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OfflineBig Worm
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The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom
    #26337502 - 11/22/19 06:35 AM (4 years, 4 months ago)

Expedition Ecstasy: Sniffing Out The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom



It was the moment of truth.

I couldn’t believe I’d actually found it. When John Holliday told me where to look to find the infamous Dictyophora species, I didn’t really believe him—probably because he also claimed this mushroom had some pretty implausible properties. But it was there all the same, right where he said it would be. Countless hours of research and reporting had culminated in this moment. There I was, standing on the remains of an old lava flow, staring at a mushroom that one man claimed could make me orgasm by smell alone.

I bent down, pressing my hands in the soft mulch on either side of the fungus, and let the air out of my lungs. Then I pushed my face next to its orange stalk and breathed in as deeply as I could.

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THE SCIENCES
Expedition Ecstasy: Sniffing Out The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom
Science SushiBy Christie WilcoxFebruary 14, 2016 6:00 AM
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It was the moment of truth.

I couldn’t believe I’d actually found it. When John Holliday told me where to look to find the infamous Dictyophora species, I didn’t really believe him—probably because he also claimed this mushroom had some pretty implausible properties. But it was there all the same, right where he said it would be. Countless hours of research and reporting had culminated in this moment. There I was, standing on the remains of an old lava flow, staring at a mushroom that one man claimed could make me orgasm by smell alone.

I bent down, pressing my hands in the soft mulch on either side of the fungus, and let the air out of my lungs. Then I pushed my face next to its orange stalk and breathed in as deeply as I could.

sniff_dictyophora_hawaii
I was on a plane flying back to Honolulu after nearly a month away when a post on Twitter caught my eye. “Women who sniff this Hawaiian mushroom have spontaneous orgasms.” How have I not heard of this?

Curious, I followed the link in the article to another article, which linked to an abstract for a talk given almost fifteen years ago—but the journal’s site was down and all that I could access was the front page for the abstract. I Googled the authors’ names—John C. Holliday and Noah Soule—finding scattered stories about the abstract over the years, but nothing more concrete. The only one which seemed to be based on an actual encounter with the researchers was an article by Ben Sostrin for the newsletter of the Oregon Mycological Society from 2002 titled “Mushrooms and Maui II: Mamalu o Wahine,” the second half of a two part series on Hawaiian mushrooms, which of course I had no access to. I emailed the society contact to see if I could get a copy, and kept looking.

I searched Google Scholar, but there appeared to be no follow up, no complete manuscript. Wikipedia somehow had the number of test subjects — 16 women and 20 men — but no indication where those numbers came from. Oh come on. Flustered, I Googled again, finding every mention of this orgasmic mushroom study. I read every blog post, note, and article—dozens upon dozens of them—all apparently based on the exact same minuscule amount of information.  I finally obtained a copy of the abstract itself:


It wasn’t much to go on. But now I was invested—I wanted to know more. I had to know more.

Māmalu o Wahine—the orgasm-inducing Hawaiian mushroom—sounded implausible right off the bat. Yet it would be ill-advised to discount the possibility of local lore identifying a bioactive plant well before modern science. After all, willow branches were chewed for centuries to relieve fever and pain before scientists were able to isolate salicin from its bark—a discovery which led to aspirin. Indigenous cultures have a wealth of knowledge, particularly about local plants and animals, hidden (or not so hidden) in their myths, legends, medical practices, and songs that are passed from generation to generation.

I knew exactly who to ask. “Hey, really random-seeming question: have you ever heard anything about an orgasm-inducing mushroom, maybe related to a fertility ritual or something?” I texted to a Hawaiian friend of mine. As a haole, I’m not as familiar with Hawaiian traditional knowledge, but I figured if the Māmalu o Wahine legend was true, she’d have heard something about it. “In all my memories of terrestrial forestry stuff, I don’t remember anything about any kinds of mushrooms,” she wrote back.

It wasn’t likely that such a legend would have been kept secret, she noted. “Our people were not shy about sexuality. There are many sexual innuendos in things like ‘ōlelo no‘eau and mele (wise sayings and poems and music). We have a good one about crabs.”

I asked if she’d be willing to ask around just in case, and she did. No luck. “Not in my usual channels of ‘ike at least.” [‘ike=knowledge]

I was going to have to dig a little deeper to find the answers I was looking for, so I kept digging.

