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Star Trek lore regularly makes use of the Vulcans, a fictional humanoid race it depicts as logical, emotionless, and stern. They hail from the planet Vulcan and are characterized by their advanced intelligence, powerful sense of honor, and, to many other species, their annoying nature. Vulcan attitudes towards love and relationships are naturally in opposition to typical human interpretations of these ideas, which leads to questions like: How do Vulcans get in the mood for sex? What, if anything, arouses them? Humans see sex as not just the process for procreation but the pinnacle of intimacy and emotional connection. How do Vulcans find a balance?

Understanding Vulcan history helps one understand their views on sex and desire. Vulcans are a race who operate through logic, not feeling. But ages ago, they were an extremely violent, religious, and emotional race, even by human standards, endlessly waging war against one another as a result of their advanced feelings. As technology pushed forward, its conjunction with their violent nature threatened their extinction. They were worried they wouldn’t be able to control their own impulses and would wipe out their own species with the technological warfare available at their disposal.

To combat this inevitability, a Vulcan called Surak crafted a new philosophy and ideology by which Vulcans could live, igniting the “Time of the Awakening,” a period in Vulcan history where warlike and violent Vulcans adopted a more peaceful existence. It occurred somewhere in line with the 4th century on the Earth calendar. Surak’s ideas suggested the root of all Vulcan’s problems stemmed from uncontrolled expulsion of emotions, and deemed the only solution to be suppression of those emotions. Followers of this ideology swore to a code of ethics based purely on logic, forcing them to control and effectively eliminate decision-making based on emotional influence. Not everyone followed this belief system, eventually igniting a nuclear civil war (in which Surak himself died), with non-followers expatriating to new colonies and morphing into a different race, known as Romulans.

Jolene Blalock as T’Pol, entering Pon Farr, in Star Trek: Voyager

Star Trek canon also speaks of the Vulcan mating ritual known as Pon Farr, which happens every seven years. It’s said that this is a time when Vulcans can allow their bottled-up emotions to be released and their sexual urges fulfilled. During this time, they either must mate or be able to meditate their way through the urges. This has maintained as part of the Star Trek canon. It implies that Vulcans are always in the mood for sex as any other humanoid species would be, but their code of conduct prohibits them from acting on it beyond the time of Pon Farr. They are conditioned to only act on it during this time when behaving emotionally is acceptable. While that interpretation of Pon Farr makes sense, it is not exatly true.

In reality, Vulcans aren’t emotionless at all—they simply don’t demonstrate their emotions with regularity. The natural explosive emotional energy of their ancestors still lives within them, they are merely conditioned to subdue it.

The Original Series (1966) story editor DC Fontana once said at a panel, “If Vulcans had sex only once every severn years, there wouldn’t be any Vulcans.” A misconception is that Pon Farr is the only time a Vulcan is allowed to have sex. Multiple episodes featuring Vulcan love stories, including TOS’s “Amok Time,” imply Vulcans regularly engage in sexual intercourse, they simply do so without expressing emotion. Pon Farr is more of a “dog in heat” type of experience, and goes beyond sex. It is more a flooding of complete emotions, including violence and anger and love, which takes them back to their origins as extreme emotional beings and, essentially, allows them to flush their systems of seven years worth of repressed feeling.

As such, Vulcans aren’t emotionless and don’t need to “get in the mood.” Instead, they need to find a partner who can accept their minimal emotional expression. Vulcans engage in regular sex, they simply do it within the boundaries of their code of conduct.