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When discussing the topic of Vulcan sexuality, it would be a disservice to the tenacity of the non-Vulcan researchers involved in the procurement of knowledge on the subject not to mention that all information contained herein was previously sealed under the Vulcan Privacy Clause (see the pamphlet titled “Everything’s Redacted: or, All We Know About the Vulcan Reproductive Cycle Can Fit on the Head of a Single Pin and Leave Plenty of Room for Demons to Dance” by McCoy et al, 2270 for a brief history on the Vulcan High Council’s policy of medical information sharing) and strictly regulated by the Vulcan High Council. Unsealed, the paper you are now reading represents the height of knowledge afforded to psi-null, non-Vulcan researchers (to request research by psi-positive, Vulcan researchers on the subject, please see the attached 40000 page document “How to Petition the Vulcan High Council for the Vulcan Science Institute’s Data Regarding Sexuality and Telepathy”).
While much has been said about the importance of a mental connection among Vulcan relationships, little has been known on how that connection manifested within the realm of sexuality. Certainly, it has been well-documented that Vulcans share a more than passive interest in mingling minds (a practice colloquially referred to as a “mindmeld” in Standard or "kash-nohv" in Vulcan) but most accounts began and ended with those encounters brought about by the touch of a Vulcan’s fingers. Many psionic centers (called qui’lari in Vulcan) reside within the Vulcan fingertip and can be used to initiate the necessary bio-chemical-spiritual sequence necessary to generate psionic energy (kash-tepul) enough for one meld partner (teretaya-tersu) to breach the mind of the other. However, as more information has been made available on the Vulcan psionic aural body alongside the Vulcan physical body, it has been noted that there are many more densely clustered qui’lari located within the fra’als than anywhere else outside of the primary contact points located on the skull. It stands to reason then, that these organs, found flanking every Vulcan’s genitals regardless of any other sex characteristics, might play a not insubstantial part in telepathic connection and mind mingling.
That these highly psionically sensitive organs reside beside the genitals has led to speculation that there may be some connection between telepathy and sexuality in Vulcans. Further buttressed by evidence that Vulcans themselves typically used only the word “teretaya-tersu” (literally: “convergence-partner”) to refer to each meld partner in a connection initiated through the penetrator’s fingers to the penetrated’s head, but were noted in the logs of the Universal Translator as having switched to the much more evocative word “teretaya-ashausu” (while still translated into Standard as “meld-partner”, this term’s much more literal translation is “convergence-lover”, thus adding an element of sexual and/or romantic passion) when asked about melds initiated instead by the penetrator’s fra’als, this topic seemed worthy of further investigation.
Firstly, it is worth noting that in the original Vulcan, language discussing melding and the actions of mind mingling mimics language used to describe sex acts (it has also been suggested in ed. Varnes, 2269 that it is more scandalous against Vulcan mores to openly discuss mind connections than to do so about other, merely physical connections) more commonly than it does not. This would seem to suggest that there exists some form of link, however tenuous, between these actions somewhere in the shared Vulcan psyche. That a “partner” (tersu) becomes a “lover” (ashausu) in the context of solely mental contact “must begin the arduous task of leaving linguistic breadcrumbs for Federation social scientists to follow in order to understand what it is a Vulcan is not saying within what it is that they are” (J’Tryyl, 2280, p. 53). A collection of these “breadcrumbs” would be incomplete without mention of the cultural practice amongst most of the Vulcan societal clans (though it is also important to point out that members of the lower and middle status clans were much more forthcoming in using straightforward language) of euphemistically referring to the act of sexual intercourse as a “meld” or “nohv” thereby changing the meaning of “kash-nohv” explicitly into an intercourse of the mind.
Secondly, those observed within a clinical setting commonly exhibited bodily reactions of arousal (measured by such indicators as: pupil dilation, blood flow changes, genital lubrication, and fra’al emergence) preceding a meld, which merely increased during the meld proper. Some (75%) even became bodily excited during conversations about mental contact, even if the action itself was not about to be undertaken.
