I’ve always had a thing for a man with a cigar — which, in our current era of ubiquitous no-smoking zones, is no longer a terribly fashionable thing to be, or to be into.
But as Carrie Bradshaw tells her own man with a cigar in Sex and the City after his ostentatious offer to buy a round of drinks for everyone in attendance at some swanky Manhattan restaurant results in a lovers’ spat, it isn’t “just about the cigar.” Mr. Big’s predictably if infuriatingly smooth reply? “It never is.”
Sure, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but not when a particular kind of man is holding one. According to certain longstanding stereotypes, that man is probably some sort of power-lunching investment banker or executive. He subsists almost entirely on hefty filets at pricey steakhouses, knows good bourbon from bad, drives nice cars and/or gets carted around in the backs of limousines with no regard for the environmental impact, and looks at home in a leather wingback chair. He’s Mr. Big; he’s JFK; he’s the Dos Equis guy; he’s the most interesting man in the world.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these men like women who like the same things they do: women who order red meat without talking about cardiovascular risks, accept limo rides without expressing concern for the environment and won’t nag a man about his cigar — in fact, she might even take a puff herself. Back in 1995, entrepreneur and author Tomima Edmark told Cigar Aficionado about the time her penchant for smoking cigars with businessmen in hotel lobbies caught the attention of a hopeful suitor. “Some of the men in our group called my attention to a Latin gentleman who they said had been staring at me amorously for some time,” Edmark told the magazine. “The man eventually approached me and said, ‘I’ve been looking all my life for a woman who smokes a cigar.’”
Edmark — who said she ultimately declined the man’s dinner invitation — is just one in a long line of sexy, cigar-smoking ladies who have seen their sex appeal heightened, not hindered, by the adoption of a stereotypically masculine pastime. Images of attractive women with cigars date back to at least the 1920s and feature the likes of early Hollywood starlets like Pola Negri and Marlene Dietrich, both sex symbols thought of as headstrong, enigmatic femmes fatales of their time. Perhaps less glamorously but no less provocatively, a snap of depression-era outlaw Bonnie Parker posing with Clyde Barrow’s cigar shocked newspaper readers of the day, upping the couple’s outlaw status and the sexual intrigue that already followed a pair of unmarried lovebirds presumed to be engaging in all manner of sin when they weren’t busy holding up banks across the country.
According to media historian and professor Moya Luckett of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, it’s a trope that “has to pre-date photography and probably relates both to the exoticism of the cigar (it often connotes the ‘Orient’) as well as its association with men smoking alone after dinner in spaces where women would not be allowed.” In this historical context, the only women who would be allowed into this kind of male space were sex workers, adds Luckett, pointing to 19th-century paintings of women smoking cigars that were often meant to represent either an image of “orientalized nudity” or “‘women of the night’ hanging out with the men in bars.”
“It has to do with the history of smoking as a male activity and the way it demarcated a space women couldn’t enter (unless they were ‘ladies of the night’) and the issue of power involved in participating in something that is so male, so tied to male power and privilege,” Luckett tells InsideHook.
But while the eyebrow-raising sex appeal of a lady with a cigar may be rooted in antiquated notions of distinctly male and female space, the trope is not without more recent examples. In the 1990s, high-profile stars and sex symbols like Claudia Schiffer and Demi Moore puffed cigars on the cover of Cigar Aficionado. A 1999 edition featured soap opera star Susan Lucci holding a cigar while lying in a bathtub full of floating roses, and a predictably leering 1995 interview with former Playmate of the Year India Allen entitled “The Lady Loves Cigars” couldn’t help but compare the cigar-loving lady herself to an actual cigar: “a Cuban double corona, elongated and slender, luscious and strong, with an intense flavor of spice.”
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But the appeal of this kind of woman to men like the would-be Latin lover who unsuccessfully approached Edmark isn’t just about seeking a like-minded partner with common interests. Men who like cigars who like women who like cigars aren’t looking for a smoking buddy with whom to puff Cubans over the dinner table in their suburban kitchen. The thing about a woman with a cigar is that she’s “not like other girls,” even comparably sexy ones. As India Allen’s Cigar Aficionado profiler put it, “Indie is not your run-of-the-mill sex goddess: she most definitely undresses to a different drummer.” For proof, look no further than that cigar in her mouth.
But what is it, exactly, about a woman with a cigar? Is it the phallic nature of the cigar and the inevitably suggestive connotations of a woman smoking it? The inverted gender roles? Or the simple fact that a Hollywood sex symbol will look good doing just about anything?
Luckett acknowledges that it’s probably all of these things, to some extent, but suggests the trope also parallels and reflects the presumably gender-bending connotations of unbridled, unapologetic female sexuality. “I would imagine it is a trope rooted in [a] kind of sexuality that isn’t associated with polite femininity and is connected to men’s more private, sexually charged spaces that are linked to pure libido,” says Luckett. “Putting a woman in this place and in these circumstances — smoking — has a sexual charge, and it also positions her outside polite society and its morals but also frames her as an active — and willing — participant,” one with a touch of “masculine insouciance.”
Luckett likens the appeal of the lady with a cigar to Midge in Mad Men, Don Draper’s mistress who smokes, wears a man’s shirt and is, crucially, the polar opposite of the Grace Kelly lookalike keeping house for him in the suburbs. The act of a woman smoking a cigar “signifies that she shares a man’s moral code — or at least what society presents as such — inasmuch as she doesn’t expect anything, doesn’t need or want a ring, children or permanence and will be able to enjoy herself without excessive emotional investment,” says Luckett.
Essentially, the seductress with a cigar is an elevated version of the woman who likes sports but manages to be sexy while doing so, the one who never complains about watching the game because she’s too busy delivering cold beers in a skin-tight jersey.
She also doesn’t exist.
Women do and have always smoked cigars, to be sure, and it’s important to note that the masculine association with cigars is a relatively recent (and largely American) one, as well as the fact that the cigar world is increasingly helmed by many an accomplished cigar aficionada. These days, Cigar Aficionado spends more time covering female industry leaders like Nirka Reyes than it does comparing Playmates to Cubans. But the longstanding trope of the sexy woman with a cigar — one that’s related, in some ways, to other notable tropes that find women appropriating stereotypically “male,” things like putting on her boyfriend’s work shirt after sex or hot girls with guns in movies like Tomb Raider — is ultimately “all a bit of a male fantasy,” says Luckett, “one that also underestimates men’s own moral and social codes.”
But if the cigar-smoking siren of an aficionado’s dreams is a mere male fantasy, so too is the man with a cigar himself. Whether men with cigars, women who love them or women who love men who love women who love cigars, we’re rarely more than fantasies of ourselves desperately trying to reflect back at each other.
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