“I have had over a thousand inquiries over the last week,” said Holliday, clearly agitated. It had been eight days since the science news aggregator IFLS had drudged up the abstract on orgasm-inducing mushrooms, putting millions of pairs of eyes on Holliday & Soule’s abstract. “I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by discussing that paper,” he said to me flatly. “I don’t want any attention focused on that.”

Whether he wanted it or not, a bright spotlight was already shining on Holliday’s nearly fifteen-year-old work. The IFLS post had gone viral with hundreds of thousands of social media shares and who knows how many views. It seemed as if every media outlet in the country, perhaps in the world, wanted to talk to Holliday about mushrooms and orgasms. I had gotten a greenish light to write a piece for a major outlet, but it hinged upon finding a new angle to the story. Since I live in Hawai‘i, I figured I could do something none of the other reporters had tried: go in search of the mushroom and try it on myself.

However, the brief abstract in the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms didn’t say where to find the species, only that is was “on recent lava flows 600-10,000 years old.” If I was going to find the mushroom, I needed specifics. I tracked down Noah Soule on Facebook, but it was a dead end—he never answered when I messaged him, and I couldn’t find an email or phone to try. So, I tried John Holliday using the email address on his website. He’d been open to interviews in the past, which made me hopeful:

But Holliday wasn’t eager to talk. “I hear so much crap about this. I saw some stuff written online last year. ‘This was never meant to be believed, it’s just a big hoax.’… Somebody sent me a link yesterday, it’s some lady I don’t even know, I have never heard of her or talked to her, and she is claiming that she talked to me and I told her that it was not legitimate… I don’t want to get myself or the company involved in any discussions of this, because it is too important for a whole bunch of reasons. Commercial reasons, scientific reasons. Reputational reasons. I am a pretty much a world renowned scientist…. When things like that come out that says this is a hoax, a lot of people that believe that. I don’t need that. I spend a lot of years getting to the point where I am. That is why I don’t really want to see anything about this.”

According to Holliday, he also is under a strict confidentiality agreement and therefore cannot discuss the study conducted in any way. He also implied that the research has continued since 2001, and that the pharmaceutical company he was working for (which he wouldn’t name but said was one of “the big ones”) was near to marketing the discovery.  “If I was to say something like ‘We are about to release a blockbuster drug,’ and you go buy stock in this company, then you and I are both guilty of insider trading.”

He was willing, though, to talk about how he had heard of the mushroom and where he’d found it. He wasn’t too hopeful I’d succeed in my quest. The mushroom, he said, disappears by mid-morning. “It is growing in probably the least hospitable environment for mushrooms there is. Direct sunlight, salt spray from the ocean, surrounded by hot black lava rock. The entire life cycle of this mushroom occurs in about four to six hours, from the time that it comes out of the ground until it is withered away and dead and gone.”

“On the lava?” I asked, trying to nail down a specific location.

“Well not on the lava itself. Are you familiar with the term kīpuka?” he asked. Kīpuka are islands of land surrounded by fresh lava flows—oases of growth in a desert of bare rock.

He explained that he first heard of these mushrooms while he was still working in Hawai‘i, before his mushroom-selling business Aloha Medicinalsgot off the ground and moved to the mainland. As the story goes, one day, Holliday needed an x-ray, and ended up politely chit-chatting with the x-ray technician in Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. “She said ‘What do you do?’, and I said ‘I am a mushroom scientist’, and she went, ‘I have to ask you: my mother and I like to go out and sniff mushrooms. Do you think we are crazy?'”

She was reluctant to explain why she and her mother did this, but eventually, she admitted to Holliday that she got a kind of euphoric effect from the smell. “It did not sound real but worth looking into,” Holliday told me. “I talked them into taking me out on their little adventure, and a group of girls on Saturday morning and I went out to Lava Tree State Park and found them. Found one, that is it—they are not common. That one got used up. I took photographs of it, and I posted photographs all around that area, and I put a reward out for this. I got three or four calls, and when I plotted them on the map, they were all within about a two- to three-mile radius around Lava Tree State Park. They were all found either under Albizia trees or Casuarinatrees.”

“There you go; that is all I am going to tell you. Have fun.”

