Exactly.
I’ve noticed an influx of new users asking why the girl they like isn’t dating them after they stand in the corner, socially inept, not talking, never making eye contact. Then they say the pheromones don’t work. I am beginning to think there should be a mental competency test before a person should be able to buy the pheromones.
well i tend to just humor them.
the one quasi-violent experience I had - when it came to my boys, I made peace between them.
I suppose it depends on whether it’s a positive or negative reaction. Positive reactions should be fostered and nurtured, and humored if fostering and nurturing aren’t possible.
Negative reactions should be mitigated.
Interesting assertion. I could note that some men have been reported to get an involuntary erection when exposed to women wearing copulins. Corresponding involuntary physiological responses have been noted in females.
Unfortunately in civil and criminal courts our sincere beliefs do not count as much as what a jury decides.
uummmm… , Can I get grandfathered in?
007-none, license to seduce. 
pheromone SATs lol
Better still something like a pheromone-driving license!
Last week I passed a young guy who is a regular guest on a tv chat show.
I was wearing A314 and somehow he just DIHL’ed…
It was too weird. I don’t know why or how it happened. Never saw a guy DIHL so far except this one.
Pheromones aside, aren’t erections to some degree involuntary? Can you have an erection at will, or will one away?
I think we all have physiologic responses to each other, all the time. Some call it chemistry, others say intuition … maybe it’s just the unfiltered perception of the bodymind.
Our society is pretty forgiving of things that aren’t causing disasters… pheromones have been in the cultural mix for at least a decade, with some increasing interest, with no disaster reports… the problem with mentally unstable persons… we now have a good menu of diagnostic patterns, is that they don’t (or can’t, or refuse to, or are too immature to, or are just too freaking paranoid) take responsibility for their own behavior… which boils down to a fascinating legal concept, “Capacity”… so what, exactly IS Capacity ? 
… Ergo, the loss of Capacity is known as the state of Incapacitation… so… at what point (is there a point ?) is one no longer responsible for one’s own actions, at one point does one lose the ability to make a rational choice, even if that choice is in the framework of the rationality of passion ?.. And to what degree should one be responsible for one’s own choices and actions ?
As a society, we have observed potent drugs, such as GHB, and arrived at a consensus that these cross the line… in that a reasonable person could be so incapacitated that that person could not make rational choices in his or her best interest while intoxicated with GHB… so we’ve had to legislate GHB out of our societies…
OTOH, I can think of no examples where pheromones have removed the capacity to make a conscious choice. Certainly infinitely less so than good old down and dirty alcohol intoxication. I have never, once, seen anyone, even at the highest doses of pheromones, behave anywhere near as incapacitated (and often anti-socially disgusting) as highly drunk people… who are probably bathed in strong outputs of pheromones of their own generation…
We also have a downside to a blame-victimization culture, it encourages making all the forces outside of oneself responsible for one’s existence… and then if things don’t go perfectly, it isn’t a function of self examination about the quality of one’s choices, but looking around for a scapegoat, something foreign that “made” one do things that one never would have otherwise… but who is to say that one never would have, otherwise ?
Did anyone follow the sorry spectacle at Duke University, where the Duke Lacrosse team, and three players for the team, Reade Seligman, Collin Finnerty and David Evans, were accused of rape and kidnapping ???.. great media brouhaha follows… a number of media pundits “KNOW, BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT” that these guys are guilty as sin… Nancy Grace, Paula Zahn, at least half of the Duke student body, KNOW what really happened, and they aren’t shy about going public with THE TERRIBLE TRUTH… you know the formula… booze, strippers, hormone crazed priveleged athletes… straight from the tawdriest pulp fiction…
Then… the unimaginable… the case collapses… totally… the prosecutor is removed, and possibly debarred from the practice of law, the state of North Carolina issues a formal apology… Nancy Grace cannot bring herself to appear on television for her regularly scheduled show… Mike Nifong apologizes, a bunch of Duke professors look like absolute idiots, everyone scrambles for cover, trying to distance themselves from their former (irresponsible) statements…
Great Object Lesson… some things/people/situations are easy to demonize, and easy to build whole constructs of belief which “have to be true”, and then, sometimes, these grand generalizations come crashing down into piles of prejudicial rubble…
I have mentioned this before both in a post and in a converstaion with Jasmin but:
Right now pheromone usage is in an experimental state and most people if you talked to them about it would consider it somewhere between silly to weird - and not in a good way.
