Cigars and Fellatio

Like you haven't noticed

Here’s what you’ll read about the pleasures of cigar smoking in all the major cigar magazines: the sweet aroma that delights the olfactory; the multitude of flavors you can get on the draw; the relaxation and stress relief provided by the non-addictive amount of nicotine that hits your system; the mind-clearing ability that, while not exactly meditation, has a meditative quality; the luxury of time and satisfaction of ritual; and the camaraderie that can be formed with fellow cigar lovers. All of these things can be true. 

Here’s what you won’t read: cigar smoking is kind of like sucking a dick. 

Cigars are phallic to the point it’s almost not worth remarking on. Yes, some of them are flattened into a box-press shape (my favorite brand, Padrón, offers almost exclusively box-pressed cigars), and some of the funkier figurados are less reminiscent of a penis, but the image that comes to mind for most of us when we think of a cigar is a five-to-six inch, round, brown, stick. 

In order to enjoy the stick, you give it a blowjob. Well, first you circumcise it, then you give it a blowjob. You clip it, place your lips around the head, put the foot over the flame, then suck and rotate to light. Then for thirty minutes to an hour you intermittently wrap your lips around the head and draw in the smoke. 

Perhaps it’s dissonance that leaves this part of the cigar smoking experience out of all cigar coverage that is consumed by mostly straight men who see themselves as participating in a macho pastime. But they know. I know they know because otherwise there wouldn’t be as much cigar content on Instagram that features women suggestively smoking cigars. As of 2014, only two percent of U.S. American women were cigar smokers (a number that has likely gone up since, given that cigar shipments to the U.S. have significantly increased, up 46.7 percent for the first two months of 2021, and women certainly a part of that consumer demand), but my non-scientific study of IG reveals that more than two percent of the most popular cigar posts are of women, fully or halfway clothed, smoking cigars. I have no doubt these women actually enjoy the cigars and all its attendant pleasures outlined up top—this isn’t about them. It’s about who’s looking and why. Presumably straight men are looking and it’s because smoking a cigar looks like sucking a dick. 

Yet, when it comes to their own smoking habit, the men ignore this part. They pretend this isn’t part of the pleasure. This, despite the fact that in the U.S., the biggest consumer of premium cigars and driver of trends, larger cigars have gained more favor. Before the cigar boom of the 1990s, most cigars were clocking in around the traditional size of 42 to 46 ring gauge (a cigar’s diameter is referred to as the ring gauge and is measured in 64ths of an inch—a 46 ring gauge is 46/64ths of an inch wide). These are the cigars you’ll see in a movie like The Sting, set in 1936, or even Purple Rain, released in 1984 (these aren’t the most famous cigar movies, they’re just two that I watched recently that have cigar smokers in them). You would rarely see anything larger than a 52 ring gauge, and even then rarely, unless the exaggerated size of a cigar was meant to capture something comedic or menacing (think De Niro’s cigar in Cape Fear, which manages both). 

Then in the 90s, Ernesto Perez-Carillo pioneered the commercial availability of large ring cigars, going up to a full inch in some cases, and the U.S. market has steadily demanded more bigger. Any number of reasons are given as explanation for the rise of the wide ring cigars, from the increased flavor due to the use of more tobacco to fill the cigar, to consumers desiring more bang for their buck per individual cigar purchase. 

But also: it’s more fun to suck on something with more girth—no offense to the skinny “cigar” lovers and havers out there. 

All this to say: heterosexuality is a prison that won’t allow us to admit when a pleasurable thing is pleasurable unless we talk our way around what is actually pleasurable about it. 

The end.