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At a maximum security mental hospital named Coalinga in California, according to an article by the BBC, sex offenders—including "some of the state of California's more serious paedophiles and rapists"—are given a test called a "plethysmograph," which features "a device...put around the subject's penis to measure his sexual arousal as he's shown a variety of images." Some of those images, the BBC says, "are pornographic images of consenting adults, while some are deviant such as violent sex or suggestive images of children eating fruit and running around in bathing costumes. Then there are non-suggestive images to establish a baseline of non-arousal." And whatever are those non-suggestive images? They're, uh, "photos of the Canadian city of Toronto." There you have it: Toronto is officially less sexy than children eating fruit. [Hat tip to Mathew Ingram.]
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This may be the funniest thing I've ever heard.
Even the CN Phallus? Well, now I don't know what to think.
Great find, David. That tops the list of my week's favourite stories.
The device has a rather sinister history in Canada.
"The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all homosexuals from civil service, the RCMP, and the military. In 1981, the Royal Commission received a "massive report on RCMP wrongdoings" by Justice David McDonald after four years of research. The report confirmed "what was already known and widely feared.
...
"The McDonald Report confirmed surveillance of all known homosexuals in Ottawa. The effort included a "plan to record the movement of all known Ottawa gays on a gigantic map of the city. More bizarre and sinister are the activities, beginning in the 1950s, of RCMP Security Service subsection A-3, whose sole purpose "was the identification and dismissal of every gay person in the employ of the public service" (Sawatsky 1980)."
Well, that makes it semi-official.
We're about as exciting as a bowl
of cold oatmeal.
Sophisticated travellers know otherwise
and the one who are from the fly-over
states usually don't cotton on to what
we have to offer.
Do the pictures of Toronto show an open SkyDome?
A silly and insignificant poster that portrays a radio committing suicide is major news in this town. Given that, is it any wonder that Toronto is the paradigm of "non-arousal"?
I rather read about that than another story about f*cking Susan Boyle or twitter, to tell you the truth.
I was quite bemused that the Astral-themed feature I had in Eye in December was accompanied in the paper by a condom ad.
Bear in mind that the titillating radio was a Virgin...
I laughed.
I'm a little confused by this story.
Are you implying that you get more of an erection when you see the city of Toronto than you do when you see children eatting fruit, or are you implying that the average Torontoist reader does?