{"id":2953,"date":"2022-02-11T10:32:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T15:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=2953"},"modified":"2022-02-14T11:10:12","modified_gmt":"2022-02-14T16:10:12","slug":"flashback-friday-the-problem-isnt-the-stupid-joke-but-the-very-real-assaults-the-jokes-conceal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2022\/02\/flashback-friday-the-problem-isnt-the-stupid-joke-but-the-very-real-assaults-the-jokes-conceal\/","title":{"rendered":"FLASHBACK FRIDAY: &#8220;The problem isn&#8217;t the stupid joke, but the very real assaults the jokes conceal.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size\"><em>[I first wrote about this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2017\/10\/this-is-a-kinda-rapey-application-of-steve-shaws-psychokinetic-touches\/\">kinda rapey application of Steve Shaw&#8217;s &#8220;Psychokinetic Touches&#8221; routine<\/a> back in 2017,  and periodically revisit the post to expand it, fix broken links, replace disappeared videos, and so on.  I&#8217;ve since seen all sorts of magicians\u2014including David Blaine\u2014lean pretty heavily on PK Touches, sometimes just doing the routine, but more often building on that foundation. It&#8217;s a great routine!]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At first blush, the magic trick in this video seems like nothing more than a mildly sexist\u2014but still basically harmless\u2014&#8221;invisible touches&#8221; routine: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Magician has a volunteer stand with her eyes closed as she pays super-duper sensitive attention to any physical contact she might perceive.\u00a0 He then steps well away\u2014way, way too far to have any direct or indirect contact (e.g., he couldn&#8217;t possibly be creating a draft, blowing on her, tickling her with threads, etc.).\u00a0 As witnesses watch (confirming that Magician never makes contact with the subject), he is able to make her believe she&#8217;s been touched (in this case, that her boobs have been squeezed)<strong>\u2014simply by the power of his psychical abilities!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><em>Tada!<\/em><\/strong> <strong><em>MAGIC!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DPeSf5tkbKo\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>(Here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9fdNcv-q9N0\">another vid of the same dude<\/a>.\u00a0 Note that he puts in our heads the notion of an unambiguous boob <strong><em>squeeze<\/em><\/strong>, but that his volunteers consistently describe a <strong><em>tap<\/em><\/strong> high on the chest.\u00a0 That gap\u2014between his implication that he&#8217;s <strong>honking<\/strong> their boobs contrasted to the women&#8217;s indication that he is lightly tapping of a light <strong>tap<\/strong> near the clavicle\u2014is the tell.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, this dude is a creep, and his impinging on women&#8217;s time and space and totally leveraging huge cultural forces that oblige them to smile through bullshit like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it&#8217;s still basically harmless, right?\u00a0 I mean, he isn&#8217;t <em>actually<\/em> touching their boobs while they are defenseless and non-consenting, right?\u00a0 It&#8217;s just a trick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Accept for the thing is, <strong>he is for real and with his actual physical flesh-and-blood hands, touching these women&#8217;s bodies without their prior consent<\/strong>, and only getting away with it because he&#8217;s manipulating the situation owing to an information (and thus power) imbalance.\u00a0 And, in a move that&#8217;s both cheap from a magic performance perspective and indicative of a guilty conscious on the part of an assailant, he mostly cuts from the video the part where he does the touching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because he is indeed a fucking creep of the first degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8220;Psychokinetic Touches&#8221; Background<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Back in the mid-1990s a guy named Steve Shaw was selling an effect called &#8220;Psychokinetic Touches.&#8221;\u00a0 Shaw himself is a really, really interesting guy (as is the pre-Internet\u2014and even current\u2014market in cheaply printed pro-grade performance techniques like these).\u00a0 Shaw designed Penn &amp; Teller&#8217;s famous bullet catch, although I myself first got wind of him in the 1980s, when I was a kid and he was a teen working with James Randi to <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Project_Alpha\">fool some ESP researchers<\/a>; Shaw caught my imagination then because of how straightforward and cunning his techniques were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of that is really germane, accept for the fact that if you maybe spend some time googling &#8220;Steve Shaw&#8221; and &#8220;Psychokinetic Touches&#8221;, you&#8217;ll dig up a blurry PDF of the old comb-bound booklet explaining his technique (which is totally indicative of the straightforward cunning of Shaw&#8217;s work; dude is a genius).