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‘Two's up and poncing fags’: youngwomen's smoking practices, reciprocityand friendshipFin Cullen aa Centre for Youth Work Studies, School of Sport and Education ,Brunel University , Uxbridge, UKPublished online: 24 Mar 2010.

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Gender and EducationVol. 22, No. 5, September 2010, 491–504

ISSN 0954-0253 print/ISSN 1360-0516 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/09540250903481595http://www.informaworld.com

‘Two’s up and poncing fags’: young women’s smoking practices, reciprocity and friendship

Fin Cullen*

Centre for Youth Work Studies, School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UKTaylor and FrancisCGEE_A_448540.sgm(Received 15 December 2008; final version received 1 June 2009)10.1080/09540250903481595Gender and Education0954-0253 (print)/1360-0516 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis0000000002010FinCullenfincullen@yahoo.co.uk

Over the past decade much has been written by journalists, policy makers, andacademics, about young women’s leisure time pursuits. A great deal of thisinterest has focused around a concern that teenage girls in the UK are taking upsmoking in larger numbers than their male peers. This paper draws on findingsfrom my small-scale doctoral research into teenage girls’ use of tobacco andalcohol in a town in southern England. I examine young women’s use ofcigarettes as an informal social currency, and as a way of thinking about suchtobacco use beyond the deficit model of the young female smoker common tomany drugs education interventions. In this paper I draw upon theoretical materialfrom the social theories of exchange to explore how young women’s reciprocalnetworks of cigarettes operate to underpin friendships and mobilise power withingirls’ social networks. I explore how smoking as a reciprocal gift-giving practicesupports and maintains friendship groups and particular gendered practices. Myargument is that teen girls create and sustain bonds of friendship through their useand exchange of cigarettes. I want to suggest that within the girls’ friendshipgroups, the flow of branded cigarettes as a resource highlights alliances, inter-group rivalries, and provides space for the production and negotiation of teenage‘cool’ femininities.

Keywords: smoking; drugs education; friendship; girls; peer pressure; sociality

Introduction

In recent years there has been a growing policy and practice concern that teenage girlsin the UK are smoking in greater numbers than teenage boys (Department of Health2005, 2006; Higgins 2000; Lloyd et al. 1998). Whilst illicit drug use has often beenseen as a largely ‘masculine’ practice, various studies over the past decade have notedan associated increase in substance use by young women (Measham 2002; Pini 2001).Cigarette smoking, unlike other substance use, has long been marketed specificallytowards women as a way of managing weight, enhancing sexual attractiveness, andcoping with unwanted emotions (Bordo 1993; Ettore 1992; Hilton 2000; Jacobson1988; Tinkler 2001, 2006).

In this paper I consider young women, smoking and identity work by drawing onmy earlier doctoral work exploring teenage girls’ smoking practices. The phrases,‘two’s up’ and ‘poncing fags’ of this paper’s title, relate to the practices of sharing anindividual cigarette between two people, or ‘poncing’, meaning to borrow a cigarette

*Email: fincullen@yahoo.co.uk

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from a friend or acquaintance. In order to share a cigarette, a young person wouldshout ‘two’s up’ or ‘go two’s’ or ‘saves’ to the individual with the valuable tobacco,who would then choose whether or not to grant the favour and go halves.

Prior work on young people and smoking has begun to look at the role of non-commercial sources of cigarettes in supporting youth smoking, and has called forfurther research in this area (Croghan et al. 2003; Harrison, Fulkerson, and Park 2000;Turner, Gordon, and Young 2004). This paper is primarily concerned with youngwomen’s non-commercial acquisition and use of tobacco in order to interrogate thesociality and emotional investments underpinning girls’ smoking practices in the fieldsettings. I explore how young women, via the sharing and exchange of cigarettes,performed and produced a range of ways of ‘doing girl’ to secure their place withintheir friendship groups, from the good ‘giving’ female friend, to more rebellious‘cool’ and anti-school femininities. This is in order to complicate some of the earlierpopular discourses around peer pressure within drugs education, by illustrating howthese young women’s intersubjective complexities of peer relations unfold. I am notsuggesting here that young women’s agency is not deeply impacted upon by widerstructural factors and power play within friendship groups, nor that girls are exercisingcomplete free choice in their smoking practices. Rather, I want to argue that there is acomplex interplay between individual players within friendship groups in shapingideas of choice and popularity, and by doing so, I acknowledge the prevailing powerof social networks, commercial pressures, and wider generational and gendered popu-lar generational discourses around ‘coolness’, smoking and brand choice.

In earlier writings various commentators have noted how drugs education (includ-ing tobacco and alcohol education) as a practice within schools and youth worksettings remains a relatively under theorised, yet contentious area (Blackman 2004;Cohen 1996; Evans 2001; Lancelott 2005; O’Malley and Valverde 2004). Moreover,much drugs education within the classroom remains gender differentiated, and seem-ingly based around a normative heterosexual femininity that focuses on fertility andmotherhood.

