A Not So Subliminal Message - Part 1

Are you being sexually stimulated by this photo? If not, then apparently you are in the thirty-eight percent of those who were not. According to Wilson Bryan Key, in his classic study on media manipulation titled, Subliminal Seduction, sixty-two percent of one thousand male and female test subjects described feelings of “satisfaction,” “sensuousness,” “sexuality,” “romance,” “stimulation,” “arousal,” and “excitement,” and several subjects reported feeling “horny” when presented with this advertisement. Without doing a step-by-step examination of all the subtle suggestions in this add, according to Key, the following are noted:

• The word “sex” is spelled in the ice;
• There is a face, with one eye peering out at you in the top ice cube and a face in the bottom ice cube;
• The melting ice on the frosty bottle suggests seminal fluid; and
• The ice is engaged in a sexual intercourse, among other suggestive images (Subliminal Seduction, pp. 3-8, (photo is figure 1 in Key’s book and was the advertisement for the back inside cover of time magazine dated July 5, 1971)).

Now some may be saying that it is a stretch to claim that Gilbey ran an ad to sexually arouse Time Magazine’s readers. To those I pose this simple question: Would one expect the devil to arrive with his tail in his left hand and a pitchfork in the other, with horns sprouting from his head? Subliminal messages are not designed to be recognized with one’s conscious mind. They target the unconscious mind where one has fewer defense mechanisms. To the average person, If I said, “satan is god,” they would immediately reject that absurd notion; but, if I said “dog si natas,” most people would only recognize gibberish. However, the unconscious mind can make sense of backward speech, and possibly would make a note that satan is god. This is an extreme example to make the point that hidden messages are just that.

Gilbey and a host of other advertisers used/use subliminal selling to market their products; however, looking at the photo above, one must wonder if Gilbey is selling gin or sex, since the lines seem to be blurred.

The 1970s were a watershed for media manipulation at the advertisement level, at the television programming level, at the cinema level, and at the news level. In fact, it may have been impossible to turn anywhere in society without being bombarded by suggestive images. When the Blaxploitation films of my youth hit the scene – Superfly, Shaft, and Cleopatra Jones, among many more – they encouraged drug use, gratuitous sex and effeminate attitudes for men. I still scratch my head over the fact that the social planners had me and many black men like me wearing high heel shoes, puff-sleeve shirts and elephant leg pants.

Looking back on the Blaxploitation of the 1970s, it is so painfully clear in hindsight that the subliminal messages were really not so hidden. They were in your face type messages: Good Times was when you didn’t have a job or couldn’t make ends meet; All in the Family had a patriarch who was highly racist and inconsiderate of women; and perhaps the Academy Award of Blaxploitation media – Diff’rent Strokes demonstrated that a black man could never grow beyond a certain point, but still needed a white man to raise him (RIP Gary Coleman).

If it is possible, even the producers of the Blaxploitation television programming of the 1970s demonstrated remorse and shame with a new cast of characters and programs with more positive themes for blacks in the 1980s and 1990s: The Cosby’s; Different World; Fresh Prince of Bel Air; and a number of hugely popular cross-over programs with blacks in prominent roles. This is why the current KIA ad campaign, advertising the Soul automobile with a bunch of rodents grooving to some rap music deeply troubles me. The ad begins with two hood-rats coming out of an apartment complex and then one of them poses the question to the beat of rap music – “Who’s the black sheep?” The theme of the song suggests that one of his homeys can either get with the KIA Soul or anything else that is inferior, as a rat is riding down the street on a toaster.

KIA Soul Commercial

Whoa! Have we returned to the 1970s? I’m not sure, but as I ponder the possible motive(s) behind the KIA ad campaign, I can’t help but remember the words of the late Samuel Huntington in Who are We, The Challenges to America’s National Identity; his handbook on why multiculturalism and bi-lingualism in the United States needs to done away with:

“…[T]he various forces challenging the core American culture and Creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict (Who Are We, p. 20, emphasis mine).”

What is most troubling about the KIA ad campaign is not the metaphor of rodents depicting blacks in an urban center, but that there has been no national move to boycott KIA and force an apology from the highest level of management. Where’s Jessie and Al when you really need them?

Disclosure: I am aware that KIA claims that the rodents are hamsters, but rats and hamsters are too closely related for me to make that distinction.

...to be continued