Frenching In Flavor Country

An Ode To The Perverse Joy of Kissing Cigarette Smokers

By: Toxicka Shock

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Let me preface all of this by saying that, at the ripe old age of 30-something, I have *never* smoked a cigarette in my life. Not even once, not even on a dare, I mean N-E-V-E-R.

Which makes my sexual affinity for smokers all the more confounding. I’m sure there’s some deep, Freudian reason for why I’m attracted to cigarette users, but I can’t really explain WHY it’s something that turns me on so much.

Before all of you Oedipal theorists start digging your incisors into me, yes, my mother did smoke. But here’s the thing - as a kid, I was positively *revolted* by her habit. Every time she lit up (which was often) I gagged and wheezed and fought the urge to vomit. I could’ve even bare to look at one of her ashtrays - even now, the sight of a ceramic graveyard for stubbed out cigs makes my stomach turn. Based on those early developmental experiences, then, you’d think that watching somebody smoke would be an insta-boner-killer for me.

Think again.

A few weeks ago I had a casual lunch with an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in quite some time. Keep in mind, this is a female that I have zero sexual interest in, even in a casual, no-commitment-wanted-or-desired context. So we sit down, about four feet away from one another, and suddenly, the stench of her last cigarette starts seeping into my nostrils. And when the synapses finally hit my brain, all of a sudden, my strictly platonic lunch date instantly became the most sexually alluring person on the planet.

Every word that escaped from her lips pushed another gust of tobacco breath into my face, and I was absolutely entranced. I honestly can’t remember the minutiae of our conversation, because the entire time my subconscious was screaming “please stick your tongue in my mouth right now!” It had been quite some time since I experienced a libidal urge that intense; apparently, all of that time in COVID-isolation only made my second-hand smoke fetish all the more potent.

If a nucleus of the kink had to be pinpointed, perhaps you’d have to roll things all the way back to my very first French kiss. At was at a junior high Halloween dance with this one super-weird goth girl in my drama class who didn’t wear deodorant and rocked neon blue lipstick decades before it was fashionable. And of course, she smoked heavily.

I’ve always considered French kissing to be the first major sexual experience of our lives. And for my introduction to the delightful word of swapping spit, my makeout partner just so happened to have breathe that reeked of Marlboro Reds. If I close my eyes and focus really hard, I swear I can *still* feel her juicy, slug-like tongue rolling over my teeth. And I can still taste the residue of her tobacco smoke on my tonsils - and it excites me to no end.

I’m not sure if that particular incident alone turned me into a non-participating smoking fetishist, but it’s hard to disconnect my sexual awakening from that very specific tactile sensation. It’s almost crudely Pavlovian, but it makes sense: if I see or smell an attractive individual smoking, my mind automatically links it with oral pleasure.

Moving forward, I’d venture to guess that about 80 percent of my subsequent romantic partners have all been at least casual cigarette smokers. Virtually every girl I dated in high school was a smoker and my first tongue kiss with another guy in college was - you guessed it - a heavy smoker. That might be coincidental. But it probably isn’t.

Indeed, so strong my attraction to cigarette smokers I’ve even snogged a couple of people I wasn’t physically attracted to JUST so I could experience the joy of licking the nicotine residue off another person’s tongue. Again, that would make some degree of sense if I was a former smoker myself, but nope - I’m still a cigarette virgin and have NO desire to smoke myself whatsoever.

Here’s the thing we don’t want to admit, culturally. Despite everything we know about the dangers of cigarettes, there’s no way around it - smoking is intrinsically sexy. The entire process of smoking has a slow, sensual, ritualistic bent to it. There’s no way anyway can look at a smoker, especially one they have a pre-existing sexual interest in, stick a long, slender, cylindrical shaft in their mouth without impulsively thinking “oral sex alert!” There’s a reason why so many femme fatales are depicted as heavy cigarette smokers - and let’s don’t pretend that that age-old axiom “if they smoke, they poke” doesn’t have at least some basis in social reality. Even if they aren’t more sexually-promiscuous, smokers just seem to look and act more sexual in general; even if it’s not intentional, there’s something innately seductive about their ritualized smoking behaviors.

Pretty much every aspect of the cigarette smoking experience has at least *some* erotic quality to it. Even lifelong anti-tobacco crusaders have to admit that it’s entrancing to watch a plume of silver miasma spewing over a beautiful smoker’s glossy, pouty pink lips, or to watch someone playfully twist and turn the cigarette itself through their spindly, dainty fingers like a flaming baton. It’s a rhythmic process, and one that seems almost innately femme. It’s a slow, eloquent, flowing process - an aesthetic that bleeds an irresistible cocktail of old Hollywood glamor and rock and roll hedonism. It’s classy AND trashy at the same time, a pastime that feels submissively feminine and rebelliously masculine in almost equal proportions. No matter how much we try to skirt the issue, cigarette smoking is always going to be sexually suggestive - and to a large contingent of people, sexually stimulating.

