Despite a potentially awkward introduction as “someone who really knows her subject from real-life experience in the field” – the field being Sex, Drugs And Rock ‘n’ Roll, title of both Big Science Saturday’s headline lecture in the Sallis Benney Theatre and her recent book on the science of hedonism – Zoe Cormier wasn’t quite the empirical Iggy Pop we were expecting. No test-tubes-as-bongs, no Ozzy Osbourne onstage animal experimentation, not even a Brian Eno labcoat.

True, she turned up a rock ’n’ roll 20 minutes late (signal failure at Burgess Hill or something) and she did give an explicit-lyrics heads-up to parents with young children in the audience (“I will be talking about the clitoris and I will be mentioning cocaine”), but the only real nod to teenage rebellion in an otherwise professionally delivered medley of scientific anecdotes was her mildly punk attitude.

After kicking off with a bit of clitoral stimulation – a PowerPoint tour of our own genitalia, which was properly annotated if not all that enlightening – we learned a few fun facts about the inventors of LSD, MDMA and the like. Narco-geek highlight: the science of neurochemistry owes its existence to the most notorious recreational drugs, with many of our brain’s natural neurotransmitters such as serotonin, endorphins and dopamine only known to us now because we got interested in their narcotic counterparts decades earlier. Not exactly mind-blowing, but certainly not mind-numbing either.

We mainly learned, though, not to get on the wrong side of Zoe Cormier. Don’t question the existence of the clitoris, anyone – especially if you’re a pioneering 16th century anatomist like Andreas Vesalius – for bullshit will be called (a lot of clitoris deniers still out there, apparently). Don’t recklessly popularise psychotropic chemicals in the 60s, Ken Kesey, you jerk, because you’ll wind up being held solely responsible for the demonisation of recreational drug use over the past half century and not just for that really boring cemetery scene in Easy Rider. And you will get called a jerk.

Oh yeah, Oedipal Sigmund Freud with your phallocentric misconceptions about female orgasms? You deserve only our sarcastic disdain, theory of the unconscious notwithstanding. (Though off-his-face Sigmund Freud using himself as a subject for cocaine research in the 1880s? Rock on. She’s way more into his early stuff.) And don’t whatever you do mistake Cormier for an American. She’s Canadian, OK?

This is not to detract from Cormier’s underlying message, which is a healthy one: that the scientific exploration of the things we use to get our rocks off is as valid as any other field of enquiry, and shouldn’t be held back by society’s weird moral reflux about hash cakes, wanking or whatever it might be this week – and that, as her sign-off slide aphoristically put it, “there is redemption in rebellion”. It’s just that rebellion doesn’t feel all that rebellious when it’s being taught in a lecture hall. And we thought the whole point was that imposing your personal morals on cold, hard science was a bad thing.

Zoe Cormier, Brighton Science Festival, Sallis Benney Theatre
Saturday 28th February 2015
Words by Chris Bourn