Misogyny and Cigars
- Vivian Li
- Jan 8, 2024
- 12 min read
It was in the middle of July, right when summer was really kicking in, in Atlanta. I thanked and left my Lyft driver and took in my surroundings as the sweat dripped down my brow. There was a Kroger, Candytopia and a Jason’s Deli in the vicinity. I walked up the parking lot to “La Casa Del Tabaco,” and the owner, Pablo Nunez, greeted me with, “Hey, how you doing? Let me know if you need anything.” I nodded and walked to the very back of the shop where the humidor was, to pick out a cigar.
The shop was dimly lit with LED lights on the ceiling that have gradually yellowed from the 20 years of wear and tear. In the front part of the store there were glass cabinets filled with sparkly silver cigar cutters, lighters, and ash trays that dotted the space. On one side there was a wall of humidors for sale, as well. In the next part of the store, there was a comfy seating area with brown leather couches facing a 40-inch TV screen, that had seen better days. The old, dusty and antique was the allure, and according to The Ultimate Cigar Book (ch.1, p.4) by Richard Carleton Hacker, the hobby itself did not start until 1793, when the British occupied Cuba and brought cigars by the box, back to Europe. I opened the door that led to a cigar smoker’s dream. There were aisles and aisles of cigars of all shapes and sizes that were waiting to be cut, lit, and enjoyed.
I just graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), with a bachelor’s degree in advertising, and a concentration in copywriting. I wasn’t ready for the job market, so I decided to keep studying. But after my very last quarter at SCAD, I was looking forward to a cigar, and a little recuperation before my Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing started in the fall. La Casa del Tabaco became my new favorite spot. I would go twice every week for my cigar fix, and to talk to the other chaps that I’ve gotten to befriend there too. At the beginning, Nunez didn’t talk much. But as I became a regular, he would pick his head up and ask a few questions about me. Now, fast forward a couple months, he greets me with, “Uh oh. Here she is, here she is. Not you again, Vivian.” And I’ll answer with, “Really, Pablo? Really? Go away, Pablo.” And every single time, we ended up smiling and breaking into small chuckles, before lighting cigars up, and conversing about the scoop on our busy lives, from the last time we met.
After going there for a few months, I noticed I was one of the only females that smoked at La Casa del Tabaco. Granted, I normally went on Tuesdays and Fridays. After three months, I saw a few women, but they never really stayed to smoke. They were what I called a “grab n go” situation, and I wondered why that was. So, I sought out to investigate the female perspective on cigar smoking, expose gender inequality in this space, find solutions and celebrate the women in this industry, in Atlanta.
During the last few months, I began to see more female cigar smokers as I visited more cigar shops, in and around the Buckhead, Midtown and Downtown areas. However, the numbers of men I saw outweigh the women by a landslide. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the percentage of men to women who smoke is 6.3% to 1.1%, which equates to about 20 million men, in the United States. Women only make one million, if that.
One afternoon that summer I found myself in Nunez’s shop smoking a stick he gifted me, because I gifted him a few sticks a week before. It was called “Guardian of the Farm Nightwatch.”
The beautiful six-by-fifty-two Toro sized stick had a paper bag textured dark brown corojo maduro wrapper. It was a collaborative project with Warped Cigars and Agnorsa. The name came from the furry four-legged friends that protected the tobacco plants at Warped Cigars’ farm, in Nicaragua. On the draw I tasted a leathery note, a tinge of cinnamon and nutmeg, and a woody yeasty bread flavor before transitioning to the finish. It was like a beefed-up bread and butter pudding, only not as sweet. On the finish, the flavors are accompanied with a black pepper flavor and tingle, and a dry earthiness that gives a fantastic close to the experience. The finish was long, giving you the medium-to-full flavors from the start to the end of each puff, until your next draw.
The cigar shop, Davidoff of Geneva, in Buckhead unfortunately closed late December in 2021, but while they were open, they gave me opportunities to meet amazing people. Wanda Garneaux was one of them. She was a retired plane engineer for the U.S. military, and now has her own cigar shop, WeSmoke Cigars, here in Atlanta. She retired because she just welcomed a son and a daughter to her beautiful family, and she thought that it was better to stay at home with them. She was half black and half Native American, and we always ended up talking for hours whenever we bumped into each other at Davidoff. The travel stories she told about her work in the Middle East, Europe and Asia were awesome.