But, as it has been stated above, if pheromone products ever get to the point where they do affect someone’s capactiy to make appropriate decisions (and I certainly do not believe we are there yet) - or if it only appears to do so via media sensationalism from a Duke-sytle case - then we will arrive at the point where legislative action will be taken.
Just gotta wonder what the stance will be on all of us who have been using these products for years. Will any of these posts come back to haunt us?
You have to look at the social track record. There are no reports, anywhere I can find, of pheromones being implicated in anything seriously bad… nobody has come foreward and been able to demonstate that the somehow “made” the do a behavior they did not consciously choose… nobody ever passed out or lost consciousness, nobody reported to the emergency room (as a hell of a lot did with the designer drugs), no crazy headbanging and autopilot sexing like MDMA-extasy, yet I wonder how many ER admissions there are per day for alcohol intoxication ?
As in, like:
“Alcohol involvement in injuries has been demonstrated in numerous studies. Hundreds of thousands of deaths occur each year due to alcohol-related intentional and unintentional injuries, and alcohol is involved in up to 30% of adult hospital admissions, particularly those to emergency rooms”
Jeez Louise… and you’d think we’d be up in arms about that ?
I look as much as I can, google and blogsearch, I just don’t see any reports or discussions pointing to pheromones as a problem, they just aren’t there***…*** and this is in marked contrast to substances they DID become defined or legislated as problems, like GHB, Rohypnol, desinger drugs, etc… where adverse reports began coming in and abuse patterns clearly understood…
eventually these things will be outlawed for common people
the government surely will abuse them
fear pheromones for soldiers, cops, etc…
i.e. in ways which will benefit THEM …
that’s my paranoid self speaking, the govt has a habit of making many good things illegal.
seriously, they work so well for me that many many times I feel I’m getting away with something!
I think there are two lines of discussion here: the original post targeted the matter of individual duty / debt and personal morality, and only obliquely addressed the question of socially legislated sanctions.
In the USA, in 2007, we are moving towards a Father Knows Best paternalism in government that I personally find distasteful. There are many people who want to legislate their morality for all of us to follow, and my distaste is not with the particulars of the legislation but with the apparently inexorable “dumbing down” of citizenship – as in, the average citizen is too stupid to know what is good for her or him, so we have to protect people from themselves.
As I see it now, we don’t need any kind of scandal to provoke a legislative agenda, because fear-mongering is now one of the most potent political tools any politico has at his or her disposal. C’mon folks, in retrospect we know how GWB won the last two presidential elections. Demagogue is a word that’s been around a long time.
So when some politician decides A Great Pheromone Scare is the ticket s/he wants to run on, the “seriously bad stuff” will be invented if it can’t be found in the wild. Please tell me with a straight face how well you think our (USA) governmental / legislative process respects science and scientific evidence …
So, my working hypothesis is that if and when the government chooses to make pheromone use illegal or to regulate same, the degree to which people have taken personal responsibility, the degree to which good people have made ethically informed and constructive choices will have no influence on either the political outcome nor the timing. In short, all of us using pheromones responsibly will neither prevent nor delay whatever is going to come.
Now, back to the question of ethical duty – I want to clarify what I offered earlier.
I still stand by my position that “we owe nothing” is very close to where I would find my best ethical value. But the “almost nothing owed” is relative, in this sense:
Here I stand at the corner of Sheffield and Addison, outside the entrance to the bleachers at Wrigley Field – I am properly showered and scrubbed and wearing clothes that have been oxy-cleaned, a clean canvas as far as artificial pheromones go.
