Drugs and sex

Here’s a fun fact: no drug has had more impact on contemporary sex lives than a legal one. If “sex, drugs and rock ’n roll” is the decadent dream, the drug most likely to make that a reality is the humble contraceptive pill. You can keep your cocaine, but you’ll have to pry the Cilest out of my cold, dead hands!

Throughout history, human beings have always practised contraception. But whether it was the honey and herbal diaphragm used by the ancient Egyptians or coitus interruptus favoured by medieval Christians, no contraceptive method was as safe, reliable or as easy as the pill when it became available in 1960.

Here’s another interesting fact: although the contraceptive pill was developed by male chemists, unsurprisingly what with it being the 1950s, it was feminists who drove and funded much of the research.

In the early twentieth century Margaret Sanger, a nurse who worked amongst immigrants and the poor, became convinced that controlling fertility would give women healthier lives and a more equal social footing with men. Although Sanger was from an Irish Catholic background, she became a passionate advocate of family planning and opened her first birth control clinic in October 1916. Just over a week later she was arrested. Over the course of her life, Sanger was arrested at least eight times, but she remained unrepentant in her advocacy of contraception.

In 1951, Sanger met the chemist Gregory Pincus at a dinner party in New York. For a number of years Sanger had been hoping for a “magic pill” and persuaded Pincus to research the possibilities. Sanger secured him a small grant and Pincus approached the pharmaceutical company GD Searle for further funds. They refused. The research ground to a halt until Sanger contacted Katharine Dexter McCormick, a philanthropist and woman’s rights activist.

McCormick stumped up the whopping sum of $40,000 and promised Pincus additional funds if and when he needed them. While Pincus was researching progesterone trying to find the magic hormonal formula, Carl Djerassi, a chemist working for the pharmaceutical company Syntex in Mexico had created synthetic progesterone. Unfortunately neither he, nor Syntex, considered testing it as a contraceptive.

The history of the pill is full of interesting characters, triumphs and setbacks. But less than ten years after research began, the contraceptive pill was approved for sale in America – and in its wake came the 1960s sexual revolution, the reverberations of which we still experience today.

The 1960s was a period when the radical overthrow of conservative values seemed, if not imminent, then at least greatly to be desired by a lot of well educated people. Granted, most people’s lives were rigidly defined by their class, sex and race, and hippies could be as hidebound, racist and misogynist as Mad Men’s Roger Sterling – but the radical movements of the 1960s suggested that a different, more egalitarian, society was possible.

The pill irreversibly altered women’s sex lives. For the first time in history, women could enjoy sex outside the bounds of marriage, to a very large extent without fear of pregnancy. Unfortunately there wasn’t always a huge amount of actual enjoyment involved, which is why 1960s feminism frequently focused on female sexuality. Despite the image of them as unshaven, bra-burning harridans, 1960s ‘women’s libbers’, or second-wave feminists, were largely college educated heterosexuals and concerned with issues such as female sexual agency and female sexual pleasure — topics which are still at the heart of contemporary concerns such as pornography, hook-up culture and teenage sexual experimentation.

The 1967 Summer of Love would never have happened without the pill, but it wouldn’t have happened without LSD either. By 1965 LSD had become widely available and counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey had popularised the idea that psychedelics could open the mind to a world of new possibilities. LSD was seen as a tool for social, psychological and sexual revolution.

Leary had written that sex on LSD offered mind-blowing pleasures and that the drug made you feel as if every cell in your body was having sex with every cell in your partner’s. With testimony like that, it’s no surprise that many young people were keen to experiment and that the American government proclaimed that LSD gave rise to lewd, wanton behaviour.

Drugs have played a part in more than one youth revolution. Just as the US cracked down on LSD, the Thatcher government was terrified that the Second Summer of Love, in 1988-89, would lead to irreversible social breakdown due to the intertwining evils of MDMA, promiscuity and repetitive beats.

When MDMA first became available it was touted as the ultimate “love drug.” Unless it is cut with speed or other adulterants, MDMA gives users heightened body awareness, feelings of intimacy, a lack of inhibition, and a general sense of goodwill to all. However, as Shakespeare said of alcohol, “It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance” — MDMA can cause, eherm, shrinkage. For a lot of people, that’s not an issue because sex isn’t all about the old P in V — MDMA users often spend hours on foreplay or oral sex for her, so it certainly has benefits. Others counter the problem with Viagra, often bought illegally on the internet, which can be a dangerous cocktail. Mixing two drugs of unknown origin could never be categorized as responsible behaviour.

In some ways, Viagra is the opposite of ecstasy in that it provokes the performance, but not necessarily any desire. But just as the advent of the pill caused us to re-examine widely held assumptions about female sexuality, Viagra opened up a discussion about male sexuality. Once it became available, Viagra was an instant hit. For a long time, erectile dysfunction was a problem hidden in plain sight. Whether due to illness or age, millions of men around the world have experienced, or will experience, it at some point in their lives. Viagra was a solution to what was once a cause for shame or feelings of inadequacy. But while Viagra may give you wood, it doesn’t give you the desire to build anything with it.

Just as the pill has been linked to unforeseen social consequences, such as delayed marriage and childbirth, or the rise in cohabiting unmarried couples, Viagra has also had unintended consequences — and I don’t mean priapism. Viagra use has been linked to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases amongst the elderly (my, my!) and the breakdown of long-term marriages. But would we want to live in a world where contraception or erectile dysfunction drugs didn’t exist? I don’t think so.

Over the centuries the precise mechanics of sex haven’t changed, there being a limited amount of things we can do with our bodies. But chemicals have completely changed our sex lives — more than any great invention, more than porn, and even more than beer, which as the joke says, has been helping ugly people have sex since 1862 (and presumably a lot longer).

Chances are your last sexual experience involved some sort of drugs – whether that was hormones to control your fertility, wonder drugs to make you hard, or illegal drugs to get you high. In the modern world, love really is chemical.