The moment we met for the interview she started talking even before she sat down. The last time we saw each other was the weekend Davidoff closed. I was happy to say that it was just like old times and the conversation kept rolling from the last time we paused. Her stories started with her first cigar experience in Portugal, in the mid-1950s. She started her career in the military and was stationed there for a few weeks, when Garneaux met a lady named Esmeralda. While getting to know one another, Esmeralda told Garneaux that she was one of the original field workers on the original Plasencia farm in Cuba, back in 1865. She told Garneaux about those long years during Castro’s regime, how she helped Nestor Plasencia transport inventory and assets in the middle of the night on boats. The seeds, leaves and rolled cigars were sent to Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Esmeralda added that the cigar industry wouldn’t be alive today, if it weren’t for Placencia’s hard work and diligence all those years ago. Esmeralda was somewhere in her 90s when Garneaux met her and said that cigar smoking calmed her during the anxious moments she experienced, especially when she remembered the war that plagued her home, in Cuba.
Getting Garneaux’s lounge off the ground was difficult in the beginning, and a big part of that difficulty was because she was female. Some of the men that came into her store would say, “Oh, you’re female, you wouldn’t know how to answer my questions.” Or “You’re a woman, you shouldn’t know anything about cigars.” Or “May I speak to the owner; I’d like to talk to him.” They were genuinely shocked when they learned she was the owner of the cigar lounge. Some would up and leave just because she’s a woman. She says that it’s disheartening sometimes but she felt that her time in the military kept her going. “Talk about a male dominated industry, the business of war has always been male-driven,” she said. “I take it as a challenge. So, challenge accepted.” In Garneaux’s perspective, the cigar industry was not for the faint hearted, especially for women. You will be pushed back just because you’re biologically female. I scowled when she told me that some of the men who went into her store had the audacity to disrespect the owner of the shop. But to be honest, I wasn’t really surprised she was treated this way.
These stories Garneaux told me piqued my interest in the women working in the industry even more, as retailers, marketers, or consumers. In Nunez’s perspective, some of the best rollers are women because they can differentiate color better than men, and their hands are more delicate making them better at crafting handmade products. Because of these aspects, a lot of the people rolling the cigars are women, and a large percentage of the people growing the crop, are women as well. So, why is misogyny still in this space?
Chaina Nickole, also known as Cigar Dutchess on Instagram, had a blog, a podcast, and was a well known figure in the industry, especially in Atlanta. You could call her an expert, but she saw herself as a passionate cigar enthusiast, with a knack for writing about the culture. Nickole also worked as the humidor manager at the Red Phone Booth in Buckhead, on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Because the Red Phone Booth was well known, the ratio of men and women smokers were more or less equal. She said women that came into the humidor range from experienced regulars to first timers, and people were welcome to smoke cigars no matter who they were. Cigar smoking, just like any other interest, does not have a gender. In Nickole’s experience, if you’re happy, everyone is happy.
I purchased two books that summer, in 2021. One was called The Ultimate Cigar Book, 4th Edition, by Richard Carleton Hacker, and the other was The Cigar: An Illustrated History of Fine Smoking, by Barnaby Conrad. Both are excellent reads if you want to learn more about how the culture
began. Within a few chapters, both books talked about Queen Victoria of Spain, her love of cigars and how she was the catalyst to the modern bands we see on the cigars. Montecristo was the first to implement them in their production, making way for new ways of marketing, advertising strategies, and packaging possibilities. The invention of the cigar band dates to about 1854 depending on which books you read. I smiled when I found out that this invention started with a woman, even though nobody really talked about her.
I sat down with Christopher Harper, a cigar rep that worked for Perdomo cigars in the Georgia-Florida area. He’d been in the business for 25 years and was a great friend of Nunez’s. We discussed a lot, but the main question we talked about was the misogyny, the taboo of female cigar smokers and how outdated the male-driven perspective was. “This new generation. Your generation [Vivian] and the social media influencers of your age will be the driving force of how big this market grows, in terms of female smokers,” he said. Women have always been in the industry, but it’s been male-dominant for a long time because women aren’t coming together, taking the spotlight and showing their roles in the industry, as men have. “How long did women go on for before they could vote?” Harper asked. “A long time. But that’s all it needs. Time.” Harper repeated that the social media influencers like CigarVixen, Octavia Toliver of HERficionado, CigarDutchess, etc., were essential in expanding the market. “But there’s only so much they can do on their own,” he said. “If they wanted to break that “masculine” perspective of cigar smoking, they needed to work together and promote the important women in the business.”
The cigar shop was the equivalent to the barbershops men went to, back in the 1900s. And from a paper about gender roles and smoking behavior, that was written by Priska Flandorfer, Christian Wegner and Isabella Buber, from the Vienna Institute of Demography, in the 1970s, men had reached their highest level of smoking prevalence across most European countries. They also wrote that although smoking behavior is impacted by social norms, age and workforce participation, the gender gap is narrowing. “Men went to these cigar lounges to get away from the women in their lives for a few short hours to talk with their ‘boys,’” Harper said. “At those lounges, they talked about anything and everything.” That culture is like how women went to get their nails done, today. It was their space to be who they were without judgment. It made sense why cigar smoking was so male-focused all these years. However, it doesn’t make this issue less misogynistic.
