{"id":86415,"date":"2017-02-06T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T12:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=86415"},"modified":"2017-02-04T15:15:04","modified_gmt":"2017-02-04T15:15:04","slug":"symbolic-seduction-womens-rights-partisan-politics-ethnocentrism-and-american-narcissism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/02\/symbolic-seduction-womens-rights-partisan-politics-ethnocentrism-and-american-narcissism\/","title":{"rendered":"Symbolic Seduction: Women\u2019s Rights, Partisan Politics, Ethnocentrism and \u201cAmerican Narcissism\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Edward Bernays<\/p><\/div>\n

3 Feb 2017 – <\/em>In 1929, Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud\u2019s nephew, U.S.\/CIA war and coup propagandist, and the founder of public relations, conducted a successful mind-manipulation experiment for the tobacco industry.\u00a0 In those days there was a taboo against women smoking in public, and Bernays was hired to change that.\u00a0 He consulted a psychiatrist, A. A. Brill, who told him that cigarettes represented the penis and were a symbol of male power.\u00a0 If women could be tricked into smoking, then they would unconsciously think they \u201chad\u201d their own penises and feel more powerful.\u00a0 It was irrational, of course, but it worked. Bernays had, in his words, \u201cengineered the consent\u201d of women through symbolic prestidigitation.\u00a0 The age of the image was launched.<\/p>\n

He did this by having a group of women hide cigarettes under their clothes at a Big Easter parade in New York.\u00a0 At a signal from Bernays, they took out and lit up what he called \u201ctorches of freedom\u201d (based on the Statue of Liberty).\u00a0 The press had been notified in advance and dutifully photographed and reported the story.\u00a0 The New York Times <\/em>headline for April Fool\u2019s Day 1929 was entitled \u201cGroup of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of Freedom.\u201d\u00a0 This fake news story made cigarettes socially acceptable for women, and sales and advertising to them increased dramatically.\u00a0 The institutional power structures smiled and continued on their merry way.\u00a0 Women were no freer or more powerful, but they felt they were.\u00a0 A symbolic taboo was breached as women were bamboozled.\u00a0 Image triumphed over reality.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>We have moved on from the symbol of the penis to that of the \u201cpussy,\u201d and now the symbol is displayed openly as an ironic postmodern spectacle in the form of a sea of pussyhats.<\/p>\n

And the fake news stories continue apace; the mind manipulators labor on and are still successful.<\/p>\n

Genitalia remain the rage.\u00a0 In the 1920s there was no overt talk of the penis; the idea then was that there was an unconscious association that could sway women to smoke.\u00a0 Today subtlety is gone.\u00a0 \u201cPussy\u201d power is out there, cutely symbolized by pink pussyhats, promoted by a group called the Pussyhat Project that on its website praises the Washington Post<\/em> and the New York Times<\/em> for their \u201chigh quality journalism\u201d and \u201cintegrity.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIn the midst of fake news sites,\u201d the Pussyhat Project claims, \u201cwe need high quality journalism more than ever\u2026.newspapers that have integrity\u2026.[that] can continue reporting the truth\u201d \u2013 i.e. the Times<\/em> and the Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>By \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201cintegrity\u201d do the women running the site mean that the Russians are behind Trump\u2019s election, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and there are 200 or so alternative websites that repeat Russian propaganda, a few of the lies reported by these papers of \u201cintegrity\u201d?\u00a0 Or do the Pussyhat women have something else in mind?<\/p>\n

Most women demonstrators who marched against Trump were no doubt well intentioned within their limited perspective.\u00a0 At the call of organizers, they were roused from their long liberal naps.\u00a0 Reacting to Trump\u2019s gross comments about \u201cgrabbing pussy\u201d \u2013 sick words, macho aggressive in their meaning \u2013 they donned their pink hats, made signs, and took their newly awakened outrage to the streets.\u00a0 Rightly disgusted by being verbally assaulted and afraid that their reproductive rights and services were threatened, they pounced like tigers on their verbal attacker.\u00a0 Massive, very well organized, media friendly marches and demonstrations followed.\u00a0 It was a hit parade.<\/p>\n

