Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Miss Poubelle tips her chapeau to the folks at Wired magazine for catching a story that much of the larger media ignored. This was the November testimony before the US Senate on the alleged dangers of pornography by several soi-disant experts in human sexuality.

Among the most alarmist of these was Judith Reisman, Ph.D., who listed her affiliation as the Institute for Media Education-- an institute which apparently exists solely to promote the career and ideas of Judith Reisman. Reisman claims that pornography is the neurological equivalent of an addictive drug. She testified that: "Pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the 'high' from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erototoxins-- mind-altering drugs produced by the viewer's own brain."

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Further, she suggested that visual images bypass the conscious mind triggering "an instant, involuntary, but lasting biochemical memory trail, arguably subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process. This is true of both 'soft-core' and 'hard-core' pornography."

That is, there is no freedom of speech for sexual images because these images aren't speech and they worm themselves into the brain by some special biological mechanism.

The evil genius of Reisman's term erototoxins is that it manages to unite anti-sex, anti-porn views with the war on drugs, by claiming that pornography produces drugs. In this way, it deviously exploits human biology to produce addiction to sex.

What are Reisman's qualifications to make such sweeping statements about biology and brain chemistry? She has a Ph.D. in Communication, which is a discipline that has nothing to do with either one. She has never held a permanent faculty position at any university, and one of the sources that she cites as evidence for her scholarship is a report that she prepared for the Department of Justice under the Reagan Administration-- hardly an unbiased funding source. (She also wrote music for Captain Kangaroo, if that's relevant.)

In her testimony, she also called for the end of federal funding for universities that teach ideas opposed to hers. To quote her-- "Congress should remove all federal funding of educational institutions that train students with bogus Kinseyan academic pornography and/or that teach that pornography is harmless."

But apart from Reisman's dubious qualifications and her call for the government to silence opposition to her antisex jihad, what of the actual logic of her argument? The "internal, natural drugs" that she mentions in her testimony are the basic chemicals of the brain-- the endorphins that reduce pain, and the natural opiates that increase the body's experience of pleasure.

But these brain chemicals are produced by countless activities-- some people find them in running, others in good food or music, and some even in prayer or congressional testimony. Sex is only one of these things. If we were to try to ban all activities and substances that caused the brain to have a natural "high," it is hard to imagine what kind of society we would have-- perhaps hell is the closest approximation in popular imagination. But that should be no surprise, since nothing so resembles hell as a world controlled by those with an unshakeable desire to impose their view of heaven upon us.