Smoking after sex
The strange double-standard in Ontario convenience stores
BY Dave Bidini
Westway Smoke and Gift was the variety store of my youth, located in the Westway Plaza in Etobicoke. Back then, malls were called plazas, and variety stores were called smoke shops, because that’s where you bought your cigarettes, and maybe a magazine. Beckers is where you bought milk. Beyond that, you went to A&P, maybe Dominion or Loblaws for anything that required a cart which, I think, used to be called a carriage. It appears as if I’m getting very old.
Smoke shops have since morphed into multi-purpose depots (this trend was first documented in column number one for this website), but their aesthetic, it seems, is ever-changing. In Ontario, one of the latest in a series of legislatively fanatical measures to protect the public from smoking has been to demand that variety stores withdraw cigarette packs from display. As a result, stores have taken to encasing them in ultilitarian, brown-and-white cabinets that hang above the counter and behind the store clerk, large drawered structures that dominate, and are a blight upon, the store’s aesthetic. Now, the Double Q or Busy Bee or Foto Grocery looks more like a prison tuck shop or Gulag scrip dispenser than the place people go to buy their Joe Louis’ or Chef Boyardee. While it may be true that tobacco manufacturers have long been pushing poison on unsuspecting patrons, the packs’ constellation of colours—DuMaurier red, Export green, Camel beige and black—has been absorbed the dirty white of the cabinet drawers, which require constant cleaning and further draws out the tired, weathered stares of those smoke shop soldiers whose work is among the city’s most thankless and exhausting.
Yet while the government has tried to dissuade the public from smoking, it is more than willing, it seems, to encourage folks to explore sado-masochistic sex or hermaphroditic tempatation. Though cigarettes are now safely sheathed from view, XXX DVDs are easily visible upon entering most variety stores in the city. Growing up, Playboy and Penthouse (and occasionally Oui, which made Westway Smoke and Gift seem impossibly wild and exotic) were forever at the top of the last row of the magazine rack, but, then as now, it wouldn’t take much for a 15-year-old to steal a look at the pendulous breasts or wagging yonni that bound across the covers of adult films currently being sold in most small corner shops. Legislators have suggested, it seems, that selling a deck of Winstons is much worse than promoting the spurious degradation of women. To them, it’s fine to show still photographs of young women prone and supplicant on the covers of distasteful films, but it’s verbotten to show a row of smokes distanced safely from the consumer.
Bringing my eight-year-old into the corner store, I never worried whether or not they saw cigarettes being sold behind the counter. If they asked, I’d tell them, “Smoking is bad for you, don’t do it,” then wait as they turned 14 or whatever and tried it. But having a XXX film pointed out and being required to explain sex and pornography, and why the place where they buy their gummy bears is a proper place for selling this kind of product, is confusing and complicated. It seems that, while the goverment tries to protect us from one kind of influence, it ignores the other. This is to say nothing of how hiding smokes from view only heightens the young person’s desire to have them. Teenage reasoning tells us that if we’re not supposed to have it, we’re supppsed to have it even more, and that anything that bad must be twice as good.
