“All lit up, but with no place to smoke; Something freaky happens when a woman lights a cigar” Special to the Toronto Star, Nov. 16, 2004, C2

When I took my first puff from a cigar, I felt indulgent. I felt defiant. I felt kinmanship with Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway and Monica Lewinsky all at once.

I enjoy stogies, but usually only in the privacy of the backyard. When I finally told my friends, they agreed that I would look like a loser smoking a cigar walking down the street. There's just something about a woman with a cigar that society finds difficult to take.

 In The Cigar Companion: The Connoisseur's Guide it says, "There can be few symbols of capitalism and plutocracy more potent than the cigar. Tycoons rarely seem happier, or more prosperous, than when pictured puffing a large Havana. It says: power, privilege, prestige - and, above all, expense."

Right - for men. But for women cigar smokers, the act is seen as something sexual. Something dirty. Something "ladies" should have no part of.

It was trendy for a while - just a few years ago. In a 1995 Cigar Aficionado article, journalist/supermodel Veronica Webb is quoted as saying, "It's fascinating to see a woman with a cigar because it's about staking a claim. And it often takes people off guard."

But it's over now. Thomas Hinds Tobacconist manager Michael Hegyi says the number of female cigar smokers in Toronto seems to have vanished in a puff of smoke since the cigar lounge trend ended about five years ago.

Hegyi says women who purchase cigars from the Yorkville shop account for barely 1 per cent of its clientele. "When the fad was in, most cigar smokers thought it was pretty sexy to see a woman smoking," he says.

No longer. It must be something about cutting the end off of a thick phallic symbol, then sucking it, that makes men nervous.

In Toronto, the climate for smokers has never been worse. Smoking was always bad for your health, we all know that. But now that the city is enforcing a smoke-free bylaw and has banned smoking in bars, smokers have been pushed outside.

So public smokers who inflict secondhand smoke on others are bad, very bad. But women smoking cigars in public? That takes it to a whole other level. It's the equivalent of being a tramp - according to one eloquent man who saw me publicly puffing.

So I planned an experiment. I would smoke a cigar in public and see if it was more of the same.

I decided to smoke a Romeo y Julieta in the most public place I could think of - Times Square - on a girls-only trip to New York. I felt empowered and liberated when I lit up.

Until the German tourist who was first to admonish me. When he saw the cigar wedged between my fingers, he looked at me, without humour, then spoke in thickly accented English: "Girls shouldn't smoke cigars. It's for men only."

Next followed a series of gesticulations which I interpreted to mean that either cigars would ruin my sinuses or give me crow's feet. I shrugged and moved on.

I continued my triumphant march down the busy sidewalk when I was stopped by my friends Gul and Helen about one short block over. They heard some guy prod his buddy and point at me: "Look at that slut. She might as well be smoking a joint."

I was so angry, I began shaking. But it was enough to make me stub the cigar on the pavement. From now on, I vowed, I would only smoke in the kinds of places where the staff is paid not to care you are a woman smoking a cigar. Like Club 22 at The Windsor Arms hotel where I went with my mother the other day, on one of those mother-daughter bonding jaunts over cigars and espressos.

It had been only six months after I bought my first cigar, a Cohiba, after a tour of a Havana cigar factory where employees - both female and male - smoked as many cigars as they could handle while on the job.

That night, after an embarrassing five minutes where I tried smoking an uncut cigar outside the Varadero nightclub, one of the resort employees grabbed my cigar, bit off the end, spat it on the ground and took two satisfying puffs before handing it back.

 

I felt the smooth smoke swirling around my tongue and I felt a heady rush, even more powerful than the buzz I had from drinking pina coladas.

I felt naughty and a teeny bit rebellious. But no one batted an eyelash. And I didn't feel the need to hide until the plane landed in North America.

It turns out I'm not the only woman who ever felt this way. Cigar Aficionado executive editor Gordon Mott says from day one of the magazine's inception in 1992, "we got letters and phone calls from women saying that they had smoked for 20 years, but they never smoked in public."

But he assured me that the cigar renaissance has made it "more and more acceptable for women to smoke cigars."

In the magazine's early days, the general assumption was that 99.9 per cent of subscribers were male. Yet circulation surveys showed that 5 per cent of subscribers are women. Reader surveys monitoring second- and third-hand readership showed that up to 20 per cent of readers are women.

Mott adds, "There was a time (cigar-smoking) was perceived as a male pastime. And it just wasn't - going back to 19th-century verbiage - a ladylike thing to do."

And when cigar manufacturers tried to market cigars specifically to women, "they found women who smoked cigars were not interested in cigars for women. They were cigar connoisseurs. They wanted a real cigar, they didn't want it packaged or flavoured, and so those one or two efforts made during that period, disappeared."

When I did my research, I saw I was in good company. In Rudman's Complete Guide to Cigars, it says Catherine II, who ruled as absolute monarch and Empress of all the Russias, was also fond of cigars. But as she did not want the nicotine to stain her lily-white fingers, she had silk strips wrapped around her smokes. The story goes that's how the cigar band was introduced.

Marlene Dietrich, Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde fame, and more currently, Jodie Foster, and Whoopi Goldberg, are also known to enjoy a good stogie.

So there are a few of us left.

And even more women would light up if they read the passage in Aldous Huxley's Time Must Have A Stop in which Eustace Barnack uttered, "You should hurry up ... and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear."