Posthuman Blues

This one is worth quoting at some length.

Sex on the brain

"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. 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'."

First of all, as Mind Hacks notes, everything has a physical effect on the brain; if it didn't, we'd all be vegetables. So who gets to define "damage"? More importantly, who gets to define "pornography"? (That's a rhetorical question, of course; the above reference to "conservative and religious organisations" lets you know exactly who.)

Mind Hacks raises another prickly issue: If merely looking at erotic images turns one into an effective zombie, what must actual sex do?

I'm not sure, but I'm betting Satan is involved.

(Learned of at Technorgasmic, a site which frequently features pictures of unclothed carbon-based bipeds.)