If alcohol is a simple depressant and marijuana a capricious intensifier, precisely what role shall we assign to opium and its derivatives? In the absolute sense, of course, opium serves as a final substitute for sex; it is addictive in whatever form it may be taken, and for the genuine addict of long standing it is an end in itself. Sex becomes unimportant if, in fact, the capacity for sex is not altogether inhibited by the drug. Male addicts generally become impotent sooner or later. Females do not lose the capacity for sex—prostitution is in fact one of the chief professions of heroin addicts, and heroin addiction one of the chief pastimes of prostitutes—but rarely experience much desire for the act or much pleasure from it.
In more moderate amounts, or in earlier stages of drug addiction, opium’s effect is a somewhat more complex matter. Both men and women are apt to find sexual desires stronger than normal, probably because of the drug’s property of permitting the individual to guide his fantasies and experience them in a particularly vivid manner. For men, however, the drug is apt to do what the porter in Macbeth attributes to drink—provoking the desire while taking away the performance. The narcotic effect of opium, by engendering muscular relaxation, interferes with the mechanics of the erection to a greater or lesser degree.
By the same token, opium or its derivatives facilitate passive anal intercourse; the relaxation of the anal sphincter renders penetration somewhat easier.
The popular image of the “dope fiend,” stoned to the gills on heroin and running around robbing and raping and killing, has little if any foundation in reality. Modern criminologists know well enough that it is deprivation from a drug and financial need that turn addicts into criminals. With his bloodstream full of heroin, an addict wants little more than a quiet place to sit or sleep. But old images die hard.
There are two substances we might call “genuine aphrodisiacs,” although neither fits the precise definition of provoking sexual desire per se. Yohimbine, the extract of the bark of an African tree, is a stimulant that works upon the nerve system at the base of the spinal cord. This stimulation is in turn focused upon the sex organs, and the physical manifestations of sexual desire follow thereupon.
The drug works quite speedily. Men are apt to experience spontaneous erections shortly after ingesting yohimbine; these do not wane of their own accord and may or may not persist after ejaculation. Women feel a rush of warmth to the genitalia that is equated with sexual desire and find coitus intensely enjoyable although not always satisfying.
Long-term use of yohimbine has pronounced deleterious effects upon the nervous system.
The other “true aphrodisiac” is cantharides, known far and wide by the more popular name of “Spanish fly.” It is not Spanish, not produced from flies, and not a stimulant at all. Made from a beetle indigenous to Southern Europe, cantharides is an extreme irritant that works most directly upon the urinary tract. When taken internally, a burning, itching sensation results in the urinary system. Blood flows to the area, and this, coupled with the extreme itching irritation prevailing in the area, makes an individual desire relief via coitus. The drug is enormously dangerous; a fairly minute quantity may be enough to constitute a fatal overdose.
History, folklore, and literature alike abound with references to Spanish fly and its legendary properties. It is hard to determine the origin of the drug—it was known definitely to the Romans and probably to the ancient Egyptians and was used frequently in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Duc de Richelieu used candies containing Spanish fly as an aid in seduction, while the Marquis de Sade was sentenced to death for his use of cantharides in staging an orgy, although this sentence was later commuted. The exact details of this last affair are somewhat confused. One contemporary account reports that
… Comte de Sade … has played in Marseilles a spectacle which is in its consequences quite horrible, though amusing at first glance. He invited many persons to a party and gave them pretty chocolate bon-bons for dessert. They were mixed with powdered cantharides; their effect is well known. All of those who ate them became shameless with ardor and lust and started the most wild excesses of love. The festival was a Roman orgy. Even modest women could not restrain themselves. The Marquis de Sade copulated with his sister-in-law and then fled to escape the death-penalty. Many persons died and others suffer still from the effects.
This account, from the memoirs of Bachaumont, is an exaggeration of the affair in question but not of the properties of cantharides. The poet Lucretius is supposed to have died from an overdose of the drug, and other famous deaths are rumored to have occurred from this cause, some even in our own time. Legend supplies instances of men and women who have engaged in sexual activity to the point of death or exhaustion after being given the drug. Neither masturbation nor coitus, however furiously undertaken, will relieve the irritation caused by cantharides, and the afflicted individual can only go on and on until overwhelmed by fatigue or until the drug wears off of its own accord.
The above description should make it quite obvious that cantharides is by no means an ideal aphrodisiac, even if the inherent dangers could be bypassed and a controlled dose administered. Coitus under its influence is in no sense satisfying. On the contrary, it is the ultimate in frustration.
It would be tempting to assert that an ideal aphrodisiac can never exist, to draw analogies to the transmutation of metals and the universal solvent, and to discourse upon the fallacy of attempting to achieve an emotional result through largely physical means. But such a conclusion does not seem entirely valid when one considers the tremendous advances constantly taking place throughout the field of drug development. We have already found several substances that work upon the emotions through physical means—this is precisely what tranquilizers are and what they do. Some of these tranquilizers can already function as aphrodisiacs, if only in a negative sense, by eliminating or relaxing tensions that stand in the way of sexual adequacy. With drug therapy already accepted as the most promising psychiatric frontier, it only stands to reason that we may expect all sorts of unpredictable progress in these areas.
