L. Ron Hubbard auditing a tomato. He claimed that that they “scream when sliced.”
 
If you haven’t seen Going Clear, the HBO documentary on Scientology, I suggest you get on it. The science fiction cult of the rich and famous is so much more disturbing than most people know! From the mouths of ex-Scientologists themselves, you hear about surveillance, blackmail, brainwashing and abuse administered strategically upon celebrities and mere mortals alike, all to build this lucrative empire based on a batshit pseudoscience religious cult. There’s so much crazy, the doc can’t even cover it all.

For example, one of my favorite details is L. Ron Hubbard’s fundamentally retrograde views on the sexes (which have, of course, been edited out of more recent publications). It’s pretty well-known that old L. Ron thought you could “pray away the gay” (or “audit” it away or whatever), but Scientology’s obsession with heteronormativity goes way beyond basic homophobia.

Below is the entirety of a now-omitted chapter from Hubbard’s 1965 treatise Scientology: A New Slant on Life, covertly titled “A Woman’s Creativity.”

The whole future of the race depends upon its attitude toward children; and a race which specializes in women for “mental purposes” or which believes that the contest of the sexes in the spheres of business and politics is a worthier endeavor than the creation of tomorrow’s generation is a race which is dying.

We have, in the woman who is an ambitious rival of the man in his own activities, a woman who is neglecting the most important mission she may have. A society which looks down upon this mission and a society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out.

The historian can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men, in political and business affairs, since this means that the men are decadent and the women are no longer women.

This is not a sermon on the role or position of women; it is a statment [sic] of bald and basic fact. When children become unimportant to a society, that society has forfeited its future. Even beyond the fathering and bearing and rearing of children, a human being does not seem to be complete without a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. This relationship is the vessel wherein is nurtured the life force of both individuals, whereby they create the future of the race in body and thought. If man is to rise to greater heights, then women must rise with him or even before him. But she must rise as woman and not as, today, she is being misled into rising—as a man. It is the hideous joke of frustrated, unvirile men to make women over into the travesty of men, which men themselves have become.

Men are difficult and troublesome creatures—but valuable. The creative care and handling of men is an artful and a beautiful task. Those who would cheat a woman of their rightful place, by making them into men, should at last realize that, by this action, they are destroying, not only the women, but the men and the children as well. This is too great a price to pay for being “modern” or for someone’s petty anger or spite against the female sex.

The arts and skills of woman, the creation and Inspiration of which she is capable and which, here and there, in isolated places in our culture, she still manages to effect, in spite of the ruin and decay of man’s world which spreads around her, must be brought newly and fully into life. These arts and skills and creation and inspiration are her beauty, just as she is the beauty of mankind.

Obviously gender conservatism is nothing new in religion, but you just kind of expect something a little more progressive from a UFO cult! This is a science-fiction religion founded in 1952—the futuristic aesthetics apply just fine to aliens, “Thetans” and bullshit E-meters (seen in the picture above, with Hubbard “auditing” a tomato), but a career girl is just way too “out there?” What would Xenu say?
 
Via The Pitch