Euphoria is the work of a sadistic porn addict
J’accuse Sam Levinson
As well as giving its users boundless manic energy and making them unable to eat, methamphetamine gives its users an extreme sexual appetite that simply will not go away for the time that they are high. It is not unheard of for tweakers to spend upwards of twenty hours practicing ‘self-abuse’ with their glans red and raw from the friction. Heavy binges of Methamphetamine can also temporarily change the user’s sexuality; they may find the same sex attractive but can also feel sexual urges towards animals and even inanimate objects. Crypto currencies made millionaires of many people in my generation; for others it was the first step on a short road which finds you trying to fondle the hollow of a tree in the early hours of the morning.
Most ‘chemsex parties’ are just rooms with people taking meth in them and having a very long orgy, which is why certain prominent figures in the media occasionally go through phases of looking very gaunt as they have developed a dependency from these engagements. Opium, which unlike Methamphetamine is a depressant, played a similar role as the narcotic of choice for sexual deviants in the Victorian era. Although laudanum had been used in British society for well over a century, proper opium dens to facilitate binge usage only emerged when Chinese immigrants in port cities like Liverpool, Cardiff and London began to set them up in the late 19th century. At roughly the same time cocaine was successfully isolated from Coca leaves and by the 1880s recreational use had become widespread in Europe’s great cities. In 1884 Freud published Über Coca based on his experiences with the new drug, saying that three of the persons to whom he had given coca had ‘reported violent sexual excitement’ and recommends it as a ‘remedy for occasional functional weaknesses’.
In Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the titular character corrupts a young man (Adrian Singleton) and ruins his reputation by introducing him to opium. Wilde himself practiced sex tourism in Italy and Algiers whilst, according to Gide, taking hashish and other drugs liberally. It is not a stretch to suggest that the abrupt proliferation of gay men in upper-class British society and the wider decadent movement during the Fin de siècle was caused by the contemporary popularity of drugs like opium, hashish and cocaine, as one might argue acid was the cause of the environmentalist/hippie movement in the 1960s (nature can breathe, it has a face).
Taking methamphetamine will do to your perception of sex what ecstasy does to your perception of serotonin. You will have the sophomoric revelation that ‘it’s all just chemicals’ and this thought will prick you in real life encounters with the opposite sex. It also does to the act itself the same thing that a lovely cigarette does to a glass of wine. Once you know you are missing you will enjoy the unenhanced experience less.
Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria, was addicted to methamphetamine in his teenage years. I could have told you that he was a meth addict without reading his biography because of the hyper fixation that he clearly has with degrading pornography which comes through in the show.
