, I probably saw a few different therapists over the course of the years. This was usually for things related to my issues in relationships, or depression, or problems with motivation or direction. During a few of these therapy stints, the subject of the fetish was investigated further. But I don't think I ever got very far into it. It was uncomfortable to talk about with a therapist, and I wasn't sure what angle to even take. I wish I could remember better. I just know that I always felt like it was a secret that I would need to reveal for my therapy to be effective, but I would always dread revealing it because of the embarrassment. In reality, I probably have always placed too much emphasis on the dread and potential importance of it. Nonetheless, the fetish never went away and, in and of itself, never really changed much in terms of the place it held in my consciousness.

I do remember a period of my life where I thought that perhaps I could be hypnotized so that smoking would no longer be appealing to me. I never went through with it. Partly because I am afraid of being hypnotized, partly because I believe that I would be highly resistant to hypnotism, and partly because it just seemed kind of stupid to try to have a fragment of my existence eradicated. Ah, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. Maybe it would have worked. Maybe not. But I think it is best to deal with things, or not deal with them, rather than try to obliterate them.

I'll jump out of order a bit just to say that, along with writing this blog, I have rekindled the topic of the fetish and its implications in my current therapy. I have been going to therapy for several years now, in what I'd call "maintenance mode". I haven't been particularly depressed, and haven't had serious problems of any kind. But it's a kind of check-in. And I decided that maybe it would be a good idea to work on my thoughts and feelings around the topic in the therapy instead of just spouting off about it on the internet.

I really do hope that what I am doing reflects some type of serious work toward a real, healthy, and intimate relationship, where my past and my present are in harmony and balance. I have to believe that there's a good reason for doing this.

No substitute for intimacy

2009-07-07T17:39:00.000-07:00

I became aware, probably, at some point, that the fetish was being used as a substitute for intimacy. It was a safer avenue into extreme closeness. It put me in a position where I was opening myself up to the person, and feeling all those strong emotions that usually go along with love and intimacy, but it was not real love, not real intimacy. It was a placebo. A safe placebo. This happened in more than one relationship, and honestly, I think it is something I will always need to watch out for, because intimacy is "hard", whereas indulgence in the fetish is "easy", relatively speaking.

In around 1996, I had finally got out of the tailspin of relationships that included and fell in the wake of the KH infidelity extravaganza. I was not particularly happy, I was lonely, and not really feeling like I belonged to anything. It was a reasonably long period of "not in relationship" for me, which was unusual. I'd moved in with these new guys, and they had their own set of friends. I was allowed to participate in it, but I was not really one of them. And I didn't feel "cool" or "in". There were a lot of women in their circle, but I always felt like a sort of sympathetic or pathetic creature to them. I felt like I was weird, and that they wouldn't like me. Not sure why, but that's how it was at that time.

I was out one night with these housemates, going to see a band that was friends' of theirs. At the table next to us, there were some drunk giggling women. One of them kicked my chair or my leg, and apologized in a way that, in hindsight, was pretty obvious she'd done it on purpose to get my attention. She seemed rather ditzy. But I'd drank a bit too, and ended up following her to some other bar, where she was so drunk she could barely stay on the stool. When I saw her at this second bar (I'd gone there separately, following her on her recommendation), she was sitting at the bar, smoking. And it wasn't sexy, I can tell you that. Because she was wrecked. But... she smoked, and that piqued some sort of "idea" in my head, in no small part because it had been awhile since I had a girlfriend.

After a brief pursuit, that involved me needing to figure out what her name was, and find her number in the phone book (I actually practically read the phone book trying to find the name, since I wasn't sure what her name was), SH became my girlfriend for what would be about a year and a half.

She and I never really had that much in common, and she really should not have been my girlfriend. We did not come from similar backgrounds, we did not have similar beliefs. It was and is still not clear to me what beliefs she had, if any, because she was always in too much of an anxious or scattered frenzy of self-absorption to formulate concrete beliefs. If you asked her about any serious topic, she would always say something like "Who cares? I don't really want to think about that. It doesn't interest me!"

At one point, my sister actually said to me, "She's nice and all, but... is she really going to be smart enough for you?"

Of course, the answer was "no". But we stayed together in a very non-intimate relationship. And the fetish had a fairly central role in the intimacy. I wasn't that attracted to her, as a person, and thus, I think I was always using the fetish as a crutch to get myself to a place where we were able to be intimate. When we first started dating, she didn't know about the fetish. And she didn't smoke in front of me much, because like most women, she assumed that it would be a turnoff to me. SH was not a frequent smoker, probably only a few a day or less. There was little about the way that she smoked that was attractive to me.

I had sort of resolved not to tell her about it. Not sure why. But we'd dated for a couple of months, without mentioning it. And then, probably in the summer of 1996, there was a day where we had not been getting along that great already, for whatever reason (could be that we never got along that well) and it was raining really hard. And in the rain, I got in a minor car accident. And somehow, I lost my shit, and started yelling at her, and almost blaming her for the accident. It was absurd. She was not in any way responsible. But it really upset her. She should have dumped me right then and there, but she gave me the benefit of the doubt that I was just being emotional. We ended up taking the train to the airport to rent a car because my car was undrivable, and it was clear it would be weeks before it was repaired. So then we're back in town with the rental car, and I was feeling extremely exasperated and vulnerable. And this state of affairs caused me to grant myself the "indiscretion", if you will, of telling her that smoking turned me on. That violated my original plan, of not discussing it. And it also started a new dynamic. Because this was apparently interesting to her. And that was the first time that the fetish played a role in that relationship. And for the remainder of the relationship, it was always a sort of manipulation. She always liked to smoke when she was drinking. And she always liked to drink. And a lot of what we did involved going out and drinking. So it was a very non-intellectual, mutually indulgent interaction.

If I could just look at it as that; two people indulging in something that was satisfying to each, with no serious objective or goal, then I guess it wasn't that bad. The problem is, I think that my actions were molding my emotions and mindset around relationship and intimacy, via the fetish. So, I was getting further away from "truth", whatever that means. Again, in this relationship, the fetish brought out the worst in me, including dishonesty. There were a couple of occasions where SH (and in one case, her friend, as well) had been smoking in my room. Of course, my housemates confronted me about this. And, I lied straight to their faces, and said that no one had been smoking, and that it must have been on our clothes. It was so stupid and absurd. But my shame and secrecy around the subject made me willing to be embarrassingly dishonest. It was probably things like that which caused those guys to never really accept me in their group.

Right before we broke up, we went on a trip together to Cancun, which was kind of a shitty place to go, but I didn't know any better when I was 27. The trip was pretty much the last gasp of the relationship, already past one breakup. And there was nothing left except the fetish, and the mutual indulgence. She in alcohol and smoking; me in alcohol and the fetish. A fairly toxic combination. Again, if you were to say that it was just two people being hedonistic, maybe it was fine. But in my mind, I had the belief that I wanted a real relationship. And this was not that.

The relationship ended badly. I think that SH, for all of her lack of depth, actually had always seen the relationship for what it was: someone to "hang out" with. I kept trying to see it as something more, even though deep down inside no part of me even wanted more. I had a bad habit of always trying to see things as more. I think in that case, the fetish was a vehicle toward false intimacy.

This blog entry isn't really about SH. Or at least, I didn't intend for it to be. If I had the patience, I would edit it, to make it even less about SH, but she's a convenient backdrop for the real issue, which was substituting intimacy with fetish. The fetish brings about such incredibly strong emotions in me, which I may never fully understand. It mesmerizes. It creates vulnerability. It brainwashes. It can even give the illusion of closeness. I have to remind myself sometimes that to someone who does not have a smoking fetish, the observation of the act holds none of these things, and that there does exist a more objective reality that is not so incredibly "charged".

I don't think, as I have said before, that I will rid myself of the arousal that is associated with watching a woman smoke. That's unrealistic, and probably unnecessary. I may also not be able to decouple that feeling of intimate bond that occurs while sharing the fetish with my partner. But what I want to do, and believe can be done, is to have the fetish be more like the parmesan cheese that we occasionally sprinkle on our pasta, instead of having it be the pasta. Good pasta is good pasta. Gnocci, very good. Ravioli, even better. Sometimes, even when you're eating the best four-cheese ravioli in the world, you still shake some grated cheese on it.

There's nothing wrong with that, is there?

More sidetracking following the insightful comments

2009-07-06T00:16:00.000-07:00

So... I will continue the history and the story that I was telling. But the comments that came in over the past few days made me want to just talk for a little bit longer about "the path". By that, I am referring to that decision I made to start this blog. Thinking about that, and how it came to be, and how it has gone forward from there, makes me realize a bit about why I am doing this, and what it has meant, and will mean.

The subject of a smoking fetish related blog actually originated from a very different angle. After I had told my partner about the fetish, and we'd been pondering and discussing it for some time, we had casually discussed the idea of "I bet the two of us could make some money if we decided to do our own smoking fetish website!" It was sort of a sexy idea, and there's little doubt that there would be money to make. We talked about what the parameters would need to be, and the care around privacy, and a variety of other things. I am not going to say any more about that subject now, because it blows the chronology that I am trying to maintain. But, the point I want to make here is that I was discussing this whole subject of smoking and fetish and internet with my lover as a "we" not as an "I". This was something different and new for me. In the past, I believe I have always treated the fetish as some sort of growth on my body that was ugly but inoperable, and that it eventually needed to be attended to, but it was mine, and it was private. Or, if I let someone in on the deal, it was purely for what they could do to indulge that fetish. But in this relationship, with this partner, I made the choice that I wanted it to always be between us. No secrets. And, for better or worse, to share it. There are interesting challenges that go along with that, which I will talk about. Later.

But I think this blog came out of that feeling of wanting to be really connected to that history, and see where it goes and what emotions come about if I don't just keep burying the past and repeating it, but instead, fully archive the past, and then try to make peace with it. And the fact that this blog was created with my partner's awareness and approval, as well as occasional involvement in terms of discussions before or after posts are made; I think that's a step in the direction I was hoping to go.

The past few days, I've been a little bit blocked, and a little down, and maybe that was causing me to not see this for what it is. I am somewhere in the middle of it. And I will keep going. Because I do think that all of it is necessary. And I do believe that it isn't just a superficial or self-serving endeavor. So thanks for the encouragement.

Harder to write, the more I think about it

2009-07-04T23:39:00.001-07:00

My life started in 1968. My story started around 1978. And the entries I've written thus far, have carried us through approximately 1996. And it's getting harder to write. I am not sure why. It's a combination of factors, I think. First, the closer I get to the present, the more I come upon recent emotions, recent experiences, recent shame, and potentially things close enough to home that I am apprehensive about stirring the pot, or possibly writing something that causes any type of anxiety for my current partner. I think, in reality, the fear is mine. Not hers. But still. I am eventually going to be up to the year 2009, and that will be a bit of a strange feeling.

