is there a new cognitive dissonance thread?

[kickassangel]

if so, please link, i can't find it.

if not, i'd like to add some things

using personal experience to prove a point is not a great argument. we have to start with the bigger picture, then see personal experiences as a case study which exemplifies, but does not prove a point.

i'm not even sure that i view myself as a feminist. i view myself as someone who believes in equality (not just on male/female issues). the generalisations about feminism being a religion i find offensive, as they both ignore the patriarchal society we live in (and this assertion can be backed up by endless statistics & experiences), and assume that one particular viewpoint is religious.

is marxism a religion? what about other schools of thought?

feminism is a broad range of thought, and there will be changes and shifts within the arguments, just as there are in other sociological concepts. and there will be women who abuse, just as there are men who do so.

however, look at the structure of society, and it is impossible to say that it isn't patriarchal. just look at the possession of wealth, the media representation of people, the male/female ration in positions of power.

if it was as simple as some women 'not bothering' to push themselves forward, there would still be enough women to fill 50% of all key positions in society, and to hold 50% of the wealth, but that isn't what happens. so, it sin't due to a lack of women exerting themselves, it is due to the inherent sexism within society.

Larry, my Ds dropped to the 9th centile, I know about worrying.
I don't doubt how worried you were, or the interest you took in it, but you must see, surely, that your experience of what happened is very different to how your wife experienced it.

What an incredible level of impudence Larry has telling us we're seeing this through the prism of academic feminism.

I spent literally hours weeping about breastfeeding and the support from the NHS was shit. One of the reasons the breastfeeding threads on MN end up in regular bunfights, is because for many of us, breastfeeding our babies goes to teh heart of our identity as mothers and as women and the shock we feel at how much it means to us and how unexpectedly emotional we find it, and how utterly inadequate the knowledge and support from most of the NHS is, is indescribable. Eleven years after my first experience of it, I can still conjure the feelings of despair and frustration and literally anguish I felt and to have some arrogant man come into a mother's feminist space and tell us what's what about how the NHS supports us to bf, and then completely miss the point about why we might be gobsmacked by that - well there's nothing fucking academic about my feelings.

Sorry to shout but surely HE'S HERE TO WASTE OUR TIME. What could be scarier than a load of women getting to talk and compare notes? While we're all tucked away with nothing to compare our experiences to, it's easy for us to minimise or try to forget, or think it's bad luck. Only when we talk to each other can we see more of the whole picture.

That's when some fucker (not naming names) decides this cannot be allowed to happen and will charge in so we have to bustle about contradicting and apologising, instead of - you know - talking about what we want to talk about.

E&M, it doesn't matter what we're talking about or if he has some skin in this game - someone on the internet is wrong

Oh, and to answer your question from WAY back, the less secure I have felt within my own skin the more distance I have needed from my family. I have lived thousands of miles away from them and hundreds. I couldn't live too close to them as long as they live in their hyper-religious community, but I miss them dearly. For all their quirks and failings, I am extremely lucky to also count my family as close friends.

Also, I do love that he thinks we're staying up all night just to refute him - instead of taking a few seconds of refection to realize that at least three of the posters he has been engaging with aren't in the UK.

I'm not in the UK either, but LG wasn't engaging me

Let's stop talking about him now - OK!!!!

Love the link marenmj!

Thanks, xkcd is one of my all time favorites. It was actually one of his cartoons that most perfectly summed up systemic patriarchy for me and how girls can be beat down by continual discrimination.

Believe it or not, it's one of the moments I can actually pin down that turned me from "well, I'm no 'feminist' buuuutt..." to "actually this is exactly why we need feminists"

This may be because I was very good at math, but still ran in to plenty of this attitude.

Yes generalisations about an entire gender just make the people making them look like idiots.....

kickass I strongly disagree with you that fathering goes unnoticed. Fathers, if they stick around and show a modicum of interest in their children are heroes. MOthers, well, they're just doing what comes naturally... or so the story goes.

