Does cognitive dissonance perpetuate misogyny, or just reflect it?

[JeanneDeMontbaston]

Hi all.

I am aware the title is feminist jargon. By 'cognitive dissonance', I mean, that state where you subconsciously hold two incompatible views. Eg., you know perfectly well that, statistically, most rapes do not happen in dark alleyways, and yet, you feel more frightened there than with your random male friend.

As I understand it, holding a position of cognitive dissonance is tiring and stressful. I wondered if it actually makes us transfer blame onto women, so that we don't just hold these contradictory positions about gender, we actually absorb the idea they're somehow women's fault?

I am thinking this because I remember going through that stage (which I think a lot of women mention) of feeling, first, angry about feminism and angry that women were 'rocking the boat' by challenging all my dearly-held cognitive dissonances.

Now, it could be that cognitive dissonance is just a reaction to living in a misogynistic society. Or, it could be that there's something in cognitive dissonance itself, that pushes us to shift the blame onto the subject of the dissonance (ie., women/gender roles). What do you think?

NB - as you might tell from my tortured syntax, this is a research question I am working on. Please be gentle!

Oh sorry, yes it does perpetuate misogyny, because I am sure that many women know on some level they actually are afraid of certain men. By not being able to articulate that and challenge that on some societal level where we have strength and safety by being part of a group and talking about things in a more transparent way, we are unable to address that fear and talk about safety. The only other option then is to act in a submissive way in certain situations in the hope of drawing out a protective instinct in someone who might be going to hurt you.

And you then have to pretend to yourself that you behaving in a submissive way, through clothes, through words, through body language, is just you being friendly, feminine and approachable, and that is who you really are. Even though I don't simper and smile and bend my head to one side to reveal my neck if the person I am talking to and being friendly to is a woman.

And then men say women don't deserve respect because they give out submissive signals, so don't want to be treated as equal.

I think I have just depressed myself. Is there a feminist around I can rage at for pointing these things out and making the world seem bad?

May I cheer you up almondcakes. All this pretending/submissive malarky vanishes as you get older and you get dazzled by all the lightbulbs going off. It may, of course, be because you are no longer "in the market" so "protection" is not necessary but also it's because you no longer give a flying fuck about what men think about you. It is so liberating! (Unless of course it is cognitive dissonance that you pretend you don't care….)

But I don't think so. Onwards and upwards. Age has such consolations - except for the creaky knees of course

so, if I'm understanding correctly, cognitive dissonance is ultimately a coping strategy, and therefore, because it suppresses discussion, dissent, the truth, it sustains the status quo.

So yes, it perpetuates the very circumstances it has sprung from, ie a sexist/patriarchal society.

or is that way too simplistic?

As so often on FWR I feel like an eager pre-schooler trying to contribute to someone's A Level coursework. So free to ignore me kindly if I've missed the point.

But a lot of men seem to believe very strongly that unknown men as a class (who they might characterise as probably poor and possibly drunk/on drugs) are violent to women, but that known men (generally educated, polite, middle class but crucially individuals, with names and achievements and interesting lives) aren't.

(I had a discussion with a nice male friend of mine about the most recent case of an ageing conductor being sent down for rape; he was genuinely appalled by the charge... to the point where I could see him beginning to wonder if the conductor had actually done it. )

So I think that's where the cognitive dissonance in the OP's initial example comes from. And yes it very much does end up as shifting blame to the woman, because the truth is too uncomfortable. So it can't be true. So it must be someone else's fault, and that someone is always the woman.

and so if one of my nice middle-class educated male friends is accused of rape, but in my mind none of my nice friends could possibly be a rapist, I dismiss the accusation as ridiculous. And from that stance, I am thus more inclined to think that lots of rape allegations are ridiculous.

And so, my cognitive dissonance results in me denying the facts about rape, and therefore perpetuates the problem.

irene, you never sound like your description of yourself! I'm quite shocked to hear you say that.

But, also - yes, I think that is what I am working towards, about men being happy to believe it's 'unknown men'.

I am absolutely not trying to suggest that women who uphold cognitive dissonance are somehow 'asking for it' or 'making it worse' or any of the other cliches. It seems to me society as a whole is in on this. And what you say about known and unknown men makes perfect sense of why cognitive dissonance could be valuable enough to men for them to sustain it - because something that's puzzled me is why people don't just see that male violence is a problem. And the answer is, it's always 'other men's violence'.

So. If all of this is true, then cognitive dissonance is going to put men into a situation where they both know male violence is a problem, and want to believe it's removed from themselves (yes, I know this is so basic and a simplification of irene's point).

Then, I see men in my fiction reading who really want to think they know about women's experiences - almost as if they can know 'woman' better than any individual woman knows herself. And I wonder if that is part of this. Men want to dissociate themselves from the category of violent men, so they end up wanting to think they can be part of the category of women? And that's why they are resistant to the idea they might not know women's experiences?

I think I'm missing something here! Of course men experience cog dissonance and so do women, and it both reflects and perpetuates misogyny, but perhaps it's that men's cd perpetuates in a more direct and negative way. And creates more anger. Am on phone, so sorry if this sounds abrupt, but do you want examples? Or you might need to find a man to ask.

I have just been watching a youtube video of two blokes fighting in a McDonalds. It was hosted on another chat website I go on. There were a couple of men filming the whole fight, and they were laughing the whole way through. There were more comments below the video. They were mostly taking the piss out of one of the fighter's accent, because he sounded like some cockney thug from a Guy Ritchie movie. The actual violence was pretty much ignore.

