The above picture comes from a spam email sent to me from
Groupon, a deal-of-the-day website. I can't remember what the product was, but whatever
it was, in order to sell it the marketing team have decided to use the most devious
persuasion tactic of all: subliminal perception. In this picture the woman's
chin looks very like her bottom and the tulip in her hand resembles her vagina;
this is very real and, despite what some might claim, I don't think it's just
the way my mind works. Subliminals like this are very commonly used in
advertizing and tend to be of a graphic sexual nature because sex is a short
cut to our subconscious mind, as Sigmund Freud discovered. It might surprise
you, but this ad is probably intended to target female customers; it is homoerotic.
This is because for most people homosexual urges are buried in the very deepest
parts of our subconscious minds. Most people who see this image will not notice
the sexual subliminal, but they will still be influenced by it. Experiments have
proven that the presence of subliminal stimuli does influence human behaviour.
This has been known for a long time. When the film Ben Hur was released in 1959 some of the reels sent out to the cinemas
had subliminal images of Coca Cola bottles which are not consciously visible to
the viewers; yet sales of Coke in the foyers were significantly higher in the
cinemas where the subliminally-loaded reels were sent than they were in the
control group. Whatever methods can be used to persuade you to buy an
aspartame-laced soft drink can manipulate your behaviour in many other ways. There's
a very interesting novel by John Brunner called The Squares of the City which was marketed as a sci-fi story, but
is actually more of a political mystery thriller. The book was published in
1965 and was very influential because it struck a chord with readers. People
sensed that it was truth disguised as fiction. Part of the plot was the use of
subliminal perception in the media to influence the characters, see: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1407130.The_Squares_of_the_City.
Why not? Subliminals have indeed been used by politicians, see: http://subliminalxtreme.com/SubliminalMessages-SubliminalVideos.html.
We need to be on our guard against subliminals. Using them to make a man buy a
hotdog though making it look like a penis is morally questionable, but using it
to get him to take up arms in a fake war is another matter.
See here for
background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/wimbledon-chemtrails.html.
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