Thirdly, under Vulcan planetary law, footage of certain acts of mental joining are classified as “lewd materials” and regulated similarly to those classified as “lewd” due to their depictions of physical acts. Among the thoroughly exhaustive list of these acts recorded in the Vulcan lawbooks, melding is mentioned many times, in order to comprehensively outline seemingly any possible way that one or more Vulcans may initiate a meld with one or more beings before labeling all of these ways as too lurid for broad public consumption. “Lewd” and “lurid”, however, are rather broad categories and when the laws are read in their original Vulcan rather than in Standard, every form of melding is classified as “guvik”, a word explicitly referring to the sexual, which stands in contrast to other “lewd” acts which were classified as being violent and therefore “khrashik” instead.
Fourthly, when asked outright in a manner worded so as to prevent any kind of linguistic subterfuge, Vulcan subjects admitted that mental contact was commonly similar, if not identical, to sexual contact (for the complete record of the data, compiled by Federation sociologists and social scientists through the civilian branch of Starfleet’s science division, which includes thousands of interviewed Vulcan subjects’ responses on a number of socially important topics far beyond the scope of only sexuality and telepathy, please see Hernandez et al, “Results of Sociological Survey: Vuhlkantra”, 2285).
Given this evidence as a starting point, the authors of this paper and their team sought to further define to what degree that a Vulcan’s telepathy intermingles with their sexuality and expression thereof. One subject of our study, when interviewed, referred to herself as “nohv-thal”, (literally "meld-loose") which she described as “a private word”, which she had chosen “to make public” and that this term allowed her to succinctly describe the way she is “captivated by alien minds and expansive ways of thinking”. Another participant, this one belonging to a clan with a higher social status in a more historically conservative province, insisted that melding was only to be practiced among Vulcans, and should not be attempted with non-Vulcan peoples, adding that “one should not have sexual congress with outsiders; nor should one have mental congress”. The close tie between sexuality and psionics in these two responses should strike the reader as obvious, and while the attitudes underpinning them vary, both refer to ways in which a Vulcan expresses their identity, both sexual and cultural, through melding.
While melding does commonly seem to represent the pinnacle of mental contact in the Vulcan mind, there are other, less intimate, ways of practicing telepathic intercourse. One of these ways is the to’tsu’k’hy, commonly translated into Standard as a “nerve-pinch”, and which works due to a Vulcan’s ability to stimulate their target’s mind via the application of their hands to the juncture of a target’s neck and shoulder. The qui’lari located in the pincher’s fingers opens a psionic passageway in the pinchee’s neck which then allows the pincher to insert their mind just enough to send a few choice nerves within the aural body of their target into overdrive which in turn causes the target to lose consciousness (T’Mara, 2286, p 73). There are several nerve clusters that a Vulcan may select in order to achieve the desired result of unconsciousness, but most rely on pain as the necessary shock to the nerves (p. 89). In the post-Reformation age of modern Surakian Vulcans, the willful deliverance of pain is meant to be avoided (Strelik, trans. Surak, 2235, p. 9679) and thus, most Vulcans who practice the to’tsu’k’hy, do so not by relying on pain as the vehicle which carries their mental suggestion, but by stimulating nerves with an overloading of pleasure instead, therein achieving that same result (unconsciousness) but through a lack of pain rather than a deliverance of it (T’Mara, 2286, p. 127). In several studies, participants admitted anonymously that upon waking from the unconsciousness delivered by a nerve-pinch, they had found that they had been physically aroused by the experience, and in some (15%), there was evidence of having also achieved orgasm (Grant, 2285, p. 439).
Another common form of mental contact amongst Vulcans is that of the ozh’esta, or “finger embrace”. Practiced most commonly amongst bondmates in public and employed almost solely in sexual connotations in private, this practice is performed when one Vulcan brings the qui’lari in their fingertips into contact with the qui’lari in the fingertips of one or more others (Trevuk, 2285, p. 82). Unlike the passive qui’lari located in the head or the neck, or those which could be either receptive or active which reside in the fra’als, the telepathic centers located in the fingers are solely used for psionic penetration (T’Mara, 2286, p. 854) and therefore, a rather candid interviewee in the attached study referred to the act of the ozh’esta as a kind of “mental frottage”. They went on to explain that while neither mind breaches the psionic membrane of the other, through the ozh’esta, each mind instead “rubs against” the other, stimulating nerves with a “tickle, rather than an impalement”. While mental pleasure exchanged during this activity no doubt plays a part as to why it continues to be performed, there also seems to be an element of sexualized marking involved in the employment of the finger embrace. Through the touch, both parties deposit trace amounts of kash-tepul onto the other that, due again to the qui’lari of the fingers being solely able to output energy rather than accept any, merely sits atop the Vulcan aural body (p. 883). The energy, which over time becomes absorbed through psionic pores or slowly dissipated onto objects and beings that a Vulcan touches, can also be “tasted” when the Vulcan carrying it melds with a being psionically sensitive enough to discern it (p. 885). Bondmates begin to “taste” like each other due to the practice of the ozh’esta and therefore, meld partners taken outside of the bond would know of the connection through this discernment of sensation and would also be aware, due to the amount of kash-tepul on the active qui’lari as they pressed into the receptive qui’lari of the partner, how often and vigorously the other partner’s fingers were embraced and exactly by whom (p. 897).
