I’m totally not hypnotizing you.
Is Anita Sarkeesian secretly trying to hypnotize us all with her videos? Like, literally hypnotize us, in the “now you’re a chicken” sense?
That’s the central insinuation of an inadvertently hilarious video by YouTube blabber Jordan Owen, one of the guys behind that Sarkeesian Effect “documentary” that’s allegedly in the process of being made.
Owen’s video isn’t a particularly new one – he put it out in January – but it’s been recently resurrected by the good folks at A Voice for Men, who reposted it earlier this week, saying that it offered “very thoughtful, erudite” criticism of Sarkeesian that’s “particularly enlightening and full of information a lot of people don’t know.”
So that’s a good enough excuse for me to talk about it. Also, did I mention that the video is hilarious?
In the video, a weirdly soft-spoken Owen – he sounds as if he’s recording in the living room of his parents’ house and trying desperately not to wake anyone up – breathlessly announces that he’s going to help to “elucidate” an important piece of information that will fill in a hole in the alleged puzzle that is Anita Sarkeesian.
Owen points out that Sarkeesian apparently once worked for a guy named Bart Baggett, a huckster and self-proclaimed handwriting expert who also dabbles in Neurolinguistic Programing, or NLP, a questionable form of hypnosis based around the idea that you can hypnotize people, possibly against their will, in the course of normal conversation by embedding secret commands into the words you choose.
Ross Jeffries in his glory days
NLP , while largely discredited in scientific circles, has long been popular with pickup artists, who would of course love to be able to hypnotize women into doing their bidding. It was central to the ridiculous “speed seduction” techniques that a guy named Ross Jeffries began teaching in the 1990s.
Jeffries’ most mockable claim: that if a wannabe Casanova works the phrase “below me” into conversation with a Hot Babe, she will subconsciously hear the phrase as a command to “blow me” and will suddenly feel a desire to do just that.
While this particular bit of speed seduction lore has fallen by the wayside due to its sheer and obvious silliness, there’s a lot of NLP still embedded, as it were, in PUA techniques even today.
So what does this have to do with Anita Sarkeesian? Well, according to Owen, the devilish Ms. Sarkeesian is embedding secret hypnotic commands into her fundraising videos in an attempt to control our brains and empty our wallets.
Owen drags out a pdf he found by Baggett called “The Secrets to Creating Chemistry,” which Owen seems to think Sarkeesian is using as her super seekrit mind control manual.
One of Baggett’s techniques, Owen tells us ominously, is something called “Adverb/Adjective Presupposition,” which is basically a trick to supposedly get your listeners to agree with your premises by … using adverbs before verbs and adjectives before nouns. Devious indeed!
Owen quotes one of Baggett’s examples, evidently intended to show how you can successfully use Adverb/Adjective Presupposition to con a Hot Babe into bed with you:
Have you asked yourself if the unlimited potential of our relationship is what is making you so happy?
Another one I found in Baggett’s manual:
Have you naturally discovered how attractive you are becoming?
If even one single woman ever had sex with a guy who said either of these things to her first I will eat my cats. This is why people laugh at NLP.
Owen plays back a sentence from Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter video, which he thinks provide clear evidence that she’s using Baggett’s word voodoo in order to hypnotize us all. Be careful, lest you yourself become hypnotized just by reading this! Here’s Sarkeesian:
Have you ever noticed that, with a few notable exceptions, basically all female characters in video games fall into a small handful of clichés and stereotypes?
Huh. That’s actually tru ….. OH NO I HAVE BEEN HYPNOTIZED!
Owen devotes the rest of his video to uncovering more alleged evidence of Sarkeesian’s alleged use of Baggett’s alleged techniques, winding up with what he describes as “perhaps Anita’s most subtle and insidious use of these techniques” – that is, her alleged use of “embedded language.”
The phrase “embedded language” doesn’t actually mean anything, as fazr as I can tell, and Baggett doesn’t use it in his manual. Owen seems to mean what Baggett calls “magic words” – words intended to get your target all excited about you – and “embedded commands” – secret commands you can work into your conversation.
In any case, Owen posts assorted screenshots of Baggett’s lists of “magic words” and “embedded commands” and then – dun dun DUUUH! – demonstrates that Sarkeesian in fact uses lots of these words in her Kickstarter video!