Whilst teenage smoking should no longer be viewed as ‘deviant’ (Lloyd et al.1998), deficit models of drug users and young women continue to underpin many drugeducation interventions. Furthermore, as observed by a variety of scholars (Cogganand McKeller 1994; Cohen 1996; Denscombe 2001a, 2001b; Ungar 2000), the peerpressure thesis within drugs education often is based around a ‘deficient’ notion ofyoung people as ‘users’ (Jeffs and Smith 1999), and thus, arguably denies both thepleasurable aspects of drug taking and young people’s own individual agency. Suchnotions of ‘peer pressure’ in play in such popular discourse often risk flattening andover-simplifying the complexities of girls’ tobacco use by, for example, perceivingsuch practices as forming part of negative ‘peer pressure’, rather than preference inpeer group relations. Similarly, as Denscombe (2001a, 2001b) argues, young people’suses of cigarettes may be about an individual negotiation of risk-taking behaviours,and the development of a ‘cool’ persona, which stresses individual agency, rather thanopenly admitting to adhering to a peer group norm.

This paper concentrates on informal cigarette trade, although such exchange wasonly one of a range of observable gift-giving practices taking place amongst teenagegirls within the field settings. Female friends regularly exchanged a variety of othermaterial goods, including snacks, music files, clothes, text messages, mobile phonecredit and photographs between intimates. However, I focus on cigarette exchange,due to its relative ‘illicit’ status for young people, and that unlike these other exchange

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practices, young women’s tobacco use provides a site for education and health policyinterventions. Whilst non-smokers generally did not participate in the informalexchange of cigarettes, they often accompanied smoking friends to the ‘smokers’corner’, or lent others money in order to purchase tobacco. Young women’s cigaretteexchange can thus be viewed as one of a range of practices that are intimatelyconnected to a range of informal daily favours that pass between young women, andestablishes their place within their friendship groups. This paper initially outlines theresearch settings, before analysing some of the ways the informal trade in cigarettesbetween girls was used to negotiate status and perform ‘giving’, cool, smoking femi-ninities. By drawing on social theories of gift giving (Mauss 1954), and more recentwork on the interplay of youth adoption of fashion and key brands (Gilbert 2007;Kenway and Bullen 2001; Kenway, Kraak, and Hickey-Moody 2006), I want to prob-lematise the uncritical use of ideas of a simplistic model of ‘peer pressure’, and insteadreframe young women’s tobacco use as a wider process of reciprocity, and theconstruction and negotiation of individual and group gendered, classed and genera-tional identities.

Before describing the research context, I briefly visit the theoretical framework inorder to unpick the range of exchanges that were at the heart of the sociality of ciga-rette use. Smoking was not a compulsory part of inclusion within friendship groups,yet the constant flow of cigarettes as a resource cemented and aided entry into partic-ular intimate networks. Following Hall’s (2005) earlier examination of gift exchangepractices and begging, I also draw very loosely on the work of Mauss (1954) to thinkthrough how gifts, in the form of shared ‘smokes’, create bonds of intimacy andsupport an established ‘pecking order’ (Michell and Amos 1997) within the youngwomen’s friendship groups detailed in this study.

The freely exchanged gift which lies at the heart of Mauss’ seminal anthropologi-cal analysis of gift giving relies on a balanced equilibrium of exchange. In this earlyanthropological work on traditional gift-giving practices within small-scale, tradi-tional cultures, Mauss identified the social obligation that lies at the heart of the gift.In such a gift-giving economy, there are no overt demands for reciprocation, but suchgifts powerfully embody a wider symbolic order of competition, as status is bestowedupon the bearer of the gift (Mauss 1954). Such gifts become a social canvas to demon-strate the loyalty and wealth of the bearer and the social relations in play. FollowingMauss’ work, Hall (2005) further develops such analysis within a contemporary West-ern context, between the reciprocated ‘Maussian’ gift in supporting ties of friendship,and the unilateral gift, such as giving money freely to a beggar. Hall argues that whilstthe Maussian gift builds friendship, the ‘unilateral gift makes us poor’ (2005, 11). Thispaper is concerned with the Maussian ‘friend-making’ aspects of reciprocated tobaccoexchange in the social practice of ‘going two’s’ within these teenage friendshipgroups, and I draw out the gendered and age-specific micro-dynamics present in thecigarette exchange in the field settings.

Background

This research took place between October 2003 and March 2005 in an affluentborough on the edge of a large city in southern England. Although a relatively pros-perous area, the young women involved in this study came from a wide range ofsocial, cultural and economic backgrounds. These were a generic youth centre and ayouth provision in a large further education college. The young people who used the

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youth centre hailed from the immediate local area, and were predominantly whiteBritish aged between 14 and 18. The college students were older, aged 16–19, andwere ethnically mixed, as the catchment area for the local college was extensive, withstudents often commuting large distances across the city.

