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, that rhetoric - 'how sad you see all this threat' - really pisses me off.

And I know perfectly decent, nice men (and women) can say that sort of thing, because they genuinely are worried. I wonder if it's telling of people's perceptions about women's speech, though?

I mean, I find if I say something about (eg.) violence being gendered or high heels being damaging to women - something that isn't particularly ground-breaking as an observation really - lots of people won't interpret that as a political statement, or even a general claim. They'll think I need personal reassurance, whether it's about something serious like male violence or something trivial like high heels.

It is very odd. And it is a way of putting women down, because the implication is that I am seeking out reassurance, not putting my view out there.

Interesting what you say about the relationship between gaslighting and cognitive dissonance. I think that's true. I know the most effective form of gaslighting is when they genuinely don't believe they're doing it (at least with some part of their mind).

I've never properly studies psychology. I wish.

'social emotional dependence' - that is such a good phrase.

I think it's much easier to have someone pander to your emotions, that to deal with them on your own.

This is becoming so much clearer for me too, btw. So much so I'm going to do the wanky bit in wanker-academic speech, which I didn't do at the start. Obviously, ignore if your tolerance for pretentiousness is low.

What I'm really interested in is epistemic disruption (where your ways of thinking about truth and knowledge are problematized) in narrative, and how that works to undermine women's credibility. I think a lot of narratives do the same thing we are discussing here: they act as if women's thoughts and emotions are not just discountable or fake, but as if they are also, and simultaneously, something men can easily ventriloquise. A lot of the fictions I'm studying perpetuate this pattern where we're required to sustain cognitive dissonance, and the responses of men to this seems to be to feel tricked - not by the narrative, but by the women in it.

I think I have one example of a narrative that subverts this, and uses epistemic disruption to force men to experience something like the experience of the traumatized woman. But it's very hard to interpret, and it also brings us back to the problem that women's emotions are represented as something men can experience vicariously.

I really want to tear all of that down, and show how deep the structural bias against believing women goes, and how much it is implicated in our ways of talking about violence and discomfort.

Jeanne, could you explain that with reference to a particular book?

I ought to find a well-known book and sit down to work it out.

But I'll give you one of mine for now.

In one of the King Arthur stories, Queen Guinevere is having adulterous sex with Lancelot, who's climbed in to her room through her bedroom window. Because the window bars are rough, he cuts his hand, and leaves blood on her bedsheets, but neither he nor she notices because they're busy shagging and it's dark.

In the morning, someone sees the bloody sheets and immediately decides it's sex-related blood, and that Guinevere must have been sleeping with another knight who was staying in the same castle (not Lancelot). They accuse Guinevere, and she tells them that it's not true, and that the blood is there because she had a nosebleed in the night.

Only thing is, the narrator tells us that she honestly does believe that's the truth of it.

So, we have to believe simultaneously that she's guilty of adultery (because she is) and that she's being truthful (because she is). These two things can both be true at the same time, but IMO they are perfectly ok as cognitive dissonance, because their implications about her character are contradictory.

There is a huge amount of epistemic disruption here, because we can't figure out whether Guinevere would have lied if she'd known, and the narrative is full of 'what-if' bits: there's too much information, and too little, to make a neat plot.

But, the crunch is that, if you think about it, Guinevere has just demonstrated that she doesn't even know her own body. She can tell a lie about having a nose bleed, because she doesn't even know her own body didn't bleed. The men around her know better than she does what her body has been doing, because they correctly guess that she's been committing adultery and don't believe it was just a nosebleed.

I find that really fascinating (if totally odd!) - because, why does the author write it like this?! What's to be gained in having Guinevere sincerely believe in something as trivial as a nosebleed? IMO, what's gained is that it forces us as readers to start seeing her as inherently unreliable even when she thinks she's truthful.

(This story gets dark, btw - Guinevere's eventual fate in most Arthur stories is incest and/or rape, and being sent/fleeing to a nunnery to die.)

And, you see, the more I read about how people responded to that story - both in the past and now - the more I see them really personalize their responses, and really show a strong emotional dislike of Guinevere as a character. They don't just accept that the narrative is forcing them to hold together all of these bizarre competing possibilities about whether she's truthful or a liar - they actually blame her for it and make it her character flaw to be duplicitous, when she is quite a lot less duplicitous than the narrative itself.

