Pampalibog: chemsex, desire and pleasure in the Philippines

Abstract

This article draws from qualitative interviews to provide the first in-depth exploration of reasons for engaging in chemsex in the Philippines. It articulates the many forms that drugs assume as pampalibog, or enhancers of libido, demonstrating the multidimensional pleasures of chemsex along overlapping sensorial and affective planes. By showing the inextricability of the corporeal to the affective, and of the emotional to the erotic, we contend that chemsex also involves the embodied and performed attainment of pleasure. As such, chemsex is both central to modern sexual scripts yet also a negotiable aspect of any sexual encounter. In constructing this rare account of drug use in settings of pleasure in the Philippines, we situate chemsex within a historical pattern of bodily tinkering and, more significantly, demystify people who use drugs by departing not only from global public health’s pathologising approach to chemsex, but also from the scholarly tendency to locate drug use in the country within scenes of hardship and marginalisation.

Keywords:

• Chemsex
• sexualised drug use
• libog
• sexual scripts
• Philippines

Acknowledgements

We thank Paolo Pangilinan for his contribution to participant recruitment and data gathering, and the anonymous participants who opened up their lives and shared their most intimate stories during the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Bikol languages are a group of languages spoken mainly in Region 5 or the Bicol region of the Philippines. Geographically, the region comprises the Bicol peninsula and its neighbouring islands in the southeastern part of the Luzon island group.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.