Any Volunteers?

Last week the Guardian newspaper revealed that a new word for things that are bad for you has been invented:

According to Dr Judith Reisman, pornography affects the physical structure of
your brain turning you into a porno-zombie. Porn, she says, is an "erototoxin ",
producing an addictive "drug cocktail " of testosterone, oxytocin, dopamine and
serotonin with a measurable organic effect on the brain.

"Eroto"-toxins? Yes, they do sound vaguely frightening, like some made-up alien microbe the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise was always encountering. We can hear Dr. Crusher saying now, "I've never seen anything like it...his erototoxins are off the scale!"

Ah, we do tease and nag, but Dr. Reisman's new word is not just a hypothesis. Well, actually it IS just a hypothesis. But Dr. Reisman is going to do the research just as soon as she cashes her check:

Under the auspices of Utah's Lighted Candle Society (LCS), Reisman and Victor
Cline, a clinical psychologist at the University of Utah, began raising money
from American conservative and religious organisations. They hope to raise at
least $3m to conduct MRI scans on victims under the influence of porn and so
prove their theories correct.

This makes us think back over the past few years, when we at the Blasphemy Blog were headquartered in Boston. Because Boston is a research hub, we would often see advertisements offering money for people willing to participate in scientific experiments on sleep deprivation, memory, etc. We often wondered, Who would be desperate enough for money that they would be willing to become a guinea pig? (Well, college students, that's who.)

Something tells us that Drs. Reisman and Cline will not have much trouble getting guinea pigs for their experiments; we just don't think it's going to be that hard to locate people willing to watch porn. Even in Utah. We might even imagine the subjects contriving to extend their sessions with the MRI machines beyond the normal duration, perhaps resorting to comical subterfuge.

But who knows? Perhaps they will discover that erototoxins exist after all. Maybe, some day, we will all say to young children we meet, "I've known you since you were just a little erototoxin in your father's cerebral cortex."