Fergus Cassidy

Pron cocktail

THE definition of porn may have changed over the centuries but it took the internet to introduce a new way of spelling it.

Pron is the jargon of choice for those who want to avoid sentinel software deployed to filter content on the web and in email. If your name is Richard but you prefer the nickname version, the same applies.

Filtering puts the main responsibility on to the individual when it comes to protection from harmful material. It has largely replaced legislation, which has not (so far) proved very effective in a computer-networked environment.

The Children's Internet Protection Act of a couple of years ago was the third attempt by the US Congress to pass law. It was shot down as "an unreasonable intrusion into the rights of Americans to view legal material online".

Today pornography is a global multi-billion dollar industry and its move onto the internet is the latest installment in the history of pornography and new technologies. There is even a law named after Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, who once said that the first use for any new communications technology is sex.

That prediction looks like continuing onward to the next generation of mobile phones without a hitch.

The Vodafone Group has introduced what it calls "risque" content in some of its markets. Tina Southall, head of content standards for the group, said last May that it was "a big commercial opportunity, so it is fair to say that commercial operators will have to exploit this opportunity in some way".

But with legislation giving way to filtering and a more technological approach, crusaders against pornography are looking elsewhere for a solution. To these proselytisers neuroscience and the study of the brain may reveal the silver bullet for porn.

This approach firstly labels porn as a drug. The next part of the strategy is similar to that used against Big Tobacco by proving scientifically that porn is not only addictive but physically damaging as well.

John Harmer is chairman of the Lighted Candle Society, an anti-porn group he founded in the US with former attorney general Ed Meese. Some of the money Lighted Candle raises is intended for research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain.

"Then", he said, "we can go into the courtroom and hold them liable for physical harm. If we can hold then financially liable for the harm they are doing, then we have the real opportunity to push pornography into the gutter where it came from, and keep it there".

The so-called porn and drug link received a further outing recently, this time in front of the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The hearing was titled 'The Science Behind Pornography Addiction'.

For one witness, nothing could be simpler. "The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviours. To have a drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than grown ups - it's a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of young addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind".

But it was the testimony of Dr Judith Reisman which really engaged my own brain. Dr Reisman, who also runs the Institute for Media Education, spoke to the hearing on behalf of the California Protective Parents Association.

She said that "thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail... . This is true of so-called 'soft core' and 'hard core' pornography".

She too supports brain scanning studies in order to provide hard, replicable data. "As with the tobacco suits, these data could be helpful in litigation and in affecting legal change".

Dr Reisman pushes hard the porn-as-drug theory, for that's all it is. "Pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the 'high' from a street drug.

"Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erototoxins - mind altering drugs produced by the viewer's own brain.

"Pornographic images also cause secretion of the body's 'fight or flight' sex hormones".

Erototoxins!!!! This stuff definitely brings out the fight or flight in me, but it's nothing whatsoever to do with sex.