Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/633

Cigarette smoking. I have a hunch (premature warping) (Lunch is the loving hunch—the social partition of the generalized desire to eat). I have a hunch that smoking cigarettes is an expression of suppressed homosexuality (by which I always mean suppressed passivity, an enforced giving inflicted upon a readiness to take—among homosexuals the active homosexual uses that as his defense against the female principle which is to take; being understood of course that male and female are merely facts, frozen hypotheses, envelopes concealing mysteries. Before male and female there is merely give-and-take in the most primitive “sexless” forms of life).

Among women who smoke, the same is true. Generally career women smoke more than happy housewives. The reason: they are fighting their desire to take, to be passive. Just as liquor drinkers are fighting their impulse to take. Nothing so characterizes the drunk as that he hears only what he wishes to hear and gives gives gives in long rambling talk upon that subject.