stairway to Hell?
THIRTEEN Disapproval and Prohibition
The limits of pleasures are as yet neither known nor fixed, and we have no idea what degree of bodily bliss we are capable of attaining.
JEAN-ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN,
The Physiology of Taste (1825)
What is your idea of perfect pleasure? What if you could conjure it up at will and in unlimited quantities? How would you really feel after endlessly sipping rum-based cocktails on a palm-fringed tropical beach and having neglected body parts stimulated in ingenious ways? A bit bored and dissolute perhaps? Even eating chocolate in the bath will eventually pall.
Pleasure is a slippery beast. We know it when we feel it. Wanting more seems obvious. But what of the troubles it leads us into? What of the gluttony, drunkenness, obesity, guilt, debt and poor complexion? What of that segue from pleasure to addiction – that dreaded slide from ‘This is nice’ to ‘This is destroying me and I can’t stop’? Secular and religious authorities have tried throughout history to control the main sources of human pleasure. Above all, they have sought to constrain our sexual behaviour, our use of psychoactive drugs and what we eat. They seem to have shared Plato’s opinion that pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
My aim will be to explore the nature of pleasure and its unattractive alter ego, addiction. Along the way, we will look at the biological mechanisms that underpin pleasure and addiction, the subtle relationship between pleasure and pain, the surprisingly tenuous relationship between pleasure and happiness, and the neglected role of boredom in driving human behaviour. We will also inspect the lives of some real people who have taken their quest for pleasurable sensations to life-threatening extremes of hedonism. There will be sex and drugs of many kinds; and, of course, there will be chocolate. A central theme will be the fundamental distinction between pleasure and desire – the biologically ingrained difference between liking something because it gives us pleasure and wanting something because we have a desire for it. The twin forces of pleasure and desire lie at the heart of everything we do. We will see them at work in humanity’s relationship with the noble trinity of sex, drugs and chocolate.
Sex, drugs and chocolate are universal objects of desire. Each can become a focus for intense cravings. When used in the right way, all three have the potential to enhance mental and physical well-being. But they can also cause harm. Even sex has its hazards. Drugs are said by some to be uniformly dangerous substances that enslave you and then kill you, while chocolate, according to its critics, is sugary fat that will make you spotty and obese. (They are wrong.) All three sources of pleasure are constrained, to widely varying degrees, by social attitudes, religious doctrine and the law. And all three are, of course, capable of producing deep pleasure.
Sex in its many forms, both social and solitary, is a sublime delight enjoyed by virtually everyone at least once in a while. Even people who have sex for a living can still enjoy it. The twenty-first-century porn superstar Jenna Jameson talks in her memoirs of her undimmed enthusiasm for purely recreational sex, despite the wearying demands of her day job. When not performing in front of the cameras, she reportedly enjoys making love with her boyfriend in hotel swimming pools, department store changing rooms and restaurants across the USA. Giacomo Casanova’s long and eventful life was famously enriched by sexual pleasure. According to his memoirs, the eighteenth-century adventurer and voluptuary was as adept at giving pleasure as he was at taking it. Recounting a tryst with one of his myriad lovers, Casanova wrote:
She was astonished to find herself receptive to so much pleasure, for I showed her many things she had considered fictions. I did things to her that she did not feel she could ask me to do, and I taught her that the slightest constraint spoils the greatest pleasures. When the morning bells tolled, she raised her eyes to the Third Heaven like an idolatress thanking the Mother and Son for having so well rewarded the effort it had cost her to declare her passion for me.
Not everyone is a fan of sex, however. Johnny Rotten once described it as two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squelching
