Smoking

The first experience of smoking is, we might say, a weak form of a loss of virginity. There is a alveolar hymen that must be rasped, lungs to be uncomfortably penetrated by the long shafts of smoke. But the second time, and then the third, is more focused on only the pleasure--a sensual pleasure that adults enjoy, tinged with a trangressive excitement. The difference, of course, is that it is a self-oriented, selfish self-pleasuring rather than a conjoining. But we love out lungs precisely because they are gender-universal organs of pleasurable penetration.