Another reason why I am hitting this wall, is because I have been thinking more about this. I dove into this pond, and now I am wondering if it's water, or acid. Did I really want to write a public story of some extremely private experiences? I haven't told you who I am. But there are definitely one or two people on this planet who, if they searched for the right thing, could stumble upon this blog and figure out that it's me. But again. I don't think that's the reason for the hesitation.

The hesitation comes from just wondering: "Did I need to go here? Did I need to do this?" And I still don't know exactly why I did it. Did I do it because I wished to indulge my thoughts more? Because that hasn't really worked. It isn't making me more aroused by the topic. And it isn't making me less aroused by the experience. It just is what it is.

Did I do it because I was hoping to rid myself of some sort of ghost or monkey on some back or skeleton in some closet or chip on some shoulder or crack in the surface of some otherwise perfectly shiny object? I really don't think so. It's not going to make anything go away, or change, fundamentally.

Did I do it because I want to desensitize myself to the taboo and secrecy of the topic, by coming out - all the way out - to a bunch of strangers, so that down the road, maybe I can be more open casually about this. In the same way that Joey might say he likes girls who wear a certain perfume, or Suzie really likes boxer shorts, will I be able to say that I think that it's really sexy when a woman smokes? Again, I seriously doubt it. And I don't even think that would be a goal since, by and large, people's sexual secrets remain secret.

Did I really think you were going to benefit from this in some way, other than your brief entertainment? Or the fact that someone might say something that resonates with how you feel? I don't know.

Or did I really just want to know how many people would look at such a blog? Get a gauge on the size of this community? Well, there's an interesting one. Maybe. Did I really just want to write something that mattered to a lot of people? Definite maybe.

I've been writing blogs in one form or another for years, and I have never had more than a dozen or so hits a day on any of those. Those blogs talked about my life, my observations, my work, my interests, my travels, politics, you name it. And at best, I got my friends to read it. I tried some avenues to get broader readership, but it's like trying to launch a ship that has no wings and is made of wet sponge. It's got nowhere to go.

But, if you pick a topic that's specific, and has a high level of interest to a specific group, there's your bingo. People will read it. Especially if it's a reasonably small market of writers, and in spite of the fact that it might only be a modest sized market of readers.

Anyway, this is borderline off-topic, so I will stop here. And move on to 1996. Because that's where my story left off.

The Internets - Round 2: the BIG discovery

2009-07-01T17:39:00.001-07:00

Around 1995, I moved into a house with a few other guys. We had internet in the house. Of course, it was dial-up, because I think that's all that anyone had. Around that same time I got a new computer. Prior to this time, I only had access to email via my work. And as far as I can recall, I had never used a web browser. The internet was a bit confusing to me, even though I was an engineering type. I just wasn't familiar with what it could do, or what was there to be found. For all I knew, there may not have been much there at all. And compared to today, of course, there was probably a tiny fraction of a percent of the content one can now find.

It didn't take long before I learned a little bit about the internet, though. And one of the first things we all discovered was the concept of a search engine. In those days, the big ones, I think, that people used were Lycos, Infoseek, and Yahoo. I don't remember ever using MSN, or Google until much later. There were other ones, like Alta-Vista and Dogpile too. I had no real preference, though I played around with them all.

Recall, as I am sure all of you reading this do, that prior to the internet, there was a time where most of us might have believed we were the only ones in the world with a smoking fetish. Because it is not something people usually discussed openly, except in the context of relationships. And it's not common enough that you run into each other, or that you know about it when you do. So, somehow or other, I did a search. I have no idea what I searched for. I am not sure if I called it a fetish, or what. But I probably searched for something like "smoking girl" or "smoking woman". And there were search results. And these consisted of a few things. There were a handful of websites with pictures (think: Kohary's Cove, Smoking from All Sides, and eventually Coherent Light) and there were links to some newsgroups (think: alt.sex.fetish.smoking and alt.smoking.glamour).

Suddenly, my entire concept of the fetish changed. Almost in the same fashion as if we were to suddenly start receiving signals back from the transmissions that SETI sends to outer space, I came to the massive realization: "I am not alone".

Remember that? Well, if you're maybe 30 or older, you remember that sensation. If you're younger than 30, then maybe the internet was already so evolved by the time you did your first Google search, that you fully expected to find hits, since by now, everyone knows that anything you could possibly look for will be found on the information superhighway.

So, I spent a lot of time looking. Reading. Masturbating. Absorbing the enormity of the fact that there was now something specific out there, designed for people like me, other than my own imagination, or the odd movie here or there that had really good smoking in it. Of course, along those lines, sites such as LH's Smoking from All Sides provided us with a handy-dandy guide to that knowledge we had all lusted after our entire lives: a) which movies had the good smoking in them? b) which actresses were the best smokers? c) which of these actresses were "IRL" smokers? (the latter, a point that holds an oddly important value for fetishists, because for some reason it makes a difference if they're IRL, or if they are just faking it for the movie).

I spent a lot of time on there. Reading the fictional fetish stories. Looking at what pictures could be found. The internet was not yet at a point where video was supported in any practical way. But I would comb through everything I could possibly comb through. And go back again and again to the things that were good. The availability of this stuff really made me become deeply indulgent, because it was like someone raining dollar bills on me in the street. I wonder, did the discovery, and the realization that I was not alone have a greater net positive effect than the potential negative that was associated with having found what was, in essence, my own special form of pornography? Prior to that point in time, and other than things that are smoking fetish related, I have never been a porno person. Strange as that may sound. It does nothing for me. I don't like to watch people having sex. And I definitely do not like anything in the realm of hardcore, or trashy, or artificially enhanced. That turns out to be true with respect to the fetish, as well. If it's got sex, or really plastic looking porny women, with teased hair, ridiculous amounts of makeup and massive breasts, and absurd artificial nails, then even the sexiest smoking style in the world would not interest me.

I remember that I was not yet aware of the concept of a "cache" on the internet. I am sure that there were times where one of my housemates borrowed my computer, and who knows what they came across when they were using the internet. Nobody ever said anything to me. So maybe they came across nothing. Maybe I am just paranoid. I am definitely paranoid, I can tell you that much.

Dark ages of relationships and fetish

2009-06-30T21:33:00.001-07:00

So, the chronology gets a bit muddied here for a few reasons. While the Veronica forays were winding down, there was the simultaneous dissolution of the LC2 relationship which, as I mentioned earlier, involved a lot of fetish manipulation. Then, I relocated, began working. Not long after starting my job, I got into a fling with a coworker, KH, who happened to have a long-distance boyfriend. For over two years, we danced a dance of her infidelity and my pursuit. She never broke up with the boyfriend, and I never stopped trying to get her to break up with him. It was a passionate, yet completely forbidden fruit. She was fairly strongly anti-smoking, though I knew she'd dated smokers before, more than once. But during that relationship, the fetish lived only in my mind, and I think the reason why it never made it to the relationship in any way was because I was too busy with the parallel obsession of "winning her". It was an emotional rollercoaster, and I was almost constantly tortured, miserable, and completely devoted to the pursuit of that misery. My friends and housemates had to constantly listen to me whine, and constantly provide advice about what I should do. I was incredibly self-absorbed, and I don't know why people kept listening to me, since I never took their advice.

At various points in that relationship, I dated other people, who actually were available and some of these people were decent prospects. But I invariably blew those opportunities, because of the obsession with KH.

At one point, I met a very cute woman, DR, who was 2 or 3 years older than me. She worked at a travel agency that was affiliated with my company. DR was a smoker. We only dated for a few months, and for some reason I never told her about my fetish. And for some reason, I never was really interested in the fetish with her, even though, honestly, she looked very good smoking. I think my obsession with KH kept me from even wanting to take a swing at being intimate with DR, and instead, I just sort of dabbled in that dating situation long enough for DR to get pretty hurt, and then get dumped. I wonder why it is that I never, at least from a fetishist's perspective, wanted to indulge in the fetish with DR? I did find it sexy, I was turned on by her, but I kept it from her. I think, because she was a regular smoker, and she also was a bit repressed from a communication standpoint, I didn't feel comfortable broaching the subject with her. She was not an intellectual. And I am not saying that because of her profession. It was just a fact. Her smoking actually bothered me, but I think it was because I was not turned on by her. So there's an interesting factoid that ties in a bit with some of the previous conversations in comments here. If I am already interested, the smoking has a great potential to enhance the attraction. But if I am not already interested (which, in that case, I wasn't) then the smoking is seen as either uninteresting, or in some cases even repellent. Another reason why I may not have had the same interest was because she was a regular smoker. Again, it feeds into that thought about "control". With someone who smokes either specifically for me, or only occasionally, there is at least the illusion of control. But if they're a regular smoker, than it's out of my hands; it's specifically not for me. I am not sure exactly how much the control factors into the allure of the fetish, but I do know that the fetish has always been weaker in cases where a woman was "a smoker" versus "someone who occasionally smokes". Maybe it's not the control. Maybe it has to do with it being "for me". Is there even a difference? I don't know.

Back to KH again. At one point, we went to a friend's wedding. We drank a little bit. Not so that we couldn't drive, but that we were perhaps just a little uninhibited. Somehow the subject of smoking arose. I don't remember if she brought it up, or me. It probably was me. But I am not sure. And somehow, on that drive home from the wedding, we stopped and bought cigarettes and stopped someplace and had one together or both had one. I really don't remember how it went down. I only remember that it was like it was some random thing to do, and that she didn't really inhale, and it was dark, and whatever it did for me, it wasn't much, and I don't think I told her about the fetish. It was more just about suggesting the idea, and acting on it. That was probably less than a year into things, and I never mentioned again.

Until "the breakup".

There came a point where, after two years of cheating, she and I could do it no more. It was tearing both of us apart. She said she wanted it to end. I, like a crazed freak, told her that if she wanted it to end, she had to come clean and tell him what she'd been doing, because she shouldn't just be able to walk away with no penalty. That's just crazy talk. I know this! But at the time, in my deranged scorned mindset, it seemed logical. And somehow, during these breakup discussions, I told her about the fetish. It was sort of what one might call a "Hail Mary" pass. I knew it was ending, and I guess after having had fantasies about her smoking for over 2 years, I wanted to see it once. It was a violation of my own code, in a number of ways, and I allowed myself that violation because of the same irrational thought process that drove me to make her rat herself out to her boyfriend. I am not proud of it.

