Hey, Look at Me!

Written by Smoke Signals | 30 April 2012

Hey, Look at Me!
SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - May - June 2012

We're sure there are some readers of this space who are fans of reality TV shows. We'd also guess there are many more who can't stand those shows - but we'd probably all agree, that reality TV is huge.

We're not talking about Storage Wars or Pawn Stars or some of the shows on Food Network. We're talking about shows that follow the lives of people who would be otherwise uninteresting - or completely meaningless - if they weren't on television doing off-the-wall things for the camera. We're talking about shows focusing on uneducated duck hunters and brain-dead socialites and anyone named Kardashian.

We don't want to sound sexist, but ratings research shows that the audiences for these shows are primarily female and relatively young. And when you team that with the fact that the heaviest users of Facebook are young females, you can draw some rudimentary conclusions and make some probably unfair generalizations about young women in the year 2012. As you've probably guessed, we have done just that. And our probably unfair generalization is that many not only enjoy watching the intimate "inside story" of peoples' lives - they enjoy sharing their own.

Why is this something we felt the need to share? It's because we've been trying to understand a development in the smoking fetish world that has taken on a life of its own.

As you're no doubt well aware, the number of young women who post self-shot videos of themselves smoking to YouTube has increased dramatically over the last year or so. Some are well done, while some are so amateurish that you can't even really tell that the ladies are actually smoking. But the number keeps increasing.

We, of course, have noticed this trend. And it occurred to us that there might be an opportunity there for everyone. We could make suggestions as far as camera angles, lighting and so on, the videos could be posted on one of our sites, and the female smokers could benefit by sharing in revenue raised from displaying the videos.

So we approached some of the young women posting to YouTube, and offered them the opportunity to make some money from the smoking videos they're currently displaying for free. Most didn't bother to explain why, but the overall response was "thanks, but no thanks." The impression we got that either the women didn't want to bother with any extra steps in posting their videos, or that they just weren't interested in making money from their videos. The exposure was all they were really interested in.

We'll leave it to more astute armchair psychologists to take this a step further, in understanding why money is of no interest to these ladies. But if any astute armchair psychologists were to say "It's because they're only interested in the attention, and since they won't be getting their own reality shows any time in the near future and probably won't even have a chance to appear on Tosh.0, this is the closest they'll come to their fifteen minutes of fame" - we wouldn't disagree.

It's a shame, not only because we saw a business opportunity but because we saw an opportunity to improve the quality of some of the self-shot video that's out there. But that's one more change in our world at which we can only shake our heads.

Anyone want to bankroll a smoking reality series? THAT one might fly.

Enjoy the May-June issue!

What If...?

Written by Smoke Signals | 29 February 2012

What If.....?
SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - March - April 2012

The continuing anti-smoking trend shows no signs of letting up (ironically, even as the eventual legalization of marijuana seems inevitable), our pessimistic side believes more firmly than ever that sightings of female smokers are destined to dwindle to almost nothing. And with the smoking rate continuing to drop, the number of smoking models available for video shoots will most likely continue to decline as well.

With that in mind, we've started to wonder lately whether women or models, smoking electronic cigarettes will someday have to actually be a somewhat-viable alternative for those of us with smoking fetishes. We believe we have been as vocal as anyone out there, in our disdain for "fake cigarettes" and for those who would suggest video of e-cigarette smoking as any sort of alternative to smoking video. We continue to feel that the two are anything but interchangeable; smoking an e-cigarette is NOT smoking.

However, our curiosity has gotten the better of us. It's hard to tell from promotional videos released by e-cigarette companies whether a real smoker could actually look like she was smoking when she was actually using an e-cig.

And so, we have tried electronic cigarettes. Among other things, we wanted to see whether there's any chance that our smoking fetish could be "fooled" into thinking that e-cigarette vapor was really smoke - and whether they were palatable enough so that people would actually consider them as viable alternatives, rather than quit smoking entirely.

Here's what we found. First of all, they ARE palatable. In fact, they're actually not bad. They taste and feel, more or less, like cigarettes do. It would take a while, however, to get accustomed enough to the taste and feel - before anyone would consider them "normal." They also sometimes require several inhales in order to accumulate enough vapor to get the feeling of full lungs - since the ones that won't blow up in your mouth have safety features that prevent you from dragging on the device for too long.

Secondly, they look like cigarettes...at least, from a distance. Up close, you can see that there's no smoke coming from the cigarette itself or ashes accumulating, and the cherry looks like a little LED (which is what it is). Some brands have different colored LEDs (and some even have different colored "filters" or "cigarettes") which makes it pretty obvious that you're looking at an e-cig, once you get close.

Now for the important question: what does the "smoke" look like? Here, we're happy to say, is where the good news comes. If a smoker takes in enough vapor (sometimes, as we say, requiring several inhales), there's plenty of vapor to exhale. We were able to do french inhales, snaps, thick nose and mouth/nose exhales, residual exhales, talking exhales, and lots of smoke rings without any problem. Two caveats: we understand that some e-cigarettes are nowhere near as strong as others and the weaker ones don't create big enough vapor clouds to actually resemble a real smoking experience. And we understand that dark side desires would probably never be satisfied by watching someone use an electronic cigarette.

So the bottom line for us is: if the unthinkable ever happens - e-cigarettes would be at least a partial solution from a smoking fetish point of view. Certainly not desirable, but we believe it WOULD be better than nothing.