It has occurred to me that Vulcan must have some form of sex industry to handle those going through Pon Farr who aren’t currently married or otherwise involved. Otherwise, they’d have constant issues with violence from those suffering the “blood fever” whose spouse was far away, or had died, or for some other reason had no one to mate with.
Given Vulcan attitudes towards sex, it’s probably kept out of sight, and is only “officially” available to those experiencing their “Seven Year Itch,” but it has to exist, right?
Orion Slave Girls
Presumably they would have solved this issue before becoming space fairing/having Orions available. If so, I’d imagine they’d be most likely to stick with their original solution out of tradition and simplicity.
Becoming space fairing creates a diffusion of mates necessitating such a solution
Sure, but it wouldn’t be the first thing. When humans became seafaring the same diffusion of mates happened. It was then exacerbated by the invention of the train. And then even further with airplanes. And in the digital age people meet each other online despite living thousands of miles away.
Becoming space faring would also exacerbate the issue, but it wouldn’t be the start.
From that voyager episode with horny belana we learn that Vulcans are basically assigned a mate, so the chances are slim that a vulcan would need release without an outlet. And aside from that, the ponfarr can also be dealt with through meditation and discipline, probably particularly created for the situations you mention where there actually is no partner available.
Vorik and Tuvok both claim the problem can be dealt with through meditation, but both of them also fail to resolve the issue in this way, so we don’t know if that’s actually an effective treatment.
There’s also lots of ways a Vulcan could end up single, not to mention we’ve seen at least two instances of Vulcans rejecting their arranged marriages (T’Pol and T’Pring), so there’s no guarantee any given Vulcan has a mate, despite their customs.
They have meditations they can do with a group of fellow Vulcan’s to help suppress the urge in the case of not being able to procreate with their mate. It comes up in Voyager.
That does seem like the simplest, most reliable, most effective solution. We’ve seen things like meditation and medical treatments fail.
