By Dewey Truman
Special to YNOT

NEW YORK – According to a report from some website I’m sure knows what it’s talking about, the harm done by pornography amounts to much more than causing erectile dysfunction, breaking up marriages and turning its male viewers into pitiless, misogynist rape-machines.

Porn, it turns out, is also causing smartphones to explode.

While porn apologists and mobile device manufacturers are sure to dispute this fact as some sort of absurd urban legend or the result of confusion on the part of a misinformed freelance journalist, Lucas Frohm, an ersatz technologist who lives behind the gym where I work out twice a year, said he’s certain reports about sexually explicit materials causing phones to explode are real.

“I saw it happen right outside the Safeway around the corner just the other day,” Frohm said. “One of their shelf-stockers had slipped out back to sneak in a little porn streaming session and all of a sudden — BOOM! — his phone just blows up on the spot. All that was left behind was his name tag and a really confused looking Metapod, which immediately ran off, only to be captured eventually by some other heartless Pokémon-slaver, I’m sure.”

Purported attorney Earnest S. Hitter said beyond the obvious risk to consumers presented by exploding mobile phones, adult entertainment studios could find themselves in serious legal trouble if one of their works is found to be the cause of a smartphone detonation.

“Even if porn studios aren’t willfully and intentionally creating porn for the purpose of blowing up consumers’ phones, the fact they would publish such volatile materials without first doing extensive safety testing is legally problematic,” Hitter said. “It sounds to me like a textbook case of aggravated negligence, or maybe neglected aggravation, or possibly negative lingerie, depending on whether any of those is an actual form of actionable legal claim.”

Rival attorney Tito Mendacio disputed Hitter’s analysis, asserting porn studios have no duty to test their content for explosiveness prior to publishing it online.

“Look, lots of products on the modern market spontaneously explode, from breakfast cereal to shower caps, but you don’t see people suing Cap’n Crunch over lost fingers,” Mendacio said. “There’s also the question of whether it’s really porn causing these phones to explode, or some sort of user error. For all we know, the people who have been incinerated by their phones could have downloaded a virus, or malware, or some kind of weird app of Middle Eastern origin which turns a smartphone into a bomb, or even just absentmindedly tapped on their phone’s native self-destruct app without realizing it.”

A starting quarterback for one of the NFL’s top teams who asked not to be identified because he’s hoping the whole “Deflategate” thing might finally blow over soon said he’s skeptical there’s really an app on the market that enables users to blow up their own phones, but he’s intrigued by the possibility simply watching porn on one’s smartphone would do the trick.

“Do any of these reports say exactly which porn videos make smartphones explode?” the future Hall of Famer asked. “I’ve been busting mine up with a hammer to date, but on top of the convenience of a self-immolating mobile, it would be a fucking great prank to hand Gronk my phone and say ‘Dude, check out this crazy porn video,’ then remote-detonate it in his hand. Unless that would turn him into a white Jason Pierre-Paul or something. I mean, even Gronk probably needs both hands to catch the ball reliably, right?”

Frohm said while he’s never seen a smartphone explode in a pro football player’s hand, he did once see one “fall right out of Mark Sanchez’s ass crack” in the middle of a crucial fourth quarter play back in 2012.

Dewey Truman is a freelance investigative journalist who is so busy compiling and analyzing facts, he doesn’t have time to actually read any of the sources from which he gathers said facts.