While neither vitamin shots nor monkey glands have proved the panacea they were once thought to be, hormone treatments are not without effect, and further refinement seems likely. Whether any of these avenues for exploration will succeed in producing the ultimate aphrodisiac remains to be seen. Such a perfect drug, a frequent fantasy of hardcore pornography, would render all males sublimely potent and all women ravenously lustful, all sexual activity profoundly exciting and all orgasms deeply satisfying—and all this achieved without danger or unpleasant side effects.
Will such a drug ever come to be?
In China, during the T’ang Dynasty, a member of the scholar class could make an excellent living by writing charms on rice paper, to be wrapped around penises or inserted into vaginas. And just a few years ago a group of Madison Avenue entrepreneurs launched an advertising campaign with the “Does your husband always feel tired at night?” theme—and with this thinly veiled aphrodisiac pitch sold an extraordinary quantity of male-order vitamin pills. So the aphrodisiac has always appealed, and no doubt always will. It remains for modern science to achieve the miraculous.
Eros and Capricorn
Precoital Sex Techniques
Known variously as love play, foreplay, necking, petting, and so forth, the infinite variety of precoital sex techniques embraces all those practices and activities which serve as a prelude to coitus. From the simplest hug or kiss to the most intimate caress, all these actions are geared to prepare one or both of the partners for copulation by heightening physical and emotional desire. Occasionally such extracoital practices as fellatio and cunnilingus constitute foreplay; occasionally such basic elements of foreplay as digital manipulation are pursued as ends in themselves. It is with the many types of sexual activity employed as preliminary steps toward sexual intercourse—more specifically, genital intercourse—that we are here concerned.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest…
A familiarity with a majority of the marriage manuals presently on the market reveals that a good many of them are first and foremost manuals of foreplay. After explaining to the reader the basic nature of the penis and the vagina and outlining the fundamental relationship of each to the other, the authors mount the soapbox for foreplay. This emphasis is not incomprehensible in view of our centuries old legacy of improperly stimulated and hence unsatisfied wives, but it might seem as though the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.
“Foreplay should never run less than fifteen minutes,” advise Berg and Street in Sex: Methods and Manners, “because this is not too ample a period in which to extend a woman’s pleasure. Some women are just beginning to experience a clitoral erection at the end of that time; others require an even longer interval.” Benjamin Morse has labeled this particular sort of statement as a “stopwatch approach to love,” and the phrase is not without merit.
And yet the emphasis on foreplay, devoutly modern though it may be, is no phenomenon of modern sexology. Marriage manuals and erotic handbooks down through the ages have laid similar stress upon precoital sexual techniques, although they generally counterbalance this by giving “equal time” to a discussion of techniques and variety in coitus itself.
In order to sample the literature on this topic, it might be best to divide the general area of foreplay into some of its component parts. Compartmentalization may seem too much along the lines of a mechanical engineer’s approach to sex, but it seems worthwhile in this case. We might begin, then, by considering the kiss.
Kissing
The kiss, described by one poet as the language of love and by another as the contact of two thirty-foot tubes each two-thirds filled with feces, is an important ingredient in precoital behavior in the great majority of human cultures. There is infinite variability in the significance attached to a kiss and similar variance in the manner in which it may be conducted.
Kisses range in type from a chaste and wholly asexual peck upon the lips to that profound and long term bit of oral exploration and discovery known familiarly as “soul kissing.” And the significance of a kiss has a similarly wide range. According to Ovid, “Once a woman grants a man her lips she may refuse him nothing. Can a man but reach so far, no door shall be barred to him. A woman who will be kissed will be taken and loved.”
Ovid would be asea at a contemporary college campus, where, in the words of one college girl, “A kiss is just a pleasant way of telling a boy you enjoyed his company for the evening.” And other cultures have other approaches to the kiss. In some primitive societies, where cleanliness is rarely a vital consideration and where the inhabitants may not even take the Indian precaution of eating only with the right hand and wiping one’s anus solely with the left, mouth-to-mouth kissing is rejected as unsanitary.
Eskimos, as everyone well knows, kiss by rubbing noses. (The Eskimo kiss is actually somewhat more complex than this, a sort of smell—kissing that makes more erotic sense than the childish game of rubbing a pair of noses furiously against one another.) The French have given their name to what Casanova called “the game of tongues.” In our own culture, kisses may be dreamy, tender, savage, yearning, hungry, fevered, or almost any convenient adjective.
After years of clandestine circulation, Frank Harris’s erotic autobiography, My Life and Loves, came on the open market a few years ago. Harris, fin de siécle literary gadabout and marginal satyr, devotes the greater part of five volumes to his sexual autobiography, reminiscing with laudable candor if with somewhat questionable memory from his earliest awareness of sex to his latest orgies in Italy. Keenly interested in pure and simple seduction, Harris was well aware of the importance of the kiss, both as a beginning to greater things and as a reliable barometer of a woman’s erotic temperament.
