I got a note from a bloke who used to be in the Emin Society. All these many years later he still believes in “Ladies and Gentlemen”.
Bizarre!!
Way back in 1974, I was told, at an Emin meeting, that there were three levels. These levels were called
Male and female, a biological term which applies to plants and animals.
Men and Women. I.E: humans.
Gentlemen and Ladies, a concept which the Emin Society was trying to sell to everyone as a thing to be achieved through “refined” behaviour.
I didn’t think very much about it at the time. It was obvious that “male and female” did apply to various biological organisms which had gender. It was also obvious that people could be categorised as men or women, boys or girls. There was nothing controversial about that in the 1970s. We didn’t really have the word “trans-sexual” in any serious usage in those days, except in science fiction sometimes.
The “gentlemen and ladies” thing didn’t seem very important when it was first introduced. I was only 20 years old and the fact that Leo, the leader of the Emin, called his followers “gentlemen and ladies” seemed to me to be just a bit of his old fashioned, fuddy duddy, 1940s way of thinking. The hippies were using the terms “cats and chicks” for gender sorting and the skinheads were calling their girlfriends “sorts” or “birds”. Sometimes the hippies would use the term “Lady” in a romantic poetry sense as part of their gothic pre-Raphaelite fantasy world. The Emin didn’t seem so different to that.
At twenty I had always thought of myself as a “boy” or a “bloke”. Women my own age (at 20) were called “girls” or “women” and the terms were interchangeable and didn’t carry any judgement or opinion.
As the next few years went by the Emin Society’s usage of the terms “Lady” and “Gentleman” became more formalised as they introduced ladies’ groups where Emin women would discuss what it means to be a Lady and men’s groups where Emin men would discuss how to refine themselves to become “Gentlemen”.
At that stage class differences became very obvious and began to create cracks in the Emin.
I was working class and doing shift work as a petrol pump attendant. The Emin men who seemed really keen on being “Gentlemen” were the middle class ones from posh homes and jobs in offices. They talked rubbish and put on exaggerated pseudo-Victorian formality which, ironically, seemed utterly camp. “Ironically” because the Emin, like most cults and religions, was homophobic.
And what was I doing in a homophobic cult?
I’d always believed in a person’s freedom to be whoever they are in their soul. I’d always believed that the physical body didn’t matter and that being male or female didn’t matter, that we should live in the life of the soul and the spirit regardless of what sort of physical body we had.
It’s very hard to describe being hypnotised and brainwashed.
The things I’d always believed had become compartmentalised by hypnosis and double-think.
I’d been made to believe that homosexuality was an “electrical cancer” which infected the human being’s electromagnetic aura. I did believe it but another part of my brain was compartmentalised and carried on believing in the individual’s freedom of choice.
The Emin was attempting to cure me of whatever it was they thought I had.
The strain of these contradictions was building up towards either schizophrenia or mental collapse.
The phrase “electrical cancer of the aura” is a very interesting construction, resembling the phrase “cancer of the psyche” which is used by one of the brainwashers in the novel “The Manchurian Candidate” by Richard Condon.
Luckily for me the mental collapse happened. So, instead of some long drawn out retreat into delusion, I got the mental collapse from the exhaustion of maintaining conflicting beliefs and that collapse led to a recovery and the ability to escape from Emin influence.
The bloke, a Mister Ford, who left the Substack note for me was still a believer in the Emin’s philosophy. He wanted me to edit what I’d written concerning 1970s Emin members. Specifically Mister Ford wanted me to conceal the identity of a “Lady”.
I think he was still living the Emin male fantasy of rescuing damsels in distress and re-instating them in their fairy castles of imprisonment. Protecting a lady’s chastity and honour. Mister Ford tells me that he believes in the three levels of “male, man and gentleman” and of “female, woman and lady”. However, the version he describes is different from the version told to me in 1974.
The 1974 version was that there were male and female animals and plants, then there were humans who were divided into men and women, and then the Emin aspired towards being ladies and gentlemen. Mister Ford’s version is a bit nastier. He says that there are three levels OF HUMANS.
So, in Mister Ford’s conception of the thing the first level isn’t just a biological classification of plants and animals. Instead, he’s using it as an insult towards some men and women. He’s demoting some men and women down to the level of only being male or female. Denying some men and women the right to be called men and women.
That’s nasty. Mister Ford’s version of Emin philosophy appears to be even worse than the version I remember. So now he has some humans being classed as not even really human. “Lower orders” as the aristocracy would call us.
I’ve always taken it as obvious and self explanatory that aristocrats are bad. How could they NOT be bad? The very name “aristocracy” is derived from the Ancient Greek word for “best”. They think they are better than everybody else! It seems to me to be utterly bloody obvious that thinking you’re better than everybody else is clearly a BAD thing. Isn’t it?
Remember how the holocaust got started.
First of all the Nazis started executing people who were considered to be “less than people”. That meant anyone diagnosed by German doctors as having mental or physical disabilities. Then, once they had Ziklon-B’ed to death all the ones with autism, Downs syndrome, sensory defects and the ones in wheelchairs, the ruling Nazi party extended the list of who was not really a human. The list then included everyone homosexual, everyone Jewish or Romani, everyone communist and, eventually, just everyone who was not a Nazi.
The process of extermination began with the classification of some people as not fully human.
The twisted idea is rooted in the fallacy of “purity”. The elitist image of the Snow White race.
The entire fantasy world of Kings and Queens and Princesses in Rapunzel towers and Snow Whites and all the other monarchy fantasy, knights in shining armor and the rest of it comes from that same old Holy Roman Empire Reich mentality where people try to impose fairy stories onto the politics of the real world.
We are now in the 21st Century. There are still some countries where being gay is an imprisonable offence, subject to so called conversion therapy or, in some cases, even punishable by death.
In reality people should be free to be gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, transsexual or whoever and whatever they are.
It’s time to wake up from the brainwashing.
___________________________________________________________________
All of my writing, sound art, visual art etc. is under a Creative Commons copyright.
CC BY-NC-ND
