Erototoxins — that’s your word for the day.

Say it one hundred times:
e-ROT-o
[pause for maximum impact]
TOXINS!

Erototoxins are the latest in junk science from the ever incredible Religious Right.

According to Judith Reisman — a self-styled “expert” and anti-porn crusader — the recent shootings at Virginia Tech were all the result of violent video games and
cell-phone porn.

“Our mass media needs to stop celebrating mass killers and pandering sexual violence,” fumes Reisman — or “Dr.” Reisman as she likes to call herself.

In fact, she is in no way a medical doctor, or even a psychotherapist. She is a woman with a PhD in communication — that classic major of spokesmodels and celebrity pitchmen — who, like many in the Religious Right, insists on using the Dr. honorific before her name to suggest that she is something more than she is.

“A major lawsuit waits in the wings,” threatens the righteous spokesmodel, “if Virginia Tech has been a pornographic/erototoxic tolerant environment.”

A what environment? Oh we get it: it’s all because of those nasty pictures of people with no clothes on.

Naturally, Virginia’s lax gun laws had nothing to do with the university massacre: The shooter broke no Virginia law when he purchased his two Glock semi-automatics over the internet — despite a standing diagnosis of mental illness.

Equally irrelevant is the tiny fact that the young man kept conflating himself with Christ in his suicide videos.

“Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people,” the delusional Cho Seung-Hui announced on the tape, with an entirely too familiar sense of God-election and self-importance. In a second video, Cho states “Jesus loves crucifying me.”

Question: Since there is no actual evidence that Cho either a) played video games or b) lingered over porn, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that he was suffering from Christo-toxins?

But then when did facts, evidence or proof ever prick the hot-air balloons of the anti-sex blowhards? Least of all “Dr.” Judith Reisman, who first came to prominence when the movie Kinsey came out, making multiple appearances on — what else? — the Fox News network to designate Dr. Kinsey as “the man who mainstreamed perversion.” Translation, Kinsey’s candid sex survey of mid-century America ushered in feminism and tolerance for gay people.

“Reisman has cast herself as the anti-Kinsey,” wrote Max Blumenthal for Alternet at the time of the film’s release, “a self-styled moral monger in an existential — and admittedly personal — battle with the forces of cultural decay and sexual permissiveness.”:

In her writings and lectures, Reisman conjures a dark world in which Playboy magazine insidiously pushes kiddie-porn, where homosexuals crusade for the hearts and behinds of America’s youth, and “erototoxins,” as powerful as crack cocaine, fill the somatasensory cortexes of porn watchers…

Though the “Dr.” that precedes her name on her book and her web site is practically cosmetic, earned with a degree in communications, this November [2005] she provided expert testimony on Capitol Hill for Republican Sen. Sam Brownback on the scientific perils of pornography….

Ostracized by mainstream academia, … Reisman [at a Christian Right conference in Colorado Springs in 1994] … introduced her theory of a proselytizing homosexual movement.

“I would suggest to you,” she told the conference, “that while the homosexual population may right now be one to two percent, hold your breath, people, because the recruitment is loud; it is clear; it is everywhere. You’ll be seeing, I would say, 20 percent or more, probably 30 percent, or even more than that, of the young population will be moving into homosexual activity.”

The notion of a surreptitious homosexual recruitment campaign is now casually advanced by conservative Christian leaders as they rally for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

The Guardian Unlimited, meanwhile, dropped all pretense at seriousness and became hilariously snarky about the erototoxin hokum. Wrote Mark Pilkington

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.

Some of us might consider this a good thing.

Not Reisman: erototoxins aren’t about pleasure, they’re a “fear-sex shame-and-anger stimulant”. ..

Under the auspices of Utah’s Lighted Candle Society, Reisman … began raising money from American conservative and religious organizations … to conduct MRI scans on victims under the influence of porn and so prove her theories correct.

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…”

What’s more, people whose brains have been rotted by pornography are no longer expressing “free speech ” and, for their own good, shouldn’t be protected under the First Amendment.

But there’s a catch. Much of Reisman’s research in developing her theory has necessitated examining hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pornographic magazines and films.

By her own reasoning her brain ought, by now, to be a seething mass of toxic smut-mulch. …

Cut to the present. Seizing on the Virginia Tech massacre, Reisman is back in the media’s eye, making up the facts, as she once did on Capitol Hill when she accused Alfred Kinsey of sexually abusing children, offering it only as her “educated guess,” as a “possibility ” — an outrageous slander immediately countered by all four of Kinsey’s major biographers.

So the Virginia Tech shooter had no history of video gaming or porn obsessing? No matter.

In an article for the conservative website WorldNetDaily, the 72 year-old Reisman showed her talent for fabricating other people’s biographies has not dimmed. Writing with typical hyperventilated gusto, she cited a catalog of “common factors shared by recent mass school killers.”

“Start with a boy who will never be a football hero or homecoming king, ” our spokesmodel began reasonably enough.

“Place him in a society drenched in sadosexual arousal as entertainment.”

Okay, here we go:

“Toss in some family troubles of a trivial and/or serious nature. Bring him to a local video game arcade to painstakingly perfect both a killer’s attitude and aim. Sit him at the Internet every night, angrily lusting after naked young blondes who provoke his loins…”

You get the picture: blame it on the poontang.

And now to provoke your loins and stoke your lust for naked blondes even more, we present a special report on the harmful effects of erototoxins and the evil Dr. Kinsey. Yes kids, it’s breaking news — from 1965. Now playing in our Blame it on the Poontang Theater.

© 2007, John Calendo. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com