\u00a0 If you dig up Shaw&#8217;s &#8220;PK Touches,&#8221; you&#8217;ll note that in the introduction to that work Shaw explains his inspiration: a routine from the early 1900s that is the totally obvious inspiration for this YouTube creeper&#8217;s stunt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I.e., not only is French hat dude a creepy perv, but he&#8217;s also an <em>unoriginal<\/em> creepy perv.\u00a0 <em>*sighs*<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(I got acquainted with Shaw&#8217;s PK Touches after seeing Peter Boie work it into his bit on Penn &amp; Teller&#8217;s <em>Fool Us<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cwtv.com\/shows\/penn-teller-fool-us\/the-invisi-ball-thread\/?play=e32f80ff-b3f3-4a81-aabe-4134e5f83c11\">season 2, episode 2<\/a> [Teller also performs his excellent Red Ball routine in this episode; worth the watch]. Boie basically does 100% textbook Shaw for <em>P&amp;T<\/em>, for an overall better effect and performance.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At any rate, here&#8217;s an overview of Shaw&#8217;s &#8220;<em><strong>Psychokinetic Touches<\/strong><\/em>&#8221; routine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Effect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The performer selects a volunteer from the audience, and explains that <em>blah-blah<\/em> psychic <em>blah-blah<\/em> ghosts <em>blah-blah<\/em> From Beyond\u2014and for that reason, he is able to <em>physically touch<\/em> a receptive individual with nothing more than his mind.\u00a0 He then makes some gestures to &#8220;clear the volunteer&#8217;s aura&#8221; (or whatever) and steps far away.\u00a0 Now, standing much too far away to conceivably physical reach the volunteer, and in full view of an audience (who can be surrounding the pair on all sides), the performer makes his cooky touch-touch gestures\u2014and <em>low and behold!<\/em>, the astonished volunteer can confirm <strong><em>that she has been touched(!!!)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Technique<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I won&#8217;t spoil the whole thing, but <strong><em>SPOILER ALERT!!! <\/em><\/strong>[1]: Dude is not a psychic or ghost wrangler or whatever.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s the basic schtick:\u00a0 The performer gives his little spiel, then <em>has the volunteer close her eyes<\/em>.\u00a0 At this stage he explains a few more things\u2014reminding her to be &#8220;psychically receptive&#8221; and super attentive to even the lightest contact.\u00a0 He shuts up, does his little &#8220;aura cleansing,&#8221; and steps away to do his mambo-jahambo magical passes and psychic touching, singling out certain parts of the body (the right shoulder, the left elbow\u2014whatever).\u00a0 N.B.\u00a0 <strong><em>Everything he&#8217;s done since advising her to be super attentive and receptive has happened in absolute silence<\/em><\/strong><em>.<\/em>\u00a0 The next time he speaks is to ask &#8220;Have you felt any contact?&#8221;\u00a0 He then has her indicate where that contact was on her body.\u00a0 Lo and behold, she reports being touched in all the right places.\u00a0 <em>OMFG!\u00a0 How did he do it?!\u00a0 And <\/em>here comes the spoiler:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-medium-font-size\"><em><strong>HE TOUCHED HER DURING THE &#8220;AURA CLEANING<\/strong>.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From the audience&#8217;s perspective the &#8220;aura cleaning&#8221; isn&#8217;t part of the trick yet, so they are <em>not<\/em> being super diligent; he has an easy pass to brush her gently.\u00a0 But remember, he&#8217;s fallen silent and the volunteer&#8217;s eyes are closed: She has no frame of reference for what&#8217;s going on, and thus from her perspective everything from when he stops talking on is part of the trick.\u00a0 Her perceptions are temporally out-of-synch with the audiences&#8217;, and they have no easy way to rectify that, even after the fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pk-oPfCjyhE\">Here is a more benign version of PK Touches<\/a>, again performed by Peter Boie, but with a slightly disadvantageous (to him) camera angle. Now the tell is more obvious. Watch carefully at 0:49 and 0:52: when the performer waves his hands around to clear the aura he surreptitiously uses his right hand to tap the back of her left shoulder.\u00a0 This is largely obscured owing to how he&#8217;s positioned the volunteer relative to the audience\u2014blocking Shaw suggests in his <em>PK Touches<\/em>.