For the love of clams

"I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance — letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts thermometers." – From the Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 2 1934-1939).

Wow, who wouldn’t want that? I once came across a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine a few years back that portrayed a judge issuing a subpoena for the much-coveted diaries of Anaïs Nin, the famous writer whose erotic expressions of life and love were way ahead of her time. Ah, trust lawyers to think that even "desire" can be subpoenaed.

But barring legal instruments, we, indeed, woo "desire" itself. We constantly test tastes and aromas to increase our passions, regardless of whether we base them on the myths we perpetuate or on findings from science experiments. I am amazed and sometimes aghast at the extent we humans go to in our taste for food, to boost our human desires. Chocolate, durian, oysters, among many others, belong to the large, mysterious cloud of sensory delights we broadly termed "aphrodisiacs" – foods blessed with the fire of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Chocolates give me a general blissful feeling about practically everything so to make it "aphrodisiac" is even to limit its powers. I do not know of any scientific experiment that has identified the chemical in durian that could energize amorous weapons in males or females but science recently found out something about clams – a relative of the oyster and testosterone.

The New Scientist reported last week that in Barry University in Florida, scientist Raul Mirza has found chemicals in clams that raise testosterone which, in turn, increases the sex drive in some animals. Mirza told the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in San Diego, California that clams, a close relative of the oyster, is shown to have the amino acid N-methyl-D-aspartate responsible for it. Now before you jump on your seat and get a bucket of oysters in this season of algal bloom (red tide), think again. It has not yet been investigated on in humans. So unless science finds a clear, logical, not to mention "safe" equivalence between the sexual habits of bivalves like clams and that of men (since it is testosterone that is driven up), do not count on the mollusks yet to rescue the decline of male horizontal might.

Science routinely does these experiments as a discipline in order to test, among other things, whether the myths we have been hearing about animals, including those about their aphrodisiac powers, are for real. This is so we do not jump to conclusions in this world dominated by "phallocracies." Take the case of the blue whale. Just because this largest animal in the world has a 10-foot penis does not necessarily mean that we can slaughter and eat them and afterwards, expect an equivalent growth in male desires, if not in organ (imagine an increase in Apollo’s size without the corresponding upgrades in the mission control of their minds; hmm, then "Houston, we REALLY have a problem"). Or how about powdered tiger testicles that are ingested believing that their desires will rage and stand regal and powerful like a Bengali tiger? I don’t even get the supposed aphrodisiac power of bear paws. I once talked to a member of a team that searched for golden moon bears in Southeast Asia and found to my horror, that these bears were hunted and sometimes were even left alive with one paw missing, until the rest of the body parts were given out to buyers! To believe that human desire is mainly launched from the digestive tract, thereby allowing that much suffering of animals killed for their prized body parts to ensure the reliability of human libido, is not only cruelty but also supreme idiocy. And cruelty and idiocy, I think, are the best counter-aphrodisiacs of all. No matter how much of an Adonis you are inch per inch of your flesh, if you are cruel and would rather intimately chew on an animal’s body part to conjure libido than get to know your Aphrodite in every sense of the word to forge passion – that fiery "élan" in the "vital" of your mind, or worse, if you even have the daring to act in that vacuum of a mind or on that narrow view, then you have as much chances as that of a clam in getting Aphrodite to fall in love with you, except "baked" on a plate as hors d’ouevre. 

Fortunately, science is not only investigating clams in love. It is also directly looking at the human chemicals, "pheromones," those scents given off from our skin that give rise to sexual attraction. And they seem to have found some promising ones, one given off by nursing moms and one that seems to be effective for postmenopausal women. The first one, reported on Discovery Magazine (Feb. 9 2005) by Jocelyn Selim, was an experiment conducted by Martha McClintock and Natasha Spencer, psychologists at the University of Chicago. They asked nursing moms to wear absorbent pads on their breasts. The absorbent pads were later on smelled by another set of women who later on reported a marked increase in their sexual activity (24 percent for women with regular partners and 17 percent for single women). They still have not figured out the exact components of the secretion and which chemical combination is exactly responsible for their apparent "aphrodisiac" effects.

The other experiment, reported in the New Scientist last Jan. 29, featured a "pheromone" dubbed as Athena Pheromone 10:13, which has been isolated from the secretion from women’s armpits. Joan Friebely of Harvard University and Susan Rako, a private physician in Newton, Massachusetts, studied 44 postmenopausal women, with half having "Athena" added to their perfume without their knowing. The results were staggering in favor of its "aphrodisiac" claims. The study, published in the Journal for Sex Research (Vol. 41 p. 372), revealed that "41 percent of pheromone users reported more petting, kissing and affection with partners compared with 14 per cent receiving the placebo. Overall, 68 percent of pheromone users reported increases in at least one of four ‘intimate socio-sexual behaviors’ such as formal dates and sex, as against 41 percent on the placebo." The promise seems to be so bright for this pheromone that the compound will not be disclosed until the patent has been approved in favor of its applicants who are not the scientists who "discovered" it.

Now, whether those statistics arising from those experiments are of the quality found in Anais Nïn’s diary – the kind that "bursts thermometers" – is, I think, beyond the reach of this column’s research. But if you must, read Isabel Allende’s "Aphrodite" (HarperCollins, NY: 1998). It is a book bursting at its seams with richly textured experiences with and recipes for aphrodisiacs, scientific or otherwise. Unlike this column, it did not waste the readers’ time and stated from the very start that the best and only lasting aphrodisiac is love. But hey, any science writer knows that for love, science is at a loss for fool-proof recipes.

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