Harris’s affairs always begin with kissing. When a girl’s ardor begins to cool, he kisses her until her lips grow warm, mentioning more than a few times his observations that when a girl’s lips are warm it is a sign that her genitalia are warm also—a variation, perhaps, on the “cold hands, warm heart” theme.
Even when Harris proceeded more directly to the heart of the matter, kissing played a vital part in his seductions. Here, for example, is his account of the seduction of a sixteen-year-old servant girl.
I got up to go on some pretext and she accompanied me to the stoop. I said goodbye on the top step and then jumped down by the side with a prayer in my heart that she’d come a step or two down, and she did. There she stood, her hips on a level with my mouth; in a moment my hands went up her dress, the right to her sex, the left to her bottom behind to hold her. The thrill as I touched her half-fledged sex was almost painful in intensity. Her first movement brought her sitting down on the step above me and at once my finger was busy in her slit.
“How dare you!” she cried, but not angrily. “Take your hand away!”
“Oh, how lovely your sex is!” I exclaimed, as if astounded. “Oh, I must see it and have you, you miracle of beauty!” and my left hand drew down her head for a long kiss while my middle finger continued its caress. Of a sudden her lips grew hot and at once I whispered, “Won’t you love me, dear? I want you so: I’m burning and itching with desire. (I knew she was!) Please; I won’t hurt you and I’ll take care. Please, love, no one will know,” and the end of it was that right there on the porch I drew her to me and put my sex against hers and began the rubbing of her tickler and front part of her sex that I knew would excite her. In a moment she came and her love—dew wet my sex and excited me terribly; but I kept on frigging her with my manroot while restraining myself from coming by thinking of other things, till she kissed me of her own accord and suddenly moving forward pushed my prick right into her pussy…
Here we see two manifestations of the kiss—first Harris kisses the girl to further her excitement and gauge the strength of her passion, and later the girl kisses him “of her own accord” before moving directly to coitus. Elsewhere Harris discusses the methods of kissing—pressing with the lips, kissing with the mouth open, and the exploration of the partner’s mouth with the tongue. He is apt to remark that a partner kisses exceptionally well, and he mentions several times that he has been told he kisses well himself.
For an almost overwhelming catalog of the varieties of kisses, the mainstay of Hindu erotica, Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra, is a good object of study. Its author seemed less intent upon producing a love manual as such than in breaking down all sexual behavior into types and varieties, writing with a Germanic enthusiasm for the minutiae of classification. After forming the opinion that the kiss may be put to good use in any of the several stages of foreplay and lovemaking, Vatsyayana lists “the places for kissing, viz, the forehead, the eyes, the cheeks, the throat, the bosom, the breasts, the lips, and the interior of the mouth. Moreover the people of the Lat countries kiss also the following places—the joints of the thighs, the arms and the navel.”
There were three sorts of kisses for a young girl, the Hindu author goes on to tell us—the nominal kiss, “when a girl only touches the mouth of her lover with her own but does not herself do anything”; the throbbin
g kiss, when she moves her lower lip but not her upper one; and the touching kiss, when she touches her lover’s lip with her tongue, shuts her eyes, and places her hands upon those of her lover. He goes on to tell of the straight kiss, the bent kiss, the turned kiss, and the pressed kiss, and then recounts the following charming game.
As regards kissing, a wager may be laid as to which will get hold of the lips of the other first. If the woman loses, she should pretend to cry, should keep her lover off by shaking her hands, and turn away from him and dispute with him saying, “Let another wager be laid.” If she loses a second time, she should appear doubly distressed, and when her lover is off his guard or asleep, she should get hold of his lower lip, and hold it in her teeth, so that it should not slip away, and then she should laugh, make a loud noise, deride him, dance about, and say whatever she likes in a joking way, moving her eyebrows, and rolling her eyes. Such are the wagers and quarrels as far as kissing is concerned, but the same way be applied with regard to the pressing or scratching with the nails or the fingers, biting and striking. All these however are only peculiar to men and women of intense passion.
The full discussion of kissing in the Kama Sutra goes on to enumerate perhaps a dozen additional types of kisses, after which the author quotes a final rule of advice. “If a woman kisses you, kiss her in return; if she strikes you, strike her in return.” One can scarcely quarrel with this pretty sexual version of the Golden Rule.
The Arabic The Sultan’s Wives, an erotic classic written in the guise of a sex manual, offers the following pertinent advice on the subject of kissing.
So you shall take her in your arms and kiss her, and by her kiss she shall tell you all of her secrets. If she pushes you off, but pushes weakly or without her full strength, then she protests but still desires love, and such women are to be taken by force until their holes melt from the assault.
Eros & Capricorn: A Cross-Cultural Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Techniques (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior Book 1) Page 5
