Trainee psychologists have published a study in which they blame artists for the fact that schizophrenia has not been cleansed from the gene pool. Creative types, they say, might carry the gene, and are twice as promiscuous as mentally healthy non-artists. "Creative types have more sex" and "Why an artistic nature may do wonders for your love life" read the headlines.
What a pile of crap. Those responsible should be shot. Better still, they should be forced to have several thousand sexual partners. Preferably schizoid artists, bad, ugly, psychotic ones. Then shot.
For a start, they've only polled 425 people by placing adverts and randomly posting questionnaires in artists' whingepapers, read only by those snivelling in the evolutionary foot bath of the artistic gene pool. You should never expect people to tell the truth about their sexual shenanigans. They lie. Always. They lie to themselves - why would they tell the truth to you?
Don't expect honesty from artists at any time. Massive delicate egos and a myopic view of reality don't make for any kind of study. The truth is that artists aren't that special. People just like to think so - especially artists. They don't deny it because the industry thrives on this very premise (and it makes them feel loved and important).
It is the same argument all the time. They expect you to lead a rock'n'roll lifestyle, but the truth in my case could not be more different: a boring day in the studio, then home to wife and kids and the occasional clean-up-after-puppy-poo-athon. Who's to say that poets are innately more sexual than, say, accountants? People don't see accountancy as a sexy profession, but if we gave them the same status we afford to artists, the misguided interest in their lives would be the same.
It becomes a sort of feedback loop; artists start believing the fantasy they've created about themselves and think, "I'm a great artist, therefore I can behave like a twat and everyone loves me." Society, in turn, looks upon them and declares: "You are a great artist, therefore you have every right to behave like a twat and I love you." But if people want to romanticise us as foppish degenerates who flout all prevailing laws and take many lovers, we'll happily oblige.