During this period I worked as a youth worker in the youth centre, and at the localcollege youth provision, known here as the common room. The recreational areaswithin the college were split down subcultural lines, and despite the common roombeing used by young people from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, includingWhite European, Lebanese, Black British, West African and White British, the domi-nant culture was white, middle class and ‘alternative’. The common room was seen byother students as a hang out for ‘grungers’1 and ‘gays’, in contrast to the working-classBlack British ‘rudie’2 straight cultural space of the refectory. The young peopleinvolved in this research were common room and youth centre users, and thusreflected the diversity of the provisions user profile. The two groups of young peopleat the college and youth centre were not mutually exclusive. Friendship circles over-lapped, and there was a mixing of students and youth centre users, as year 113 pupilsbegan to enrol at the college to take academic and vocational qualifications, and thecollege students used the youth centre for social events.

This multi-method, qualitative research involved: participant observation, groupand individual interviews, bulletin board postings and visual participatory methods. Inall, 36 young women were interviewed either individually or in informal groups. Thispaper draws on selected findings from interview and participant observations fromthese settings. To ensure anonymity, all names in this paper have been altered and,where possible, substituted by young people’s own choice of pseudonym.

‘It wasn’t peer pressure, but all my friends were doing it’: complicatingpeer pressure

Over the past decade or so there has been a range of critiques of various notions of‘peer pressure’ to explain young people’s substance use and social relations (Cogganand McKeller 1994; Cotterell 1996; Denscombe 2001a; Michell 1997; Ungar 2000).These critiques are centred on three main areas of contention. Firstly, that the ‘peerpressure’ model does not take into account the heterogeneity of young people’s expe-rience, nor the complexity of adolescent social networks (Cotterell 1996; Michell1997; Michell and Amos 1997). Secondly, that the model presumes passivity on thepart of young people and negates individual’s own sense of autonomy and personalagency, which assumes a ‘deficit’ model of children and perceives young people aspushed into a behaviour because of a personal ‘lack’ rather than an active choice(Coggan and McKeller 1994; Cotterell 1996; Denscombe 2001a; Michell 1997; Ungar2000). Finally, it is suggested that such a thesis negates the inherent sense of enjoy-ment in taking a drug, or participating in ‘risky’ behaviour (Measham 2002; O’Malleyand Valverde 2004). Such pleasures may not arise purely from the pharmaceuticaleffects on the body, but also from the socially cohesive aspects of the practice of drugtaking itself.

In Michell’s (1997) earlier work on young people’s social networks and smoking,she argues that the likelihood of taking up smoking depends on young women’s placein their wider social network. Michell concludes that despite its widespread use, theterm peer pressure in relation to school-based smoking prevention initiatives were‘almost meaningless’.

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There is pressure on teenagers, but it is mainly to do with purchasing the ‘right’ imageand wearing the trendiest gear and logos. For girls, there is pressure to be seen to attractboys. (Michell 1997, 12)

This tension between individualised and group explanations for young people’stobacco use is further expanded in more recent work on teenage smoking byDenscombe (2001a, 2001b) which suggests that one needs to consider young people’sdrug use as part of a wider reciprocal relationship with others in discursively produc-ing and creating idealised selves. This is not to say that the power hierarchies betweenindividuals and wider social peer groups do not have any bearing on the take up, main-tenance, cessation or meaning-making behind such smoking practices, but does offera critique of the unproblematic use of some broad discourses of ‘peer pressure’ toexplain young people’s risk taking and substance use practices (Coggan and McKeller1994; Cotterell 1996; Denscombe 2001a, 2001b; Michell 1997). The remainder of thisarticle explores the complex interplay between smoking and teen girls’ individual‘choices’ within friendship groups focused around the cigarette as an artefact of theyoung women’s social relationships.

Starting smoking – social exchange

Since October 2007 in the UK it has been illegal to sell tobacco to young people underthe age of 18. At the time of the fieldwork (2003–2005), tobacco could be legallypurchased by young people aged 16 and above. The young female smokers in thisstudy reported obtaining tobacco from a range of sources including friends, family andfrom commercial outlets. Young women who failed to ‘pass’ for 16, in order topurchase cigarettes would therefore either trade with other young people who could,or alternatively, there was a word-of-mouth network of which local retail outletswould sell cigarettes either in packs or singularly to children. Girls explained theirparticular patterns of use and allegiance to certain brands by raising factors such as therelative affordability, supply and the local availability.

