July’s Idiot of the Month award goes to Judith Reisman, a nutty anti-anything-sexual crusader who is astonishingly popular with social conservatives. Reisman is one of the leading lights of the “abstinence-only sex ed” movement and a longtime anti-porn and anti-gay activist with a history of saying absolutely loony things. Her latest contribution to absurdity is the notion of “erototoxins”, which she invented out of whole cloth and foisted on an unsuspecting Congress last year. “Erototoxins” are brain chemicals allegedly released in the brain when one views pornography, chemicals which, Reisman says, are highly addictive and turn those who view pornography into something like a porno zombie:
Thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably, subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process. This is true of so-called ?soft-core? and ?hard-core? pornography. And once new neurochemical pathways are established they are difficult or impossible to delete.
Pornographic images also cause secretion of the body’s ?fight or flight? sex hormones. This triggers excitatory transmitters and produces non-rational, involuntary reactions; intense arousal states that overlap sexual lust–now with fear, shame, and/or hostility and violence. Media erotic fantasies become deeply imbedded, commonly coarsening, confusing, motivating and addicting many of those exposed. (See ?the Violence Pyramid? at http://www.vbii.org/violence.html) 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.
How does this ‘brain sabotage’ occur? Brain scientists tell us that ?in 3/10 of a second a visual image passes from the eye through the brain, and whether or not one wants to, the brain is structurally changed and memories are created ? we literally ‘grow new brain’ with each visual experience.?
Now one might think, since she dubs herself as “Dr” Judith Reisman, that she must know what she’s talking about. But in fact, her PhD is in communications, not medicine or neuroscience or even psychology. And this nonsense above is just pseudo-scientific claptrap. Of course a visual image creates a memory, and since memory must be stored within the brain, the brain is therefore “structurally changed.” But so what? Where is the link between that and anything else? It appears she just assumes it, or hopes that the mere mention of the process by which the brain stores information will dazzle her uneducated audience enough that they won’t bother to ask for such a link. There is no such thing as an “erototoxin”, of course, but there are pleasure chemicals that are released in the brain called endorphins and they are released in a wide range of activities, including physical exercise, laughter and – surprise, surprise – sex itself. Which of course leads to the one question which destroys this entire edifice of stupid rationalizations she has built for her opposition to pornography: why isn’t it also true of sex itself? Surely if seeing a sexy picture triggers “structural changes” in the brain that “subvert the First Amendment” and alter the mind, why does not sex itself do this? The same brain chemicals are released, but this time you have a live human body that you can experience it with right there in bed with you. That means not only do you have the visual stimuli of the erotic image seering itself into the brain, you have the input of the other senses as well. So by Reisman’s “reasoning”, the actual act of having sex should do far more to alter the brain, and in precisely the same manner, as the viewing of pornography. So why not ban the act of sex itself? Hell, that may be next.
One might also ask another question in this regard. Reisman herself was given over $700,000 by the Reagan administration in the early 80s to study pornography as part of Edwin Meese’s anti-porn crusade, which means she likely exposed herself to more pornography than the average middle-aged male could likely consume in his entire adult life. Why, then, has this not reduced Reisman’s brain to mush? Remember, she claims that the release of “erototoxins” is non-rational and involuntary.
The reason why she has invented this fanciful and self-contradictory rationale is because she is pushing for harsh and invasive anti-pornography laws, and even more so because she is pushing for tobacco-style lawsuits against the pornography industry for taking control of people’s brains and making them do horrible things. In her Congressional testimony she actually said:
State-of-the-art brain scanning studies should answer these questions with hard, replicable data. As with the tobacco suits, these data could be helpful in litigation and in affecting legal change…
An offensive strategy should be planned, mandating law enforcement collection of all pornography data at crime sites and judges, police, lawyers and law schools should receive training in the hard data of sexology fraud and erototoxins as changing brains absent informed consent.
Informed consent is an important legal concept that she is actively trying to undermine. If pornography turns people into porno zombies against their will, then they are unable to engage in informed consent and are rendered child-like, requiring protection from their own brains by those good folks like Reisman who are, after all, just looking out for them. As the Guardian pointed out last week:
They foresee two possible outcomes: if they can demonstrate that porn physically “damages” the brain, that might open the floodgates for “big tobacco”-style lawsuits against porn publishers and distributors; second, and more insidiously, if porn can be shown to “subvert cognition” and affect the parts of the brain involved in reasoning and speech, then “these toxic media should be legally outlawed, as is all other toxic waste, and eliminated from our societal structure”.
But Reisman’s lunacy in no way stops here. At 70 years old, she’s had decades to build up a record for saying loony things and she has succeeded admirably. Not only is she virulently anti-gay, but she even manages to blame homosexuals for the holocaust itself, as the New Yorker reported late last year:
The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were largely the creation of ?the German homosexual movement.? Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to repeat those crimes. ?Idealistic ‘gay youth’ groups are being formed and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those who formed the original ‘Hitler youth.’?
This displays a breathtaking ignorance of history. The Nazi party was violently anti-gay and eliminating homosexuals from society was every bit as much a part of the Third Reich as eliminating Jews. Over half a million homosexuals were killed in the concentration camps along with millions of Jews (though, unlike the Jews, when the US liberated the death camps they turned the homosexuals over to the authorities rather than releasing them). It’s especially shameful for Reisman, a Jew herself, to blame those who suffered and died beside the Jews at the hands of the Nazis for their own suffering. But this is hardly surprising. Reisman also blames her fellow Jews for the “abortion industry”. So, for contributing so much utter nonsense to our public discourse, and for providing the ridiculous rationale for a further expansion of the governmental nanny state that must protect us from ourselves, Judith Reisman has earned July’s Robert O’Brien Trophy as July’s Idiot of the Month. Congratulations.