But she did it. On one night, she indulged it. And I think she did it because it intrigued her, and because she was in a sort of vulnerable spot where I think she wanted to do anything to make her guilt feel less than it was. The surprising thing was that she wasn't half-assed about it. I want to spare all details, because I don't really think they help the story. But the takeaway feeling that I had after the experience was that I felt worse for having done that. I felt dirty, like I had broken my own code, of encouraging someone who had not been a smoker, to do it specifically for me. And I used the situation to my advantage. I felt very glad that I had not ever mentioned the fetish to her before, because given her personality, she probably would have indulged it, and then it could have been even messier.

There was one more element to this story about which I think I demonstrated some shameful behavior, and about which I have regrets. I had housemates at the time. And though we started the smoking activities outside, she eventually ended up smoking in the living room as well. It had been cold outside, and kind of wet too. This was a clear indiscretion on my part, and involved ignoring my better judgment. And obviously, there is no way to hide having done that, because it is beyond obvious. But when my roommates confronted me about it, I lied straight to their faces, and said that nobody had been smoking, but that maybe they were smelling it from our clothes because we'd been at a bar. That is so utterly absurd, that it is hard to believe I would utter it. But I was so unwilling to acknowledge that I, or someone I was with was smoking, that I would go beyond what is real or possible to avoid admitting it. And that was not the only time I did such a thing.

It pains me to think that I told such an obvious lie, because it insults the intelligence of those to whom I told it. And they didn't call me on it. They didn't say, "Listen, asshole. You are lying. And I don't know why you're lying, and it doesn't really matter, but don't play me for a fool". More likely, they just said to each other, behind my back, "What's the deal with him? Why's he lying about this?"

After having indulged the fetish with KH, she and I parted from our "relationship". She apparently did tell her boyfriend about the cheating. And I have no clue what happened to them after that. Within a month or so, I had moved to a new department at work, and we vanished from each others' lives.

Internets - Round 1 - Role Playing

2009-06-29T23:51:00.001-07:00

Around the time of the LC2 demise, I was spending increasingly more time playing on a MOO. Some of you have probably heard of these, and many of you maybe have not. It was big before the internet was even really resembling anything like the internet we have today. Ironically, LC2 was the one who introduced me to it, and then I ended up staying late in the lab, playing on the MOO so that I wouldn't have to go home and be in conflict with her. I didn't really know what I was doing on there. I was not a programmer, and that type of world was really confusing to me. I did make a couple of friends on there, though. And mostly I would just use it for chatting. I met one woman with whom I had a brief long-distance relationship. I met another woman, who was local, with whom I became friends. She, in turn, introduced me to yet another woman, who I'll call EB, who has been "present" in my life, in at least some capacity, for the last 17 years. But I will come back to her in a moment.

After playing in the MOO for some time, it occurred to me that it was possible to "be anyone you wanted to be". I didn't need to be "me". Up until that point, I had been myself. But this was a role-playing game, of sorts, and this occurred to me in a fleeting moment of bored arousal. I could be a woman character. And I could be a smoker. And then, I would be writing my own fantasies, to an audience of... zero. Well, actually an audience of one, myself. Because obviously none of the characters with whom I interacted would either a) know that I was not a woman, and b) know that I had a smoking fetish that I was exploring. And it was not like I was doing anything erotic or kinky, either. I was just talking about it from the perspective of this being a female who smoked, but the key was that I had control over her smoking. I think that was the allure to it. I had control over it, because she was me. I didn't think of it at the time that way. I just was role-playing. But in hindsight, that's the only logical reason why I'd do such a thing.

So I had my character, who I'll call Veronica, for sake of keeping my pseudonym anonymous (it's pretty bad when your aliases need to have aliases, isn't it). And I would chat away with people, who just befriended me as if I were the woman I claimed to be. Actually, it was interesting from that perspective, to observe the way supposed men would interact with me, and how supposed women would interact. So there was that added bonus of the psychology experiment. It's kind of cool seeing how differently people talk depending on what gender they think you are. But that's off-topic, a little.

Drop that subject for a moment, and let's talk about EB. We were acquaintances on MOO. We eventually met "IRL" because she lived locally. We talked a lot, and became very good friends. Maybe could say we even sort of dated a little bit over the course of a year or so. At some time during our acquaintance, we were out having dinner and drinks, and she starts talking about smoking. It was odd, and tangential, and I cannot even remember what it was. As far as I knew, she was a non-smoker. But she was talking about it in a very bizarre and probing way. I perceived her line of commenting and questioning in such a way that it made me uneasy, so I was evasive.

Some days or weeks later, on a subsequent meeting, she says to me, if I recall correctly, something like "So who is Veronica?" To quote Fight Club (which is a great movie for the smoking fetish, but I'll talk about that some other time, perhaps): "We have just lost cabin pressure". She knew about Veronica. God. It turns out that my alias, Veronica, was talking one time with her alias that I didn't even know existed. And I was doing my role-playing thing. She was curious as to who this Veronica person was, so she did some sort of look-up, of which I knew nothing. It turns out that regardless of what aliases you used, your character ID would be the same for a given login. So she knew that I was Veronica. Which meant she knew that I was pretending to be a woman and talking about smoking with strangers on the internet. I was so mortified that I wanted to die. I felt like my privacy had been invaded, even if it had been my own fault, and completely incidental. And that caused me to feel a lot of shame, and a lot less acceptance of myself. Though I don't want to put much blame on EB, because I did a pretty good job of being ashamed and unaccepting without that episode.

So even in its infancy, the internet was already getting me into plenty of trouble!

We'll come back to EB later.

How will I be remembered?

2009-06-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

One thing that I always wondered, and actually have never known, is how women have really perceived me for having the fetish. It is amazing, after 22 years of relationships, that this is still completely unknown to me. It partly has to do with the simple fact that we never really know what anyone thinks of us. We never know what people say about us to others. We don't know. And even if I ask you, and you tell me, it does little to convince me. We do know that women will discuss each others' sex lives. We certainly know that men will discuss them as well. Generally speaking, the more intimate the detail, the fewer people will know. And also, generally speaking, the fewer the problems in the relationship, the fewer discussions will be had with people outside the relationship. Right?

So, one thing I have always wondered, and actually have ever known, I repeat, is how women have really perceived me for having the fetish. I am resisting the urge to put a smiley face, since that was supposed to be funny, but using emoticons sort of takes away the right to call oneself a serious writer, I think.

The reality is, you just can't think about it. You can't. Because if you do, you'll go crazy. If the girl who likes to wear a leash and be walked around the bedroom floor, while barking, had to think about whether all of her guy's friends know about this, every time she hangs out with them, it would be mortifying. Much the same, if I had to think about the fact that some of my girlfriend's friends might know that I am completely mesmerized by smoking, I would probably crawl under a rock from embarrassment. I could construct these paranoid fantasies where I walk in the room at a party, and everyone is putting their hands over their mouths and pointing at me, and giggling, and girls are pretending to take a drag on an invisible cigarette and then rolling their eyes at me. Surprisingly I have never had such dreams. Instead, I have dreams that I can't find the building for a class on my college campus (I haven't been in college for years), or that all of my teeth are crumbling.

But it is still interesting to me to know, when it comes to a fetish, are special rules applied? Do partners take respectful caution about discussing it with their friends? Or is it no different than discussions of impotency, or premature ejaculation, or any other issue that might be present in a relationship, i.e. they're going to talk about it with their friends, and you just have to accept it.

I used to tell girlfriends, "Please don't tell anyone about this", but I pretty much have stopped doing that, for a few reasons. First, I think it's an unrealistic promise to make them keep. And second, because if they try to keep that promise, they're depriving themselves of what may be much needed support and advice. We need our friends to help us. And while it is best to deal with relationship problems within the relationship, it often does require an outside ear to see things objectively. In my most recent relationship, in fact (though I am a long way from getting to talking about that one), I have explicitly said, "I understand and respect that you may find you want to talk about this with your closest friend(s), and I only ask that you use your own best judgment and discretion". I think that's the right way to go, because it avoids the need for them to deceive you, and it also gives them permission to do what they might need to do.

Nobody has ever told me that I am weird, when I told them I had the fetish. They may have thought it, but they never said it. Nobody ever told me that I was perverted. Maybe one or two people said it was unusual. Most, surprisingly, thought it was at least moderately interesting. I think for many, also, it became slightly less interesting when they realized how much of my psyche could, potentially, become obsessed with the topic. It can get tedious. And in relationships where things were not as good, I think it may have slid further and further into the foreground, because there was not much else left to hold onto.

And I do wonder, when those relationships were ending, if lots of beans got spilled, and if I got ridiculed behind my back, or if my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriends' friends, in reassuring tones, reminded these various girls that I was a freak, or odd, or that they didn't need to put up with that crap, or that I clearly had some issues. The kinds of things you say to your friend when you're trying to help them get over someone.

But the reality is, if it were not the fetish, there would have been other topics about which the same discussions would have occurred. The fetish may be an obvious "trait" of mine, that might even set me aside from other people that they've dated. But for all I know, the fetish may not be the thing that these women remember most, when they think back about that difficult or unsuccessful relationship they had with me, three, five, ten, or twenty years ago. It may be far more likely that it was my moodiness, or my self-absorption, or my temper, or my manipulation, or my big mouth, or my insensitivity, or my inability to commit. Who knows?

Nonetheless, all that aside, I wonder still, years later, whether these women will think, when asked to say the first thing that comes to mind about that guy that they dated so long ago, would they say "Oh yeah... I remember him... he had that funny fetish with smoking... that was so ridiculous... I don't know what I was thinking when I dated him".

Sigh... the mind never sits quietly.

The visual nature of man

2009-06-25T04:28:00.000-07:00

Many times, in the course of many relationships, and friendships, though to a lesser extent, the point has been raised of how men are much more visual than women. There is probably a significant body of literature out there on the topic, and it may even have evolutionary roots in terms of mating, hunting, and who knows what else. Or it may not have roots in any of those areas, but simply be a function of male humans having become kind of superficial and perverted. I'm being facetious. Sort of.

But it does seem that women value a variety of traits in a man, many of which are physical, and many of which are not. And visual stimuli often seem to be less important then a variety of other characteristics, like odor, or intellect, or power (either physical or otherwise). Men, on the other hand, seem to value most what it is that we can see with our eyes. Again, I am generalizing, exaggerating, and being a bit silly.

Common wisdom seems to be that fetishes are much more common in men than in women. And this could tie in to the higher importance of visual stimuli for men. I suppose there are fetishes that are non-visual in nature, though I do not know of any. Of course, I am not particularly versed in the field of fetish. I know about lingerie, and high heels, and lipstick, and then there's the whole realm of bondage and masochism. I guess there is a substantial incidence of fetish in women that lie in the realm of bondage. But that is, I would assert, only in small part, a visual fetish. It's much more about touch, and about the psychological position of being submissive. So again, I maintain that men are more visual.