I visited Burn by Rocky Patel last Wednesday, on March 2. Although this was my first time there, I had an amazing time when I met LouAnn Steffens. The insight she had to offer me was impressive. She walked around Burn with a cigar in her hand from when the store opened at 12 p.m. ‘till around 8 p.m. and made sure that the men that worked with her knew how to talk to the female patrons at the cigar lounge. “If I heard a male voice in the humidor saying, “The flavored cigars are there,” for example, we’d have a very long talk on the spot.” When she told me about how she trained the gentlemen. “Give the ladies the choice to choose what she wants, and do not assume that the lady wants a flavored cigar,” Steffans said.
Personally, I like flavored smokes. They’re not usually my go-to, but I liked them at the best of times when I wanted a change. One of the sticks I usually chose when I wanted something flavored was the Deadwood Fat Bottom Betty cigars, by Drew Estate. Handmade in Esteli, Nicaragua, they featured a beautiful dark brown chocolate-colored Maduro wrapper, with Nicaraguan tobacco in both the filler and the binder. When you first lit up the cigar, the sweetness hits you first and it coats your palate, then the draw flavors of cocoa, general woodiness, slight black pepper taste and tingle, and dry earth starts coming through. The finish kicks in, in a couple of seconds, and although there were no additional flavors on the finish, the draw flavors deepen from a medium body to a medium-to-full. The smoke was thick and chewy, giving a fantastic texture to the experience.
When a couple walked in the store, or the humidor, or sat down at a table or the bar, Steffens addressed the lady first letting her know that she was just as welcome and respected at the establishment. Women were treated equally to their male counterparts and had the liberty of being who they were. “Women are a lot more inquisitive and will ask questions when they’re not afraid, or when they’re not judged, or looked at in any particular way,” Steffens said. “That’s what we want. We want to teach these women about cigars, about the culture and show them that this hobby is not as intimidating as it looks on the outside.” It’s important to her that women felt comfortable in that space, and because she is female herself, it was a lot easier to welcome women.
They tended to follow Steffens as she led by example. She realized the misogyny in the cigar industry for a long time, created the Ladies Cigar Club at Burn by Rocky Patel, and hosted events every first and third Tuesday of every month. The first event that happened was in February 2020, and only a few ladies showed up. After shutting down the whole operation for a few months because of the pandemic, they started it up again a few weeks ago this year. Because they just restarted the Lady’s Cigar Club, the most recent event they had that happened on 1 March, had only about seven women. But the very last event before they closed because of the pandemic, had about 50-60 female attendees. During these events, Steffens would introduce a representative from a reputable company, and get them to address any questions the ladies might have, or teach them cigar etiquette, cigar history, their brand and their cigars, and many more topics.
Drew Estate was the company that talked at the last event, and a big percentage of the audience had no idea how to cut, light, and prepare the cigar. “That is also what we want,” Steffens said. “We want to help these women learn about cigars.” Most of the time women came in with their boyfriends and husbands, and they waited for the males to cut and light the cigar for them, and Steffans said, “you should not have to wait for your man, or whoever, to light the cigar for you.”
Having said that, that afternoon when I met Harper at Nunez’s place, we talked about women who’ve worked the industry for years, female social media influencers who smoke cigars, and speculated why cigars are still viewed as a male-driven hobby. But one of the aspects of the industry we discussed was how could we, as a cigar community, stop this “taboo” and celebrate these women. Throughout the years, men were the ones going on tours. They have one almost every year to showcase new products, talk about tobacco leaves and converse new ways of processing them, etc. If the women in the industry got together, created a tour of their own and hosted events, this would gradually halt the idea that cigars were only for men. It will give women who smoke cigars behind closed doors the confidence to be a part of the community, give women outside the community the reassurance that this interest has no gender, and that both men and women were
equal.
Despite the misogyny, the cigar lounges that you can go to in Atlanta are inclusive. People in this community are some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. And just like what Garneaux said!" With your next stick, you never know who you#re going to meet.” This piece wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the people I met. In my experience, if there is an interest you’d like to explore, do your research. Learn about the hobby, talk to the people and ask questions, it’s just like how you first start any interest. With time, the percentage of women who smoke cigars will gradually equal their male counterparts, and the language that people may use to differentiate genders in this interest, will fade away. I can’t wait to see how the cigar industry changes in the future, and who I get to meet with my next cigar.
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Sources
The Ultimate Cigar Book by Richard Carleton Hacker
The Cigar: An Illustrated History of Fine Smoking by Barnaby Conrad III
10_07.pdf
Wanda Garneaux
(470) 370-6486
Christopher Harper
(770) 527-5063
LouAnn Steffens
(404) 925-1988
Pablo Nunez
(678) 697-1212
Chaina Nickole (Cigar Dutchess)
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