OK, this did not propagate from my NNTP server to Google, so I'm posting it to Google directly. If you got it twice, that's why. -DG

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This would be funny if not for the way it messes up people's heads.

First, a little background. The Sea Org is not like Scientology in general. In particular, sex in the Sea Org is highly regulated and repressed. This comes from Hubbard's earliest works where he says that all sexual "perversions" and "irregularities" (including homosexuality) belong in the lower bands of the tone scale, and mostly the dreaded 1.1 - Covert Hostility, the evil plotters who smile in your face but are continually plotting the destruction of everything good.

For Sea Org members, any sexual contact outside marriage or between unmarried persons is an RPF offense *at least*. Even married partners live with the awareness that everything they do in their own bedroom could become the subject of a sec check, and some of the people reading the "knowledge reports" could have some highly inclusive ideas about what constitutes sexual perversion or irregularity. Hubbard never defined either term, which left it open to interpretation by whoever was wielding the Ethics baton. Hence, better safe than sorry.

Masturbation was a grey area. Hubbard said very little about it. The only negative thing he ever said or wrote was in the book Handbook for Preclears, in which he says masturbation could never drive anybody insane, but "recalling" sensations from past experiences while masturbating could become habitual and generalized, so eventually one could begin unconsciously recalling any and all sensations including bad ones and could become sick. This is in line with the Dianetics belief that nearly all illness is psychosomatic.

However, this reference was not well known most of the times and places I was in the Sea Org, and really a reference was unnecessary. If there were any people who thought it was irregular behavior, it was damned. And if people felt "withholdy" about doing it (meaning they didn't want everybody to know about it), it would invariably come up in O/W write-ups and sec checks. And these two ideas fed on and reinforced each other: "It must be out-ethics, because he feels a need to keep it a secret," and "I need to keep it secret, because they'd punish me if they knew."

- In about 1983, a Sea Org member at Flag was sent to the RPF by an ethics mission. I happened to see the telex to Mission Operations. It explained, in an embarrassed tone, that they'd had to RPF him because he was perverted. His perversion? He had confessed to masturbating twice a day.

- In 1985 or '86, I was given a woman's personnel records to review, with the idea that she might be transferred to my area. The record contained her own report *on herself* in which she admitted to masturbating a few times and to becoming aroused when she'd heard people having sex on the other side of the wall in her Sea Org berthing. I doubt she was punished other than perhaps being denied promotion to the higher levels of COS power; the point is that her indoctrination made her feel so guilty about it that she felt a need to report herself to the faceless organization. And that the organization, as a matter of course, felt a need to give me this information about her. I was not an ethics officer and did not even work in Personnel.

- In 1997 I was on a mission into ASHO Day. A fourteen-year-old Sea Org member was being considered for placement on a particular post. His personnel records detailed his struggle to give up masturbation, his backsliding, his ethics handlings by others, his ethics conditions on the subject, and his specific "overts" of masturbation. He was convinced of his guilt and out-ethics and was in agony over his failure to quit once and for all. The kid was an excellent candidate for the post, but my Mission In-Charge asked me if it was OK to propose the transfer because of his masturbation. (I told her there was no policy that covered it and that it was irrelevant.) Aside from the guilt trip and control mechanism being used on him, which is inexcusable in its own right, I have a major issue with minors being forced to detail their sexual activities for adults to read - adults who have no training or licensing or qualifications of any kind.

- In 1995, all of INCOMM and most everybody who'd had much to do with them, including myself, were held under house arrest by a mission, under 24-hour watch by security guards, inside INCOMM, for about four months. (That's another story!) We were all kept together inside one large room most of the time in the beginning. Everyone was either getting sec checked or waiting to get sec checked. One day, the Mission I/C walked into the room and walked up to one of the men. The room fell silent. She loudly told him he was wasting his sec checker's time with his continuing overts of masturbation, and ordered him to cease his out-ethics. Then she simply turned around and walked out. "Continuing overts" is a code term everybody understood. The reason suppressive persons can't get case gain is that they keep committing overts, and no case gain is possible when the preclear has unhandled overts. So she was implying he was suppressive, and for a Sea Org member, that means the RPF or worse.

- By way of contrast, back in the late seventies or early eighties, I was being sec checked either before or after taking my annual vacation. (The sec checks - both of them - are mandatory, but the vacations are not and soon became nearly nonexistent.) I tried to tell a masturbation withhold to my sec checker, who was a public student. He almost wouldn't let me, and showed me LRH references implying there isn't anything wrong with it. I already knew and agreed, but talked him into it because it fit the broadest definition of "withhold," anything you wouldn't want someone else to know, and who wants these sex-obsessed weirdos prying into your life? So you see it's entirely arbitrary, except that as "group agreement" accumulates at the higher levels that it's out-ethics, the lower levels are sooner or later forced into line.

