THE AGE OF MANIPULATION: The Con in Confidence, the Sin in Sincere

by Wilson Bryan Key ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 1989

Here, the author of Subliminal Seduction (1973), Media Sexploitation (1976), and The Clam-Plate Orgy (1980) resumes his long-running rant against the mass media and advertisers. Offered as a serious inquiry into the physiology and psychology of perception, the inch-deep analysis serves mainly as a framework for what might most charitably be described as Key's pornographic paranoia. In brief, he argues that newspaper and magazine publishers as well as TV producers provide congenial vehicles that Madison Avenue uses in perverse ways to foist goods or services upon an unsuspecting public. To illustrate, Key discerns a phallus in an ad for Tanqueray gin (as well as the widely reproduced Norman Rockwell painting, Mother's Blessing), female genitalia in the art for Betty Crocker cake frosting, and evidence of castration in the graphics for a Chivas Regal campaign. Death and its symbols (chiefly skulls) also intrude upon the author's brave new sex-drenched world, where the sales appeal of music videos is enhanced by orgasmic backgrounds audible only at subconscious levels. The text encompasses a surfeit of other far-fetched findings notable principally for their shock value. Writing about the work of Ernst Dichter, Vance Packard covered the use and abuse of subliminal techniques many years ago in The Hidden Persuaders. Much more has been learned in the interim. Key, however, keeps doing business at the same old stand, hinting at conspiracies whose purpose he neither discloses nor explains. Salacious and morbid nonsense. There are illustrations (not seen), whose priapic and/or vaginal aspects are pointed out in the text.

Pub Date: July 12, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989

Categories: NONFICTION