Does cognitive dissonance perpetuate misogyny, or just reflect it?

Jeanne, I don't think it is the same as the sense of freedom women can get, because men are generally not policed about it to begin with.

I can remember it being one of the first feminist things I read when I got an internet connection. Some woman talking about how annoyed she was when men offered to walk her home, and them making out she was some kind of crazy person for wanting to walk alone.

She was talking about the serious damage it did to how she felt about herself and society, if she were to accept that she was not free to walk around where she lived and worked.

I had never really thought about benevolent sexism before, and it was massively liberating for me to think, no, I am not being chaperoned. I will go where I want because this is my society too. I am not giving up and sitting in my house.

I don't think most men are going to experience that feeling of liberation because most men are not policed to begin with.

Sorry, that was a bit rambly.

In the case of not walking anywhere alone (or at least after dark), aren't the consequences of that - the limitations on your freedom, on what you can do, where you can go, who you can see, and the psychological consequences of that so severe, that going out and doing it anyway is rewarding despite the sense of fear and policing you associate with it?

The rape in the Thomas Covenant books was supposed to be - um, he started off as a victim himself. And he wasn't one who felt no remorse.

YY to "the narrative itself is manipulating us." Even as a bad writer, I am aware of the fact that I am setting the structure up in such a way as to direct the reader's responses. In some ways, part of being a bad writer is that this is probably all too painfully obvious to the reader - the scaffolding is visible. With a really good writer, the scaffolding is hidden inside the building and this can lead to immense cognitive dissonance.

Actually I think the Spike/Ewan in Sunset Song comparison is an interesting one. For me, what makes Grassic Gibbon not a sexist is that no attempt is ever made to minimise the rape, to explain it away as "normal sex gone to the extreme". It is horrible for Chris to experience, and horrible for Ewan later when he regains his sanity and realises what he has done.

In contrast, the Spike narrative is the age-old trope of "well, you wanted sex to be passionate, didn't you? This is just what happens when the passion gets too strong." Rather than sympathising with the idea that a person who is trying to be decent just gets stretched to breaking point, we're instead being asked to buy into the excuse of the person who feels no remorse. So instead of "Oh god, what I did was terrible, even though at the time I was stretched to breaking point for other reasons" we're being given "Was what I did really so terrible? Or was this a temptation any decent person would have succumbed to?"

Fascinating example. I find it interesting how you've framed it (haven't seen the season, so not sure how much is your gloss and how much is inherent in the narrative, if there is such a thing as inherent in the narrative). In terms of doing a bad thing and being a good person, as Buffy - perhaps that should be "our Buffy" to distinguish her from the character under discussion - put it, that might work if you'd framed it as evil and tried to rape her but flawed hero because he was, I dunno, suffering from PTSD (effectively the tragic narrative of Sunset Song, in which the man does rape his wife while on leave from the trenches, goes back, realises what he's done, deserts to try to find his way home to make amends and is shot) or did so while under the influence of some massive supernatural struggle between his vampire side and human side.

But your "did it because he loves her" sounds like the programme makers were invested in a particular rape myth (in which case I'd have expected more of Joss Whedon) and are inviting the audience to come along for the ride and engage in a piece of cognitive dissonance ("even though I, the viewer, know that rape is about exerting power and forced subjugation, not about sexual attraction, my successful suspension of disbelief and entrance inside the fictional world will only work if I pretend that in this instance it's about overwhelming sexual attraction and passion.") Does that make sense as an analysis? I feel like I'm not being very clear about this one.

It's a very interesting question. Friends raved to me about the Thomas Covenanter books, but I put the first one down after about 3 chapters when it became apparent that the hero started out the books as a rapist and I was being expected to believe in his eventual redemption.

That's an interesting thought, Buffy. Connects up with the resurgence of a certain type of very individualistic liberal feminism - so long as I have a personal narrative in which I'm triumphing in the face of a sexist system, then everything's fine. That equality means being able to point to a few examples of women succeeding against the odds, rather than drawing attention to the fact that statistically most do worse than their nearest male equivalents (once you've corrected for class, education, race, etc. - NB that's not to detract from the point being made on the woc thread that for a woc, often the biggest gap is between them and a white person of either sex, not between them and a man of the same ethnicity).

I'd be really interested to have examples of what you have in mind about fictional narratives (it's something I've become increasingly interested in since starting to try to write a bit of - bad- fiction myself: in my case how to write feminist fiction while still having believable characters in a realistically messed up world - partly because I know some of what I write is read by young adult women, and I don't want to add to the pile of cognitive-dissonance-inducing crap out there).

Ah, I see where you're going Jeanne (and riveting's post is fascinating). But the "nice guy" strategy could also perpetuate as well as being an unintended consequence - it's the whole business of male privilege, and how even nice, non-sexist men benefit from being part of the collective that includes sexist arseholes. (Agree with Buffy that the collective angle is more useful than individual psychology alone).

What does a rejection of cognitive dissonance in a man look like? A move from "but I'm a nice guy" to "while I try to be a nice guy I have to accept that we live in a fucked up society where it is rational for women to think of me as Schrodinger's rapist"? (I'm assuming that the johns Riveting speaks about are so invested in finding strategies to continue their behaviour that they will not reject cognitive dissonance come what may).

And I absolutely agree with Buffy that a focus on ideological systems is appropriate here. The psychology of the individual is not sufficient.

Kajsa Ekis Ekman has a very interesting section of her book 'Being and Being Bought' where she talks about the cognitive dissonance experienced by men who buy sex. On the one hand, the john thinks that he's special, that he's not like the other johns, that the prostituted woman actually likes him for himself, that he shows her a good time etc. The happy hooker myth is therefore very important to these men. This is clear from the comments they leave on websites rating prostituted women (which I strongly advise you not to look at, so dark...)
But the john also know this isn't true. He knows that he's just a client and that she doesn't actually want to have sex with him. He's not really special at all and he hates and blames the prostituted woman for this - how dare you fail to live up to my fantasy! How dare you make me feel like less of a man! This may well be one of the reasons that women in prostitution are subject to so much violence.