Saying Yes by Sullum Jacob

Author:Sullum, Jacob [Sullum, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781101658192
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2004-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Signal of Misunderstanding

The alarm about the sexual repercussions of “club drugs,” then, has to be understood in the context of warnings about other alleged aphrodisiacs, often identified with particular groups perceived as inferior, threatening, or both: American Indians, Chinese immigrants, blacks, hippies, teenagers. The fear of uncontrolled sexual impulses, of the chaos that would result if we let our basic instincts run wild, is projected onto these groups and, by extension, their intoxicants. In the case of “club drugs,” adolescents are both victims and perpetrators. Parents fear for their children, but they also fear them. When Mayor Daley warned that “they are after all of our children,” he may have been imagining predators in the mold of Fu Manchu or Charles Manson. But the reality is that raves—which grew out of the British “acid house” movement, itself reminiscent of the psychedelic dance scene that emerged in San Francisco during the late sixties—are overwhelmingly a youth phenomenon.

The experience of moving all night to a throbbing beat amid flickering light has been likened to tribal dancing around a fire. A similar exuberance, sense of community, and trance-like state of consciousness can also be observed in traditional Jewish dancing, in which the same verse is sung over and over again while everyone whirls around in a circle. But for most people over thirty, the appeal of dancing for hours on end to the fast, repetitive rhythm of techno music is hard to fathom. “The sensationalist reaction that greets every mention of the word Ecstasy in this country is part of a wider, almost unconscious fear of young people,” writes Jonathan Keane in the British New Statesman, and the observation applies equally to the United States. For “middle-aged and middle-class opinion leaders…E is a symbol of a youth culture they don’t understand.”40

This is not to say that no one ever felt horny after taking MDMA. Individual reactions to drugs are highly variable, and one could probably find anecdotes suggesting aphrodisiac properties for almost any psychoactive substance. And it is no doubt true that some MDMA users, like the woman quoted in Cosmo, have paired up with sexual partners they found less attractive the morning after. But once MDMA is stripped of its symbolism, these issues are no different from those raised by alcohol. In fact, since MDMA users tend to be more lucid than drinkers, the chances that they will do something regrettable are probably lower.

Jasmine Menendez, a public-relations director in her twenties who was using MDMA every weekend for a while, decided to cut back because she didn’t like the after-effects. But her most serious drug-related scrape occurred when she was sixteen, the night she was nearly raped after she drank so much peppermint schnapps that she passed out. “I swore to myself that if I ever drank like that again, it would be with people I knew in an environment that wasn’t shady,” she said.41 You won’t be reading Menendez’s story in Cosmo, of course, because alcohol is legal and familiar. It doesn’t even count as a “club drug.

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