Does cognitive dissonance perpetuate misogyny, or just reflect it?

I know where your coming from Bertie, I'm a bit of a loner (thank god for the internet) as I have found it difficult to find a group of friends who don't have someone or a few whose too fighty/druggy/grabby which is tolerated by the others.

Jeanne Sorry - I honestly don't know what you mean by cognitive dissonance. I've only become interested in this thread lately - with the reasons why the our species displays the violence it does.

With the point about human's escalation of violence - if I understand the word 'cognitive' correctly, humans (or the hominids from which we are descended) came to realise that unless you defeat an enemy permanently - it'll be back to fight another day with you - it makes sense to wipe out a competitor completely - humans with their greater cognitive abilities are the first (or the only survivors left to grasp this). (btw Im not looking at this from a moral stance)

human violence is deplorable - but without it we wouldn't be here. We are a species whose own success has backfired on it to a certain extent. Evolution has no sense of hindsight.

Though i have heard it said in nature many species 'ruck' eg deer why dont they just spear the other animal but they don't they just butt heads, whereas humans (males) seem more ready to escalate?

Argh, now I'm all angry

All species are violent - in the sense that they compete (defensively or oppressively). Show me a species that is not good at competing - I'll show you a species either extinct or on the road to it.

"Why's it beneficial for us as a society?"

I would say it's actually a strategy to avoid conflict. If there's a man in a group who has an obnoxious personality, making excuses for him allows the others to avoid confronting him. Not that the primary fear would be violence on his part, but the solidarity of the group would be split; I believe social pressure within male groups is strongly towards keeping conflicts down. (Maybe because you might have to fight the group next door, and when that happens, you want your fellow warriors to support you.)

Cognitive dissonance in general seems to me like a way to hold onto our comfort, to deny that there are problems we should be dealing with. I wonder if it makes for a more peaceful or a more violent society, in the long run.

This is really interesting and I'm afraid I don't have much to add but I did want to say I really identified with the notion that men often say "Oh so-and-so is a bit racist but he's alright really" (Yeah, to you, because you're white) or "Oh he's a bit of a dinosaur, but he's a good bloke." (Um, yes, TO YOU, because you're a man) - DH does this CONSTANTLY and it drives me absolutely bloody mad because to him, it's really literally not relevant. I suppose perhaps because I have stopped compartmentalising people like that, where I might have done in the past, accepted flawed parts of someone's character where they didn't affect me directly. Now I can see not only how bigoted and selfish that was of me, but that if someone is an arse to some groups of people it doesn't really matter if I'm in the "right" category, they still have arsehole tendencies to believe or behave like that in the first place.

But then perhaps it's just a bit depressing if you are a man and only accept friends who are neither sexist, homophobic or racist because that brings the potential pool of friends and the possibility of being accepted into the "lad" crowd really really low. I mean, there's a reason why I am mostly friends with women, and it's not only because I come into contact with more women, it's because I find a far higher rate of these things among men somehow, or perhaps they are more visible to me because of feminism (perhaps that's a bit of what cognitive dissonance does, acts as a nice blinder to block the nastier bits from view so you don't have to think about them?)

Actually, been thinking about the resources issue, and although it plays a role, it's a bit indirect. If you're absolutely desperate for resources, you don't have the energy or materiel to wage war - no-one's ever seen an army of famine victims marching on their nearest well-fed neighbours. Wars are about acquiring and perpetuating inequality - oil fields, mineral resources, land. We in the UK for instance maintain an army because we're rich and we want it to stay that way. Internally, police forces play the same role - they protect the property of the rich, much less interested in protecting the powerless against violence (low rape conviction rates), prepared to turn a blind eye to the occasional bit of violence themselves if directed towards people who've already been othered - high rates of stop and search among ethnic minorities or poor communities, while at the same time accepting civil liberties arguments that you shouldn't do random breathalyser tests. (I believe that officially the police are only meant to stop people on the grounds of them driving erratically - they can't sit down the road from a country pub at closing time and stop every 10th car. While they may do this, your chances as a middle class white motorist of having this happen to you are far lower, I would guess, than the chances of a black man under the age of 25 in Peckham getting randomly stopped and searched).

And actually the resources issue isn't new of course. Wars can be caused by resources, or in an effort to provide political cohesion, or to distract attention from trouble and potential social unrest at home by providing an external enemy as a scapegoat. The Falklands in the 1980s fit this pattern, but so too, arguably, do the crusades.

In the past war I guess was seen as what was needed to stop a race to the bottom and men being enslaved by other men and losing their chattels?

