Erototoxin

When pornography is viewed, the autonomic nervous system overrides volitional control, especially in the absence of frontal-lobe inhibition in the person's brain. The direct route of pictorial erototoxic stimuli (which links lust to fear and shame) is through the eye, to the visual cortex in the brain, down the spinal cord, and into the reproductive organs, overriding and hijacking the frontal cortical areas of the brain, where reason and cognition are located. The process thus occurs without the viewer's informed consent or awareness. Thus begins addiction.

The term erototoxin has been introduced by Judith Reisman, PhD, in order to operationalize how the human brain processes erotically stimulating intimate scenes that appear outside, in the public media, a documentably unnatural, dangerous environment for such scenes. The resulting harms to the observer may present as physical impotence and/or as emotional, in the inability to bond. Such psychopharmacological dysfunctions will afflict many or all repeated pornography users. While the visual stimulus' entry into the limbic system is virtually automatic and autonomic, it still allows for some levels of frontal cortical discernment commonly undeveloped in the adolescent brain. Although the tragedy of pornography use is thoroughly documented anecdotally, science is just beginning to confirm the involuntary anti cognitive nature of media eros.

Neurosurgeons Hilton and Watts explain in Pornography addiction: A neuroscience perspective, that all addictions cause chemical, anatomical and pathological brain changes "collectively labeled hypofrontal syndromes ... damage to the 'braking system' of the brain ... well known to clinical neuroscientists, especially neurologists and neurosurgeons." "Patients with traumatic injuries to this area of the brain" the authors report, "display problems-aggressiveness, poor judgment of future consequences, inability to inhibit inappropriate responses that are similar to those observed in substance abusers." Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) stated, "addictions such as pornography ..." Hilton and Watts agree. They urge a medical study of "the pathology of pornography" similar to the study of cholera, when its Public Health implications were "perhaps as primitive as that of pornography today."  (more...)

Erototoxin