Is Smoking Pot a Feminist Act?

Posted by Samhita Mukhopadhyay at 11:00 AM on August 21, 2007.

This post, written by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, originally appeared on Feministing

Do you think men smoke more weed than women? Is that a proven fact? Have you ever been to the Bay Area? LOL. OK seriously, this article in the Stranger (and as a tribute to Hempfest) is about gender and weed smoke and how women don't smoke weed.

Smoking pot is a guy thing. Guys are the ones who deal, buy, and smoke. In 2005, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stated that adult males were 50 percent more likely to have smoked marijuana in the last month than females. (Alcohol use showed only a 12 percent difference.) All illegal drugs show this approximate divide between the sexes (except illegally obtained prescriptions--women use those in substantially higher numbers).

Is this actually true? Or do women hide that they smoke weed more? A very quick look at my friends, I would say half the women I know smoke weed all the time. Even in my women's studies undergrad, I knew a lot of female stoners. In fact I have never attributed smoking weed to being a male activity. Perhaps this says something about the kind of women I hang out with, but this is seriously news to me.

Reading more into the article, I did have to agree that media depictions of drug use are in general inaccurate and definitely sexist. The war on drugs is extremely racist and gendered with little conversation about how drugs affect the lives of young women, while being absurdly focused on the incarceration of young men. Furthermore, the usual drug user is depicted as male.

But on a much less serious note, maybe women don't like to look lazy. . .

Perhaps the obstacle to female toking is a fear of looking lazy. Getting stoned is, in effect, a great way to relax. Men are allowed to be lazy--being stoned is part of their farting, pajama-wearing, video-game-playing pantheon of acceptable male relaxation techniques. Since Jeff Spicoli made his debut in 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and continuing into the entire oeuvre of director Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up), stonerdom is an accepted part of modern maleness. Their sloth is even kind of adorable.

But modern women are not allowed to be lazy, adorable stoners. Women have to go to college (which they're now doing at higher rates than men), and then get their careers going quickly, before their biological clocks run out. Then they have to have kids and take them to all of their activities. There is no time for women to be slovenly and relax--and if women do relax, it has to be at a gym.

I have never really thought about mainstream pot culture being sexist, I always thought about it as pretty corny, considering people of all different types smoke weed, not just middle class white dudes in California. But now that I do think about it, it does reproduce certain stereotypes.

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Tagged as: culture, media, drugs, feminism, marijuana, sexism, war on drugs

Samhita Mukhopadhyay is an editor for Feministing. She is also is the Training and Technology Coordinator at Youth Media Council.