Lurcio - I kinda get where your coming from and how this could be used to excuse mens 'letting off steam'

Absolutely last post, mascara firmly on!

Just on the 'cognitive dissonance needed because we need violent men' point: perhaps deep down we feel we need to defend our resources now because of our extremely high level of consumption.

There are nowhere like enough resources at First World rates of consumption to go round.

So if we want the next ipod every 6 months, we need keep our armed forces useful. So male violence good.

Really really off now

Sorry, missed the intervening discussion while posting that epic! My anthropologist friend again: we don't need warfare where there are enough resources. Hunter gather societies facing low levels of external threat exhibit low levels of violence internally, and high-ish levels of gender equality. All that gets completely screwed over as soon as they perceive themselves to be facing an external threat - then they typically create some sort of warrior class themselves.

That's nice of you to say, Freddie. I think your post really adds to it (a line from one of the Sharpe novels springs to mind at this point: Sharpe, in a rare moment of introspection, says something along the lines of "They (the ruling classes) need men like me to fight their wars for them, but don't know what to do with us when we're not at war.")

I was talking to an anthropologist friend about this recently in the context of male violence against women - she thought that a limited amount of low-level violence was the faustian pact made by women in societies facing external threat from, say, neighbouring tribes, to protect them from much higher levels of violence during conflict. Now this is female CD again - but bringing it back to male CD, there's very interesting research on male violence within armed conflict - it turns out that only a minority of men, even among trained soldiers, will actually shoot to kill. Most men in armies in fact provide covering fire (shoot over the heads of the enemy with the aim of preventing them shooting back), tell themselves that they're doing their bit by passing ammo, that sort of thing. I heard a fascinating programme on R3 (prob about 10 years ago) about this, and about the fact that various nations (esp. the Americans) had put a lot of research into trying to work out what training programmes would up the percentage prepared to kill. Brutalising raw recruits, typically through "hazing", is one cheap and effective way. The Pentagon, not surprisingly, has experimented with drugs to achieve the same (the Bourne films may be sci-fi, but they have a grain of truth hidden within). But it comes at a huge cost - it leads to massively high rates of PTSD which while in the military interfere with effectiveness and undermine discipline, and once out of the military, leave you with vast number of veterans who just don't fit into civilian society.

Going back to Jeanne's earlier comment about narratives, I think this whole shitstorm explains the ubiquity of books about war - Sharpe, anything by Clancy or Andy MacNab - in which the hero is a loner, a trained killer, but only to the bad guys (the "he's okay with his mates" narrative again), and is possessed of a magic spidey-sense to tell instantly who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. He can magically kill the bad guys, but because he knows it to be right, he magically comes out the other end of the process psychologically intact. There's a great article by Lindy West on the film American Sniper - the last paragraph in particular is very insightful. (I dread to think what it says about my psyche that this sort of twaddle is actually one of my favourite forms of escapist reading!)

Coming back to Freddie's post, one thing I'd perhaps offer a slightly different angle on is this: I'm not sure it so much a socially learned ability to control violent men as a socially learned strategy for mitigating the worst excesses of violent men and living with (minimising) the aspects you can' mitigate.

We need them for conquest and the acquisition of finite resources and land. Warfare, in other words. Sometimes for survival, sometimes for greed. I think that is what Freddie meant.

must go and slap make-up on to go out, you'll be glad to hear, so hopefully someone more useful will be along

Lurcio's post says it better!

'why's it beneficial for us as a society?'

Well, it's not. It's beneficial to a patriarchal society, so mostly to men. (pedantic).

Historic realities? ie, up til very recently we needed strong, violent men, and we learned as a society how to control/socialise them.

We still need them to defend our borders. We dress it up in acceptable clothes, but when it comes down to it we need some men (and now some women) to be able to kill another man to defend 'us' (ie I'm talking about the UK in this instance).

And that socially learned ability to control the violent men has been formalised in rugby clubs, pubs, male groups.

So, it's perhaps just ingrained in us as a society, and most people don't give it a second thought, so it doesn't change.

Humans can be weird like how we apportion risk to say flying v driving.

Its interesting as take for example the we would generally think that people who work in charity are altruistic in nature but now with jmmy saville etc that myth is getting busted.

There was a case a relative was on jury service they believed two girls testament that this old guy had bought them booze and fondled them inappropriately. They based their guilty vote on the evidence but were the only one who gave a guilty vote and was lambasted by the rest of the jury during the process.

Relative was told by another jury members:

"as does not have kids, they don't know what they were talking about"
"he's just a harmless old man",
"I dont want to send an old man to jail"
"my gut feeling says he's innocent'