\u00a0 The waving-arms misdirect is also straight out of Shaw&#8217;s <em>PK Touch<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(Wondering how Boie pulls off the second PK touch, where the male volunteer feels the ghostly strokes on his nose? You can slow that video down to 1\/4 speed on YouTube, and you&#8217;ll clearly see that Boie <em><strong>never<\/strong><\/em> touches the dude&#8217;s nose with his hand. It&#8217;s terrific! Now put the video in slow-mo and watch the performers hands starting at around 1:44, before he approaches the volunteer. When he parts his hands and spreads them far apart, he&#8217;s extended a loop of thread between them. Now watch as he clearly strokes the thread down the man&#8217;s nose during the &#8220;aura cleansing.&#8221; As I recall, this thread gaff is <em>not<\/em> part of Shaw&#8217;s original PK Touches. I&#8217;ve read somewhere of something similar done to simulate a touch running down a volunteer&#8217;s arm, but I really like it used here in this way. Excellent misdirection to create a similar effect\u2014the psychic touch transfer\u2014in two totally different ways, one of which would seem to eliminate the obvious explanation for the other. <em>Bravo!<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once you know what to look for, it&#8217;s pretty easy to spot the Creep-o-Perv Magician in the original embedded video moving into the &#8220;magic passes&#8221;(\/secret boobie poke) portion of his routine (goto around the 0:34 mark in the video embedded above, when he squares up the girl&#8217;s shoulders).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Bad Touches and Bad Jokes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what annoys me more:\u00a0 A skeevy dude using a decades-old store-bought mentalism routine to non-consensually poke girls&#8217; in the bust, or the fact that he has so little respect for his craft that he resorts to cheap &#8220;camera tricks&#8221; to pull it off cleanly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Naw, I take it back:\u00a0 What annoys me most is using a third-rate performance of a first-rate effect to make a jokey pantomime of sexual assault in order to cover up the actual sexual assault you just perpetrated, &#8217;cause it so clearly gets to the heart of what enrages me about the <em>&#8220;Lighten up; it&#8217;s just a joke!&#8221;<\/em> attitude toward minimizing the crazy-making reality of <a href=\"http:\/\/annarborchronicle.com\/2013\/12\/19\/in-it-for-the-money-happy-holidays\/index.html\">microagressions<\/a>:\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><em>The problem isn&#8217;t the stupid joke, but the very real assaults the jokes conceal.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size\">[1] Penn Jillette has this aphorism in one of his books, to the effect of: <strong><em>There is an inverse relationship to how impressive an effect is and how fun knowing the secret is.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 For example, effects that rely on an Elmsley count or Three-of-Clubs Card Force are sorta neat, and if someone shows you how it really works you think &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s actually pretty clever.&#8221;\u00a0 Meanwhile, when I was a kid David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear on live TV, broadcast nationwide.\u00a0 That effect was fucking incredible.\u00a0 I was 6 at the time, and my mind was fucking blown.\u00a0 My folks&#8217; minds were blown.\u00a0 Everyone&#8217;s minds&#8217; were blown.\u00a0 <em>Amazing<\/em>.\u00a0 The secret to that trick is so fantastically lame\u2014even though it is sort of impressive, simply as a construction project\u2014that you feel cheated knowing it.\u00a0 (NPR&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thisamericanlife.org\/radio-archives\/episode\/619\/the-magic-show\"><em>This American Life<\/em> has done a show about magic tricks<\/a>, devoting about half the episode to this specific Copperfield trick, and the other half to Teller&#8217;s Red Ball\u2014pretty much perfectly illustrating the full continuum of magic from disappointingly crass bullshit to absolute loveliness.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[I first wrote about this kinda rapey application of Steve Shaw&#8217;s &#8220;Psychokinetic Touches&#8221; routine back in 2017, and periodically revisit the post to expand it, fix broken links, replace disappeared videos, and so on. I&#8217;ve since seen all sorts of magicians\u2014including David Blaine\u2014lean pretty heavily on PK Touches, sometimes just doing the routine, but more &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2022\/02\/flashback-friday-the-problem-isnt-the-stupid-joke-but-the-very-real-assaults-the-jokes-conceal\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;FLASHBACK FRIDAY: &#8220;The problem isn&#8217;t the stupid joke, but the very real assaults the jokes conceal.&#8221;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[11,3],"tags":[702,107,77,703,430,121,572,53,168,167,701,634,169],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2953"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2953"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2957,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2953\/revisions\/2957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}