Or take the intersection of sex and horror. I helped a friend move, and she likes to watch horror movies, so we watched an episode of “American Horror Story”, I think it was called, with some relatively well known actors, including Jessica Lange, Joseph Fiennes, and James Cromwell (best known to me from “Babe”.)
Story line one: Adam Levine and some other babe sneak into an abandoned sanitorium, do some vaguely kinky things, like tie her down, then he sticks his arm through a hole while she goes down on him. His arm is ripped off. Hilarity ensues.
Story line two: an amiable car mechanic is secretly living with and in love with a black woman in the pre-Civil Rights Movement South. They make love. He is very happy. Then aliens descend, do twisted things to him that are only vaguely hinted at, and he ultimately winds up in an insane asylum.
Story line three: A woman is doing a story on the asylum. She goes in. Everyone is weird, it’s run by Catholics, and the head nun is cruel. Later, we find out she is a lesbian, and she makes love to her woman. She later sneaks into the asylum, is caught, and slotted for “treatment’ for her sinful ways. The lover is blackmailed with threat of exposure as a lesbian, and keeps her silence, lest she lose her job, and social position.
Story line four: James Cromwell more or less tortures people at will, allegedly in the pursuit of “science”.
What one finds here is powerful cultural propaganda. We are taught to hate people who disagree with interracial couples, or lesbianism. We are taught to hate Catholics. We are exposed, again, to acts of sadistic brutality, conditioning us to expect and tolerate them.
Most importantly, though, and this point is crucial: we are taught not to relax, to be wound up. Right after the mechanic makes love to his woman, when he is utterly at peace, the aliens descend. Right as Adam Levine is feeling pleasure, he is dealt a mortal wound. Very shortly after the lesbians copulate (is that the word?), one of them is in effect attacked and tied down on a bed. All of this is tied with organized religion.
If you wanted a captive population, one of the things you would do is create incessant and inescapable anxiety, and the surest way to do that is to fragment in subtle psychological ways the historic means of relaxing and unwinding, which would clearly include sex. What fragmented sex looks like is mutual masturbation, not losing a part of your sense of self, your identity, in another. It is reduced to sensation only, with emotional connection disbanded and cast away.
Propagandists want lonely people. I posted on Ellul a week or two ago, and have decided it might after all be worth posting some 2-5 paragraph excerpts, since I see NO indication in any of the media I read that the Right actually gets how this stuff works.
Now I really have to run. I had a day and a half of work, slotted two days, and am now back to a day and a half. Should all be fine, though.