- In 1993 or 1994, I was getting sec checked in order to get "Int Clearances," meaning I'd be eligible to work at the Gold base or to go there, and would be able to become fully qualified for the org where I already worked, OSA Int. It consists of a detailed sec check on your Life History, the notorious many-page form that nowadays all Sea Org members have to fill out and routinely update or redo. It wants pretty much everything, in detail. There is a whole section requiring you to detail all sexual activity of any kind you have ever had. This is where they decide whether you've ever been perverted or queer or promiscuous or irregular or out-ethics or whatever. This is also the reason they like young recruits - they've never done anything in life yet! Which means it's vastly easier to find people who are qualified for Int, a continual search and a continual problem for recruiters at the top. So, I got nearly all the way through my sec check fine; there was nothing that was not already known. But then, out of session, the sec checker said he noticed that there was nothing at all about masturbation in my sexual history. I said no, why would there be? This was the same life history that had been following me around for more than ten years, and nobody had ever mentioned it before, and I'd never seen it on other people's life histories. None of it was a secret; it had all been raked over in sec checks before.

But he wanted it in my LH, so I had to write it up and get sec checked on it. The fact that I didn't feel guilty about it became an issue! I was sent for ethics handling and re-education. I said OK fine, if it's an issue for you guys, I won't ever do it again. Nope, that wasn't good enough. I had to understand that it was out-ethics. I was given False Data Stripping and reading assignments like LRH's HCOB Pain and Sex, which says they're both inventions of the whole-track psychs meant to degrade and control beings.

-0-0-0- The Sea Org's Willie -0-0-0-

And now comes the Sea Org's Willie. But don't whack him! He's a stand-up guy. He keeps it on the straight and narrow.

Around 2000, the Continental Liaison Office, Western United States, got a new D/CO E&I: Deputy Commanding Officer for Ethics and Image. This post, just below the CO of the whole "continent," was responsible for the ethics (Scientology definition) and the public image of the Sea Org members, aside from and senior to all Masters-At-Arms and Public Relations Officers other than CMO or above. Such a person would have to be tough, unreasonable, and not too friendly. He would have "ethics presence," as a Scientologist would say it. You wouldn't want to jerk him around.

This new D/CO E&I was named William. Of course, Willie is not a good name for a fierce ethics officer, so nobody called him that - but to me, he will always be a Willie.

One day, after an especially thorough round of meter checks and O/W write-ups, Willie made an announcement to the entire PAC Base. All the *males* were to attend a mandatory briefing that night. Just males. No, didn 't matter what age. No, there was no corresponding briefing for the females. No, we won't tell you what it's going to be about. You'll find out at the briefing. Everybody be there. Don't make us send Security to get you.

Gee, that was a real tough one to figure out.

So it's time, and all the guys are crowded into the auditorium of Lebanon Hall. Willie stands up straight in front of everyone and begins spewing. He has reviewed everyone's O/W write-ups. The most common overt, says Willie, is masturbation. So Willie is going to educate us. He tells us we know better. We know it's out-ethics to masturbate. We know it's out-ethics to look at a girl and imagine what she'd look like in the shower. He reads us Pain and Sex. He reads that bit from Handbook for Preclears. He reads us everything from the "Justice" Codes that talks about sex.

The cream of his message is this: According to the Scientology justice codes, it is a High Crime, aka a Suppressive Act, to engage in (paraphrasing) sexual or sexually perverted conduct which inhibits or interferes with progress up the Bridge. Because masturbation restimulates your case, it interferes with your progress up the Bridge. Get it? Whacking your Willie is not just minor out-ethics: It's SUPPRESSIVE!

So Willie reads all this stuff and, in an eyebrow-raising episode of "verbal tech" (a big no-no in Scientology), explains it all to us so there's no wiggle room, no chance for anybody to think that what he himself is doing might be exempt from what LRH says is bad. Now Willie wants examples and testimonials from the crowd. Examples of false data they were taught or observed in non-LRH books or magazines or movies or ads that made it seem like masturbation is OK.

I am outwardly calm. I have a litany for times like this: No matter how insane it gets, it will end. Sooner or later, this will be over and I can go home. It's not hurting me. It's just words. I will survive this. I always survive. It will end, and I will still be myself.

All the same, this is exceptionally bizarre, and the revivalist fervor is making me nervous. One guy stands up and talks about the scene from There's Something About Mary where the evil best friend gives Ben Stiller the "false data" that he has to masturbate before he goes on a big date, so he'll be relaxed and be "like a chick," because chicks love guys when they're like that. (Murmurs of approval - we've recently watched that video, in that same auditorium, for our weekly "upstat org awards.") Another guy, or the same one, gets up and says he was told when he was a teenager that when you get "blue balls" after a hot make-out session, you should masturbate when you get home to relieve it. He says he did that and his balls still were sore afterward. Q.E.D. Just more false data from the psychs to degrade us. Amen!

And so it went, for an hour or and a half or more, but it seemed like forever.

-0-0-0- The Moral -0-0-0-

Moms, Dads of Sea Org minors - this is what's being taught to your children and this is what's being done to their minds. Ask them, if you can't believe it! It is an old control trick: Make them guilty, degrade them, so you can sternly "handle" and then forgive them.

And it is not going to get better. It's gotten progressively worse. Do you want this to continue? They cannot be in the Sea Org without your permission. Just because you signed your permission once doesn't mean you can't withdraw it.

Dan Garvin

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