Subliminal Messages

I'm eagerly anticipating starting two books by Angela Carter that I have on my bedside table, but I haven't yet finished my current read.

I've mentioned the book 'Blink' a couple of times, it has some interesting thoughts on how the subconscious controls us, just like Freud said really, not that the author, Malcolm Gladwell goes in for anything fancy schmancy like Mortido and Libido, but he does show us that this submerged iceberg drives our behaviour.
And he uses it. I have arrived at the bit in the book where he's mostly just waffling. There may be more fascinating studies to come, but when you get to the waffle, no, not the 'small crisp batter cake' but the 'lengthy but vague or trivial talk or writing', then it leaves your attention unleashed and able, as Nigella Lawson would say, to notice other things.

Earlier on in the book we were shown how even those of us who could honestly and hand on heart say that we would never discriminate against someone on grounds of colour or gender, do so without realising it. And you start to realise what an onion it is to peel, how many layers of this there are. Gladwell avoids one level that I find most grating and harmful in writing in that he does not refer to every non-gender specific example as 'he' but varies between he or she. He avoids this particular subversion.

But adrift now, I suddenly realise that most of his gender-specific examples are men. I can't tell whether they are black men or white men unless I know the individuals, but they are mostly men.
Not all of the men mentioned are illustrating something good, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are certainly not. Nor are they strictly speaking white. The book doesn't really mention how we subconsciously treat people with skin colours in between black and white, so I'm not sure whether say someone with the skin colouring of Salma Hayek would fare as badly as Oprah Winfrey.

However, leaving that aside, I counted, possibly not too accurately, but I counted, the number of women's names that were referenced throughout the book, against the number of men's names. There were only four names that could at a stretch have been either. 142 men were referenced against 18 women.
That itself gives a continual subliminal message. When we read this book, we are constantly not only being shown men as heroes and great thinkers and few women as such - that is one level - but we aren't even hearing women's names. Every hit on our brain cells is a man's name, so at that level of consciousness women are hidden.

In this post, I have deliberately inserted a woman's name every time I have mentioned a man's name and it is rather clumsy because I haven't taken much time over it. There was no reason to mention Nigella Lawson for example, nor Salma, nor Oprah, but then this is a blog rather than a book that I should spend months editing and fine-tuning.
And when I compared the skin colours of Salma and Oprah, did your brain side-line the point I was making and instead compare their physical attractiveness? Did that happen when I mentioned Bin Laden and Hussein?

This book has made me more aware of what the author was trying to bring to my attention, it has raised my awareness to that extent. Finding a solution is another matter.