When I was in secondary school every one smoked B&H [Benson & Hedges], and if youdidn’t have enough money it was Sovereign, but now B&H are £2.50, and I rememberwhen they were like £1.80 for Sovereign. Then my friend smoked Richmond becausethey gave discount. (Chloe, White British, 18; youth centre)

The girls in this study participated in a ‘mixed economy’ (Hall 2005), by purchasingcigarettes from businesses and singularly from non-intimates. In addition, girls regu-larly gave or received whole or part cigarettes to friends. This gift-giving process of‘two’s’ cemented girls’ friendships and ensured brand loyalty. Single cigarette salesand the informal tobacco currency within friendship groups enabled relatively youngpeople with a very limited amount of money into the practice of smoking and thenetworks of cigarette exchange. Young women also described having close connec-tions to a particular brand, and that factors such as taste and budget influenced theirbrand choice.

Researcher: What do you smoke?(Both girls reply at once) Jodie: Richmond Superkings. Lisa: Richmond Superkings.Jodie: Yeh, we both do.Researcher: Why do you smoke Richmond Superkings?Jodie: You get more for your money.

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Lisa: They’re cheaper.Jodie: Yeh, like buying Superkings, 10 fags are the equivalent, you get 12.Lisa: ‘Cos it’s longer than normal sizes.(Jodie, White British, 14; Lisa, White British, 15; youth centre)

However, it was clear that young women smoked the same brands as their friends, andthat certain makes were linked to particular youth subcultures. There was a clear ‘fash-ionable’ dimension to the uptake and popularity of particular brands (Gilbert 2007).As acknowledged in earlier studies, particular brands as signifiers are perceivedsymbolically to bestow particular esteemed values on the consumer. (Kenway andBullen 2001; Nairn, Griffin, and Gaya Wicks 2008). Thus, certain global brands fromNike to Marlboro as a style choice, can become shorthand for a certain youthful‘cool’, and via a reciprocal relationship with wider media representations, can be usedby individuals to produce a ‘cool’ self-image (Kenway and Bullen 2001). Such brandsthus became ‘raced’, classed and gendered, and associated with particular youthsubcultures through the norms of exchange. The use of such brands within these socialnetworks, became emblematic of wider bonds of friendship, aspirational identities,and through brand loyalty one could define oneself against the loathed ‘others’ byavoiding brands (from clothes to cigarettes) associated with that group. Such observa-tions around brand loyalty, contested ‘coolness’, fashion and young people’s identitywork are not unique to this study (Eckhart 1989; Gilbert 2007; Kenway, Kraak, andHickey-Moody 2006; Nairn, Griffin, and Gaya Wicks 2008; Wearing and Wearing2000). Cigarettes as icons of a ‘cool’ fashion statement, and as a shorthand signifierfor a subcultural contextual, fashionable ‘cool’ (Eckhart 1989; Gilbert 2007), couldthus confer status, even when they took the form of the relatively cheaper rollingtobacco, with its related allusions to illicit cannabis use and an associated ‘bohemian’lifestyle.

Moreover, the subcultural dimension in this study to this reciprocity meant thatvarious style groups of young people smoked differing brands of cigarettes. Forinstance, the largely middle-class ‘Grunger’ girls smoked Marlboro Lights and loosetobacco ‘roll ups’, whereas ‘rudies’ and ‘townies’4 preferred Mayfair and Richmond.Young women’s affinity to a particular brand identity and the cigarette as a unit ofexchange was thus negotiated in the face of this strongly branded recognition andsubcultural membership. ‘Grunger’ girls disregarded and eschewed cheaper cigarettesas ‘trampy’, yet continued to smoke rolling tobacco as a performance of their alterna-tive ‘unfashionable’ identity, and the relative low cost in comparison to the expensiveMarlboro Lights.

Many of the girls suggested they would take whatever was offered if they were outof cigarettes and ‘desperate’ to smoke. Yet despite this claim, as the majority of thetrade was between intimates or people within a subcultural group, smoking one’sbrand of choice could be fairly certain if one borrowed (‘ponced’) a cigarette of afellow member of a localised exchange network. As illustrated below, girls identifiedbeing without cigarettes as the chief reason to break with their brand allegiance,particularly if they were the only one who smoked a particular brand within a socialexchange network.

I always used to smoke B&H Silver before I met my friends, but they converted me. Atfirst like I could always taste the difference I was like ‘urgh’, but I remember one day Iran out of cigarettes so I had to keep smoking Marlboro Lights and I had to keep takingthem off my friends and I got used to them. (Ella, Iranian/White British, 16; common room)

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For instance, Ella describes her conversion to Marlboro Lights as a gradual process,and one in which the reciprocal trading relationships within the friendship groupfacilitated this brand conformity. Ella voices a mixture of personal agency and theneed to fit in, before describing how her friends’ gradual conversion led her to smokethe ‘right’ brand. The cigarette brand, Marlboro Lights, thus had an elevated statuswithin Ella’s social group, and through a process of peer preference, young womeneventually smoked the same brands as their friends. Such processes were evident inboth settings, as young people socialised with other young people from the sameclass, cultural and subcultural position as themselves and pointedly made key,normative selections over music taste, dress styles, fashion labels and choice ofsmoke.