And yet, in court, when a father commits a horrific crime against his child [there was a case recently where a father stuffed a baby wipe up his newborn baby's rectum and left it there over night, while the baby was writhing and pain and almost DIED- after 8 hours of surgery doctors removed it from his bowel] then the court decides that "dads sometimes make little mistakes" and let him off without even a fine. If that had been the mother they would have locked her up and thrown away the key. So women face double standards in all areas of parenting. SOme are threatened with having their kids taken away by social services if they don'T get the kids to school on time.
Men do the minimum and they're praised and feted.

oh? does anyone else hear Carly Simon?

If that had been the mother they would have locked her up and thrown away the key.

Oh really? I think you are just making that up.

X 10, Marenmj

Back to breastfeeding and the intensity of feelings the sight of a breastfeeding mother in a public place or business open to the public can inspire, and the interpretation of symbols -- I think breastfeeding in general (as well as the baby and childcare book industry, especially the work of John B. Watson) has been a lightning rod for western patriarchal attitudes, and a flashpoint (yes, har har) for wider society in its approach to women's bodies.

At first I thought this discussion had to be a complete windup, but I somehow kept down my last meal long enough to keep on reading, aghast -- here's a sample quote: 'Public breastfeeding is rude, its disrespectful, its shameful and a sexual act of perversion among the women who chooses to expose her sexual private parts in front of everyone to see so we can take the blame of being insinuated as a pervert just for making a complaint to the restaurant manager about it'. It comes from www.medicalnewstoday.com/youropinions.php?opinionid=10528, and provides a fine example of a culture gone mad, cognitive dissonance left, right and centre. The intensity and vehemence of the 'should' statements on the part of those opposed to public breastfeeding, plus the utter lack of self-consciousness in the way they expose their own psycho-sexual problems and insecurities as arguments against women's freedom to feed in public, make me cringe.

Despicable. Those are the types of men who really loathe women and their bodies. Usually their the same men who have no problem with the mutilation of female bodies in the name of eugenics (cosmetic breast surgery)

OMG, they're from the US, well that explains it. Porn culture is rife and widely accepted there. They've forgotten what breasts are actually for. They've opened up a friggin restaurant called Hooters in the UK, which is a slang word for breasts and yet breasts doing what they're designed for is "filthy" and "should be illegal"

There are some seriously mentally ill men out there

Yes, I've seen a few writings refer to BFing in the terms of an agressive act done for the sake of making the wider public an audience (as though the baby is a non-entity in its feeding exists purely for the viewing of other people).

To be fair, I have never heard anyone use this sort of language in RL, just the vague "some people say" sources in the media.

Well I read more and about 80% of the people were absolutely as flabbergasted as I was, so that's reassuring

The idea that porn is great, lapdancing is empowerfulizing, etc. yet breastfeeding is gross, is some pretty remarkable cognitive dissonance.

Mind you breasts don't really appear in porn - tits do.

I'm sure I remember reading somewhere (probably in The Politics of Breastfeeding) that there are cultures who think it is weird that grown men like to 'suckle' grown women in the manner of babies.

The fetishization of women's breasts as playthings designed to be ogled by men has done huge damage to breastfeeding culture.

Does anybody know if, in the western countries where BF rates are high, there is less of a porn culture?

I'M not sure what the BF rates are in Japan, but what's interesting is that breasts aren't fetishized here because Japanese women are V flat-chested. WHen I wore a kimono they padded me out to make it look as though I had no breasts at all. My husband's jaw dropped. The kimono is sexy, large breasts, not so much. It's more of a niche porn market here.
The reason I mention all this is because breast fetishizing is clearly just that: a fetish. It's not evolutionary or part of human nature or anything.

iceland would be interesting to look at - it has banned any form of nudity for profit (so no Hooters there). paying for sex is also illegal.

mind you, this has only happened in the last 12 months, and it would prob take nearly an entire generation to completely change attitudes & behaviour.

speaking of fetishizing women's breasts/breastfeeding (not that this adds to the discussion) but there is almost no amount of shock I can feel that compares to the moment I found out that there is a type of porn featuring breastfeeding women that focuses on the milk they leak during sex. Some people really are capable of fetishizing anything.

