What are "smoking-room stories"?

Question

I recently started reading C.S. Lewis's book *That Hideous Strength*, the third in his Space Trilogy (and I'm devouring it - what a story!) The following passage, from when Mark first meets Miss "Fairy" Hardcastle, isn't quite clear to me: > It would be misleading to say that he liked her. She had indeed excited in him all the distaste which a young man feels at the proximity of something rankly, even insolently, sexed and at the same time wholly unattractive. And something in her cold eye had told him that she was well aware of this reaction and found it amusing. She had told him a good many **smoking-room stories**. Often before now Mark had shuddered at the clumsy efforts of the emancipated female to indulge in this kind of humour, but his shudders had always been consoled by a sense of superiority. This time he had the feeling that he was the butt; this woman was exasperating male prudery for her diversion. > _{-- Chapter 3 (emphasis mine; full text available at [Project Gutenberg](https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-thathideousstrength/lewiscs-thathideousstrength-00-h.html))} I've tried searching the internet for `smoking-room stories`, but the results are things like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smoking_Room) or [this](https://www.wdl.org/en/item/13060/) which aren't useful at all. **What does this phrase mean?** It seems to be part of the characterisation of Miss Hardcastle, so I'd like to understand it better, even though by now I've got far enough to know exactly what kind of person she is.

Answer 1

In traditional upper-class British society, say the late-18th century through the mid-20th, at dinner parties the men would remain in the dining room after the mean was finished to talk, drink, and smoke (pipes, cigars, cigarettes) while the ladies went into the drawing room to talk and perhaps pick up their embroidery. In large houses, especially English country estates, the library might be used as the after-dinner gathering place for men to engage in these pastimes. Many gentlemen of means also belonged to private men's clubs where some rooms were dedicated to smoking, drinking, and playing cards. During such occasions -- when the men were not subdued by the proximity of delicate feminine ears and sensibilities -- their conversations could at times become salacious. More often men regaled each other by recounting bawdy stories (some true, some fictional), telling dirty jokes, and reciting sexually explicit poems. These entertainments fall under the designation of "smoking-room stories."

In That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, Mark is somewhat affronted when Miss Hardcastle tells him "a good many smoking-room stories" because it shows she is unladylike, if not a little slutty. She wants to seem emancipated, showing that she has spent time with men in unconventional, if not intimate, settings by telling such stories. She wants to seem modern, fashionable, and very un-Victorian in her attitudes about sex. This makes Mark nervous. When she has done this in the past, he was able to take on an air of superiority, looking at her as being tawdry and of low social bearing. But now he worries if times have changed to the point that she is really "with the times" and he is being make fun of for being a prude or old-fashioned.