The Mad Professor found a note today he had left for himself and neglected to add into his “Fingernails” piece. “Fingernails and smoking,” it says, and I remember what it mean too, and that is that fingernails not only relate to touching the body (lips, neck, tits, pussy and cock), but that fingers and hands often handle objects, also often in close-up, so that the nails are frequently showcased. Often the objects handled involve other fetishes, and that is “the touch on the cigarette,” in the Mad Professor’s stolen logic. But he wasn’t going to get into smoking. Now he is tricked into it.Smoking is one of the Mad Professor’s areas of least expertise. He doesn’t practice it at all (except perhaps for the medicinal kind), and his head is now avoiding this topic of ignorance. He is spinning instead toward all the different kinds of fetish things that hands, fingers and nails might touch. Whips comes to mind. Dildos and toys. Condoms, lipsticks and make up–now there’s a whole ‘nother fetish, the privacy of the boudoir. And trampling. Does that requires pretty toenails or dirty feet? But wait, the Mad Professor is now two stops off course.

Smoking.

The cigarette has long held a deep fascination in sexual media. Long before we suspected its carcinogenic effects it became first a sign of a bad woman (c. 1900), then of the liberated flapper (c. 1920s), to the sophisticate (1940s-1960s). If Freud is correct then a lady drawing on a cigarette — or a long holder like Marlene Dietrich — is metaphorically sucking cock. Freud might likewise be amused by the large dick Rush Limbaugh crews in his mouth. But lets not over-dwell, cigarette or cigar, female or male, the smoking device held into the mouth invites a visual drawing out. There may be no such thing as a “neutral smoker” and sometimes there may well be no sexual intent, but you can most certainly create a sexually charged oral tone with a smoking device.

Why is smoking a fetish? (Why anything? But that’s another topic.) Smoking is a fundamental fetish because it involves a major body marginal: air. What we breath. Oxygen in the air is extracted by our lungs and passed into our bodies; carbon dioxide is passed out on the exhale. Carbonization rate is about 100 watts using carbohydrates in our food as the carbon source. The burn occurs throughout your entire body and all your living tissue. See a 100 watt light bulb for equivalent energy output (albeit in a small space/mass and non-biological). Breathing, that’s what we do.

The smoking device–be it a cigar, pequenos, cigarette, joint, bowl or bong–combusts plant material (tobacco, cannabis) and mixes it with oxygen in the air; upon inhaling molecules from the burned plant pass from the lungs into the bloodstream. Often the air tube is channeled through the smoking device so the incoming air is tunneled in. For example a cigarette filter. Or a small hole gag on a bondage slave who gets smoked.

Upon exhale the smoke reveals the breath. There are other ways to reveal the breath–cold air, breathing into smoke or dry ice, but there is nothing better to excite smoke enthusiasts that mouthfuls of damp smoke rolling out of the performer’s mouth in a languid, humid room, key and back lit on a black limbo. If the girl is naked or giving a blow job at the same time or if she has great nails that can be a double-up and increase the value of the shoot, but the fetishist first and foremost wants to see the details of the act, so it is critical it be staged to maximum effect.

The Mad Professor assumes you can find volumes about the Six Kind of Breaths (the Blow, the Let Out Slowly, the Huff, as well as the more practiced Take Back In, Nostril Drag, and of course, Blowing Rings). There are also…, wait a minute–probably a lot of your smoker friends know tricks and if you are a smoker you know them too. The web experts probably have tips on what the relativity humidity and light positions should be also. The Mad Professor is sometimes less scientific, and if his talent ever wants to take a smoking break he hovers after them in hopes of some candid cig action.

And so you say to yourself, “Why am I reading this? What’s in this for me? Either I become a smoking expert and try to find the one pervert out there who cares to join my website so I can go broke. Or I take off all my clothes and take a picture of myself smoking in the bathroom mirror.”

Well the moral of the story is that maybe there is a middle position. Here’s a research project for you: Pick out a bunch of “cute girl” sites–digital camera plates of relative recent vintage–and see if you can determine the site’s cigarette policy. Do any girls smoke, and if so, how is it treated?

The middle position is the position of the professional webmaster. It views the fetish with the eye of knowledge. The professional knows the cig is seldom there by accident; and when it is present it always contextualizes the scene. The Mad Professor is not sure what he means by “contextualizes,” except that the very presence of the cigarette–and any smoke–changes the scene and changes its interpretation.

We gotta keep our heads up in tough times.

The Mad Professor hope you enjoy reading his rants. His goal is to entertain you, inspire you, share insights about the sexual nature of humans and our media, and mutter about business. In the Picticon he is proud to harbor a hundred plus fetishes, and likes to spawn new ones the same way a virus like to bud from a cell.