This would be a smoking gun, except for one little problem: the words on Baggett’s lists are some of the most commonly used words in the English language. It would be pretty much impossible to communicate without them (or their counterparts in other languages).
Here are some the evil “embedded” words Owen finds in Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter video:
Look
Show
Imagine
Talk
Say
Understand
Decide
Some
All
Many
Most
When
After
Was
Ok, ok, I’m going to have to stop for a moment to acknowledge this last one.
JORDAN OWEN LITERALLY THINKS ANITA SARKEESIAN IS TRYING TO HYPNOTIZE US BY USING THE PAST TENSE OF THE VERB “TO BE.”
A few more of the evil voodoo words and phrases she uses:
Through
Down
On
Imagine
“In addition to”
“Have you ever”
I have a question: Have you ever watched a video so incredibly obtuse that you begin to wonder how humankind ever made it out of the caves in the first place?
Because I just did.
Owen ends his video with some comments that are far more manipulative than anything Anita Sarkeesian has ever said probably, ever, in her whole life:
Remember that the techniques Anita used in her video are those of the seduction gurus.
Wait, isn’t that use of the word “remember” an EMBEDDED COMMAND basically ordering us to accept his interpretation of what Sarkeesian was saying?
If you condemn the behavior in the form of men trying to manipulate women into the sack, then you must condemn Anita’s behavior as well because, while she is not a feminist, nor is she a gamer, nor is she a legitimate academic, she is, from a technical standpoint, a pickup artist.
Don’t PRESUPPOSITION me bro!
If Jordan Owen were the main character in Bioshock, I would ask him: Would you kindly develop a tiny shred of self-awareness?
If you’ve played Bioshock, you would know that this was an extremely clever reference to (SPOILER ALERT) a key plot point.
Crap, I inadvertently tried to hypnotize you with PRESUPPOSITIONAL WORD VOODOO in that last sentence.
Sorry! I’ll just stop right now, before I accidentally raise hundreds of thousands of dollars on Kickstarter.
Well, in a second. First, here’s a diagram from Baggett’s manual that I find sort of hilariously baroque:
And here’s Owen’s ridiculous video:
FULL DISCLOSURE: I have not shaved in several days, and I also have some videos up on YouTube (including this one of Owen’s Anton LaVey-looking pal David Aurini), so technically I am also a YouTube Neckbeard.
CREDIT: Thanks to Brooked for the meme graphic up top, and to Hellboy to alerting me to the existence of Owen’s delightful video in the first place.
Since the subject has inevitably come up, here’s my shorter Jordan Owen:
“The Sarkeesian is an agent of the Hypnotoad. We must destroy The Sarkeesian with my documentary so we can stop The Sarkeesian from hypnotizing all us manly alphas into unmanly beta slaves of the Hypnotoad. And normal English grammar was invented by the evil Hypnotoad conspiracy. Beware the words ‘the’, ‘and’, and ‘was’. The backwards messages the Hypnotoad planted in The Sarkeesian’s videos told me so. Because science.”
Yeah, I think that’s about right.
I just read this and it was really good. Y’all other people should check it out, too.
The comic is really good and also full of feels. It’s just a shame it was so short.
You know, I really like one-arc comics. The default is that comics run forever, so they usually either end in the middle of everything when the creator gets swamped and falls behind schedule and gives up, or they keep running and the creator eventually runs out of ideas and they stop being good. So I, for one, welcome comics that go until the story is over and then end.
(Not that I wouldn’t read more if it was there.)
Is the Pierre story over? 🙁
@cassandrakitty and thebewilderness
I agree that her arm looks weird (the woman in the picture with Jeffries), but out of curiosity I just checked in the mirror. I can get my shoulder in a very similar position. It’s not comfortable or aesthetically pleasing, but if you’re a bit double-jointed, it is possible.
Hmm. There are several adjectives and adverbs in that paragraph. Sorry for hypnotizing everyone. 🙂
You are forgiven, glorious HypnoThyria.
See the first case.
Among the Red Stars is eating my life right now, but I would love to return to Pierre in the future. If anyone wanted to me a BIG favor that might help get me back on track, it would be to track down any of the various scripts that haven’t been drawn, who wrote them, and what they refer to, and gather them in one place. I always forget to just bookmark them when they happen.
