As I did with yesterday's posting, I apologize in advance for distraction from the main event - today, the glorious inauguration. (Did anyone else find Reverend Joseph Lowery's benediction to be the sentimental high point? Michelle Norris did a touching
interview with him yesterday.) But a phrase in Richard A. Friedman's
essay in the Science Times reminded me of a wild goose chase I once enjoyed. Friedman was describing an instance of "winging it" — a behavior that doctors resort to now and again. He had used Prozac or a similar
antidepressant to treat male patients who, in the wake of orgasm in sexual intercourse, experienced symptoms of depression for as long as a day. In passing, Friedman wrote, "As the saying goes, after
sex all animals are sad."
In writing Against Depression, I had occasion to refer to the the Problemata Physica, or Problems, a work sometimes attributed to Aristotle. That work may well be at the historical root of the link, in the Western imagination, between creativity and mood disorder. The Problems is also the book that is sometimes associated with the post-coital blues saying. When I looked for that quotation (as many others before me had done), what I found was only this more interesting claim, which I included as a curiosity in my book: "Why do young men, when they first begin to have sexual intercourse, hate those with whom they have associated after the act is over?"
I had known the after sex saying in a longer and, depending on taste, arguably more amusing form: "Triste est omne animal post coitum, praeter mulierem gallumque," which translates: Every animal is sad after sex, except the human female and the rooster. Searching for the source of the original quotation, I came across a 1982 article, downloadable here, in the journal American Notes and Queries. The author, Justin Glenn, then a graduate student at Florida State University, did not manage to get to the root, although he found that Alfred Kinsey, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, attributed the sentence to the ancient (ca 130 - 200 AD) medical writer Galen. (Previously Freud had wisely written, "This quotation has not been traced.") But Galen's writings fill 20 volumes; no one seems to have done the work to locate the quotation or demonstrate its absence, a task that would be complicated by Galen's having written in not Latin but Greek.
As Glenn demonstrates, the underlying ideas were commonplaces in the ancient world. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, reinforces the Aristotelian view that men feel repugnance after intercourse. And classical wisdom, buttressed by the mythical testimony of a hermaphrodite, has it that though they hide the truth, women enjoy ten times the sexual pleasure experienced by men. As for the rooster - who knows? But now and then, someone has to brag.
For those who might enjoy a brief detour into a longstanding controversy, the Glenn essay is worth a glance. And for the wider audience: cheers to all on this exciting day. Here’s to political passion that can be shared without a sense of letdown.