Yet as others have forcefully written, something is amiss here. During the Obama years of endless wars, drone killings, the jailing of whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, etc., these demonstrators were silent and off the streets.\u00a0 \u00a0A large number of the women (if not the vast majority) who marched against Donald Trump \u2013 and the recent women\u2019s marches can only be described as anti-Trump marches \u2013 were Hilary Clinton supporters, whether they would describe their votes as \u201cthe lesser of two evils\u201d or not.\u00a0 Thus, opposition to Trump\u2019s aggressive statements toward \u201cpussy\u201d was implicit support for Clinton\u2019s and Obama\u2019s \u201cfeminism.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, it was support for a man and a woman who didn\u2019t publicly talk aggressively about women\u2019s genitals, but committed misogynist and misandrist actions by killing \u00a0thousands of women (and men and children) all over the world, and doing it with phallic shaped weapons.\u00a0 Trump will probably follow suit, but that possibility was not the impetus for the marches.\u00a0 The marches centered on Trump\u2019s misogynist, macho language, and his threats to limit women\u2019s access to health services \u2013 i.e. family planning and abortion.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Since the women who recently marched didn\u2019t march against Obama and his Secretary of State Clinton while they slaughtered foreigners (others) and Clinton exulted at the sodomized killing of Muammar Gaddafi, it is quite clear the focus of their anger was a sense of personal outrage at Trump\u2019s insulting remarks.<\/p>\n

Where were they these last eight years?<\/p>\n

Mike Whitney<\/a> recently said it perfectly.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were asleep. Weren\u2019t they?\u00a0 Because liberals always sleep when their man is in office, particularly if their man is a smooth-talking cosmopolitan snake-charmer like Obama who croons about personal freedom and democracy while unleashing the most unspeakable violence on civilians across the Middle East and Central Asia\u2026.No one seems to care when an articulate bi-racial mandarin kills most people of color, but when a brash and outspoken real estate magnate takes over the reigns of power, then \u2018watch out\u2019 because here comes the protesters, all three million of them!\u201d<\/p>\n

Obviously partisan politics, self-interest, hypocrisy, and incredible ethnocentrism are involved. Would women\u2019s marches have occurred if Hillary Clinton had been elected?\u00a0 Of course not.\u00a0 She would have been applauded and regaled as the first woman president, and her war-mongering history against women and men would have been excused and supported into the future, just as Obama\u2019s has been.<\/p>\n

This is liberal war porn by default; complicity through silence.<\/p>\n

\u201cHands off my pussy.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cMy pussy bites back.\u201d\u00a0 These are funny repartees to Trump\u2019s comments, but they are totally ineffectual and harmless.\u00a0 Trump\u2019s objectives are larger, as were Obama\u2019s and Clinton\u2019s.\u00a0 Symbolic protests attract attention, but result in the stasis of structural power arrangements, or worse.\u00a0\u00a0 Edward Bernays\u2019\u00a0 \u201ctorches of freedom\u201d campaign resulted in more women smoking, more disease, and more profits for the tobacco companies.\u00a0 He preyed on the gullible.\u00a0 What was learned?<\/p>\n

The Pussyhat Project resulted in a sea of pink adorned women and made for colorful images.\u00a0 Images, Daniel Boorstin wrote in his prescient 1960 book, The Image<\/em><\/a> , were the future.\u00a0 That future is now.\u00a0 The language of images is everywhere, and it is tied to what Boorstin termed \u201cpseudo-events\u201d and our \u201cdemand for the illusions with which we deceive ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Symbolically wearing your genitals on your head is surely an arresting image, but it is misplaced and duplicitous when one has not opposed the systematic brutality of the American empire\u2019s ravaging around the world under Obama and Clinton.<\/p>\n

Boorstin argued that this world of images would displace our ability to think clearly and understand the ways we were being manipulated.\u00a0 An image, he said, was \u201csynthetic, believable, passive, vivid, simplified, and ambiguous.\u201d\u00a0 Contrived and appealing to the senses \u2013 there are no pink pussycats as far as I know \u2013 they side-step thought and cannot, strictly speaking, be unmasked.\u00a0 \u201cAn image, like any other pseudo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.\u201d\u00a0 The contrivance of the image and our knowledge of its ingenuity \u2013 e.g. pussyhats \u2013 convince us that we are smart to be taken in, even when we\u2019re not.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting to note that the word image (Latin, imago<\/em>) is related to the word imitate (Latin, imatari<\/em>).\u00a0 It\u2019s as though certain images can serve as mirrors (\u201cto mirror\u201d being cognate with \u201cto imitate\u201d) in which we can see and mimic ourselves, \u201cthough we like to pretend we are seeing someone else.\u201d\u00a0 And seeing our images in the images, we can imitate ourselves in an endless cycle of self-love and navel gazing.\u00a0 Selfie culture has triumphed.\u00a0 The society of the spectacle marches on.<\/p>\n

The focus on genital imagery is a reflection of American narcissism, an inward gazing, while out \u201cthere,\u201d others are being slaughtered by our masters of war.\u00a0 This is the start of a pink color revolution.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.\u00a0 He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 globalresearch.ca<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3 Feb 2017 – In 1929, Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud\u2019s nephew, U.S.\/CIA war and coup propagandist, and the founder of public relations, conducted a successful mind-manipulation experiment for the tobacco industry. In those days there was a taboo against women smoking in public, and Bernays was hired to change that. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}