So that’s it! They’d all been hypnotised by Anita Sarkeesian!
http://youtu.be/jVygqjyS4CA
@strivingally
All Hail the Hypnotoad! I DO love animated memes. I really do . . . now . . .
@kirbywarp:
Ooh, I actually had someone tell me that on twitter- that the fact that so many journalism outlets were against gamergate was obviously proof of a conspiracy, not proof that they’re obviously odious.
@Binjabreel:
Yeah, I remember that all over the leaked IRC logs too. There was this whole section of users trying to spread whatever story on every part of 4chan, leak it to every news source, then come back frustrated that nobody seemed to be taking the bait. “I believe this absurd story, why doesn’t everyone else?”
That’s probably the real source of their claims of journalistic corruption…
I don’t find Anita hypnotizing.
As someone with a dissociative disorder, I can be really easily hypnotized, like AMAZINGLY so. A dissociative state basically is a variant of a hypnotized state. But then I think for myself and in strange directions when formally hypnotized.
I can also see subliminal ice people in soda machine graphics, for the graphics that contain the ice people.
Not all do, just a couple of them.
You see…Ice does not photograph well, so ice images are crafted things…and a couple of the older graphics used for soda machines had ice cubes that really looked like humans doing things like…having sex, or a woman pushing her boobs up.
If I stumble across a machine with the old graphics that I’m talking about, I’m going to take a “before” photo, then another after I’ve delineated the subliminal naked ice people in dry-erase marker.
I don’t understand why they aren’t so obvious to everybody.
Oh, forgot to mention…Neuro-linguistic programming is a therapeutic technique, or a collection thereof. I doubt it would benefit me, and I don’t remember much about it ATM. But a lot of people do find it quite beneficial.
The one thing that does work is dissociative technique for flashbacks, in which one imagines the memory replay occurring on a movie screen and you watching in third person. Thus producing detachment.
NLP is still not going to get you laid.
So this guy and all other PUAs should be fine with Anita if they buy this. She is one of you, according to you. How is it that she can be doing exactly what you’re doing but sinister enough to be harassed and threatened off the internet?
Is it because she is like way better at getting women interested in things than you will ever be? Aaaw, it is, isn’t it? Bunch of jealous PUA assholes talking out of both sides of their mouth.
I find it hard to believe that these guys seriously buy into any of this. I mean, obviously they do, but egads.
This is really not hard. Anita’s videos are meant to be both informative and persuasive. Persuasive writing and speaking techniques are A Thing. Shoot, I remember having to learn how to write persuasive arguments in middle school. There are lots of well-known techniques for engaging your audience and coming across in a convincing way. Lots of people use them, in almost every imaginable sphere of communication. Appealing to your listeners, asking them to engage with you, offering rhetorical questions, etc. etc. are basic tools of good speech.
There is a massive gap between speaking persuasively and hypnosis.
Anita Sarkeesian is attempting to persuade her viewers, through a combination of well-researched examples and engaging, well-crafted scripting, that disturbing tropes against women exist in many (#notall) video games.
These dudes are attempting to persuade their viewers, through a combination of fearmongering, hyperbole, and flaky conspiracy theories that Anita Sarkeesian is an evil, money-grubbing sorceress wishing to crush digital entertainment and drive men out of it forever.
Between those two, one sounds a heck of a lot more manipulative than the other.
Was was was was was give me all your money was was was was was
Am I doin it rite?
*eyes glaze over*
*mechanically throws money at Buttercup Q. Skullpants*
I guess this explains why their “criticisms” are always so wrong. They’re afraid of being hypnotized, so they don’t actually watch her videos.
That comic was awesome!
Pushing it on FB now 🙂
I also express my opinions (and try to get support for them) via words. Usually English, sometimes French. Diabolical as that is, I just find it more effective that interpretive dance – requires less stretching beforehand too.
Occam? Who is Occam? Razor? Why are you talking to me about razors? ARE YOU TRYING TO HYPNOTIZE ME WITH MIND CONTROL?
The simplest answer to this “idea” would be: if Sarkeesian can control minds with the mere power of her words, why is she wasting her time with video games? Surely she could earn more money elsewhere?
