In “Words in uniform: A Propaganda Reader”, a book containing excerpts of propaganda and various essays on the topic, the author/editor Nick Aaron Ford points out that a very large sample of political propaganda pieces are repeated variations on association games. (Please note here that “propaganda” in general is a neutral term, but what I’m about to describe is particularly bad.) What that means is effective propaganda doesn’t make arguments. Effective propaganda merely trains you to associate good or bad emotions with a person, a place, or a thing. This is done by story, I.e. arguments from disgust, and/or explicit labeling, like the way Trump comes up with adjectives or titles for people and reuses them, i.e. “nasty woman Hillary Clinton”, “pathetic”, etc. It’s particularly effective and you can see how well it works, even sometimes completely dehumanizing others once the association hits critical mass in terms of people who have heard it.

One of the reasons this works is that if you are listening to a person you trust, you take in their opinion and it’s now associated with this idea that goes along with it. You will repeat the opinion yourself, probably. And we know from the few decades of psychological research we have that people tend to do things instinctively first and justify them after. So if you’re not careful, a baseless value judgement on your part or careless dismissal can develop into full-blown arguments (of varying merit) as they jump from person to person. It happens to me. It happens to all of us.

I’m digging a little deeper into the idea here because I want you to understand that you have inadvertently done the things that this post is guarding against. You associated another concept, a sterotype of a negative thing that men can do, into a discussion about staying impervious to association games on the internet. And it was funny too, for a second.

tinyurl.com/Ms-Morrison

This entire process selects for homework-doers, personal entrepreneurs, and individualistic bureaucrats. It's why, like I said, the oracular outsiders, the Pauls of the world, who can't conform to society's expectations to check boxes and become legible to the powers that be, aren't in these programs and aren't getting the opportunities that are downstream of them. It's why you end up with tons of fiction about "my white boyfriend" and "everyone online is mad at me" or "anxious strivers in NYC" or "my annoying polycule." These are the obstacles this class encounters. You can't spend time, like Cormac McCarthy did, living in an unheated cabin in the Smokies, or embedding with the Mujahideen like William T. Vollman, or working as a psychotherapist like Olga Tokarczuk. You must move from strength to strength, always turning in your homework on time, and certainly never suffering a psychotic break.

i'd like to preface this by saying that i am in no way advocating for the sexualisation of women in media, however i would like to raise the point that we need more nuance in our discussions when we talk about it.

oftentimes when we see these kinds of portrayasl of women, the most common responses tend to either be to immediately condemn, defend or dismiss it as 'goonerbait' for example. however these approaches remove any element of critical engagement or nuance from the wider discussion of why they were presented in that way and what message were they trying to evoke.

What was the intention behind its inclusion? What effect was reached with the execution? What is the history/stance behind the person/company that made these decisions? what could've influenced this? all these things need to be analysed before coming to a conclusion.

that isn't to say that you cannot condemn, defend or dismiss these depictions when you see them, however these conclusions must be reached after at least some level of consideration.

though there is also a clear line between the intention of its inclusion and the way they executed it. both these things need to be taken into consideration when critiquing media. just because there may have been an impactful intention behind why they chose to portray these people like that also doesn't dismiss them from further critique if the way they executed it could bring harm or be misconstrued.

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past