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Up All Night Long
Get ready to rumble. It's moth larvae versus seahorse in this battle
of the aphrodisiacs.
By Daffy Roderick
2-17-2004
Hong Kong - I don't suffer from erectile dysfunction. There, it's out of the
way. I'm a happy and healthy 32-year-old male, and that's why this isn't a
story about Viagra, a proven treatment for that dreaded malady. This is a story
about what you might reach for before you need Viagra. Let's put it this way:
when I was growing up, I occasionally bought aircraft fuel to improve the
performance of my Kawasaki dirtbike. It ran fine on gas, but with the higher
octane—let's just say DOWN BOY. This is a story of a search for a more personal
brand of jet fuel.
China has a long tradition of natural aphrodisiacs. Dating back to imperial
times, doctors have prescribed herbs and animal parts to help their patients,
in the words of one old advertisement, "fight 100 battles in nine nights with
no loss of verve and leave the ladies with cherished memories." Wow. That's a
lot of battles. And seeing as I only have one lady and I do occasionally suffer
from lower back pain, that might be more than I need.
Nonetheless, I headed to Hong Kong's Sheung Wan district, which is home to
hundreds of shops selling all manner of traditional medicines. The window of
the first shop I entered looked promising: dried seahorses were arranged on a
dirty glass cabinet with pieces of deer antler inside. The smiling proprietor
showed me a range of products that ran from deer's penis to a tea made from
summer grass, a fungus that grows on the larvae of bat moths, priced at $600
for 500 grams. (There were no prices quoted for moth larvae penis.)
It quickly became clear that there are a couple of decisions to be
made—seahorse or moth? Antler or penis?—before getting all hopped up on Chinese
sex aids. The first: Do I really believe that eating another animal's penis is
going to improve my sex life? (Plenty of people do: one of the hottest sellers
is a tonic made by soaking tiger, bear and deer penises in rice wine.) A
follow-up question: Even if I do, is it remotely reasonable to believe that
things that simply resemble penises, such as snakes and antlers, have the same
effect? And let's say I don't. (I'm suspicious of the overtly obvious; for
example I don't believe that star fish are really like stars.) Do I then
subscribe to the opposite school of Chinese sex aids: that anything incredibly
obscure and hard to gather, such as fungus from the larvae of a moth, is more
effective?
After discovering my disappointing budget and skeptical tastes, the shopkeeper
directed me up the street to the Chinese medicine counter of the Yue Hwa
Chinese Products store. That was like a treasure chest of herbal helpers. I
read the box labels and admired the packaging, most of it red and gold, some of
it vaguely pornographic. All of the products make wide-ranging claims. East
Superman Pills: "Strengthening the functional activities of the loins and
knees, and the sinews and the bone as well." Strong Man Bao: "Fights recurring
back aches, depression, degeneration and impotency." Chinese Dragon Tonic:
"Battles impotence, lassitude, amnesia and cold pain of the waist and knees."
And, finally, Sinphar Supra Softgels: "Make yourself powerful during active
sex!" After a few moments I opted for the "fast-acting" Nan Shi Xin Bao spray,
a local anaesthetic to prolong coitus, and the high, focused promise of the
Sinphar Supra Softgels. I started to explain to the attractive woman at the
counter that I was a journalist writing a story, but I broke off in
mid-sentence. She looked as if she had heard that before.
That was two weeks ago. The Sinphar Supra Softgels have yet to manifest any
effect. There's no extra lead in my pencil and, I can only hope, none in the
rest of my system either. (There have been frequent reports of herbal remedies
containing dangerous levels of lead.) The spray turned out to be an awful
product. It comes in a floral-print bottle and you're directed to spray it on
liberally a few minutes before making love. The problem was that my brand
didn't merely desensitize: it burned like Ben Gay. This made me do a very odd
dance around the bedroom, at which point my girlfriend, the sensible one,
decided it was time to call the experiments off. I proposed durians from
Southeast Asia—remembering the Malaysian proverb, "When the durians come down,
the saris go up"—but she had a better idea: champagne and oysters. They may be
no more effective than Asia's aphrodisiacs, but at least they don't remove any
layers of skin as I fight my hundred—O.K., one or two—battles.
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