How Love Potions Became a Discredited Trope
Love potions have been a trope for a long time, but have been discredited in recent decades, with limited exceptions. Three factors have contributed to the decline of this trope.
- First, love potions were pure fantasy. Prior to the development of date rape drugs, the idea that someone could drug someone else in order to have sex with them seemed more like science fiction than anything that could actually happen. With the advent of roofies, although there is nothing currently in existence that could induce sexual attraction, the notion is not as far-fetched as it once was, and its development is probably a matter of time.
- Second, the depiction of sex in media. Prior to the 1970s, sex was not openly depicted in works outside of pornography. At most, implied sexual encounters would be glossed over with a Sexy Discretion Shot and Fade to Black. On network television, even married couples would sleep in separate twin beds. Combined with more conservative mores regarding sexuality, it was easier for viewers or readers not to realize, or to ignore, any implications that characters, particularly those under the influence of love potions, were sexually active. The increasingly frank depiction of sexual activity in mainstream works has made it harder to ignore the obvious implications of love potions leading to sex.note
- Third, the evolution in the understanding of rape. In the early part of the twentieth century, the legal standard for rape held that, for a woman to be raped, a man, not her husband, had to beat her into submission and have his way with her. Some early litigation actually was about whether victims fought hard enough to qualify as having been raped. The only exception was age of consent laws, which came out in the late nineteenth century as a result of the nascent women’s rights movement. No allowances were made for drugs, and if a woman had sex while drunk, it was considered her fault for getting drunk in the first place. In addition, it was often only considered rape if a man did it to a woman, not vice versa or with members of the same gender. Only with decades of legal reform and changes in societal attitudes did society come to the present standard of "No means no," in addition to taking factors into account such as incapacity resulting from infirmity, unconsciousness, or involuntary intoxication.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, in that love potions are still used in works for children. This derives from the fact that works aimed at children do not discuss sexual matters at all, so any implications of sex — consensual or otherwise, are easily ignored; especially since children don’t — or aren’t supposed to — think about sex in the first place.
