Hipsters and Cigarettes

For Michael Bloomberg, everyday Democrats, and the people who design health curricula for middle schoolers, smoking cigarettes is an unmitigated evil. IR blogger Ian Tuttle does a good job of summarizing the “vilification of smoking” here.

But at least the mindset behind cigarette crackdowns—though annoyingly paternalistic—are understandable. Cigarettes are horrid for our health, and a government as vast as ours assumes it’s responsible for our lungs.

What’s more confusing, however, is the popularity of smoking among hipsters. It’s hard to estimate exactly how many hipsters inhale or who precisely belongs to this elusive, record-playing, beer-brewing, sweater-recycling demographic. As of yet, hipsterism is not a box you check off on the census. But, anecdotally, I’ve observed that many hipsters smoke.

My first true disillusionment with Higher Ed came when, at age 14 or so, I noticed that a number of the students on Brown’s campus were lighting-up. At that point, I’d been fetishizing the U.S. News & World Report college rankings for several years. How could people who were, ostensibly, some of the smartest students in the country take part in a vice like smoking, which my public school teachers had framed as the ultimate sin?

Most of what motivates hipsters, it would seem, is a delight in irony. At Swarthmore, our alternative social spaces, cleared of irritatingly conventional athletes or frat brothers, are often clouded with smoke. But is the irony really worth it when it’s a matter of inhaling carcinogens and propping up the tobacco industry? Eric Edelman, in a Bowdoin Orient column, writes:

Hipster culture runs astray, however, in celebrating cigarette smoking. Though they profess to be staunchly opposed to corporate America, each time they buy a pack of cigarettes, hipsters support the industry that hires more lobbyists and kills more Americans than the National Rifle Association’s wildest aspirations. How does that make sense? When did being above it all turn into buying it all? At what point, did ‘they don’t actually hurt you’ and ‘I’ll quit eventually’ stop being clear self-delusions? Where is the ironic commentary in joining an industry’s hellish quest to hook new users faster than the ones rapidly dying off?

Sure, genuine hipsters account for a minuscule portion of the population. But they’re also trendsetters who operate at the margins of what we might term our “cultural elite.” The act of smoking may be a way that far-left hipsters stick in to the mainstream liberals who are still obsessed with banning cigarettes. Or it’s simply an aesthetic statement. Or a means of mocking prudes. Or a true love for tobacco.  I’ll leave it to someone more culturally astute to peal back all those layers of irony.