What Does a Woman Pothead Look Like?

Dont get Jane West started on Seth Rogen. West the co-founder of Women Grow, aprofessionalnetwork for female cannabis entrepreneurs is no fan of the monopoly that stoner bros seem to have on pop culture. You know the type: Cheech and Chong, The Dude, the guys from Friday and Mall Rats and Half Baked, and, of course, Rogen, the current cinematic standard-bearer of the bong-hitting, heavy-lidded, very male tribe. Seth Rogen makes millions of dollars propagating the entire image of what a stoner is, West says. The problem with that image is that it happens to ignore the wide world of female potheads.

Women like West have been delighted by the success of Comedy Centrals Broad City, starring comedians Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. I love that Abbi and Ilana are the counterparts to the bromance thats happening in current cannabis media, West says. Jacobson and Glazers on-screen alter egos are aimless, harebrained heroines and proud stoners in a fantastical version of New York. Awkward, weird and pleasantly crude, they are the inverse of dainty Sex and the City types. Abbi and Ilana hide weed like drug mules (see Season 1s Pu$$y Weed). They vape in coatrooms. They put pot in chocolate graham cracker sandwiches. They get stoned in NYCs parks and on its street corners. In one uncomfortably hilarious Season 2 episode, Abbi actually smokes weed with Seth Rogen himself, and then unwittingly date-rapes him.

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Like all stoners, Abbi and Ilana live in a state of hazy, suspended disbelief. While women everywhere else are working for equal pay, breaking glass ceilings and leaning in, Abbi and Ilana somehow find the time and money to lean back, inhale, exhale and get super-high. Its a beautiful gift to the comedic genre even if most people who get stoned in the real world dont have the luxury of becoming full-time stoners.

Broad City is the boldest rebuttal yet to a decades-long tradition of men, and only men, getting high on screen. Smoking weed was an activity relegated to dark, dingy living rooms with sunken-cushioned couches, hazy lighting, greasy old pizza boxes and half-dressed dudes taking bong rips. It was a world where women were either unwanted interlopers or juicy stoner-chick accessories, passively scoring weed from the guys who allowed them to be present. If a woman ever was portrayed smoking pot in the media, she was all thighs and cleavage, lips and lacy lingerie think High Times cover girls or pouty-mouthed, midriff-baring Milla Jovovich in Dazed and Confused.

There were exceptions that let women have moments of blazing glory. The ladies of the First Wives Club smoked up while they talked shit about their exes. Brenda Blethyn grew weed to dig herself out of a debt hole in Saving Grace. Anna Faris ate too many cupcakes in Smiley Face. Even on Sex and the City, Kim Catralls Samantha sparked the occasional pre-coital joint in satin underthings. Perhaps most heroically, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin shared a very memorable revenge joint as they planned their bosss demise in 9 to 5.

Today, with marijuana legalization slowly becoming a realityin the United States, a new demographic of cannabis consumers is coming into focus. Its people with chronic pain. Its adults with anxiety. Its mothers with children. Its girlfriends going out to dinner on the weekend. Its anyone who needs to unwind at the end of the day. Its everyone but stoners as we traditionally imagine them. Maybe thats the bigger issue with the way we depict marijuana users on TV and in movies stoner burnouts of any gender are an outdated stereotype.

Jane Wests businesses represent a whole sector of weed-smoking women who dont rock pot-leaf T-shirts, light up three-foot bongs or celebrate 4/20 as a national holiday. Its not a culture I relate to, she says of these hokey institutions. Theres something about the whole look and feel of what they are presenting as cannabis culture that is not helping.

At some point, most potheads grow up, get jobs, find our own dealers, and get high at night before waking up for work the next morning. We cant all be Abbis and Ilanas for the rest of our lives. If West is the new face of cannabis consumers, the onscreen representation of her client base is going to need a serious facelift.