Partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies…By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist…makes truth the principal form of falsehood. – Christopher Lasch
I often write about the way prohibitionists “reframe” facts to make them seem different from the way they actually are, both to make their own war on human sexuality look noble and heroic, and to make whores and clients seem evil, criminal or pathetic. Police and academic neofeminists (with the help of the sycophantic media) are especially skilled at this: escort services or advertising websites are described as “prostitution rings”; dumb luck or shotgun tactics are depicted as brilliant police investigation; status offenses are equated with violent crimes; escorts become either “criminals” or “victims”; their husbands or drivers become “pimps”, “traffickers” or even “gangsters”; young adults are called “children”; productive work is referred to as “being sold”, “servitude” or even “slavery”; denying the agency of women is described as “protecting” them; abducting and jailing them is called “rescue”; and so on.
Though many prohibitionists lie a great deal and others are simply delusional, good propagandists don’t have to invent anything; they simply omit what they don’t want, “cropping the image” to display only those isolated details of much larger picture that they wish to display. The most skillful of them artfully edit, rearrange and embellish the facts with emotive language, logical fallacies, euphemisms and dysphemisms, the prose equivalents of dramatic music and cinematic lighting techniques. Lately, I’ve run into three excellent examples of how this works; none of these have anything to do with sex work, but they graphically illustrate the techniques I’m talking about. If you wondered why I started the column with that iconic picture of the brave protester in Tianamen Square, and illustrated this paragraph with that cute little kitten, you’re about to get your answer. As it turns out, the famous image of man against tanks was only a part of the story; here’s another of the same scene which surfaced a few weeks ago:
It’s obvious that this one was taken a few moments earlier and at a much wider angle; the protester is almost lost in it, and the better-known photo calls attention to him at the cost of losing the incredible scale of the thing. I don’t believe that the photographer was intending to deceive, but the principle is the same; the first photo tells only a small part of the story. The same thing goes for the kitten; I myself cropped her out of this picture:
Seeing that tiny creature in her true surroundings inspires a totally different emotional reaction in the viewer than that elicited by the isolated detail; one might even say that the two pictures tell completely different stories. But my final example is the most striking of all; a clever film editor used scenes from the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire, accented with new music and a different production design (visual effects, editing style, etc) to create a trailer which makes it seem like a film of an entirely different genre:
In this case, the intent was to amuse rather than deceive; the impact is strongest when the audience already knows that the actual film is a comedy. But the principle is the same: skillful manipulation and omission of facts, with the proper emotional cues, can easily turn a mundane or even benign narrative into a tale of horror.
One Year Ago Today
“Here Comes the Groom” discusses a form of call somewhat more common in June: the bachelor party.
Look at the lights in the “iconic” picture of Tianamen Square; I can’t see them in the same place in the second photo. So the photos were taken from (slightly) different positions — the second is from a lower viewpoint, and we can’t know if the “iconic” picture would have caught the bigger picture.
My favourite trick with photos is the flipping (lateral reversal) which newspapers quite often use to suggest that the person is either looking towards the story or away from it, depending on what subliminal message they intend (when they don’t have a suitable picture available).
Speaking of which, look at my “Ampelmann”… 😉
Yes, and the iconic photo is clearly a minute or so later, because in the big one the tanks haven’t yet “stacked up” as they have in the iconic one. And though I’m no photographer, it seems to me they were taken with a different type of film stock; what we probably have here is a photographer who took the big one, then quickly shifted to a slightly different (lower) point and probably switched cameras as well.
That presumes they were taken by the same photographer, of course.
Two photographs taken with different cameras from different positions (note the lamppost in the short-range photo) at slightly different timeframes. No reason to assume the same finger clicked the buttons.
I used to be a photographer – and I can’t really tell. In the first pic, the tanks have traveled about 25 – 30 feet farther than the second and, as I recall, the tanks tried to go around him but he kept backing up and repositioning to face them. Looks to me like only the elevation angle has changed, while the horizontal positioning looks the same. If the photog was high, he may have moved lower in order to get a closer shot – thinking he was about to witness a guy being run over.