But are they?

I decided I should not be utterly and downright lazy, so I did a Google search. Not that you can necessarily trust Google to tell you the truth any more than you can trust me. I searched for the following "Are men more visual than women?" figuring that might be a good place to start.

One article that immediately piqued my interest, to the contrary, was this one:

New Brain Research Challenges the Myth that Men are more Visual than Women

Seems like a decent one to check out, doesn't it?

To quote a tiny bit of the article:

The study, carried out by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis measured brainwave activity of 264 women as they viewed a series of 55 color slides that contained various scenes from water skiers to snarling dogs to partially-clad couples in sensual poses. The researchers were interested in the speed, strength, and location of brainwave activity of the subjects as they viewed erotic versus non-erotic images.
As they hypothesized, the brainwave activity of participants was markedly different when viewing erotic images versus non-erotic images. But a finding they didn’t expect was that female participant’s response was similar to men.

About the results, one of the researchers commented:

"Usually men subjectively rate erotic material much higher than women," he says. "So based on those data we would expect lower responses in women, but that was not the case. Women have responses as strong as those seen in men."

The problem with this research is that it only showed that there was not a significant difference in brain waves in response to erotic images. It did not explain why it is that men subjectively rate them higher than women, which I would assert is still a core question. Of course, maybe the issue is that women are culturally forbidden to express eroticism in the same ways that men are allowed, for fear of being seen as inappropriate.

There was a critique referenced within that article that talked about how there is much doubt as to whether erotica really represent the types of biologically relevant images that might relate to reproduction or evolution. However, that also did not address, even remotely, the fact that men rate erotic material higher than women do.

So, that chunk of research, while an interesting detour, certainly doesn't convince me, with my fetish, plus my biology background, that my assertion is incorrect.

So, back to Google. Another article, this time from the journal Nature, which tends to hold a little more weight than the previous reference which came from the journal Brain Research (by "weight", I mean that there's typically a much higher peer review burden to make it to publication in that journal).

Men and Women Differ in Amygdala Response to Visual Sexual Stimuli

The abstract from that article stated:

"Men are generally more interested in and responsive to visual sexually arousing stimuli than are women. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that the amygdala and hypothalamus are more strongly activated in men than in women when viewing identical sexual stimuli. This was true even when women reported greater arousal. Sex differences were specific to the sexual nature of the stimuli, were restricted primarily to limbic regions, and were larger in the left amygdala than the right amygdala. Men and women showed similar activation patterns across multiple brain regions, including ventral striatal regions involved in reward. Our findings indicate that the amygdala mediates sex differences in responsiveness to appetitive and biologically salient stimuli; the human amygdala may also mediate the reportedly greater role of visual stimuli in male sexual behavior, paralleling prior animal findings.

There. I'm convinced. Nature says it. I say it. We all say it. It must be truth. In fact, it makes sense to me that it would involve the amygdala, since that's involved in a lot of things like emotions, fear, love.

But what is still not explained, at least not yet, is why men are more visual than women, if they are. Another good article, that at least seems to want to discuss the topic from the psychological, rather than biological point of view:

Why Men are More Visual

In that article, they mention what seems to be a reasonable evolutionary explanation:

Men are more visually oriented because given the males best ‘impregnate and leave’ reproductive strategy, the best criteria for selecting genetically desirable females were primarily visually observable physical attributes. For a male who engaged in a typical ‘impregnate and move on‘ strategy only young, strong, fast, and healthy, females had a chance of surviving pregnancy and protecting the offspring without him.

And on the flip side, as to why visual elements are less important to women:

However, because so many males developed a reproduction strategy based on impregnating as many females as possible and moving on, the visible male attributes were not the most important criteria for a woman. It would not matter much that the baby had great physical genes, because if the father did not stick around for long the child would probably not live long enough to benefit from them. This may be the reason why male persistence works as a seduction strategy. It demonstrates ‘the tendency to stick around‘ which is not readily visible but is a male trait that is very important to female reproductive success, and only becomes apparent over time. Hence these visible attributes became less critical.

This is an interesting view. And thus ends my brief tangent on evolutionary neurobiology.

When the manipulator becomes the manipulated

2009-06-25T03:18:00.000-07:00

I have never spent a particularly large amount of time not in a relationship. If I were to go back and scan my entire adult history, from ages 18 to 40, I think it is possible that I have spent less than one year, total, in a state that could be described as "completely single". There were stretches where things were messy, but there was always someone, or more than one someone, in the picture. So it should not be surprising that, a few short months after things disintegrated between MR and myself, I started seeing someone new - another LC, so this time we'll call her LC2. MR apparently had cheated on me prior to our breakup, though we were in such a state of apathy that it hardly affected me - she then went on to marry the guy with whom she cheated, so at least I can feel some satisfaction to know that it was worth her effort.

LC2 is one where I am going to leave out a lot of unnecessary details. It was an extremely tumultuous 2 year relationship. There was a lot of intensity, with some good things, but also a lot of very bad things. We both engaged in emotional interactions that were damaging. The reason why I cannot omit her entirely is because she represented the first relationship where the fetish became an open and integral component, in a not-particularly-healthy fashion.

Shortly after we'd met, I believe that I told her that I had a smoking fetish. I am not sure why I told her, but I did. It is interesting to me, thinking back, to try to remember what my thought process was regarding the decisions of how to broach the subject with various people. I think it was probably related to my perception of how well they would accept the topic.

She was not a smoker, but she had done it in the past socially, and was from a culture that was not averse to smoking (Latin American). When I brought it up, she said that she would absolutely be happy to do it "for me". And in this situation, compared to the one with MR, the realization of the fantasy was more successful. It was something that became an occasional part of the relationship. Sometimes it was private. Sometimes it happened in the presence of friends, in either public or private. It remained under control, though, and was not something that was escalating into a more frequent event. And it also did not consume our relationship. So this was something different and new. It felt less bad and less shameful, because it was not a secret, and because it was not being manifested through covert manipulations on my part. I am not sure if that means I was coming to accept it.

So. It sounds like paradise, right?

Well, I am leaving out the fact that we had a lot of pressures in the relationship, and there came to be a progressive increase in frequency of fighting over big issues that could not be resolved. Commitment issues. I cannot say that I was in the right, either. But the relationship was headed in a direction that would undoubtedly bring about its dissolution. And as things went downhill, the fetish began to take on a different role. LC2 began to use the fetish to change the course of arguments. She knew the power of the fetish, and that despite any level of stress or anger, I could effectively be "hypnotized" by its use. So, when we were entrenched in a major battle, or had descended into the depths of stony silence, she would "use" smoking as a means to change the subject. And it was effective. No matter how angry I was, or how checked out I was, it was never so much that I would turn my back on it. I couldn't. I liken it to the chemical communication that ants use. When one ant produces a certain chemical transmission, it is like a command that must be obeyed. And that was the effect the smoking had on me. And to some extent it made me feel powerless. But it was a willing powerlessness. And that felt even more powerless.

Things deteriorated even further from there. There were a series of breakups, including my moving out. And the manipulation via the fetish grew ever increasingly. She would call up with some random question or point to make, and then the subject of her smoking would be brought up, by one of us, and suddenly we were back to "needing to break up all over again." You get the picture. Whenever I went over there to address some issue, or to try to have some type of "break-up discussion" (which, one could argue, was just asking for trouble), she would always do whatever she could to bring about a result that she wanted, which was for us to stay together.

After we finally broke up "cold turkey", which is really a misnomer, since it would more aptly be described as repeatedly dining on "old turkey" until it finally became rotten and inedible, there were still repercussions, fetish-related, down the road. We needed to have some discussion about either finances, or logistics, or something, months later, and she indicated that she had started smoking heavily. This may have been a lie. It seemed implausible because she had never done it more than a couple or few times a week, and she did not, by any means, have an addictive personality. But whether she said it in truth, or as a manipulation, the effect was the same. It made me feel both extreme guilt, and a non-negligible amount of interest, which were both bad things. Eventually, the connection was severed completely. About 5 years later, we spoke for the first time. All seemed to have been forgiven, and she'd moved on with her life, having married, and had a couple of children. I suspect that she was a non-smoker, and would feel comfort knowing that to be true. I did not, and do not, really want to have on my conscience the guilt of having participated in someone's addiction, as a result of my fetish.

So, in the span of 5 years, I had gone from being the manipulator (with LC1) to the manipulated (with LC2). Neither one of those positions, I think, was good for my self-esteem. Manipulation is never a good thing in a relationship. I guess, if I had to choose, then being manipulated was better. Less guilt. But I am not sure it was any less damaging to me. When you are manipulating, you have the power to recognize your actions and cease. When you are manipulated, it's a little trickier, because then you need to have a lot of willpower to not surrender to the manipulation. I am certain that between those ages of 18 and 23, I did not have much capacity for properly managing either side of that coin.

Some notes about relationships, lust, and fetish

2009-06-25T03:05:00.000-07:00

The three years with MR put a damper not only on the fetish, but on the role of sexuality in my life on the whole. It's interesting, actually, that I think I have gone through periods of sexual Dark Ages and Renaissance. I am not sure if that is true for most people. It probably is. I do think of myself as a physical person, with a very high level of passion and certainly a healthy amount of lust. That is why it surprises me a bit, that I have been willing to endure stints of years in relationships that were largely without it. During those periods, my sexual energy would turn almost entirely to fetish thinking. I would not even share these thoughts with the partner, because I was uncomfortable with sharing them.

I really do not believe that the fetish is an essential element of romance and passion for me, in terms of the physical involvement of it in the relationship. But, because it is so ingrained (to steal a favorite term of a fellow blogger on the topic) in my character, I think that when I feel like I need to hide the fetish, or at least downplay it, or not discuss it, something wedges between myself and my partner. It makes sense to me, because intimacy is about sharing and openness. It's about letting your partner into your dark places. And if there is a very specific, significant "dark place" that you feel you must hide, then that sets a limit to how intimate you can become. I also believe that intimacy, especially sexual or physical intimacy, is a delicate house of cards. It does not take much to bring it down, and when it goes, there is little one can do to reassemble it.

I have a few counterexamples to that in the stories I will tell. There were a few instances where the fetish remained only in my mind, for the entirety, or nearly the entirety of the relationship. I am not sure how or why those worked the way they did, though I am sure I'll put forward some theories on it, when I arrive at those stories.

In fact, rather than go on this tangent, I think I will move ahead, and continue the stories, and then come back to this topic when we have a little more background.