For me, the key factor is something a lot of people find downright disgusting - cigarette breath. We’ve all heard that canard a million times about how kissing a smoker is like licking an ash tray; alas, lost in the hackneyed utterance is the less-publicized reality that a lot of people, indeed, appear to enjoy licking ash trays. That is, just as long as the ash tray in question takes the form of a lover’s mouth.

I *love* the scent of cigarette breath. It’s not just the odor of burning paper and tar, it’s this magical biochemical elixir of tobacco, nicotine, saliva, bacteria, cosmetics, perfume and pheromones (which, it is to be noted, is often coupled with whatever the individual in question last ate, drank or had swishing around their teeth over he last few hours or so.) The overpowering olfactory sensation of the cigarette breathe itself is usually enough to get me swooning - that it IS such a strong and nasal-assaulting aroma is *precisely* why I like it in the first place. It utterly WRAPS you up in another person’s breath, to the point that you can’t help but focus on them and them exclusively. Their presence is unmistakable; whether you like it or not, you HAVE to fall under their spell, so to speak, even if it’s a spell that makes you nauseous.

Naturally, considering how much I like smelling cigarette breath, I suppose its’s not surprising that I also have an affinity for kissing cigarette smokers. Again, it’s an act that many people find disgusting, but to me, it’s about as powerful of an aphrodisiac as I can imagine.

Kissing is the most intimate thing two people can do - yes, even more intimate than sex, considering the insane amount of INDIVIDUAL bacteria and enzymes that get swapped back and forth during your standard open mouth smooch. French kissing is thus an extremely passionate and extremely unhygienic social bonding mechanism; not only is it meant to stimulate you sexually, it’s also meant to voluntarily expose oneself to a staggering array of alien microbes and oral diseases and protein-rich phlegm - a sly little evolutionary ploy to test just how compatible you and your make-out partner’s genetics might be pending you stop swapping spit and start bumping uglies.


Of course, by now we all know that deep kissing isn’t just designed to be a loins-warmer for some well-beyond-first-base encounters. Scientific literature indicates that long, sloppy, gooey tongue kissing bouts also produces profound biochemical reactions in the brain. Not unlike your favorite recreational substance (be it legal or otherwise), kissing causes your brain to release more endorphins and pleasure-causing chemicals into your nervous system; even more salivating, deep kissing also causes certain hormones in your body to spike that produce nearly-euphoric sensations, including a compound called oxytocin which some medical experts go as far as to describe as a naturally-occurring opioid.

Now, why am I going through all of this seemingly needless bio-chem background material? Well, because it ties back into that little cigarette breath kink of mine. So if *regular* kissing causes all of this wild and woolly hormonal and pheromonal tsunamis, what happens when you augment the activity with a substance KNOWN to be physiologically addictive? On a strictly Freudian level, it makes perfect sense. You experience this particular thing that’s pleasurable, so you want to experience it again. And if it’s something innately tied into your developing psyche (which would be the case with one’s first truly romantic kiss, for sure), almost subconsciously you would develop a cause-and-effect fetish as a result.

I don’t know how much clinical research is out there on the hard neuroscience behind specific sexual kinks, but I’d venture to guess that a lot of our sexual tastes as adults stem from some kind of pleasurable hormonal experience we had as adolescents, even if those experiences were indirect or hardly sexually suggestive at all. For example, one of my favorite memories of high school was sitting behind this one older girl whose hair smelled like it was marinated in Virginia Slim smoke. Some days I couldn’t even focus on my algebra tests because her scent - that magnificent mixture of tobacco and cucumber melon lotion - just assailed my nostrils and prodded me into daydreaming about what I’d be like to lock lips and twist tongues with my oblivious object of infatuation. Again, that’s not really a social experience in the traditional sense, and it’s most certainly not one that could be described as sexual in any regard. But somewhere in my brain, that secondary exposure to second-hand smoke is unshakably tied to a profound sense of sexual stimulation. Im sure that if I smelled that same cigarette brand today, I would likely have an erotic response to some degree, even if the person clouded in that scintillating smoky scent was someone I didn’t find sexually attractive.

That’s the thing about sexual kinks and fetishes. Deep down I suppose we can all pinpoint certain catalysts for our interests and paraphilias, but even decades later it’s still a mystery as to WHY we found those early exposures so arousing in the first place. All I know is that I like what I like, and as unhealthy and trashy and unpopular as it may be, I can’t help but be excited by the prospect of torrid kissing with another person whose mouth is stained by the miasma of nicotine.

Mmm. Anybody got a cigarette, by any chance?

XOXO, Toxicka