But – whatever, I’ve never seen the second pic – and goddamn – look at how much hardware the ChiComms have lined up back there to supress their own people. I’m not sure Hitler used that many tanks to invade Poland.
I never heard what happened to that guy but I’m sure he’s either dead or in a ChiComm jail somewhere.
Maggie, I did some googling and the “iconic” pic was taken by a photo-journalist named Jeff Widener. He claims it was shot from the 5th floor of the Beijing Hotel. I think someone higher must have snapped the second version from a higher floor as Jeff doesn’t describe shifting positions for another shoot. However, it would seem both pics were shot from different floors of the Beijing Hotel.
A couple of interviews …
http://lightbox.time.com/2012/06/05/tiananmen/#1
http://asianhistory.about.com/od/china/a/WidenerIntervw.htm
The iconic photo is credited to Jeff Widener from AP. A Google search shows many versions of this, with differing colourings — the wider version looks a bit like Ektachrome, but it’s difficult to be certain. Where did you find the “wider” view?
While when I first discovered THC, I was so intrigued I think I read posts for about 12 hours straight, forgoing that night’s sleep entirely, these days I usually read the posts on my iPhone via the email mailout (which means I rarely comment anymore unless I have something very specific to say; rest assured I am still avidly reading this insightful and interesting blog).
I was quite confused today over the embedded “Dark Mrs. Doubtfire” video clip. It doesn’t show up at all in the email, you see, not even as whitespace. Just a complete, uninterrupted paragraph with no hint that I was missing something other than the mention of it in the text. Makes me wonder if I missed other videos in past posts that might have not referred to their embedded vids so directly.
I imagine there’s quite a lot of folks like me, enjoying the convenience of Maggie’s thoughts emailed straight to their mobile devices (very convenient bathroom reading). The emails have all the text and pictures of the blog posts, so it doesn’t SEEM as though we’re missing anything by not clicking the title-link to read (what we presume to be) an identical page through a web browser.
Maybe a little footnote or hotlink to alert those reading via email of a video in future?
Fantastic illustration of reframing, of course. I’m glad I didn’t miss out on it.
I haven’t been doing embedded videos very long; my first one was in That Was the Week That Was #11, and every one so far (I think) was in a TW3 column. Most TW3s since the beginning of May have had one. And the column of a week from today (and the day after) will be absolutely FULL of ’em.
I’m not sure abbreviating ‘the Hoenst Courtesan’ to ‘THC’ is a good idea. I thought you were talking about something completely different at first.
Yeah, me too. I was about to ask if he got the munchies.
Hey check this out: Hot diggity dog, I get to be proud of my state for a change. Almost makes me wish I still called myself a Democrat. Almost.
I was at a friend’s house today, and they were reading an article about some vice bust in New Mexico. Apparently, a couple of agencies were caught and the client lists were seized. The article, however reframed it as “busting a prostitution ring with over 20,000 members” implying that they were all sex workers.
In a few days, I’m sure they’ll think it was actually 20,000 underage sex slaves.
Another trick I see neofeminists use in propaganda is deliberate misinterpretation. What this mean is that if you want to please a neofeminist with a piece of creative work, you have to be very simplistic and spell everything out explicitly and in a way that doesn’t rely even slightly on the viewer or reader’s own mind to draw conclusions. I’ve seen very, very wrong neofeminist interpretations of everything from Rebecca (the novel) to Mad Men.
This is kind of similar to your Dark Mrs. Doubtfire (or another video I saw which was a trailer showing Perfect Blue as a Disneyfied romantic comedy.). Except that the neofeminist will say that rather than parody the dark interpretation is correct, and anything that detracts from it is just put in as a distraction. (If you’ve ever seen the Goodbye, Girl you’ll see this in the very wrong interpretation of “Richard the Third” that Richard Dreyfus’s character is performing in.)
This is where post-modernism is helpful to their agenda, because it denies absolute truth and authorial intent. So, if you try to contradict some neofeminist pronouncement, you’ll be accused of “mansplaining” or being a “self-hating woman.”