Everybody who is somebody has got to take a hit now and then. When you are famous, people start rehashing your sex life, and, first thing you know, your reputation goes down the tube and your nomination with it. Happens all the time. Gary Hart. John Tower. Aphrodite.
Yes, fabled Golden Aphrodite! Also known as Kallipygos (Beautiful Buttocks). Borne full-blown from the sea (aphros means foam; -dite rhymes with nightie). Worshiped for centuries by amorous couples coupling clamorously. She was Homer's Goddess of Pure and Heavenly Love, but we forget that Homer was blind. So, alas, are we. Turns out that Aphrodite (Venus to you Romans) was not Ms. Clean at all but the Goddess of Naughty Sex. It is she we can thank for most + of mankind's sexual problems, and chief among these is our obsession with her elusive elixir, the aphrodisiac.
Nothing is safe from her depredations, not even endangered species. Government agents recently rounded up a band of poachers accused of slaughtering hundreds of black bears in the Northeastern U.S., ripping out their gallbladders and selling them for profit. The gallbladders are dried and ground into powder and sent to Asia, where they are sold for as much as $540 an oz. for "medicinal" purposes. Men who take a tiny pinch of the powder are convinced that it enhances their libido. They believe that if you devour parts of a powerful animal, you will absorb its sexual vitality. And if bear gallbladder fails, they will contrive potions and lotions from the hump of the camel, the penis of the tiger or the horn of the rhinoceros.
So it was Aphrodite who led us on. For starters, according to one account, she was created from the genitals of the god Uranus, who had been hurled, dismembered, into the sea by his ill-tempered son Cronus. Her husband was Hephaestus, blacksmith to the gods and the ugliest fellow in the pantheon. This may explain why Aphrodite lost no time in fooling around with squads of other gods and not a few surprised mortals, among them an obscure shepherd or two. It is no wonder that Aphrodite should continue to be so seductive even to this day. Underachieving, oversexed men -- and for that matter overachieving, undersexed men -- keep pounding at this hussy's door, and she is always at home.
Her earliest visitors, the ancient Greeks and Romans, tried just about any concoction to have their way with her. A scholarly study on the subject by Alan Hull Walton tells us that the pith from the branch of the pomegranate tree and the testes of animals were considered hot stuff. So were certain foods. "If envious age relax the nuptial knot," advised the poet Martial, "thy food be scallions, and thy feast shallot." Onions were a favorite, as were garlic, pepper, savory, cabbage, asparagus, eggs, pineapples, snails ("but without sauce," cautioned the fastidious Petronius) and just about any creature dredged from Aphrodite's watery birthplace.