Well yeah; that’s part of the effectiveness of the technique. That makes it really hard to detect! How impressive of Owen to have seen through it! Anita Sarkeesian is actually a pick-up artist. It all makes sense now.
RE: WWTH
FEMA death camps
Well, where else are they going to put all the Katrina fridges?
RE: katz
You know, I really like one-arc comics.
Same. Probably because that’s the kind of comic I make. If I wanted something interminably running forever, I’d just keep reading Big Two shit. (Though I make exceptions for comics that are gag-a-day, rather than specifically story-based, like Manly Guys.)
These must be the superior scientific understanding and reasoning ability men have that I have heard so much about.
Bwahahahahahahahahaaaa!
Yes, because it’s carried on the Y chromosome, which women do not have. Oh wait, the Y chromosome is a reduced version of the X chromosome, which women do have.
I never knew I could use common words to hypnotize people into getting what I want. Guess I’ll use them next time I want a raise from my boss.
Also, I love that BioShock reference.
…Like…Maybe if she made up a religion on a bet she made while drinking beer and eating fried clams at a bar with a science fiction writer…
*Looks around nervously*
Watch it, blahlistic! They’ll get you if you keep that up!
Ooh, well remembered.
On topic: So, use of proper grammar and language is hypnotic? This may explain why so many of the doodz spell so badly!
Off topic: omg, I followed the link, and I loved that comic! Thank you soooo much for sharing!
I wonder if MRAs think the two dot ellipses have hypnotic powers too. This could finally be the explanation for them.
Also, by posting the link on FB, I have spread Nimona to Central Europe (Luxemburg) !
Wasn’t Nimona great? I read it ALL yesterday.
It was beautiful. Pondering buying it as an actual book, cos I don’t want to lose it.
“as fazr as I can tell”
OMG are you trying to hypnotize me by using superfluous letters?!?!?!
Seriously though, Owen has seen the fnords. He’s on to the Illumanita™.
Nimona was really good! I didn’t expect to like it so much. May indeed have to buy a copy when it comes out! Loving the change in US comics from the typical superhero styles to a more animation/graphic design influence!
RE: katz
Ooh, well remembered.
*bows* Thank you, thank you. Always remember Katrina fridges.
That’s it! Anita is the anti-them! They must bring her down before she helps all women see through all sexist asshats — especially the kind that wear cheesy little hats! Now it all makes sense!
I am not myself a gamer (my wife and son are, to some extent), but in the course of chasing around the various right-wing attempts to claim that Obama is deliberately bringing Ebola to the US (or in fact ordered the current strain of the virus to be engineered), I came across a couple of commentaries on Gamergate. I don’t think there is anything these people say that hasn’t been said many times here, but I thought people might be interested that there seems to be fairly strong support for the opinions that are generally expressed here.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/8/6919179/stop-supporting-gamergate
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/10/11/serious-question-if-you-are-concerned-about-journalistic-ethics-why-are-you-a-part-of-gamergate/?__lsa=1b31-19ec
Who knew my study of English Grammar would have such useful person applications? Now I totally want to study hard for my difficult mid-term!
.
.
.
.
Judging from my lack of desire to do it, I still need more practice.
cassandrakitty: There is definitely something with the left woman’s shoulder/torso. Shoulder looks almost dislocated. First thing I noticed about the picture and then got fixated on it before I noticed how ridiculous the whole picture is.
I think the woman’s shoulder is just flexed forward. I read her visible breast as her left one at first, but I think it’s her right one.
It does look like her arm just comes straight out from the front of her chest, though. I hope they didn’t make her hold that too long. Or touch that skeevy guy too long, for that matter (more than about two seconds, by my estimation).
Aww, I don’t check the site over the weekend and I missed my big moment when David used my meme. I’d like to thank my parents, my 10th grade English teacher, the Academy and memegenerator.net.
I thought the shoulder was sort of a ‘forward-dip-Betty-Boop’ thing, but done really badly.
I suppose Owen found himself agreeing with Anitta in regards of female objectification in gaming, and decided that the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY that such thing could happen was (“””wwwaaaaassssssss””” *spirals*) if she was hipnotizing him
Or, you know, right.