Networks of exchange practice

So whilst I want to think about the reciprocal webs of exchange in the fieldsettings, I am also conscious of the role of style, pleasure and popularity in theuptake and maintenance of smoking within these peer networks. As stated earlier,there was a range of existing gift-giving practices in place in both the fieldsettings, and an intricate web of daily exchange and counter exchange arounditems such as cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, music and food. The rules of reciprocityconcerning cigarettes were identical between the two research settings, withyounger participants learning the codes of exchange, and associated necessary stylechoices from their older peers. These networks of exchange were apparent whenyoung women described their first cigarette, as all the female smokers intervieweddescribed being initiated into smoking practices via family and friends in theirearly teens.

Girls voiced a variety of reasons for their initial entry into the practice of cigarettesmoking. These included youthful experimentation, boredom, and social convention,relieving stress and wanting to ‘fit in’. However, threaded throughout these accountsyoung women were keen to stress their own sense of agency, and regularly echoeddiscourses of drugs education and peer pressure, in order to refute this as a reason fortheir personal use of cigarettes. In the extract below 14-year-old Amy explains howher initiation to smoking regularly began as a gradual social process, yet she rejectsthe notion of ‘peer pressure’, and remains keen to stress her own agency to resist thenorms within her wider friendship group.

I think it was because all my friends smoke … I think everyone starts smoking ‘cos likemy friend is smoking, I’m gonna try it. You know I started smoking ‘cos all my friendswere doing it, I might as well do it as well. It wasn’t like a peer pressure thing, but it nottrying to be cool, but just because I thought ‘hey all my friends are doing it. I may aswell’, and I ended up smoking. Now, I would give up. I wouldn’t worry about what myfriends thought of me … but just can’t be bothered. (Amy, White British, 14; youthcentre)

Clearly Amy is aware of ideas of contested ‘cool’ and peer pressure, she states thatshe started smoking ‘not to be cool’, and that she navigates both notion of ‘coolness’and ‘peer pressure’ in her description of taking up the habit. Amy’s story blendsversions of free choice, friendship, and the normative practice of teen smoking,whilst acknowledging that she might cease if she ‘could be bothered’. Smoking thenappears for Amy as a potentially ‘cool choice’, that one might choose to take up,

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maintain, or cease depending on friendship group, circumstance and personal prefer-ence. Amy was not the only girl who dismissed the idea of ‘peer pressure’ as a wayof explaining her entry into cigarette smoking. Fellow youth club members, Lisa andJodie, also stressed a strong personal sense of agency in choosing to smoke their firstcigarette.

Researcher: Can you remember the first time you smoked?Jodie: …I wasn’t pressurised or anything, I did it for my own thing … I was

having a bit of a bad patch with friends and there was this one girl whostuck by me, and I became quite friendly with her and I went round herhouse, and she was quite a heavy smoker anyway, and her mum knew.And I just said to her, I said ‘oh let me try?’ and she was like ‘well are yousure?’ and I was like ‘yeh!’ And that’s how I got into it, I kinda startedmyself.

Lisa: There was this girl called Julie, you’ll probably know her Jodie, and it wasbefore school one time, me and my sister used to go and knock for her,‘’cos she was at her foster parents at the time, she was like ‘do you wannatry some?’ and so I was like ‘Go on then’. So I tried some and I thought Imight actually keep this up … ‘cos it was like all right … but so I tried itfor a few times, and now I’m addicted and everything.

Jodie: Yeh, like it is nice but you get proper addicted, ‘cos like me and her, if wehaven’t had a fag … probably after this we’re gonna need one.

Lisa: I need one now.Jodie: Like if we haven’t had a fag like in two hours, we literally cry. ‘Cos like at

school…Lisa: We get stressed out literally.Jodie: I have one at half eight and then I can’t have another one, till 20 past 11.

And from like half 10 I look at the clock and I’m like, ‘Hurry up’.Lisa: I always say to her. ‘I need a fag!’Jodie: Yeah, I like keep ‘em in my pencil case and I look at them. And I think just

another half an hour.Lisa: I just have to hold my pencil just like I’m holding a cigarette … Then I’m

fine until break time.(Jodie, White British, 14; Lisa, White British, 15; youth centre)

For these girls smoking although a rebellious practice provides a canvas to performother appropriate feminine values of good friendship and intimacy. In Jodie’s accountshe asks for the first cigarette, almost as a way of cementing the close social bond shehad built up with her friend, ‘who had stuck by her’. Lisa describes being offered thefirst cigarette by Julie, but is keen to assert that she decided to ‘keep it up’ herself,before eventually becoming ‘addicted’. For Jodie and Lisa, cigarettes punctuate thetedium of the long school day, and demonstrate their resistance to school authoritywith long narratives about snatched surreptitious smokes behind the school’s bikeshed. The young women reproduced this close social bond as they bantered about thetypes of cigarette they preferred, and the urgency for which to conclude the interviewin order to go for another smoke.

