THe mention of Bernay reminded me of Noam Chomsky which in turn reminded me of The Corporation and in return Naomi Klein- my favorite feminist in the world. And even though I have no theory I like feminist film theory. Horror films are my obsession and of course in horror films the female is often represents a monstrous feminine.
blockquote>As a form of modern defilement rite, the horror film attempts to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that her universe signifies.
and in horror films you see “a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a nonphallic sexuality” so again I make no attempts of not being inane.

Feminism: where did it come from? What were its cultural antecedents? Who created them and for what reason? In some sense, you could quite possibly point to film noir and its depiction of the female flouting conventional roles as a strong cultural precursor. As to the other questions: well, don’t forget that Edward Bernays was one of the pivotal figures behind “Liberty Torches” or conflating the Suffragette movement to female independence and ultimately used the cigarette (on behalf of his corporate clients) as a symbol of that. He also believed the cigarette was for women a subconscious symbol of the penis: penis envy solved. Bernays, not surprisingly, was also the man who invented product placement in movies.

Pieces coming together at all yet?

Great essay by Hakim Bey, by the way!

Something by Hakim Bey: Boycott Cop Culture!
http://www.left-bank.org/bey/resoluti.htm

“The pivotal moment politically for me was in December 1989, when there was a massacre at the University of Montreal. A man went into the engineering school - he had failed to get a place - and he separated the men from the women, shouted, ‘You’re all a bunch of fucking feminists’, and opened fire. He killed 14 women. … It was a cataclysmic moment. It politicized us enormously. Of course, after that you call yourself a feminist.” Naomi Klein

One of the things interesting in film noir is that the woman is sexually subversive.

The quintessential femme fatale of film noir uses her sexual attractiveness and ruthless cunning to manipulate men in order to gain power, independence, money, or all three at once. She rejects the conventional roles of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society prescribes for women, and in the end her transgression of social norms leads to her own destruction and the destruction of the men who are attracted to her.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/noir/pp-all.html

In Propaganda, his most important book, Bernays argued that the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. … In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

I also found a source online where you can downlaod a PDF of this book.