Now just tell that to the women who come on MN, scared to BF because if they have sex w/their OH they might leak and put him off

FWIW, in America there is also a whole lot of leftover quaker/shaker/puritan nudity-is-taboo stuff going on. So here public BF is taboo in part because breasts are sexualized and in big part because nudity is just Not Okay (and then of course there's the whole fetishization of nudity because it's so taboo). Mothers here are encouraged to BF as long as they cover their nakedness!

Probable not possible to gauge the prevalence of porn culture s so much of it is available on the internet -- law enforcement has trouble even keeping up with child rape porn.

When I first arrived in the US (back in the late 80s) I was very surprised at what I saw as the extreme conservatism of the swimsuits most women wore. I was used to seeing even middle aged Irish women with a few spare tyres changing into bikinis on beaches (unheard of in the US to change on the beach with just a flapping towel between you and the general public) and taking a dip (in the icy waters of the Irish Sea Brrrrrrrr), but learned that bikinis were generally not worn except by young teenage girls or women considered quite brazen. Only recently have bikinis become ok for women, for mothers, and even for pregnant women, who used to wear tent-like garments for swimming.

Yes, it's a somewhat odd culture by itself. My mother says that in the 70's she and her sisters used to sew panels into their suits because they couldn't buy one-piece suits and didn't want to show their midriffs.

It's men too - it's no more acceptable for men to flash their thighs on the beach as it is for women most places and there's this idea that once a person reaches A Certain Age they cannot reveal any skin whatsoever.

When I moved to the UK I thought a lot about the difference and the best I can come up with is that button-up, puritan ethos that makes nudity automatically sexual and therefore naughty which is then driven into this sexually charged place. And everyone suffers as a result, except for Playboy and Penthouse because they can make a mint off it.

I think you've hit the nail on the head marenmj

The blindness of privilege is one of the most obvious examples of cognitive dissonance that there is (she says, dragging the topic back under control).

The original OP (OOP, I suppose), last thread, was about the cognitive dissonance that women experience when men behave in ways that are disrespectful, uncaring, selfish or abusive, and yet those same men are supposed to be the loving supportive partners in their lives. The entire world is telling us that we should be happy, and our men are nice, and yet many of us find ourselves in situations where that cannot be reconciled with their actions.

So cognitive dissonance is a coping mechanism to allow us to keep living our lives in a patriarchy.

Well, it seems very obvious to me that intelligent, thoughtful, caring men who enjoy the privileges of their sex have to employ a huge amount of dissonance as well. Because as soon as you acknowledge that another group is disadvantaged, you have to acknowledge that you are advantaged, and that means your position in life hasn't been won entirely through merit. I have the same thing re: being white - it is an indisputable (to me) fact that black people in this country get discriminated against at every level. It follows that I have not lived my life on an equal playing field, and my colour has in fact given me a leg up. Likewise my heterosexuality, able-bodied state, etc.

That's a hard thing for a lot of people to face, I think, and the more privileged one is, the harder it is. So what do you do? Like the abused spouse in the OOP who blames herself for the treatment you receive, the privileged person blames the disadvantaged for their situation.

So people talk about individual responsibility, and blame rape victims for dressing rashly as if rapists look for a sign that a woman is sexually confident and not vulnerable! How crazy is that logic? Why the hell would a rapist seek out a woman who is dressed to indicate that she wants sex? That would defeat the purpose, and argue that of course childcare is paid badly because it's fun (so fun that men v v rarely choose to do it, of course), and women are only not promoted because they choose part time work. Because that's safer than admitting that you are living in an unequal world.

Oh, damn, I'm sorry about the bump, I didn't realise the conversation had gone stale.