The girls’ account does not simply fulfil the ‘coercive’ initiation by peer pressureinto cigarette use, but instead a more complex account emerges, one of curiosity,bonding and initial personal choice. However, I also note that a discourse of ‘addic-tion’ underpinned these accounts, and potentially blurs the narratives of ‘free choice’.Indeed, whilst the girls’ tobacco ‘addiction’ brings them together in their shared expe-rience, Jodie and Lisa also voice ambivalence about their shared dependency on ciga-rettes, as well as acknowledging it as an entry point into a secret taboo adult world ofsubstance use.

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‘I’m a pretty generous person’: the rules of reciprocity

Young women, as they became established smokers, learnt the wider localised normsand codes in the reciprocal exchange of cigarettes. Yet, not all young women hadequal access to such resources, and the enduring need to be ‘popular’ ensured a steadysupply of tobacco when times grew hard. For the young women in these fieldworksettings, the closer one was to the centre, the more intimate and more frequent thesocial exchange, and the wider the network that one could draw upon. This intimacysecured one’s place in the wider social network, and is perhaps illustrated by thefollowing extract, where a close female friendship group contemplate the rules of reci-procity.

Researcher: What’s twosing mean?Louise: It means do you want a couple of tokes.5

Researcher: Ok it’s your last cigarette but it’s your best mate?(Girls all speak at once)Karen: You’ve only one left, you need it.Louise: It depends. Sarah: You’d two’s it!Louise: Yeh you’d two’s it … But if they’re in a really bad situation, they’re really

stressed out, then you’d probably give it them.Karen: Yeh, I think I’m generally a pretty generous person, so yeh under circum-

stances if I had few then definitely if I had enough.Researcher: Ok, so is there other things you share with your mates?Karen: Drink!Louise: Drink, yeh, Clothes! Advice.Researcher: Uh huh, what else?Sarah: Well it depends if they’re your mates. Everything really!Louise: Like me and Karen are best mates, so there is nothing I wouldn’t share with

her … maybe men? (Girls laugh)Louise: Well depending on how you felt about the man.Karen: Yeh you’d have to pay them.Louise: I dunno, say someone’s ponced five fags off you, then I feel I could ask

them, normallyResearcher: Do you give people fags that ponce off you?Louise: Yeh! Sarah: Yeh I do!Researcher: So say it was a stranger that came up to you?Sarah: If they offered money then maybe.Louise: If I had them on me then I might.Karen: If I had a load.Louise: Yeh.(Informal interview, Sarah, White British, 17; Karen, White British, 17; Louise, WhiteBritish, 17; common room)

Within the young women’s social networks, factors such as gender, class, ‘race’ andsubcultural identity worked together to allow entry into a particular trading network.As illustrated above, despite these unspoken rules of brand affinity, friendship and thesocial obligation of ‘going two’s’, girls were keen to perform dominant normativeforms of ‘giving’ femininity. They were keen to suggest they would offer cigarettes toall who asked, highlighting the prevailing dominant narrative of normative feminine‘niceness’ (Hey 1997) which masked the true inequalities that were all too apparent intheir social networks. As in other studies on girls’ social identities (George 2007; Hey1997; Reay 2001), the young women’s emotional investments in their friendshipgroup, and the intricate power plays within these groups, are of paramount importancein these girls’ lives. Fundamental to the rules of friendship are those of exchange.Within these friendship circles, girls suggested they would share drink, cigarettes,

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clothes, and advice with one another, although following the rules of heterosexualfeminine competition and monogamy, Karen and Louise drew the line at sharing aboyfriend. Indeed, immediately after this interview, Louise described an instancewhere a ‘rudie’ had approached her and demanded a cigarette. Such behaviour, by amember outside the social group and negotiated system of reciprocity, dislocated theperceived social order. In fact the young women largely only traded cigarettes andother items with those who formed part of their inner circle and exchange network.The closer knit the circle, then the more intimate the item of exchange, with youngwomen occasionally talking of sharing underwear on sleepovers with their closefemale friends.

