the episode “This Side Of Paradise” is a funny one because fanfic writers sometimes credit it as the origin of the “sex pollen” trope, and… well.
Okay. there’s a colony of humans living on a planet full of plants that spray weird spores in people’s faces, which subdue anger and promote affection. When Spock gets hit with them, famously, is one of the very few times we see him kissing a woman. I can see how it may have inspired that trope.
but if you actually pay attention to the episode, it seems the spores may have actually been …something very different from sex pollen.
I mean, yeah, they did make people docile and cuddly and friendly with each other. And they made them feel contented, all the time, to the point of having no motivation to accomplish any sort of progress or change, including the scientific research they’d traveled there to do.
And, crucially, another effect was to subdue anger to very low levels… but, Kirk figured out that if you could manage to push yourself to anger despite the spores’ effect, that was what cleared them out of your system.
Except. They never said it was specifically only anger that got subdued, or only anger that neutralized the effect. The wording was always something like “primal urges” or “primitive feelings.” Anger was among the feelings included, but they always used language that sounded like it could include more than that.
(Star Trek TOS varied in how many levels of euphemism it would use in reference to sex, but it was always at least a bit oblique, never explicit. This was public TV in the 60’s, after all.)
Anyway, the way I interpreted it when I saw the episode, was… the spores, while they did make everyone cuddly and affectionate, actually stopped sex from happening. Getting sexually aroused through the effect of the spores would have been as difficult as getting angry. And if you did manage it, the arousal would act as a primal, primitive urge and clear the spores’ effect from your system.
Of course, being on the planet surrounded by the spores, you’d get re-infected and subdued again pretty fast (this was why no one on the planet had previously overcome the spores for very long). But clearing them out momentarily would leave you pretty freaked out and disoriented, during the moments you might otherwise be getting laid. It probably was quite uncommon for anyone to complete a sex act there.
Which is conjecture, yeah– but it’s at least consistent with the fact that one of the first strange things the crew noticed about the colony was that they had no children.
Anyway, I have two thoughts about this. One is very asexually nerdy, the other’s a bit hornier.