Erotic Toxins

Josh writes:

I heard of erotoxins a little while ago, but never paid much attention until I happened to read a brief article on them straight after one on Alfred Kinsey, and noticed the name Judith Reisman in both.

This is the person who claims that Kinsey is a "Nazi Paedophile Collaborator" whose deliberately skewed research involved the abuse of hundreds of children and is generally responsible for the downfall of Western civilization, and who now claims that viewing pornography triggers your brain to produce mind-altering "toxins" that have a lasting effect on your behaviour, eventually leading to serious psychological aberrations including violence and paedophilia.

Aside: It's always paedophilia, isn't it? Because, one assumes, it's pretty much the one sexual practise that can be pronounced wrong without controversy. (I would add bestiality as well, but the number of "I love my dog, why can't I marry it?" arguments put forward during the Civil Unions debate makes me wonder...) This means, of course, that any other sexual practise you can tie to it becomes uncontroversially wrong as well. Hence the project of trying to prove that the more controversial practises -- homosexuality being the usual one -- are intrinsically linked to it. But anyway.

My understanding is that the reasoning behind the erotoxins project goes something like this: Street drugs are addictive, toxic substances that make you feel good. The sexual arousal caused by viewing pornography makes you feel good and can be addictive, so must therefore be caused by a toxic, drug-like substance. Essentially, we have an attempt to scientifically prove that things that feel good must be bad for you.

"Puritanism" is defined by the consistently quotable H.L. Mencken as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." In reference to my earlier post, it seems to me that if there really are people out there living in permanent horror at the state of the world, they're people like Dr Judith Reisman.