Breaking the cycle of reciprocity

The cycle of cigarette exchange both at the youth centre and college did not alwaysrun smoothly. Individuals could become ill-favoured if they requested to borrow ciga-rettes too often, without reciprocation, or bothered those they had not sufficientlynegotiated reciprocal-trading rights, for instance, if they were from another ‘subcul-tural’ group in this highly stratified setting. Similarly, if one took too much and gavetoo little it created tension, in what Hall describes as the ‘give and take of friendship’(2005, 4). Such difficulties within a social group can lead to potential marginalisationor effectual expulsion from the trading network for individual transgressions. Certaingroup members potentially faced greater exploitation in this trade by feelingcompelled to give to other more powerful members in the group. Such uneven tradingpower relations highlight how the ‘giving’ aspects of normative traditional feminini-ties position young women at a potential disadvantage if they refused requests frommore powerful peers for shared smokes. In order to prevent this potential exploitativetrade, several girls clearly voiced their frustration at the expectation to always providecigarettes to their peers when requested. For example, in the common room I observeda terse exchange between two young women. Sylvia’s request for a ‘spare cigarette’was greeted with exasperation by her friend Sade.

Sylvia: Have you got a spare cigarette?Sade: There’s no such thing as a spare cigarette. It’s not like when I bought a 10 pack

there was a spare … but you (to Sylvia) can have one, but it’s not spare. Iintended to smoke it … Do you want me to roll it as well? (With exasperation)… It’s not like anyone taught me. I just watched and learnt.

(Sade, Black African, 17; Sylvia, Black African, 17; common room)

In this exchange Sade demonstrates the limitations of her reciprocated gift relationshipwith her friend, Sylvia. Sade is keen to display an autonomous, self-reliant, active andeconomically minded persona. For Sylvia to request a cigarette and ask Sade to roll itas well, is testing the boundaries of reciprocity. The tensions between individual ‘freechoice’ and the wider social network are clearly played out here. Sade suggests thatsmoking is a set of learnt practices, which enable one to become independent, andinsists that one needs to be an active learner in order to become an autonomous andself-reliant member of the smoking community. Moreover, in this exchange, it isimplicitly assumed to be better to give than to receive, as Sade voices frustration withthe idea that any of her valuable tobacco is in fact ‘spare’.

Such tensions around cigarette use were common place. One afternoon at theyouth centre I saw another example of a power struggle over cigarettes that illustrated

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what might happen if the cycle of reciprocity broke down. Noel, a young man of 14,was angry. He entered the entrance hall, tussling with a slightly older girl. Noel wasknown for his enjoyment of ‘play fighting’, so I gave Noel a hard stare and shoutedfor him to ‘Quit messing about!’.

‘But she owes me 10 cigarettes!’ Noel implored, continuing to wrestle the girl intoa headlock. The young women laughed and fought back, happy to tease Noel in thisplayful, flirtatious banter, until she broke free and ran upstairs towards the female-only sanctuary of the girls’ toilets. Noel looked dejected, and he slunk off to play pool,as I called after him that I would sort out the conflict with both parties in a moment.A few minutes later, I saw Noel still on the look out for cigarettes by the entrancelobby. He was negotiating with Lisa who told him, ‘If you come to the shop with meI’ll give you a fag’. Noel obliged, and followed Lisa across the road to the shop.

Girls used the valued commodity of the cigarette to locally mobilise existingpower hierarchies within the negotiated trade of cigarettes with younger boys andgirls. Noel finds himself angrily demanding cigarettes off the first girl in a mock flir-tatious banter. Noel felt wronged, and that the first older, and more mature-lookinggirl owed him cigarettes but refused to repay him. It is worth noting that Noel, at ayouthful 14, could sometimes struggle to purchase cigarettes easily, in contrast tothese older girls. In this instance, the debt of obligation and social contract betweenthe two participants had not been upheld, as the older girl shrugged off the mantle ofresponsibility, in the girls-only space of the female lavatory, she escaped herconscious and social obligation, whilst still retaining the upper hand.

Lisa, as a canny negotiator, did not want to go to the shops alone, and so she usedNoel’s need for a cigarette (and perhaps his younger appearance), as a bribe to encour-age him to accompany her. Here, the cigarette symbolises the generational andgendered power relations in play amongst this friendship group. Lisa, as the bearer ofthe gift, has the power in this relationship, although Noel’s need for a cigaretteperhaps overshadowed his potential reluctance to accompany Lisa to the shops. Such‘bribery’ was a regular occurrence in these youth settings, with young people implor-ing friends to accompany them into the cold of the outside smoking area with a prom-ise of a ‘fag’. Indeed, young people disliked smoking alone in the outdoor draughty‘smokers’ corner’, and would regularly negotiate, with their smoking and non-smok-ing friends alike, to trade cigarettes and other items such as snacks for company.

