poledriver
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
- Messages
- 11,543
Women and Weed: The Re-Emergence of Female Cannabis Culture
Having spent a large amount of my youth at a Church of England all girls' school, I had decided drugs were evil. Take one toke on a spliff and it would be a slippery slope towards your school portrait appearing on the front page of the Mail: "GCSE Student Tragically Dead at 16 from Doing Too Much Reefer".
Skip past my puritanical phase, though, and by 19 I was smoking weed pretty regularly, thanks to my boyfriend and my male housemate. No surprise there, really: weed is the most commonly used drug in Britain, and 93 percent of those who use drugs (around 14 million people) have smoked cannabis.
I got stoned after work, before going to the cinema and with my friends after parties. Slowly, I bridged the gap between newbie and someone who knows what "indica" is, and hoped to share the ritual I'd grown to love with some of my close female friends. Problem was, I barely knew any women who smoked. Unlike my male friends, who were all experienced weed smokers – and proud of that fact – my female friends avoided it. I realised I couldn't share my experience with women, and was instead just having weed mansplained to me by all my male friends.
Men had always smoked weed. They knew how to do it. They always rolled the joints, they had bizarrely expensive grinders, they owned an unnecessary amount of paraphernalia. Men rapped about smoking weed, men smoked weed onscreen in stoner comedies like Harold & Kumar and Pineapple Express. Men, like everything in my life, owned it. I could partake, but I would only ever be a guest in the bro-stoner house of bongs. Although women had been smoking weed as a natural painkiller in childbirth for hundreds of years, men had monopolised the culture around it.
Cont -
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/wome...lture?utm_source=vicefbuk&utm_campaign=global
Having spent a large amount of my youth at a Church of England all girls' school, I had decided drugs were evil. Take one toke on a spliff and it would be a slippery slope towards your school portrait appearing on the front page of the Mail: "GCSE Student Tragically Dead at 16 from Doing Too Much Reefer".
Skip past my puritanical phase, though, and by 19 I was smoking weed pretty regularly, thanks to my boyfriend and my male housemate. No surprise there, really: weed is the most commonly used drug in Britain, and 93 percent of those who use drugs (around 14 million people) have smoked cannabis.
I got stoned after work, before going to the cinema and with my friends after parties. Slowly, I bridged the gap between newbie and someone who knows what "indica" is, and hoped to share the ritual I'd grown to love with some of my close female friends. Problem was, I barely knew any women who smoked. Unlike my male friends, who were all experienced weed smokers – and proud of that fact – my female friends avoided it. I realised I couldn't share my experience with women, and was instead just having weed mansplained to me by all my male friends.
Men had always smoked weed. They knew how to do it. They always rolled the joints, they had bizarrely expensive grinders, they owned an unnecessary amount of paraphernalia. Men rapped about smoking weed, men smoked weed onscreen in stoner comedies like Harold & Kumar and Pineapple Express. Men, like everything in my life, owned it. I could partake, but I would only ever be a guest in the bro-stoner house of bongs. Although women had been smoking weed as a natural painkiller in childbirth for hundreds of years, men had monopolised the culture around it.
Cont -
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/wome...lture?utm_source=vicefbuk&utm_campaign=global
