Updated on 5/30/2022
Shrooms — they make you smile, giggle and believe your friends are heavenly beings dispatched from the spiritual realm to guide you on a mystical odyssey. But, um, do shrooms make you horny?
For answers, I asked the psychonauts of r/Shrooms what sex on shrooms was like, and boy did I open a can of worms.
Some were in the “no” camp: “For the first 3 hours my pee-pee is like a shriveled up tater tot that rolled under the stove 4 months ago.”
Others were in the “yes” camp: “I get so horny that I want to absorb my husband. Then I kind of do. It is fun! Sex on mushies is fabulous.”
And a few were in the “WTF” camp: “If you boof ‘em.”
Among the many responses, there was one fairly agreed upon opinion: A smaller dose of shrooms is more likely to make you horny, because larger doses will make you so easily distracted that anything even remotely sexual will be impossible to focus on. Shrooms can at times be tough to dose, because certain strains have different concentrations, but one gram is typically considered to be a light dose.
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For a more nuanced answer to my question, one r/Shrooms navigator suggested I read up on psychedelic sage Terence McKenna and his “Stoned Ape” theory, which proposed that prehistoric primates consumed magic mushrooms they found in the wild, causing a profound change in their consciousness that accelerated their evolution into humans.
And a crucial part of that acceleration, he said, was an increased libido caused by the psychoactive effects of shrooms: “It means you feel alert, you feel interested, you want to boogie, and also, if you’re male, you can sustain an erection. So arousal means arousal. So then, this stuff is an enzyme promoting sexual activity at that level. Well, sexual activity — you know, the number of copulations that occur within a population is directly related to the number of successful impregnations. So suddenly you have these horny primates with more interest in sexual contact and partners and all this. This means that these psilocybin-using creatures that are now more successful at hunting and more interested in sex have all kinds of pressures on them that will force them to outbreed the dull, uninteresting folks who don’t use mushrooms at this point.”
Of course, it’s unlikely you’ll experience any of these effects if you don’t have a partner that makes you horny. As with all trips, who you do them with can have a major impact on how you feel and what you experience, so unless you’re with someone who you trust and who turns you on, sex on shrooms might not be as transcendant as it was for McKenna’s horny prehistoric apes.
While all of this seemed kinda sorta reasonable, for one final opinion on shrooms and sexual desire, I reached out to Grace and PJ, “experienced travelers of inner and outer realms” and professional trip sitters at Akasa Journeys. “Mushrooms, like all psychedelics, are dependent on set and setting,” they explain via email. “Set is your mindset, attitude and mental state at the time, and setting represents the actual physical surroundings where you are while tripping. The other concern is dosage. Given all that, if one’s mindset is already horny, and the setting is conducive, and the dose isn’t so high that one can’t concentrate, it can be quite the experience. Lower doses are better for sex on shrooms, if it works at all.”
So, do shrooms make you horny?
Guess there’s only one way to find out.
Ian Lecklitner
Ian Lecklitner is a staff writer at MEL Magazine. He mostly writes about everyone's favorite things: Sex, drugs and food.