Most of college spent not fulfilling fantasies

2009-06-24T03:22:00.000-07:00

After LC, I spent one semester of college "single". Actually, it wasn't completely single, because I spent part of that semester chasing one girl, and part of it chasing another girl. Eventually, after an elaborate courtship, involving something that could only be characterized as my performing of "emotional feats of strength", I convinced the second of those two "chasees" to be my girlfriend. The feats of strength part was because, for several months, my displays of affection were met with psychological torture and teasing and taunting. It was one of those games where I was supposed to be nice to her, and she was supposed to be mean to me, and then eventually, when I had demonstrated the proper capacity to endure this, I would win "the prize". Sometimes human courtship seems way more like the animal kingdom than any of us would like to admit!

Anyhow, that's the background on MR, whom I also have nicknamed "Four Foot Eleven", though I'll stick to MR for here. Let's not talk about "the relationship" but I'll just tell you what happened with the fetish during that period of time. And what went on was a lot of disappointment. I knew that MR was not a smoker, and to the best of my knowledge she'd either never done it, or only tried it and not been interested. However, at one point in the relationship, something really small and random happened that triggered a change. I cannot remember the exact order of these events, but I remember each of them fairly vividly, and they occurred in a very short span of time. One night, MR and I were hanging out in her dorm room. This would be my sophomore year, her freshman year. And out of the blue, she says to me "I want to smoke!" This, of course, caused a fairly massive adrenaline rush in me, as has always been the case when a fetish "opportunity" arises. In fact, I am seriously concerned that one day my fetish may cause me to have a heart attack, due to these "rushes" of adrenaline that it can produce. MR was into being "random", so it didn't completely surprise me that she would say such a thing. I probably asked her why, and she probably made some silly response like "I don't know... it just seems like a good thing to do right now". But it wasn't a ready possibility and, in fact, by this point in time, cigarette machines had actually been removed from college campuses. That occurred between my freshman and sophomore years - 1987. It was, as you might say, suddenly "Hip to be Square". Ugh.

Not sure if it was that day, or the next, but I think it was that day, that serendipity struck. I had gone downstairs probably to do something like pick up a delivery of pizza or subs, which we often did on the weekend. And on the way back up the stairwell, I saw, sitting on the floor of the stairs, a pack of Marlboro Reds. Again, more adrenaline. I picked up the pack, and looked inside, and there were maybe a few left, or maybe even only one. But here you had it: MR had just recently said she wanted to smoke, and here was the way for it to happen. So... with insane nervousness to the point that my hands were shaking, I went back to her dorm room, and probably said something like "Hey... look at what I found". From there, the story is unfortunately a disappointment. She did smoke a cigarette. But she really didn't know how, and she really didn't look sexy doing it. Other than the fact that she was doing it, there was nothing about it that turned me on. And that's saying quite a bit, because the stimulus itself is usually powerful enough to be effective. But it was a disappointment.

I didn't leave it at that, of course, because now the door was at least ajar, in terms of pursuing the fetish with her. I didn't initially come out and tell her about the fetish. Instead, I did passive manipulations like telling her that I wanted to smoke, which was a lie. And I would try to plant the thought in her mind and get her to bite, but she just wasn't getting it. Eventually, somehow, I did end up telling her that it turned me on. And she did do it for me at least a handful of times. I remember it in the dark, in the car, parked somewhere. I am trying to remember how I felt, and I am sure I was aroused because she was doing it. But I just always remember being disappointed, because she was not really seductive about it, and she didn't know how to inhale. So instead of the use of the fetish making her seem more sexy to me, it ended up, in some ways, making her seem less sexy, and less sexual, and less experienced, and a whole bunch of other things.

I really don't remember how much of that relationship included the fetish. I know it happened at some point during school, and I know it happened at some points during school breaks, when I was visiting her in her hometown. I do have both of those memories. But thinking back on that, even now, I feel a little embarrassed, ashamed, and silly. I remember those feelings. I don't like feeling them again. I am writing this in an effort to feel less uncomfortable with myself and with the fetish, but recalling something like that relationship just feels bad. She and I had plenty of intimacy issues, and we were never really in any sort of mature romantic relationship. Eventually I ended up seeing her more like a daughter than a girlfriend, and she became "de-sexualized" to me. But it took almost three years to move on. Something tells me, though I don't remember exactly, that the fetish was probably only a player in the middle year of that relationship.

An Aside: Keeping it safe for the girl

2009-06-23T03:01:00.000-07:00

A quick aside here, because I want to tell you a bit about my current existence, rather than making you wade through 29 years of history to get there. One thing I decided when I came up with the idea to write this blog was that I would not do it without the approval of my current girlfriend. This was a difficult decision, but it was also an easy decision. Not sure if that makes sense. But what I decided was the following: First, there was no way in hell that I wanted to be covertly writing a blog of any sort, and posting things about myself on the internet, without her knowing. It would feel wrong for so many reasons. I think that it would constitute a level of dishonesty and deceptiveness that would warrant ending a relationship. The second reason is that I wanted her not only to know about it, but also to have the opportunity, if she wished, to be a reader of it. Why should you lot of strangers have the rights to the history and secrets of my fetish, but not the person whom I love and wish to be as deeply intimate as I can possibly be. In essence, this opening of "the book" is an effort (I believe, an honest effort) not to repeat the mistakes of past relationships, and also to start accepting for real; to have this thing that is a part of "me" become a part of "we", in a way that does not involve fear, manipulation, or deception.

The girl already knows about the fetish. I made a painful effort to be completely open from the start. So this is not a "coming out". But it is a "letting in", so to speak.

So, why this entry now, injected in the early-middle of a 29 year history? Well, because one thing I am constantly balancing as I write this, is that I want to make sure this is something that I can share not only with you, but with her. And that's an interesting challenge, because I don't know exactly what is too sensitive of a topic. But getting into adult relationships could be painful. Having the reality that the fetish is not a new thing that only she has experienced, but something that played at least some part in several earlier relationships, requires care. I want to tell this story right. And I believe if I tell it right, meaning that I stay true to my mission, of relating an understanding of myself, and my experiences, that it will be a positive thing for everyone.

Still, it makes me nervous. There's storytelling, there's editing, there's censoring, there's tact. And I would like to stick to tactful storytelling, rather than leaving out large chunks, or altering important details, if they relate to the evolution of my fetish or my understanding of self. I want to accept myself, and be accepted for all of who I am or have been. It just doesn't seem like there's a lot of value in settling for something less than that.

Still... it makes me nervous.

Love, Fetish & Manipulation (Take 1)

2009-06-23T02:29:00.000-07:00

I was not sure what to call this entry. Really wanted to give it a clever name, because it is an important milestone in the history that I am attempting to relate to you. I chose the title you see above because I think, unfortunately, that manipulation was at the very core of the first relationship that I had which truly involved the fetish.

Here, again, I want to be careful to focus on the details that matter to my real story, rather than tell you a little fetish "blurb". And that's not to say that I'm not tempted to go there. I remember, reading the forums on LH's website, where people would post their real-life or fictional stories. Some of them were horribly cheesy, and others were exquisite. But again, I'll come back to LH later. In fact, it will be about 6 years ahead in this history.

So. After all of the bullshit of high school, and the girls at the pizza place, and the flea markets, and the movies, and magazine ads, and all other things that had stimulated my brain and my sexual organs for the first 17 years, I went to college. I went to a large state school. And I really did not know what the hell I was doing. I was not particularly mature or self-sufficient at 17 years old (turned 18 a month into my first year).

In another realm, sexuality, I was also not particularly mature. I was still a virgin. But within about 12 days of my arrival at the university, that cherry had been picked.

My college dormitory was in a 17 story tower. I had a corner room. And corner rooms had a unique feature to them. These rooms jutted out of the ends of the building, such that the windows of each pair of corner rooms were facing one another. You could see into the room across from you. One night, I was in my room, probably during the first week of college. And I look out my window of the 10th floor, I think it was. Or maybe the 11th floor. And across from me, and one floor down, there is a girl with curly blonde hair sitting on her desk and smoking. She's laughing and talking with friends. At some point later, either that day, or the next, or the next, I was in my room at night, alone, and saw her down there again. The lights were out in my room, and I was watching her. And I am pretty sure that I masturbated while watching her. What a nice Peeping Tom I was. God. Forward another day or so, and I am sitting in my room in the daytime, looking out the window, and she (LC) is in the window and she sees me, and yells up to me and says hello. Somehow we start to talking, and she ends up inviting me down to talk some more. That had to have been September 5th, 1986 because I recall that as being the day we met. And we pretty much immediately became inseparable. One of those deals where it's so inseparable that it makes everyone else either sick or uncomfortable. One week later, LC became the first girl I slept with. Sadly, I was not the first guy she had slept with, which would not be a big deal, except for the fact that later in the relationship (when her little sister discovered her birth control pills), we both got in huge trouble, and it ended up being me who was chastised (pun intended) for stealing their daughter's innocence. And, of course, I could not blurt out "But it wasn't me!"

Back to the point. The smoking story.

So, LC was going to be my girlfriend, obviously. But I couldn't date a smoker. So, I had to try to get her to quit smoking. She smoked Newports, in case you're curious. The reason she did was because her aunt did, and I guess she looked up to her aunt. I don't really know how much she smoked, but it couldn't have been very much, maybe 5 or 6 a day or fewer, would be my recollection. Nonetheless, I needed to make her stop. So I was pressuring her, and asking her about it, and wanting her to tell me all about why she did it. But, as you can clearly guess, I was getting really turned on talking to her about it, in spite of the fact that my words were supposedly words of discouragement. The fact was, I had friends at school with me, and I could not have them think I was dating a smoker, because I was way too uncomfortable with that. They probably would have made one comment about it, and then let it go. But I couldn't handle it.

After much prodding and pressure, LC agreed to quit. This was probably only a week or so after we started dating. And what happened next was the beginning of an elaborate "dance" that lasted pretty much the entire relationship. Whenever LC would get upset with me, she would want to smoke because, in her mind, the only reason she had stopped was "for me". So if I pissed her off, she would smoke. We had a reasonably volatile relationship, so this turned out not to be infrequent. And what happened next, which I alluded to in the title of this blog, is that I realized that I could get her to smoke by instigating a fight. Ugh. Not a good dynamic. But incredibly effective. And it would go back and forth like this. I would fight over nothing, and be completely irrational. She would get fed up and start smoking. And suddenly, I would stop being difficult, and we'd make up. Over and over and over.

