@Velsy No, I simply believe it's outdated to think badasses still need to smoke in 2020. China is a particularly interesting in this case because more than 40% of the men apparently smoke there, but only a few percent of the women, according to a couple of sources you can quickly find by googling. In other words, a smoking woman in China is rare, yet when you want to make a woman look badass in China, she would need to smoke? Does that, then, mean half of the Chinese men (in RL) are badasses because they smoke? This is the kind of conflict in the idea that's problematic even if you don't have a problem with smoking, per se. Just to point it out, the author didn't actually reverse the smoking statistics for the reverse world.
Thanks for actually producing a sensible argument, unlike that Ekfreet person.