The Friday Thing is a paid-subscription email newsletter. This interview with me was included in the 24 January 2003 issue. TFT claimed a circulation of 45 thousand at this point, and apparently this item provoked a lot of interest. I've done lots of other media things, but I was most pleased about this one as it was an opportunity to vent to an intellectual audience about whatever issues I felt like.
Martin Poulter is a man of many metaphorical hats. He is a doctor of philosophy, the webmaster of Glandscape Hardening (a website which advocates 'sexual freedom') - and a champion of sexual abstinence. He is a thorn in the side of the Scientologists, and they have twice threatened him with legal action. He also presents The Annual Stupidity Lecture, which is coming up in March.
We sent him some questions. He sent back his replies. This is the result:
I gave a tenner to an infamous Bristol con-man last year. That's pretty embarrassing given that I've taught logic and my life revolves around critical thinking. However, psychology claims that irrationality is built into the very nature of how human beings work, so I like to think that by being stupid myself, I confirm the theory.
I'm sometimes asked if there is a personality type that is susceptible to delusion and irrational belief. The answer is yes: human. To persuade yourself, read Stuart Sutherland's 'Irrationality: The Enemy Within'. On the topic of drugs, porn and other consensual crimes, I wish everyone would read 'Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do' by Peter McWilliams, which luckily is available online.
I'm a licensed preacher with the Church of the SubGenius, which states that every member must form their own heretical schism. The Church of the SubGenius is like Scientology, except that Scientology is a joke.
I learnt about Scientology because of their attempts to wipe out criticism from the Internet, and in talking to them on the street I became grimly fascinated with their level of closed-mindedness. I've no doubt they would round up us skeptics and put us in camps if they were in charge.
Here's a one-minute video of a scientologist on Tottenham Court Road trying to persuade me that dictionary definitions are a matter of life and death - not sure if it's very audible.
My research is about biasing influences that affect how we form opinions. Scientology illustrates these biases well and, in my opinion, uses them in the most abusive ways. They tell you, for example, that you won't benefit from their courses if you are a criminally-minded, anti-social person. They also say that if you did not understand their books you need to go back and look up dictionary definitions of all the words. Then they ask you if you understood and benefited from their courses. It's not surprising that they get masses of glowing testimony.
Taboos and censorship are other potentially biasing influences. I don't think censorship is ever neutral: it always benefits one side of an argument; usually the argument about whether or not there should be censorship. For example, the politically dominant view on recreational drugs is that the populace must be protected from them and from positive depictions of them. So the tabloids pillory Noel Gallagher and Stephen Fry for talking honestly about the effects of Ecstacy, and the BBC sacks presenters who take cocaine and still lead happy lives. The net effect is to marginalise non-scaremongering opinions of drugs, so the establishment view protects itself.
Me, I sometimes take too many puffs of Ventolin but that's it. I want my sober focus on grimy reality to be a free choice, not a legal mandate.
The Daily Mail (and other sources) have attacked homosexuality as absurd on evolutionary grounds. Well, most of what people do in the name of sex doesn't do anything procreative. What about eating a raw egg off someone's chest? Does that somehow make you ovulate more vigorously? There are various myths that have been used to suppress various kinds of material as obscene, and which are still widely believed:
Knowledge about the variety of sexuality seems to be a kind of sex education that we are lacking as a culture. The Internet - for example the torrent of infuriatingly badly-spelt fantasies in the Usenet discussion groups - is potentially doing good by filling this gap.
Of course, porn potentially brings its own myths, for example that horny web-cam fuck-sluts (what other kind of sluts are there?) are 'waiting for you NOW!' or that 'barely legal' is the biggest compliment you can pay a woman. The answer is to democratise it and destigmatise it, so that fantasies are seen as just that, in context. That requires fewer laws and taboos, not more.
If everybody shared, without stigma, ideas about what gets them off, then we'd see the futility of applying norms to desire. Why are some people turned on by sexually immature children? The same reason others are turned on by girls eating ribs and others are turned on by the thought of animals being crushed by a leather boot, i.e. no reason: it's just a fact of the human condition that people are aroused by stuff. The moral dimension attaches not to how you fantasise or exchange your fantasies but to whether you carry them out only with consenting adults.
For most of my life, I've been pretty much asexual. What I wanted from sex education was an answer to 'why?' but people don't talk about that because to them the answer's too bleeding obvious. I helped set up a celibacy mailing list and was active on it for years. Complete strangers opened up to me about extremely private aspects of their lives and feelings, in a way that I'm sure a proper sexological researcher would kill for. Amongst other things, it taught me the power of the drive to love or be loved. There's a surprisingly large portion of the population who don't really care for sex, but even those people crave some form of intimacy and romance.
Have a roam around the further reaches of Martin's mind by visiting his website.
And if you're feeling especially bold, and don't have a firewall - have a go on his Porn Engine:
http://www.glandscape.com/xxxvids.asp