My curiosity blossomed into obsession. I re-read every article, and then every comment on each of them. In my hunt for more information, one name kept reappearing: Debbie Viess, founder of the Bay Area Mycological Society. Her comments appeared on every major story about the mushrooms, even those from years ago. In a comment on an older post (several months before the IFLS article), Viess stated that she had a copy of the study itself, and in her words: “I can assure you that the evidence, as presented, was wholly unconvincing. No reputable journal would have published that crap: zero references for statements made, no detailing of study protocol, conclusions made without verification of results. In other words, garbage science, if you can even call it science at all.”

Was this the woman Holliday mentioned, saying he’d never spoken to her? And did she really have a copy of it? I reached out to Viess, and she agreed to talk.

“When I first heard about it, I thought it was preposterous, but I hadn’t read the paper at that point because it’s very hard to find,” she explained. “None of the universities have copies of this journal. I refused to pay $35.00 to read garbage. So the guy actually sent it to me.”

‘The guy’ was John Holliday.

She wasn’t alone in receiving the draft paper. My emails had proven fruitful, and I had received a copy of the original newsletter article for the Oregon Mycological Society by Sostrin; he, too, stated that he had the paper, and seemed to be the source of the numbers in the Wikipedia entry. At least a few people were given a copy over the years—a paper which Holliday now claims he can’t give out. I obtained a copy of the word document from one of them (who shall remain unnamed). Viess confirmed that the document I received was the same one Holliday had sent her.

Though there was no photo in the paper itself, the orgasm-inducing mushroom was described:

The mature Fruit body is from 7 cm to about 20 cm in height, unbranched, with a roughly bell shaped cap tightly attached to the stalk. The stalk itself is very fragile, consisting of soft, sponge-like tissue with numerous holes and chambers within.

The Stipe is hollow, typically 2 – 3 cm in diameter and nearly cylindrical. It is often bent away from the prevailing winds. The color of the stalk is bright orange when found in the forests and deserts away from the ocean, and a brilliant pink to pinkish-purple when found in the salt-spray zone.

Dictyophora species, like other members of the family Phallaceae, are quite distinctively (if inappropriately) shaped. The group is also known by the common name stinkhorns, referring to their notorious stench. Thanks the paper, I now had a complete visual to hunt for, including color.

The text raised new questions, though. According to the published abstract, the fungus I sought grows on lava rock. “It is often found on the cliff edges above the ocean, where it is consistently exposed to salt spray from the breaking waves below,” the paper states, details confirmed by Holliday himself during a talk at the 2014 Telluride Mushroom Fest (“hot, black, rocky lava flows right above the ocean in the saltwater surf zone.”). I called an old mycology professor of mine at UH, Nicole Hynson, and asked her what she thought about a fungus growing on the bare rock. She said it was biologically unlikely—that’s just not a place this kind of fungi would grow. “Dictyophoraare saprotrophic, so they depend upon organic matter for survival. On recent flows, there isn’t organic matter — there isn’t a lot of soil, period.



https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/expedition-ecstasy-sniffing-out-the-truth-about-hawaiis-orgasm-inducing-mushroom


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OfflineMorel Guy
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: Big Worm]
    #26337534 - 11/22/19 07:06 AM (4 years, 4 months ago)

Could make a lot of $


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"in sterquiliniis invenitur in stercore invenitur"

In filth it will be found in dung it will be found

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Invisibletyrannicalrex
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: Big Worm]
    #26337651 - 11/22/19 08:34 AM (4 years, 4 months ago)

Well it is shaped like a penis, soooooooo....:nursemaryjane:

What's up BW? Is it snowing up there? Got about 3-5 in here so far.


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Offlinesonoramo
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: tyrannicalrex]
    #26337767 - 11/22/19 09:28 AM (4 years, 4 months ago)

Not a mushroom, but another trigger of 5HT1a. Note that this affects men as well as women, suggesting that the Hawaiian mushroom's phallic appearance isn't what was getting her off.

Also, in the following article, a really interesting use of the word "offending"!

https://journals.lww.com/clinicalneuropharm/Abstract/2018/01000/Drug_Associated_Spontaneous_Orgasm__A_Case_Report.8.aspx

Drug-Associated Spontaneous Orgasm
A Case Report and Systematic Review of Literature

Chen, Wei-Hsi MDMSc LLM*; Chu, Yuan-Hsiang PhD†; Chen, Kuo-Yen PhD†
Clinical Neuropharmacology: January/February 2018 - Volume 41 - Issue 1 - p 31–37
doi: 10.1097/WNF.0000000000000259


Spontaneous orgasm is characterized by a spontaneous onset of orgasm without any preceding sexual or nonsexual trigger. It sheds insight on the mechanisms underlying orgasms and the sexual response cycle in humans.