This reaction is par for the cause. There is no outrage that this was happening in public, or that someone might get hurt. I think that as men, we accept that there is a place for violence in our society. We might not express it like that, but there is almost a resigned acceptance that at some time, at some point, we will at least witness it, and possibly be caught up in it. There will be a lot of 'othering' of the perpetrators, because most of us don't resort to it, but it is always there, simmering away in the background.

whatwould - you are missing the point, but it's because I obviously didn't express myself very clearly.

In my OP, what I was getting at was, what is it in cognitive dissonance that makes it an attractive or useful position to hold? Why do we bother with it?

I don't need examples of CD itself, unless you think they're relevant to that question, which I guess they might be.

Ah, ok - well, precisely because it sustains a society advantageous to men-as-a-class? They subconsciously learn to play this game of knowing-but-not-admitting all sorts of stuff, because ... well, no clear 'because', as probably those men don't think that far, 'don't go there', because then, actually, Jim from down the pub might in fact really be a rapist.

(and women play along as just another example of getting by in the patriarchy)

I still think I'm missing something!!

or to put it another way, it's attractive because it allows us to go through each day without having a mental breakdown and shouting in the street

Sure, but that's us as women.

I think I'm going round in circles here. One day, I promise, I will learn how to write a proper OP.

Let me have a go at a possible explanation, based on watching the process of my DS (yr 2 primary) being socialised. In a nutshell it's because men (and small boys) also fear male violence.

This is very obvious in the playground - one of DS's contemporaries is a head taller than the rest of them, and also in the process of growing up learning to copy his father who is I suspect borderline emotionally abusive to his mother - but thus far, the tall boy in the class shows lots of bullying behaviour and a manipulative streak (for instance, if he comes off worse in a 50-50 clash over a football, he will run to the nearest adult whining that he's been hurt deliberately by the other boy). But he's also big and therefore influential in the social world. Therefore to some extent the other boys have to modify their behaviour - excuse the bullying to an extent to make it bearable, and only make a fuss when it crosses a certain threshold. (This makes the whole scenario sound a nightmarish Lord of the Flies one - actually it's not at all that bad: the adults around have all "got tall boys number" and we police the situation quite carefully).

But (as far as I can see, having worked and socialised in a lot of predominantly male environments as an adult) this pattern continues into adulthood. Not all predominantly male groups will contain a bullying alpha male type (and when they don't, they are pleasant, egalitarian spaces to be in). But when they do, the threat of violence, or verbal bullying, or social exclusion leave the men on the receiving end with the choice of leave the group or embrace cognitive dissonance: "he's a tough bloke but he's okay when you get to know him"; "he can be an arse but only to people he doesn't like, he's fine with his mates"; "well, yeah, he says some shitty things, but he doesn't mean it, he's only trying to get a rise out of you, it's just banter"; "oh yeah, he may joke about rape, but he's a good guy really, would never lay a hand on a woman in real life" (10 to 1 on that the bastard would and does).

So the upshot of it is that men engage in a form of cognitive dissonance whereby unacceptable behaviour by their peers is minimized and brushed under the carpet.

Now it may look like I'm bringing it back to individual personalities, but I don't think I am. I think this is a collective social phenomenon about group dynamics, and that small groups (the rugby club, the workplace) are the micro-scale groups in which the cognitive dissonance is learned, and it then gets generalised to the broader societal scale.

So you end up with the classic "irregular verb" scenario: I'm a nice guy, you occasionally crack rape jokes but you don't really mean them, they (unspecified "other" classic bogeyman down dark alley, probably from a different social class) commit rape, but only a tiny fraction of "real" rapes. The rest are made up by women who regretted it the morning after, doncha know?

Ah, sorry, that's me being unclear. I was meaning men also might be screaming in the street if they didn't adopt cd! (hopelessly naive perhaps!)

Most men think of themselves as 'a good guy', but in order to maintain that, they have to, for example, suppress the likelihood that their mate Jim is a rapist, and keep up the facade that he's been falsely accused.

Otherwise their whole social set up/circle is threatened. They have to choose to reject their friend Jim and probably lots of other friends too, or stick by him and carry on the charade.

Another thing that might be relevant, but which I don't have time to pin down, is how cognitive dissonance is never an active choice. By definition it's something we don't realise we're doing. So it's very much tied up in subconscious socialisation. So I'm not sure whether it can be 'attractive' or even a choice.

eg, only now from age and experience do I realise that a particular relationship I had in my twenties was abusive, and yet at the time I was far more scared of walking past a particular pub late at night than I was going through my front door, home to my then partner.

This is obv. a woman's example, but same applies to men.

That is really useful, thank you. Especially what you say about the way people construct those little responses to the bully at work, because I've come across those and found they're unanswerable really. If you disagree it's obviously your problem.

I think you're right it's a collective social phenomenon.

I love your point about the irregular verb. Because I am interested in how these things seep into language and become the normal ways we expect to hear people expressing themselves. All of those statements 'he's a tough bloke but ok when you get to know him' just assume that the speaker knows more about your experience than you do - because the speaker is in effect saying 'I've had your experience already, and I got past it, and now I am in the inner circle'. So the statements aren't just speaking about the alpha bloke's reputation, they're also de-centring the person listening's sense of self in a way that makes it hard for them to reply.

what - yes, you're right, 'choice' was the wrong word for an individual. But, as a society, maybe we can be said to 'choose'? What I mean is, why's it beneficial for us as a society. I am beginning to get why it is, btw - I just mean, that's where I was coming from with that word 'choice'.

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'

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.

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

Sorry - but I don't buy that at all. Why did we need strong, violent men? And haven't women participated in warfare too?

I believe we are told we need strong violent men, but I don't believe we actually do.

Have fun out.

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.

Really?

Why?

Resources are finite, but not that limited. Economically, for most countries, warfare is actually a pain in the arse, not any kind of benefit.

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.

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.