Men and women have put more effort into finding aphrodisiacs than alchemists ever put into changing lead into gold. Metals at least hold still; other people’s sexual success has the bewitching fluidity of quicksilver.
One of the oldest medical texts, the Ebers papyrus, recommended wrapping a wilting penis in henbane and animal brains, in beans and sawdust of pine and willow, in onion and goose fat and pig’s dung. Elsewhere in the ancient world, as in the Babylonian code of Hammurabi, doctors like myself were punished if we failed to treat a condition after claiming it was fixable – by having our hands cut off, for example. This concentrated our minds wonderfully. For the ancient Egyptians it was enough that you had followed canonical advice: you weren’t responsible for consequences. And sometimes the penis poultice must have worked: the power of placebos should never be under-estimated.
History tells us people used to be gullible. The ancient Egyptians revered an aphrodisiac so powerful that it could cause an uncontrollable frenzy of lust. The aphrodisiac in question was lettuce. Romaine – also called Cos – is what you use for Caesar salad, and the Egyptians noted that when it was cut it oozed an opaque and viscous milky-white sap. The Greeks took the same vegetable and saw the opposite, believing it an anaphrodisiac, the grave of youthful fire: Aphrodite laid out the body of her lover Adonis on a bed of lettuce.
An old joke tells of President Coolidge and his wife being shown round a farm. She points out the rooster’s unflagging sexual powers; he points out that it’s never with the same hen twice. The Coolidge effect is now a technical term in animal behaviour, and it applies to aphrodisiacs too: yesterday’s miracle loses its potency when something more exotic arrives. When a new tuber arrived in Europe, it was widely perceived to restore a failing libido – hence Falstaff’s greedy invocation, the old goat, to ‘let the sky rain potatoes.’
Only one explanation accounts for so many different agents working, and then, as cultures change, ceasing to work and being replaced. Of all the vast array of aphrodisiacs with which people have draped, dosed and sprayed themselves, none work in the manner people believe. The power of a placebo is often helpful, but there’s an opportunity missed every time one shucks an oyster in the belief it contains some special chemical. What if the target of your desire prefers parmesan? We fool ourselves endlessly and with woeful ease when it comes to sex. We are fond of easy explanations, and too often look to chemistry for qualities that belong to the harder realm of character.
Old men a hundred years ago had slices of chimp testicles sewn into their bodies
Old men a hundred years ago had slices of chimp testicles sewn into their bodies, seeking their youthful ardour. But wishful thinking affects puritans as well as hedonists, and Kellogg’s aim for his Corn Flakes was to damp you down. Strongly flavoured foods, the traditional meat breakfast of a fry-up, were held to inflame the blood. He intended his Corn Flakes to do the opposite, to be anaphrodisiacs, to diminish libido, and to subdue as a result the grave perils of carnal desire – above all, the horror of masturbation.
The 1st of April, said Mark Twain, is the day we remember what we are all the rest of the year. On the basis that gas expanded you, foods that made you fart were once presumed to cause erections. ‘Himalayan Viagra’ is a parasitic fungus infesting the heads of buried caterpillars. Spanish fly, from the iridescent emerald beetle, had a real effect, causing such pelvic inflammation that blood flow to your genitals increased, but at the possible cost of making them painfully unfit for future use. Oysters have a touch of the same semen-like appearance as the sap of Cos lettuce, and perhaps a more evocative accompanying taste. Jay Rayner advises against dating people who dislike oysters, and not on culinary grounds.
Darwin wrote on evolution being driven in all animals not only by the law of battle, but by the taste for the beautiful. Our longing for aphrodisiacs is sometimes the desire for a short-cut, a way of clawing back the unfair advantage we think fate has given to her favoured darlings. More often it’s because we wish to be spared the terrible uncertainty of asking another person to find us loveable, or the effort of sustaining our love for someone over long years. We make fools of ourselves when our yearning overcomes our judgement. But the strength of our longing is to our credit, and most of the time we don’t just long for beauty, we also long to be worthy. The alternative to a pill or a potion, to an oyster or a lettuce, is to be someone worth loving, and to go on loving when the novelty has gone.
Woody Guthrie, writing lyrics in tribute to Ingrid Bergman, imagined paying her to become his wife. He never set the lines to music. But he dreamt of paying her ‘not with pennies dimes nor quarters, but with happy sons and daughters.’
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