I forgot to mention in my earlier post that it is interesting that you found a picture of a woman in some kind of cloak, presumably a chador, smoking a cigarette.

Smoking is, and has long been, an icon of prostitution, and very many book covers and other illustrations of prostitutes show them with cigarettes. This is partly because women who smoke look rather independent and sassy. Smoking has lost its ability to shock, but prostitutes are still depicted with cigarettes.

It so happens that the image of the smoking prostitute is one of the few stereotypes about them that is accurate. Almost every prostitute I met really did smoke. This is no doubt to some degree in order to keep up the image. Women who work as prostitutes must act like prostitutes, and these images are what a newly-minted prostitute has to learn what she has been hired to do. It is partly this role-playing aspect of prostitution that led me to call my book Games Prostitutes Play.

I am afraid that an even more decisive factor in prostitutes' choosing to smoke is that their job is so boring. A successful prostitute might have two clients during an eight hour shift in the brothel I studied. That means she has two hours upstairs in the bedroom with them, and ten or fifteen minutes chatting with each one downstairs during the initial contact. The women talk with each other sometimes and to some extent, but rarely for hours at a time. That means hours and hours of sitting around staring at the ceiling, unless she is one of the minority of reading prostitutes. Smoking has always been a companion for the bored and the lonely.

One of the reasons why my book exists is exactly this boredom factor. Many prostitutes found talking with me a relief from the tedium that brothel life becomes, especially after a few years on the job.

David Farer, author of Games Prostitutes Play