Methods: We report a male patient of repetitive spontaneous orgasm under trazodone treatment and systematically review the literature on drug-associated spontaneous orgasm (DASO).

Results A total of 25 patients (18 women and 7 men), including our reported case, experienced 27 DASO events. Over half of them were under 50 years of age during the DASO event. Depression was the leading morbidity for these patients, and a limited list of antidepressants and antipsychotics were involved in 92.5% of all DASO events. Although offending drugs possess variable pharmacological properties, their common effect is an augmentation of serotonin-1A (5HT1A) neurotransmission. Offending drugs seemingly increase personal susceptibility to DASO. Over half of the patients, especially men, did not concurrently experience sexual arousal or desire during the DASO event. In the remaining patients, the orgasm was accompanied by or ensued with arousal or desire. A reduction of dose or discontinuation of the offending drug usually abolished DASO.

Conclusions It appears that 5HT1A has a key role in generating orgasm. Orgasms may be activated through arousal-independent or arousal-dependent pathways, and both orgasms and sexual arousal are bidirectionally activated. This double-bidirectional model of sexual response cycle may promote the success of sexual procreation and recreation, and further research on this pathway could offer an innovative method to manage anorgasmia in the future.

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Invisibletyrannicalrex
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: sonoramo]
    #26337921 - 11/22/19 10:44 AM (4 years, 4 months ago)

:thumbup::heart::thumbup::mushroom2:


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InvisibleStygianKnight
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Registered: 03/12/12
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: Big Worm]
    #26338202 - 11/22/19 01:41 PM (4 years, 4 months ago)

This is really good, everyone should read the article!

But since I know not everyone will, let’s just cut to the chase, no one orgasmed but two people did inhale some putrid smelling chemicals also produced in rotting corpses.

Now that you know, click the link and read the article!

Also, massive eyeroll,
“I am pretty much a world renowed scientist” -Holiday
I mean I guess he is ‘renowed’.

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Offlinesonoramo
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: StygianKnight] * 1
    #26339004 - 11/22/19 08:17 PM (4 years, 4 months ago)

Quote:

StygianKnight said:
...no one orgasmed...





From the Neuropharmacology article, however: "18 women and 7 men, including our reported case, experienced 27 drug-associated spontaneous orgasm (DASO) events."

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InvisibleStygianKnight
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Registered: 03/12/12
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: sonoramo]
    #26339033 - 11/22/19 08:30 PM (4 years, 4 months ago)

Oh I was referring to the original mushroom article only.

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Invisibleellomello
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: StygianKnight]
    #26340614 - 11/23/19 04:01 PM (4 years, 4 months ago)

old news.. it's just a bunch a hoowy IMO.. i'm sure there are some old threads about it on shroomery..
stinkhorns grow in my area in summer time (i believe it's the same mysterious species in the article)

Stinky Squid (Pseudocolus fusiformis) smells pretty weird, that's about all,
but i don't believe it induces orgasm in females from smell..
more like eww no get that thing away from me.

*though it may be a different mushroom, the article say it's "Pseudocolus Dictyophora "
https://www.fungimag.com/summer-09-articles/Stinkhorns.pdf


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PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN get back to the garden

some came singing, some come to play, some come for keeping the dark away

Edited by ellomello (11/23/19 04:10 PM)

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InvisiblePsychoReactive
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: ellomello]
    #26341414 - 11/23/19 11:31 PM (4 years, 4 months ago)

Anyone try this mushroom?

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OfflineAlan RockefellerM
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Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: PsychoReactive] * 1
    #26345932 - 11/26/19 01:36 AM (4 years, 4 months ago)

Quote:

PsychoReactive said:
Anyone try this mushroom?





Thousands of horny women have tried it.  All were thoroughly disgusted and none were brought to orgasm.

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Invisiblesh4d0ws
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Registered: 02/26/08
Posts: 12,086
Re: The Truth About Hawai‘i's Orgasm-Inducing Mushroom [Re: Alan Rockefeller]
    #26346451 - 11/26/19 10:26 AM (4 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:

Alan Rockefeller said:
Quote:

PsychoReactive said:
Anyone try this mushroom?





Thousands of horny women have tried it.  All were thoroughly disgusted and none were brought to orgasm.




:ilold:


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