No exploration of the mental arts in conjunction with sexuality would be complete without turning to the matter of bonds themselves. A bond represents the core building block of Vulcan society, stretching as they do between individual Vulcan to individual Vulcan in order to create social groups (Fredricks, 2257, p. 90). The primary bond of all Vulcans is the k’war’ma’khon, literally translated as “vibration of extended family”, which is the psionic connection that all Vulcans share with all other Vulcans (p. 3). Another pan-cultural bond, commonly described as a kind of extra sense within the Vulcan psyche, is an understanding of oneness with the primary creative force of the Universe (p. 42). When pressed on just what this oneness entailed, an explanation oft repeated was that it referred to the mental connection that Vulcans instinctively have with “the mind of the Universe”, which Vulcans deified in a personified way under the name Ekon and deified in a more neutrally unenfleshed way as the Nome, translated most frequently into Standard as “the All” (p. 123). Beyond these two pan-Vulcan bonds, each individual Vulcan usually possesses several other types of psionic bonds connecting them to others. There are ancestral katric bonds which connect a living Vulcan to the lineage of those who have passed away (p. 74), as well as animate katric bonds which can exist between a living Vulcan and any other sentient being possessing the brain structures necessary for the connection to be made (p. 78). Of this last type, there exists the tel-kal’i’farr, the marriage bond.
The tel-kal‘i'farr is the anchor on which the pon farr latches (Trebik, 2270, p. 45), thus connecting it with one of the most potent symbols of Vulcan sexuality, namely, the pon farr, and connecting both, namely, the pon farr and Vulcan sexuality generally, with psionics due to the bond’s existence as a wholly psionic linkage. An overwhelming percentage (89%) of the Vulcan participants in the survey preferred to define the “proper” expression of Vulcan sexuality, cross-clan linkage, through the marriage bond. The health of this kind of bond, which links one Vulcan with one or more beings who possess the psionic capabilities needed to sustain the telepathic structure of the link, is considered within the realm of Vulcan sexual health (T’Shura, 2234, p. 3). The tel-kal'i'farr, furthermore, was spoken of in pre-Reformation literature as something that “alone, without even hunger-touch, could bring forth nectar from the body” and “nerve-reverberations in the mind” (Uhura, trans. Anturik, 2272, p. 756), speaking of the ability of Vulcans to cause bondmates to reach orgasm through telepathic stimulation of the bond. These examples make explicit the relationship that exists between the telepathic bond and more obvious eroticism.
A full exploration of the interrelatedness between Vulcan telepathy and sexuality is beyond the scope of this journal, but the authors hope that this may act as a call to action to those who have the space to dedicate to this fertile topic. Bonds, the ozh’esta, nerve-pinches, and melding represent but the proverbial tip of the proverbial iceberg on this subject. As more information hitherto unpublished outside of Vulcan becomes available from the unsealing of data under the Vulcan Privacy Clause, more follow-up research is desperately needed to further round out non-Vulcan understanding of this aspect of the Vulcan social psyche. In this, all researchers may be benefited by the guidance of the Vulcan philosophy of the IDIC, or the belief in the inherent worth and goodness of diversity (Strelik, trans. Surak, 2235, p. 5546), as a principle underpinning and inspiring expansive curiosity. Just as the mind itself, the inner cosmos, may never fully be mapped, so too may Vulcan sexuality never be fully known by non-Vulcans, but what we have been able to understand has proven most, to borrow not only a philosophy but a phrase, fascinating.