Now I spray two (or ten!) sprays of SPACELAND on the back of my neck. And I enter the ballpark.
My position is that my ethical duties change almost negligibly when I enter the ballpark. I now have, perhaps, a slightly enhanced emphasis in my duty with regard to being aware of my surroundings, because I am with so many other people in the ballpark. It’s a trivial shift, really, and in one sense it’s not a change in ethical duties at all, it’s a change in how I execute that duty.
And likewise, my position is that my ethical duties also change negligibly when I sprayed on the SPACELAND.
And I do not foresee that (short of discovering evidence that wearing pheromones DOES create disastrous consequences) my view of my ethical duties, of how they might or might not change when using pheromones, will change.
Even if you demonstrate to me that wearing some pheromone produces in others a compelling desire for sex, or to eat or dance, or to become self-abasing or totally compliant/submissive, or to compulsively tell the whole truth … I don’t think my ethical duties change much, if at all.
Have you perhaps noticed that whever a real political scandal begins to rear its ugly head, there is suddenly a flurry of pseudo-news and non-events stuffing up the media pipes ? 
A major figure is found to be flagrantly corrupt and all of the sudden TomKat or (back then) BenniFer or BraAngelina or JenniPitt or whomever the effing what is beating their child with a seatbelt or horribly deformed by liposuction or stocking the kidney shaped swimming pool with catfish… social control by flooding the public consciousness with irrelevant factoid-barf…
I’m sure that the real reason the pheromones aren’t being dragged into this ongoing freakshow is that they’re too abstract and complicated to put the Demon Costume on… Joe Q. Dick hears about them and thinks… huh ? Let’s watch big guys beat the crap out of each other in the octogon and eat pork rinds… I idn’t paid to think, so I’m not doin no thimkin, dammit.
I mentioned this concern earlier in the thread. Since then I’ve listened to a taped course on contract law. In general, it appears that contracts signed by intoxicated people hold up as valid, unless the person is so intoxicated that they don’t even understand that they are signing a contract, in which case it is likely to be invalid. Of course, things vary from state to state but this seems to be the gist of it.
Although pheromones can influence people in a manner arguably similar to alcohol, it is hard to imagine a pheromone effect so powerful that a person signs a contract without understanding what they are doing.
There is another concept called undue influence that may be applicable to pheromones. An example of this would be if an investment advisor starts dating a bereaved widdow, meanwhile churning the lady’s investments and generating large commissions to his benefit and her detriment. In this case the dating relationship and the churning could combine to get a determination of undue influence and an invalidation of affected contracts. It seems a parallel could be drawn with the type of influence that pheromones provide. It remains to be seen if the courts would consider the two situations analogous.
Even if there are no legal issues with influence, the ethical issues will remain.
I too have wondered this. I doubt there are legal reasons to worry, as the “ex post facto” protections theoretically prevent people from being punished for things that were not illegal at the time they did them. However, even that protection has been “flexed” in recent years. Probably a more reasonable concern is the social effects if numerous people start becoming concerned or agitated about pheromones. It won’t really matter if their concerns are reasonable or not, just that they exist. In that case, known pheromone users could experience some social difficulties.
Bump.
This is a great thread that hasn’t been visited in a while. Let me repose Gone’s original question.
“What do we owe the responders?”
If we have opened a door for the responders then the Universe will decide who pays who, how what and when.
Perhaps you have opened a door in having me respond to your post, and perhaps what will be will be.
Nevertheless a good question Renny, And one that will be answered by each indivual who reads your post, Either in reply or in mind.
I think we owe ourselves more than anyone else. Being true to my own heart is what I think “Universe” wants.
I mean, what if we eventually discover that the reality we see is all really in our heads - there is no spoon, or anything else. When we think people are responding, that response is really in our thoughts.
We owe the responders nothing more than a “you’re welcome”, for enabling them to follow through with or express feelings, emotions or actions that they were already feeling anyway, but may not have had otherwise had the courage to express!