The Spanish Fly Is A Lie
For as long as medicine men, shamans, wizards, hedge witches, potion sellers, alchemists, patent medicine salesmen, and those dodgy advertisements in the back of grungy comic books have been around, the dream of a pill or a powder or a potion you could give a lady to induce wild lust has been a male fantasy. Somebody with a ten dollar bottle of sugar pills or saline drops or ground-up bugs has always been willing to open his trench coat and promise he had just the stuff. They are always there with a smooth line of sales talk, but their magic powder that will make a lady wild with lust and unable to resist jumping your bone? That has always been a lie.
“Genuine” Spanish Fly is an alleged aphrodisiac as old as the ancient world; the Roman poet Lucretius is said to have died of an overdose of the stuff. It never worked on women; it may sicken them but it has no sexual effect, and if they get a fatal dose, they go to the graveyard while you go straight to prison. Sorry lads, but true Spanish Fly is a deeply-toxic ground-up powder made from blister beetles. There was quite an industry around collecting the dangerous little burny fuckers:
Ground up spanish fly powder “works” (when it doesn’t just kill you outright by poisoning your internal organs like it did those of poor Lucretius) as a sort of deeply-inferior dick pill; when your body tries to pee out the toxin, the blistery irritation in your urethra gives you a painful erection. Blisters in your dick, woo! You could sell that sort of stuff in the ancient world (before they invented product liability laws) but these days, they’ll bung your ass straight into jail. That’s why everything sold as “Spanish Fly” is fake nowadays. And since they’re lying about the basic ingredient in their “Spanish Fly” product, they might as well tell more wild lies about it… so they do! Which is how the myth got started that it was an aphrodisiac that works on women also.
To speak the truth: it doesn’t. There are not now, nor have there ever been, any aphrodisiacs you can feed to women to make them wildly horny. Not literally; not in a physiological, pharmaceutical sense. Sure, there are drugs (alcohol is a classic favorite) that in moderation have a disinhibiting effect, which is handy when she’s already keen on jumping your bones but is repressing the impulse because you are nine kinds of bad idea. (Which, if you’re shopping for a pill that “turns on anyone fast”, you are!) But anyway, none of the disinhibiting drugs are explicitly drugs of sexual arousal, as a true aphrodisiac ought to be.
You may think me a cynic for what I am about to say, but the observations of a full life have let me to the following conclusion: the most reliable stimulant of arousal in the human female is a display of wealth. I honestly don’t think that for most women this is this conscious or grasping or “gold-digging” or deliberate. We are warned to reject facile evolutionary-psychological explanations these days, but I nonetheless think it may be tied to deep evolutionary impulses around having babies with men who are securely established in their communities and proven as good providers. Money — and the immediate markers of it, like good clothes, decent shoes, nice jewelry, a fine car, an expensive house or apartment, the ability to purchase expensive drinks and meals — is just a visible proxy for this “good provider” aphrodisiacal quality.
It’s not a powder or a pill, but it’s a like a rich scent that wafts wherever well-off men go. It dampens pussies, loosens knees, makes ladies lick their lips and flip back their hair and plump their boobs in their shirts as they “accidentally” trip out to collide with the fellow in the nice suit. You can’t buy it out the back of a magazine, but you can spend a few years getting your economic shit together. Then strut that big expensive purebred dog with nice manners and a $200 groom through the dog park on a sunny Sunday and see how many recently divorced MILFs try to spill their lattes on you! No pill or potion can compare.