One tiny little detail out of this story. I cannot remember if this relates to the first such "fight" of these incidents, or a subsequent one. But I vividly remember one night where I had really pissed her off, and she had said she wanted to smoke. But she did not have cigarettes. So she need to go buy them. This was back when college campuses still sold them in machines. And I remember following her out of the dorm, in the night, in the cold. She was storming across the courtyard, on the 5 minute walk to the commons building that had the vending machines. I was continuing to fight with her, but also pressuring her not to go through with it (though, of course, I wanted desperately for her to do it). We got to the building, and she purchased the cigarettes. By this point, I think the fight had subsided, especially or at least partly due to the fact that I'd given in to the desire to indulge the fetish. And it was this night, sitting in the lobby of that building, that she "taught" me how to smoke properly. I had never actually done it right before, and had not done it at all for many years, probably since those experimentations of ages 12-14. LC was the one who told me not to try to breathe it in, but to first suck it into my mouth, and then inhale. And I remember feeling like I had "learned" something from her. And it made the fetish a bit more powerful, and also made the bond with her a little stronger. But in hindsight, I think that night was probably the closest we ever became, because that was the big opportunity to come clean and I don't think I did it.

For the entire first year of college, we went back and forth, with her stopping and then starting. And us fighting a lot. Some very big fights. I do not even remember if I told her that I had a fetish. But I think I might have eventually. Because I remember there coming a turning point where I would ask her to smoke for me. Or with me. But I was always very controlling of it. The fetish was mine. And I did not want to lose control over it. I don't know how to put it better than that. I didn't know how to communicate honestly about the feelings around it. So instead, I would manipulate. It's surprisingly a bit fuzzier of a memory than I thought it would be. Selective amnesia perhaps. I remember doing it together a bit. In fact, during that relationship was probably when I almost did it enough to develop a tolerance for it. But of course, always in private, except around LC's one roommate, who was sort of allowed in on the secret (probably way more than she wanted to be a part). I remember only one time where I did it with her in a completely public place. It was near the cafeteria in the student union building, at an area where people would sit. But it was in the evening, so there was not much traffic through there. I don't know why, but it was some reason we were on campus, and I remember it being both a rush, and a bit scary to be doing it in public. I do think I remember specifically wanting her to do it in public at that time. And I also remember that we fought about it, since we fought about everything. During that relationship I also started manipulating her about what brand she was smoking. Wanting her to smoke lighter cigarettes. Then wanting her to smoke all-white cigarettes. Strange, because that was a very short-lived interest, and then it was back to finding the Marlboro to be the sexiest thing. I don't know what was going on in my head, but maybe it was just about manipulating. Making her do it for me, instead of for herself.

I don't think I learned anything positive from that encounter, when it comes to the fetish. I don't know if it was a Dark Ages, or a Renaissance. It was most definitely an indulgence, without honesty, sensitivity, or understanding. And it pretty much set a pattern for a large chunk of the years to come. And it also marks the start of the time period which is going to be harder for me to talk about.

Nice girls don't? Or do they?

2009-06-23T01:38:00.000-07:00

Okay. I was about to jump straight into college where the meat of my experiences begin, but I thought of one more precursor story that I think is worth relating, because it does set somewhat of the stage for the theme that emerged subsequently.

During my senior year of high school, the pizza place where I worked often asked me if I would be interested/willing to fill in at other stores, in order to help them out, and get some extra hours. One time I agreed to work at a store in the neighboring town. While working there that day, there was a very cute girl (EO) who was working with me. We immediately struck up a flirtation, and it was obvious that we liked each other. Again, it seemed that I could only manage to hook up with girls from other towns. Not sure why that was. The only girls I actually "dated" in high school were AH, from a neighboring town, whom I'd met through a friend (a non-smoker) and TK, from another neighboring town, whom I met at a track-meet (also a non-smoker). TK was the first girl that I was probably supposed to have slept with, but I was so stupid and naive, that I missed whatever opportunity there had been, this during my junior year of high school, and she promptly blew me off, no doubt for being a guy who "just didn't get it".

Anyway, EO and I were having a great time. And when she got off work, she sat down in the lobby and lit a cigarette. And suddenly, I became very interested in her. She was probably 16 or 17. So, we exchanged phone numbers, and we started talking on the phone a lot. We went on a few dates. And as soon as we started talking, one of the first things she had said to me was "I am really sorry about the smoking. I know it's disgusting, and I am totally trying to stop". Now, the "me" of today might have said something honest like "Actually, I really don't mind if you do it occasionally. I think it's kind of sexy". But the "me" of 1985 said... nothing. Thus, EO never again smoked in front of me, if at all. Not once. We probably went on half a dozen dates. She was crazy about me, and I would talk on the phone with her for hours, doing funny voices and making her laugh. We totally could have been boyfriend and girlfriend. She was certainly a great choice. But for some reason, I got bored really fast. I decided she wasn't that smart. Or wasn't that interesting. I really don't know. I am not sure it had anything to do with her not smoking. In fact, I think it probably had more to do with her not being that smart or interesting. But she was cute. And if she had smoked, there's probably a good chance I would have spent a longer amount of time figuring out that she was not smart or interesting due to being hypnotized by the fetish.

I cannot remember for sure, but I do think that I brought up the question of smoking with her several times. But the way I would do it was backwards and passive. I would ask if she had been smoking, in such a way that might have sounded as if the correct answer was "no". I think that would be a recurring pattern straight through my life. A woman would have to know me really well to know that the "correct" answer (meaning, the answer that was going to turn me on) was "yes".

So, long before graduation, EO and I parted ways, and I never heard from her again. But there was a period of time where I wondered if she might have been my first love, if I'd given her half a chance. After her, there was one other girl I dated briefly, who was an occasional smoker (also from the pizza place). Her story is another deal altogether, but it has nothing to do with smoking so I won't tell the story here, other than to say (just to tease you) that the story contains the following features: proms, older boyfriends, cheating, blow jobs, car accidents, and hospitals.

Curious?

Ha!

The beginnings of "The Paradox"

2009-06-22T06:21:00.000-07:00

So, things got much "better" in terms of opportunities for viewing. And the reason for this was that I got a job working at a restaurant. I need to pause here for a second and remind myself of why I am writing this blog, because I think it would be easy for it to devolve into a long list of me telling you about all the things I've seen and all the things I've done, and having it be no better (from my point of view as a writer) than "fetish material", which is specifically not what I was trying to create here.

What was the point of this blog? Well, I wanted to relate things about the chronology of my fetish to my emotional development, and understanding of self, and try to present what might be a quite typical experience so that we can all relate to it, and feel a little more comfortable. I will feel more comfortable (ideally) because I think though all of this. And you will feel more comfortable (ideally) because you'll realize that you're not alone. And maybe in some small way, we'd even have a good chat via the comment section of this blog.

So let me be careful not to turn this into a long list of girls that I have seen smoking. But also, let me be careful to not remove so much of "that", such that it becomes boring. Right?

Back to the restaurant. Working in the restaurant, I was around a lot of girls who were smokers. And it was different from anything I had experienced before, because I no longer needed to be sneaking a glance at them. Instead, I was working with them, taking breaks with them, having meals with them, and pretty much just hanging out with them. So this might have started to be the point at which I became a little bit less voyeuristic, since I didn't have to be. Though, I probably still was. Because, in addition to the coworkers, who were always around, there were also customers who would only be around for a little while. This was when smoking was still allowed in all restaurants. So if I noticed that there were some really cute girls sitting in the dining room and smoking, suddenly I would be volunteering to go clear tables (which I hated to do, so the managers should have known there was some sort of ulterior motive). Again, even at age 16 or 17, I was probably still really obvious and not very tactful at all. Given that I have even had significant others tell me that my "staring" can be a bit intense, I can imagine that whatever I was doing to these poor girls was probably more than a little bit disconcerting.

The thing I really wanted to get into here was "The Paradox".

Here I was, surrounded by all of these girls who smoked. And I had an excellent rapport with all of them. And they thought I was cute. And they thought I was funny and smart. But I would not ask any of them out, or try to be their boyfriend! Why? Because I wouldn't date a smoker.

There you have it. That, in a nutshell, is pretty much the essence of my entire existence on this planet. There were a lot of reasons I had in my head. These included things such as... she's got to be part of the wrong crowd if she is a smoker, or... I wouldn't want my parents to find out, or... I wouldn't want my friends to find out. The list of reasons went on and on. But the truth is, on the one hand, I was completely aroused and driven insane by these girls, but on the other hand, I would not date any of them. And ironically, I never dated a single girl from my town in all of high school. I had crushes, but none of them ever went out with me. But here, right there for the picking, were a big handful of dating opportunities that I passed up.

At one point in time, there was this girl, BR, who actually was from a very messed up family. She was probably only 16 and I was 17, and we had a strange flirtation that would go on. She wasn't very intelligent, I am sad to say. She had a certain streetwise ability, but she was not going to be applying the Pythagorean Theorem to the pizza slices, put it that way. Anyway, she smoked Marlboro Red which, to this day, I still think is the sexiest thing, for reasons that I cannot fully explain, but perhaps, at some point, I will write an entry devoted to my attempt at offering a rational explanation for a completely irrational preference. Anyway, like I said, because she smoked, I wouldn't date her. Well, at one point, she said she had quit smoking. So I asked her on a date. And we had a pretty good time. We went out a few times. And of course, when we were out, I was almost undoubtedly thinking about her smoking, and wishing that she were, while simultaneously acknowledging to myself that if she were, I would stop dating her.

It turned out, after a few dates, we stopped seeing each other anyway. I sort of just blew her off, which was primarily because one of my coworkers, who was also a friend of mine, had a huge crush on her, and I think his feelings were immensely hurt that she went out with me and not him. So first his feelings were hurt. And then her feelings were hurt. And then, not long after, she started smoking again. And then things returned to the way they were before the whole thing started. So, BR was messed up, yes. But there were a number of other girls at work during that time - well, at least two that I can think of - who were not messed up. And I could have, and probably should have dated them.

That issue of being uncomfortable with my identity, though... it kept me from seeking anything that might make me happy. However, this is not to say that dating a girl who smoked was the thing that was essential for making me happy. But I should also not have let that thing, which happened to be a huge turn on, also be a reason not to date them. I was way too concerned about impressions and what people thought. And I spent most of my youth, and adult years worried about what everyone else thinks.

Sadly, I think I still worry about what people think. Fortunately, that list of people has shrunken to be a very short list. Fortunately again, that list does not include my parents. And even in the case of the few people whose approval I still seek, I am fully aware of the absurdity of it, and at least try not to let it govern my choices.

My first time kissing a smoker

2009-06-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

I am not 100% sure that I am correct in this assertion, but I am pretty sure I am. But maybe not. Hm... Let's say yes, just so the story has the proper impact.

