Media Sexploitation

by Wilson Bryan Key

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451075374
• ISBN13: 9780451075376
• Release Date: July 1977
• Publisher: Berkley Books
• Length: 234 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Highly intelligent, sensible and crucial reading

I put the word "sensible" in the summary since it is believable to those readers who are cynical of the obvious and also psychologically sophisticated. Key's point is that the advertisers who fashion the consumer culture do not solely rely on messages that are geared for the consumers logical,conscious mind. The advertisers have a card up their sleeve-in the form of subliminal (AKA unconscious) material. Because information that can enter the unconscious cannot be defended against or be constructively criticized, it would be money in the bank for merchants to slip their product in there. Key's claim that there are embedded words and pictures in all print media can be tested by anyone willing to train their eyes to it. Besides his damming expose on this illegal procedure, Key does a great job in analyzing cultures taboos and fears and how the advertisers co-opt psychoanalysis for consumerism. Needles to say, if one does not believe in depth-psychlogy, this book will be more difficult to comprehend.

Mostly nonsense, but fascinating nonsense

You'll read about (and see color pictures of) ad campaigns, rock albums and movies that Key claims contain subliminal messages of sex and violence to entice and enlist you as a consumer. Find out about the Paul McCartney death hoax, secret sounds of angry bees in The Exorcist, and a cigarette ad in Penthouse that, if held up to light, has an L & M poking out of a certain part of the female anatomy that appears on an image on the following page (in the original copy of the magazine, not in this book). All the examples are pre-1980 and, though it is highly doubtful that any of it is part of any orchestrated effort to enslave people as consumers, some of it surely represents the undercover work of mischevious, underpaid, disgruntled advertising artists and photographers. Take it with a grain of salt, but rest assured that you can one-up your super-hip, cynical, quasi-intellectual friends by having this on your coffee table (mess with their minds! Convince them you believe it!)