I have been to a lot of U.S. Senate hearings, and I can tell you without a doubt that the best U.S. Senate hearings are the ones where U.S. Senators talk about masturbation. Better than war. Better than taxation. Better than Supreme Court confirmation fights. Senate hearings about masturbation easily top the rest.

Back in 2005, then-Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, held a hearing for the Senate’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, for which he gathered a terrific panel of masturbation and pornography experts. One of them, a graduate student from Brigham Young University, argued that pornography amounted to a “potentially addictive substance,” like a drug. She said the self-stimulative effect on the brain of a porn-induced orgasm could override “informed consent when encountering this material.” At the same hearing, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, compared pornography, and the behavior it arouses, to secondhand smoke and high-fat foods, saying porn was a “problem of harm, not an issue of taste.” No one fell asleep.

I mention all this for a reason. The U.S. Senate is wading back into the masturbation issue.  As Josh Gerstein reports, a group of 42 Senators have just sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting more obscenity prosecutions of pornography. The letter refers Holder to a website, www.pornographyharms.com, which is filled with masturbation research with headlines like “Mirror Neurons Control Hard-Ons?” The lead article on the site right now likens self-pleasure to the use of cocaine, heroin and alcohol.