The MacKinnon Patriarch

If you’ve got a beef with Catharine MacKinnon then you’ve come to the right place. Watch my latest from youtube:   

I See Where She Gets It

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Answers so many questions… too many even; the old man really got around. Oral history of Hon. George E. MacKinnon:

MACKINNON: This girl’s name was Mary Kay Johnson and her pimp was Bobby Banner. To give you a good idea of what a white slave case is, she was the most popular girl in North High School and one of the most beautiful. Graduation night, along with several other people in a crowd, they went to a Black and Tan place and were dancing.

Q: What’s black and tan?

MACKINNON: That’s a colored place. That’s what they used to call it in those days. While she’s there dancing, on the sidelines, here’s this Bobby Banner, a nice tall, slender, slick-haired moderately colored individual, trying to cut in, and Mary’s date wouldn’t let him.

They left the party about 1:00 or 2:00. When she got home, she found that Banner had picked up her name from someone in her crowd and about 2:30 a.m. she received a telephone call from Banner to go out with her. She turned him down cold, and she turned him down for three solid weeks. He called her every day, not once but many times.

Finally, she agreed to a date and in two weeks time, he had her on the train for Fort Dodge, Iowa to work as a prostitute for him in a house of prostitution. That’s the way the white slave traffic worked.

Oral History Project
The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT

I swear this is the last video for a while. This is actually the one I originally was going to post about, and I got waylaid by all the other videos along the way.

It’s about “Social Engineering”, which is “the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information.” – says wikipedia

Here is a quote from the beginning of the video:

“This is the story of how Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind were used by those in power in post-war America to try and control the masses.”

And now, since I looked up the synopsis of the thing, I will slack off and copy it instead of transcribing it from the video:

The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud’s ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.

Politicians and planners came to believe Freud’s underlying premise – that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.

Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

WARNING!! There is some extreme Holocaust footage at the start – at about 40 seconds in to about 1 min in, it pops up suddenly.  My Fave part is the bit about Betty Crocker and how empowering housewives to add an egg inadvertantly led to orgasm producing car seats. That might not have been the exact corelation there, but it was hilarious. That’s at about the 21 min mark.

Now here’s some interesting side stuff- In the early 90′s Catharine MacKinnon was engaged to a guy named Jeffrey Masson, and he had been some bigwig at the Sigmund Freud Archives, with full access to all sorts of letters and research and notes that Freud had never published. Alas, MacKinnon and Masson didn’t make it to the alter, and neither of them has ever said much of anything about the breakup.

The whole situation is hardy fodder for any conspiracy theorists out there, but it’s rather long and convoluted so I’ll just give a quick (I hope) synopsis with a few links here and there so you can immerse yourself in the mystery if you’d like to.

Basically, — well screw this…. here are some bits from wikipedia:

Jeffrey Masson was born in Chicago and is the son of Jacques Masson, a French Mizrahi Sephardic Jew of Bukharian ancestry, and Diana (Dina) Zeiger from a Ashkenazi strict Orthodox Jewish family. Jeffrey Masson’s great-grandfather Shlomo Moussaieff was a kabbalist and founder of the Bukharian Quarter in Jerusalem. Both of his parents were followers of the Jewish mystic Paul Brunton. At Brunton’s urging, Masson went to Harvard University to study Sanskrit. [Masson's] degrees were in Sanskrit and Indian Studies.

Masson taught Sanskrit and Indian Studies at the University of Toronto 1969-1980…

In 1970, Masson began studying to become a psychoanalyst at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute … he befriended the psychoanalyst Kurt Eissler and became acquainted with Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna Freud.

In 1980 Masson was appointed Projects Director of the Freud Archives, with full access to Freud’s correspondence and other unpublished papers. While perusing this material, Masson concluded that Freud might have rejected the seduction theory in order to advance the cause of psychoanalysis…

(Freud’s Seduction Theory: “emphasizes the causative impact of nurture: the shaping of the mind by experience. This theory held that hysteria and obsessional neurosis are caused by repressed memories of infantile sexual abuse.”)

In 1981, Masson’s controversial conclusions were discussed in a series of New York Times articles by Ralph Blumenthal…  and later in The New Yorker, the latter which Masson ended up suing for defamation and the suit lasted a decade (he lost).

Masson was subsequently dismissed from his position as project director of the Freud Archives, and stripped of his membership in psychoanalytic professional societies.

Masson wrote several books critical of psychoanalysis, including The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory.

- He’s still a pretty popular author, writing a lot of vegetarian/vegan type stuff and about the emotions of animals.

While Masson wrote about Freud, Janet Malcolm wrote a book about Masson writing about Freud, titled In the Freud Archives;  here’s a quote from one of the reviews on Amazon that pretty much sums it up:

It deals with the appointment of Jeffrey Masson as head of the Freud Archives, … and his claims that Freud’s abandonment of the “seduction theory” invalidates the entire discipline of psychoanalysis.

And here’s my last couple of links, also 2 of my favorites:

First is a great piece in New York Magazine about MacKinnon and Masson shacking it up and how it’s so bizarre because she was a feminist prude and he was a terrible womanizer.

Last is Suzie Bright’s essay “Prime of Kitty MacKinnon” in which Bright talks about MacKinnon being in New York Magazine and her infatuation with Masson. There isn’t any big insight to Masson and Freud, but it’s a hoot’n a half if you disbelieve MacKinnon’s propaganda like I do. The whole essay is hilarious, scathing and too-true, here are just a couple snippets:

MacKinnon has picked up a drum to beat that is already as American as apple pie, the devil-made-me-do-it bandwagon, where every erection is a threat, where sex is men’s domain and women’s suffering. It’s puzzling why she thinks this is radical or iconoclastic.

…

[MacKinnon] posed for a lovey-dovey pictorial with her paramour Jeffrey Masson on the cover of New York magazine in such fawning poses that, even if you didn’t know who she and Masson were, you might find your feminist aesthetics turning a little green around the gills. She gets called a genius and a brilliant mind by all sorts of mucky-mucks, and then she has the nerve to act like she’s the Harriet Tubman of the underground survivor’s network.

…

Ironically, she is the fiancee of Jeffrey Masson, the author and psychoanalytic critic who has had incredible and numerous sexual adventures of his own. … He says living with Catharine is like living with God, which I would find rather overwhelming, but which he finds sublime