When I was finishing up junior high school, and definitely into the first couple of years of high school, I had an occasional job helping a friend's family. They sold goods at flea markets. It was more of a hobby for them, as they both had regular jobs, but they liked to set up a booth and sell some items that were easy to sell - things like the rock and roll pins (think: Duran Duran) and Jordache purses, and all the kinds of crap that kids would beg their parents to buy for them. I remember those Jordache bags well, because we always had to say the same thing when people asked how much they cost: A dollar seventy-five each, or three for five dollars. We said that so many times, that I used actually refer to my friend by that phrase as a nickname.

There were a number of these flea markets on different days and different times of the year. Through the crappy seasons, there would be big indoor ones at a couple of sites. And then in the summer time there would be the huge outdoor festivals. Of particular note (giving away my location), there were these Italian Saints festivals in a particular neighborhood of a particular city. And those would be a blast because there would be huge crowds.

So, as you also might suspect, at these flea markets and festivals, there would be a lot of women passing by. Some of these women were attractive. And some of these women smoked. That alone was fair payment for my services. On occasion, I would see one who was roughly my age, maybe a little older, who was particularly arousing to me, and I would have to follow her around for a bit so I could watch her. I don't know. Is that wrong? Probably. But I didn't do anything bad.

One time, at one of the Italian festivals, I started talking to a girl at the booth, near the very beginning of the day. And she smoked. And she was cute enough. And it was clear that she liked me, and I liked her. And as the day wore on, it was clear that we wanted to have some time alone together. I think that, by this point in my life, I had kissed maybe a couple of other girls. I could have even been 16 at this point. So, I got permission to go wander off with this girl for a bit, instead of performing my work duties. And it was evening. We would stick around at these festivals sometimes until midnight when the whole thing ended.

And I remember walking all around with her, and I am pretty sure that she smoked when I was with her. And then we ended up sitting down somewhere quiet, and making out for a little bit. I don't remember her name. And I never saw her again. But that might have been the first time I had ever kissed a girl who was a smoker. I don't remember much about it. I just remember that it was not "nasty" like I had been told it would be. I actually think that there are many things that can make kissing a person nasty. The number one thing would be oral hygeine in terms of brushing or flossing. And number two would be if they have a tendency to eat a lot of things that cause them to be nasty on a regular basis. But smoking, in and of itself, as you probably agree, if you're here reading this, is not something that is inherently nasty. In fact, at the worst, it is "interesting". And at best, it's kind of sweet and enticing. But this is coming from the keyboard of a fetishist, so probably it's best to take what I say with a grain of salt or some Listerine.

All that said, I am sure that the thing that was the biggest turn out of that whole experience was that she was just this normal girl, who happened to smoke, and she liked me, and she wanted to kiss me. And that was a new thing for me. It was a combination of things that I hadn't experienced and perhaps did not think were available to me except as a fantasy, especially given how much fantasizing I had done around the subject.

Awkward encounters with the girls and with myself

2009-06-22T05:45:00.000-07:00

Jumping backwards in time just a little bit, because I missed a bit of relevant history that's come back to me. These fragments I cannot really pin to a specific age, but I am guess that it would be the 12-13 range. I should mention a few things.

I think it was around this age that I experimented with smoking myself. And actually, it would be an overstatement to call it "experimenting" because I did it alone, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And the goal was not to really experiment with smoking, but to play in the fantasy around it. It was not difficult for me to do this, because of my mother being a smoker, and there always being them around the house. This made it such that, at least from my perspective, I didn't even believe that I needed to leave the house to do this. I would just go into the bathroom. In hindsight, this is probably another example of self-absorbed stupidity, because even though the house had a smoker living in it, I think it was still quite likely that it would be known that something was "off" if I were experimenting in the bathroom. I am trying not to be embarrassed even writing about this, because I realize how silly it sounds.

But I did "try" it a few times. And every time I did, I would get an insane adrenaline rush of anticipation, and arousal. But I really didn't know how to do it, and never learned to inhale, and honestly was not really interested in learning. It was all about exploration of the fetish. On one occasion, I had been rummaging through a box of stuff in the closet of the bathroom, and I found a pack of cigarettes that had been stashed away. It was unopened. And it was apparently some sort of special thing, because the package identified it as a commerative Apollo-Soyuz something or other, and might have even had Russian text on it. I have no clue where this came from, but it was obvious that these were just being stored, never to be used. And I don't have the faintest clue how old they were. Maybe they were opened, actually. I don't really remember. But they'd been "forgotten" for sure. So, on this one occasion, I got the idea to take them down, and take one and pretend to smoke in front of the bathroom mirror. This obviously got me very aroused, and I was able to translate this in my mind into it being a woman, and voila. New stimulus for masturbation. This happened at least a handful of times, and eventually would evolve into me spending longer periods of time in the bathroom, putting on makeup even, all so I could look more like a woman and pretend to smoke. And of course, it culminated in fulfilling the plan to actually smoke, with the makeup, in front of the mirror. There was a lot of shame mixed in with the arousal, and it was confusing too. Because I was doing things that I knew were "wrong". And I also knew enough about sexuality to recognize that there was a mixed signal in there somewhere. But I now also know that there's a difference between a) wanting to be a woman, b) wanting to be with men, and c) pretending to be a woman in order to fulfill a fantasy that involves women to whom I did not have access.

I know that it was not unnoticed. There would be times where my mother would yell into the bathroom, "What are you doing in there?!" to which I would, of course, reply "Nothing!"

One must assume that I did a horrible job of concealing the evidence, and that they probably thought I was potentially a very strange boy. Though, much as mentioned earlier in the "No Birds, No Bees" entry, they never said a word to me (that I recall) about any of this.

The one other thing from the early history that just came back to me was a conversation with neighborhood kids. One time, I was outside playing with a few of the kids on the next block. There were a couple of girls (twins) who were really nice kids, same age as me (though, a grade behind, if I remember correctly), and then an older girl, maybe 2 years older, who was nice, but slightly on the side of being prone to trouble. One time, the older girl asked me if I smoke, and I didn't want to say no, because I thought it would be uncool, and I didn't want to say yes, because I was uncomfortable with that too. And I definitely was probably interested in angling for a possibility of seeing these girls smoke (which did not happen). So I said yes. She asked me what kind I smoked, and I said something really stupid like "whatever", and I remember her responding with something like "Yeah? Anything you can get your hands on, huh?" and I felt really stupid because the reality was that I really didn't smoke, and that I felt like an ashamed little fool.

Isolated and alone

2009-06-18T00:59:00.000-07:00

Until I was well into my twenties, I was pretty sure I was the only person in the world who had a smoking fetish. Except for possibly my grandfather, but if you've read the whole blog, you know that story, and that it was likely a fabrication, with no truth to it whatsoever. So I was alone. And isolated. Lonely. And felt stigmatized. Whenever we would talk about girls, my guy friends would always call out the unpleasant flaw "But she smokes... that's disgusting", to which I would pretty much have to just be quiet. I certainly never felt comfortable telling them what I really felt about it. In fact, to this day, at age 40, I have never told a male friend of mine about the fetish. I have told a lot of women. Girlfriends whom I've told? At least 9. Plus two other female friends. Plus at least 3 therapists.

I will come back to those stories later.

But to be in your teens is already to feel like you're different from everyone, and to be constantly struggling to be accepted, without hardly a hope of being able to accept yourself. And when you throw the fetish into the mix, I guess I was rather uncomfortable.

Ironically, I imagine that a greater number of people learned about my fetish in the last week through this blog than had learned about it in my "real life" in the entire 30 years prior. That's a bit funny to me.

High School courtyard longing

2009-06-18T00:46:00.001-07:00

When I got to high school, there was a whole new opportunity for what was fast becoming a kind of voyeurism for me. It had been mostly limited to photographs or movies or the occasional adult that I would encounter when I was younger. But when I got to high school, suddenly I was surrounded by people who were up to 4 years older than I was. And of course, high school was a time when a lot of people, or girls, as the case may be, would start smoking.

I should quickly interject a side note here, that I have never been a smoker. And I am not sure if I could become one even if I set my mind to it. I have done it occasionally, rarely, but only in the context of the fetish. And I never developed the tolerance for it that it seems others develop reasonably quickly. So, the voyeurism that I will describe is also a bit more awkward because of the fact that I was always an observer, and never a participant.

In addition to the fact that I was not a member of the smoking crowd, I was actually, if anything, a member of the opposite crowd -- the track team. So there was really nobody that I would hang around with who was a smoker. So I really needed to step out of the bounds of my normal activities to observe.

And the place that I had quite an opportunity was in the cafeteria of our high school, after school or before school. Because there was a courtyard just outside the cafeteria, and in the 1980s there was not yet any sort of strict enforcement of smoking policies at high schools. So the kids would freely hang outside and do whatever they wanted. And I would hang inside, occasionally, and watch. And it was definitely awkward, because there was really no good reason for me to be hanging out there. But it was a chance for me to see it in person, rather than in my imagination, or in print. I don't really recall how frequently I did this, but I do remember doing it. There was one girl who was a senior when I was a freshman. Not only was she beautiful, but she was also a very experienced-looking smoker, especially for her age. And there was something about her style that was so incredibly attractive. She never met me, though I did occasionally see her years later at a pizza place where I worked, because she would come in to pick up an order. But I didn't exist in her world. It's weird the notion of someone being such an obsession in my mind, and I don't even exist in their world. And the fetish did that to me a bit. I don't even remember her name, but I think it was a name that starts with a P, and has a nickname that starts with a T. That leaves very few guesses.

She was the best of the bunch. But she wasn't the only one.

Yet still. By the time I was 15, I had probably still never actually had a girlfriend, other than the childhood girlfriends. And I had never had the opportunity to spend much time close to a girl who was a smoker. So I had to catch these glimpses wherever I could. At the mall. On the street. After school. On the movie theater screen. It was a little later that I started to have encounters.

The sexiest thing I had ever seen

2009-06-16T22:20:00.001-07:00

I was probably 13 years old. And I was, of course, in junior high school. Probably 8th grade, if I remember correctly. A very close friend of mine, RW, had invited me to have a sleepover at his house. It was summertime, so perhaps it was between 7th and 8th grade, actually. It was warm, and we had set up a tent in his backyard. Stayed up late talking. And at one point, RW brought out to the tent a girly magazine. It was possibly, probably, the first one of these that I had ever seen. It had belonged to his older brother. I think it was a Penthouse. At 13, this was a big deal to see. We flipped through the pages together with a flashlight in the tent. Ironically, RW is gay. Of course, we did not talk about that at the time, nor did I know it. Though I suspect that he knew it, and he was trying to like something that he didn't really like.

