Billmon: Tickling the Limbic System

The limbic system is highly interconnected with a structure known as the nucleus accumbens, commonly called the brain's pleasure center . . . Rats with metal electrodes implanted into their nucleus accumbens will repeatedly press a lever which activates this region, and will do so in preference over food and water, eventually dying from exhaustion.

Wikipedia
Limbic System

One of the more pronounced features of this election cycle, at least since the Mark Foley story broke, has been the sublimination of actual news -- on Iraq, the economy, even old-fashioned graft and corruption -- by sex talk, and the raunchier the better.

I'm talking mainly about what's on the boob tube (a doubly accurate description these days), both on the "news programs" and the ads, which increasingly seem to be fusing into a kind of soft-core peep show, in which the periodic doses of smut are interrupted by bursts of puritanical outrage -- most of them as fraudulent as the female orgasms in a porno movie. These days it seems the entire political-media-industrial complex can spend days a state of high sexual excitement waiting to see who's going to get nailed (so to speak) next.