Such power relations were also occasionally in play for non-smokers. Within thecollege setting, two young male non-smokers occasionally distributed cigarettes asgifts to their friends, handing them out one at a time to those who proclaimed them-selves desperate, but without the money to buy them. Such young men as non-smokerswere not part of the ongoing process of cigarette exchange reciprocity, and so one mayquestion what they gained from such an act. Although, such gift giving might appearunilateral (Hall 2005), such actions were about consolidating friendship, and would bereciprocated later with company, affection and other goods, in addition to providingan accessible way of acquiring the symbolic ‘cool’ associated with particular brandsof cigarettes without actually having to inhale. The recipients would feel obliged toreciprocate for this ‘kind offer’, and so through giving out cigarettes young peoplecould cement their place in the wider social circle. The trade of cigarettes, and otheritems, thus enabled these young male non-smokers to display their wealth, generosity,‘coolness’, bonds of intimacy and emotional investment through the exchange whichbestowed status upon the giver and receiver. Such ‘giving’ relationships remain highlygendered, and this unsolicited masculine gift giving differs perhaps from the enduring

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social obligations underpinning the normative expectations of the ‘good’ givingfemale friend, as illustrated earlier with Sade and Sylvia’s curt exchange.

Conclusions: ways forward – rethinking ‘peer pressure’ and smoking

So far in this article I have outlined how notions of branded ‘cool’, popularity and theneed to participate in the demanding, reciprocal rules of girls’ friendship maintainedyoung women’s smoking practices. In common with earlier studies of pupils’ smokingpractices in these examples, the informal trade allowed young women to carve out anexchange network, free from the involvement of the adult world (Croghan et al. 2003;Turner, Gordon, and Young 2004). Whilst girls’ risk-taking, through smoking, drink-ing, drug-taking, sex or socialising, could be viewed as an enactment of newly found‘girl power’, commentators have also suggested that traditional normative discourseof femininities still structure and underpin wider responses to young women’s actions(Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005; Pini 2001; Sweeting and West 2003).

As reflected in other studies, ‘coolness’ in these research contexts was a slipperyand highly contested symbolic value (Nairn, Griffin, and Gaya Wicks 2008). Particu-lar brands of cigarettes provided useful symbolic tools to produce desirable ‘cool’femininities, yet girls still needed to take great care to smoke the ‘right’ brands, andthe expectation to share with the ‘right’ peer group, Conversely, the very act of smok-ing, as a shorthand for a rebellious youth, created a space to highlight a personalautonomy in taking up the ‘grown up’ activity that could help manage nerves, and thecomplexities of the teen social landscape. Cigarettes as multi-faceted symbolic objectsrepresented both autonomy and control. They could be perceived as ‘trampy’ and/orsophisticated, a sources of considerable pleasure, yet a significant health risk. Simplis-tic discourses of ‘peer pressure’ do little to acknowledge such complexities. Incommon with earlier studies of pupils’ smoking practices in these examples, the infor-mal trade allowed young women to carve out fashionable, cool femininities, and in anexchange network, free from the involvement of the adult world (Croghan et al. 2003;Gilbert 2007; Turner, Gordon and Young 2004).

There are clear ramifications from these observations for potential tobacco anddrugs education initiatives. Drugs awareness and prevention are too often collapsedinto one another in drugs education policy and practice, yet effective practicalresponses to young people’s substance use largely remains elusive (Blackman 2004;Cohen 1996; Evans 2001; Lancelott 2005; O’Malley and Valverde 2004). If tobaccoeducation and smoking cessation initiatives are to be more meaningful within schooland youth work settings, then a starting point must be based on young people’s ownunderstandings about the social complexities and meanings of substance use withintheir own networks (Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli 2003).

Finally, at the time of writing the changing social policy landscape within the UKhas meant further restrictions on young people’s access to cigarettes and places tosmoke, with a banning of smoking in all indoor public spaces in England from July2007. Such shifts in policy necessitate further research to explore how these impact onyounger smokers. The social complexities of young people’s cigarette use and tradenetworks also require further longitudinal research to trace young people’s brand alle-giance, and explore the interplay between gender, class subculture, social exchangeand friendship. Further research could provide a more nuanced understanding of suchprocesses, and inform the development of more effective policy responses and tobaccoeducation and smoking cessation initiatives within school and youth settings.

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Notes1. The term ‘grunger’ was used pejoratively to describe young people who listened to rock

music and wore dark clothes, particularly hooded sweatshirts and baggy jeans.2. ‘Rudie’ was a shortened version of rude boy or rude girl, and was used sometimes pejora-

tively to describe young people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who listened to urbanmusic and dressed in a Black British cultural style, including streetwear labels like Nike,Avirex and Fubu.

3. Year 11 is the last year of compulsory secondary education in England and Wales. Pupilswould be aged between 15 and 16 years.

4. Townie was a term often used pejoratively and interchangeably with ‘rudie’. However, ittended to refer to white working-class young people who were seen to adopt ‘Black’cultural forms such as Hip Hop and Garage music, and wore tracksuits and gold jewellery.Townie was used often in a pejorative sense, although many young people within thesubcultures rejected or only grudgingly accepted these labels.

5. Toke meaning a pull or drag on the cigarette.

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