Looking through the magazine, we reached one of those sections where they had a whole "story" on a girl. Several pages of photos, including some clearly fictional background info. A little profile. This girl was supposed to be outdoorsy. She was supposed to be a country girl. And as we flipped through the pages, there were photos of her nude in a field by a horse, which was a little bizarre. And some other suggestive poses around nature. No bestiality of course, and if there had been, I don't think I'd be telling you about it, other than for sake of amusement. And then we turned another page, and there was the picture that I remember vividly to this very day. The girl had auburn hair and brown eyes. Her hair pulled back in a bun with loose tendrils framing her face. She was posed in a grassy field. She had smooth, slightly tanned skin -- not overly so. She was squatted in a half crouch, almost like a catcher's stance. Her lower half was nude, in three-quarter view. She was wearing boots. She had a loose delicate magenta blouse on her top. And she was holding a half-smoked Marlboro in her hand, having just taken a drag on the cigarette, so that the smoke was visible coming out of the filter.

I saw that image, and I was awe-struck. Because it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It defined a fantasy that I am not sure I had previously even known how to define. I remember that, as we looked at the pages, in silence, laying in the tent with a flashlight, I had an orgasm just from laying on my stomach with the pressure against the ground. I was very, very quiet about it. And I doubt that RW suspected anything. But it was a little bit shameful. Then, when RW was not looking, I tore the page out of the magazine, and folded it up, and hid it. Saved it. I am pretty sure this occurred after the confiscation of the hidden advertisements in the bookcase. Pretty sure. And I hid this much better, because I believe I had it still into my late twenties, in a box. I am pretty sure. Not 100%. But I do recall stumbling upon it from time to time when moving and packing. I do believe it is gone now.

I think it is possible that image may have largely shaped elements of what I found sexiest about smoking. But it is also possible that it just happened to resonate with things that I had already found sexy, and that's why I bonded with it.

My first real-world fetish encounter

2009-06-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

I will refer to all real people in this story by their initials. I think that's safe, since you don't know who I am. It just helps me keep track of things. And I also think it's kind of amusing to use the intials motif, like all the psychology literature uses. Because this is psychology literature, of sorts.

My first "girlfriend" was SK. I met her at summer camp. I was 12 and she was 11. And we fooled around more than I can, in hindsight, believe. We didn't have sex. But there was most definitely a significant amount of activity that would not be construed as "age-appropriate". Oddly, I didn't actually have sex for another 5 1/2 years after that. So, I was fast out of the starting gates, but then sputtered out for quite some time. Sigh.

Anyway, at some point in time, it came to discussion that SK had experimented with smoking. She was only 11. But I guess her mother smoked, and had even told her that if she ever wanted to try it, she should ask, rather than do it behind her back.

And I remember having a telephone conversation where SK was at home, alone, and she was talking about doing it. And then she actually smoked in her house, while she was on the phone with me. And I most definitely remember masturbating while talking to her. I never told her that I had the fetish, because I was obviously in no way able to verbalize these feelings. But that was my first real-life "encounter" with the fetish. Arguably, it was also my first real-life encounter with phone sex as well! But that's a different topic entirely, isn't it?

SK and I dated only a little while, and I never actually saw her smoke. And I am not even sure if we discussed the topic again. But she was my first girlfriend. Oddly, I was put in contact with her on Facebook recently via a common friend. 28 years later. She looks different than she did when she was 11.

Hypotheses of Origins... Take #1

2009-06-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

So all of that indirect communication and strangeness with my mother was probably all part of the beginning of the shame. Of course, the shame is not surprising in the least, since smoking is something that has become increasingly taboo. My father strongly disapproved of my mother's smoking. But he also was a supportive husband, and if she asked him to buy them for her at the store, he would comply because it wasn't loving to say "no, do it yourself", especially if the weather had been bad outside. Given the lack of giving and communication that I observed between my mother and father in general, I have often wondered if that one act of selfless generosity, "I will buy you cigarettes even though I disapprove of your smoking", in some way contributed to my having a fetish in the first place. Perhaps that was the only thing I ever saw my father do for my mother when I was a kid? I don't really know. They were not close. They argued a bit. Never saw them hug or kiss. They didn't even sit on the sofa together. By the time I was 8 or 9 years old, they were sleeping in separate beds in the same room. So perhaps my little brain was trying to understand what makes a bond between two people? Where is the connection? And the wedge topic was the smoking. His care for her health and well-being was demonstrated by his admonishing her smoking. But at the same time, he would buy them for her. Maybe he had a smoking fetish?! Maybe it was genetic?

Well, I know it wasn't genetic. Because I can see no biological explanation for that. I am not even sure if any research has ever shown fetish of any sort to be genetically linked, though that would be an interesting PubMed search for later.

I won't ever know the origin. And it doesn't matter. It just kind of sucks to want to guess.

No Birds, No Bees

2009-06-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

My parents never talked to me about sex, in any traditional way. I only recall maybe 2 conversations that were related to the subject when I was young, and then one conversation when I was about 18, when they became aware that I was having sex.

Shortly after my sexual "awakening", I started to realize that I could control the good feeling, and make it happen. And I knew that I wanted to look at pictures of women smoking. Again, not sure why. But that's just where my mind went. And the way it manifested itself is that I would go through all of my mother's magazines: Better Homes and Gardens, Woman's Day, whatever the hell she had laying around. And I would tear out the pictures of cigarette advertisements that had attractive women in them. Because I was 11 or 12 years old, maybe 13 at the oldest, I wasn't particularly tactful, nor did I plan ahead for possible eventualities, such as discovery. I just tore out the ones I wanted, and I would look at them in bed in the dark, after I went to sleep. And I would rub against the bed, and I would have an orgasm. Then I would fold up whatever pictures I had taken, and I put them away. By "away", I mean, I threw them all on my bookcase, behind the row of books. To keep things interesting, I would reach, each day, randomly behind the books, and grab a couple, and those would be the pictures that I looked at. Of course I had favorites, but variety was an important factor.

This went on for a long time. I don't know how long. If it was months, or a couple of years. But it was quite some time. During this time, I remember three things that occurred. All of which made me feel embarrassed.

Embarrassing Thing #1: One day, my mother, out of the blue, decides to inform me that when my brother was young, he would arouse himself by sticking his penis between the mattress and boxspring and that it he would take care of himself that way. And she said that she would be making the bed and tucking in the sheets and discover a sticky mess. Now, I am not sure if she explained to me much, but I am fairly certain that the reason she said this was because either my sheets or my pajamas were starting to be stained from my nocturnal activities. But instead of being direct, she related this embarrassing story about my brother.

Embarassing Thing #2: One day, I reach behind my books on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and the folded up photos are gone. Not one there. Of course, this makes sense. My mother was probably dusting the bookcase, and came across this pile of troubling material, and she discarded it. I can't even imagine the discussions she and my father had. I figured out that they must have been taken, but nothing was ever said about the pictures, by anyone.

Embarrassing Thing #3: One day, my mother, out of the blue, decides to inform me that my grandfather (my father's father) used to like to watch my grandmother (my father's mother) smoke, and that he would make her do it to turn him on. I just sat there, acting stupid and didn't say anything. To this day, I don't know if that story is true. I suspect it was not, and that my mother was trying to provoke a discussion around the fetish, which she had obviously figured out from the pictures she had found. But the problem with this was many-fold. First, I spent the next 15-20 years of my life thinking that my fetish was genetic. Second, it was an odd thing for my mom to do, implicating her in-laws in her scheme to try to get me to talk. I seriously doubt it was true. Maybe it was. Who knows. Maybe it was? Hm...

So that was probably all part of the beginning of the shame. Of course, the shame is not surprising in the least, since smoking is something that has become increasingly taboo. My father strongly disapproved of my mother's smoking. But he also was a supportive husband, and if she asked him to buy them for her at the store, he would comply because it wasn't loving to say "no, do it yourself". Given the lack of giving and communication that I observed between my mother and father, I have often wondered if that one act of selfless generosity, "I will buy you cigarettes even though I disapprove of your smoking", in some way contributed to my having a fetish in the first place.

The Beginning: 29+ Years Ago

2009-06-09T17:15:00.000-07:00

I am not sure if my smoking fetish began 29 years ago, or longer. I presume its origins would have to date back further in time than that. But I do remember that the first time I experienced what one might call an orgasm, albeit minus any form of ejaculate, was when I lived in my second childhood home, which means that I was over 10 years old. Possibly over 11 years old. Silly and embarrassing recalling it, but I would press myself up against the corner of a chair or sofa, and after a little while, it would feel good. I didn't know what I was doing. Had no idea that it was sexual. And had no idea why I was doing it. I am not entirely sure how we start doing these things. Are they purely by accident? Or does a switch flip inside us that says "Start being horny now"?

At any rate, that is my earliest "sexual" memory. And what I also know is that I was thinking about a woman smoking when I was doing it. I don't remember which woman it was. I am nearly positive that it was not my mother, who was 53 at that time. And I am also nearly positive that it was not my sister, who was 26 at that time. Although, both of them were regular smokers. I don't recall having any Oedipal or incestuous tendencies then, or ever! It might have been a neighbor, or a distant relative, or someone on the television that I thought about. I really don't know.

But that's where it started.

The history of it is probably somewhat muddied. I will try to relate to you the approximate chronology of things. But obviously, this is my recalling things that started 29 years ago, which I never documented at all. Once I got to the age that I was exploring the fetish in relationships, I think my historical data will be far more accurate, because I will always have the dates of the relationships to mark time.

Smoking Fetish Diary: Mission Statement

2009-06-09T17:04:00.000-07:00

This blog is starting today. This is the first entry.

I have had a smoking fetish for at least 29 years. Possibly longer. Other than the women whom I have dated, the therapists I have seen, and my private, abandoned diary, I have never shared my story. Because this is anonymous, I guess it could be said that I am not really sharing the story here either; at least not in a way that makes me vulnerable. Nonetheless, it is a form of sharing, because I am opening myself up to comments, and also providing my experiences as a potential avenue through which you can evaluate and accept your own fetish.

So let me tell you what my "mission statement" will be for this blog:

To relate the history of my smoking fetish, as far back as I can remember
To talk about the role it has played in my life, and in my relationships
To talk about my feelings around the fetish
To discuss the role the internet has played in my acceptance (and indulgence)
To talk about types of material available online, and my preferences
To talk about different segments and variations of the fetish

And let me tell you what are specific "non-goals" for this blog:

I do not intend to post or repost photos or videos; this could change
I will not reveal the identity of anyone from "my world"
I will probably not engage in battle with detractors of the topic

Now that we have that out of the way, let the story begin.