I think I've said this before (possibly to Buffy), but I recommend Perec's book W.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W,_or_the_Memory_of_Childhood

The author has chapters about false memories he has of his childhood, including false memories of injuries, and chapters describing his fantastical imaginings of a dystopian society.

The 'truth' of his childhood (as a Jewish child under a Nazi regime) is within the false memories and the imaginings when read together.

That is perhaps a similar kind of subversion, although not about women.

This is interesting but I'm now too tired to follow properly, so will think on it and be back in the morning :)

Bertie, I x-posted with you before. My mum does the same thing - she can be horrified about how I view the world and finds it very sad.

Yet she has seen her fair share of women have awful things happen to them at the hands of men, and sees it as terrible whenever they suffer cruelty or deceit or whatever. YET, at the same time, she sees it as some sort of massive betrayal of good faith for women (in general) ever to take steps to see things that might be coming and protect themselves against them. She would never say anything like this against anyone whom she actually knows who has suffered, but I think there is a "magical thinking" part of her that thinks that anything other than total Pollyanna blind trust on the part of a woman, is a betrayal of the Sacramental Love Project, and if you are going to be like that, then no wonder it doesn't work out for you.

I have often thought, and never got around to saying, that by that logic the people who count the money at church (according to strict procedure, no one is ever alone in the room with the cash, etc) are just INVITING theft by daring to imagine that it might happen and taking steps against it.

(And yet - and yet! - and yet - trust is important and precious and good things do not happen without trust. So...?)

Jeanne, that is a great example.

Have you watched Veronica Mars? It's a great show and really interesting in this context. Veronica is at high school when her best friend is murdered, and her father is discredited and loses his prestigious job as chief of police and sets up as a PI instead. The first series deals with Veronica's growing sense of her town as a place of the haves and have-nots (now she is one of the latter) and her attempts (detective style) to find out what happened to her friend, and what happened at a party where she was drugged and raped (and has lost her memory of it).

There's a lot in there about all these themes of your status inflecting your credibility; and your sexual credibility / honour being very crucial for a woman.

BUT

Veronica is completely credible and as a result one of the most likeable, trustable, honourable female characters on TV ever. In the context of all the stuff you have been writing about, Jeanne, I can now understand why this is such a fantastic exception that has such great resonance - why I watched it with a feeling that this was a Different kind of show

BUT BUT BUT

(slight spoilers alert)

ALTHOUGH Veronica is utterly trustworthy and credible as a character, she cannot remember her rape because she was drugged. Her eventual nailing of the culprit is achieved through scientific / forensic information. So we are STILL in the situation where a woman's word will not do (in her case because she hasn't the memory / consciousness to speak it) and instead there has to be an external "proof" of what happens. Veronica is an agent, so she achieves this proof and delivers it to herself.... but still its in the pattern where it can't simply be that it happens to the woman, she tells everyone, and everyone believes her. It is a puzzle to which SCIENCE has to deliver the answer

Ooh, yes, Veronica Mars is a great example - because there are so many red herrings in that plot about whether she was actually raped or not. Thank you!

buffy - I generally don't know enough about the authors to do that. I usually don't even know their names. But, I would guess it is nothing to do with male or female authors, because my hunch is that this is a type of story we tell, and we're not even totally aware that we're telling it or reading it. I think that is why it survives so long - it becomes part of how we expect fiction to work.

almond - thank you, I will look at that. It is similar, but perhaps slightly less manipulative if I am understanding rightly.

Well, I don't have literature skills, but certainly people who do have looked at it in terms of revealing oneself through self erasure, psychoanalytic approaches and testimony around trauma.

I don't think about it as manipulative in the sense that it is autobiographical as the parts of the book (alternating chapters) are about a. his personal false memories and b. a dystopian fantasy he constructed as a child. So even when he reports on meeting people who can 'objectively' say this injury did not happen to you, that only makes the false memory more meaningful. He had to lie about his identity for his whole childhood to remain safe from the Nazis, so the falseness is his real story.

The main character in his dystopian chapters also has gaps and false memories, but I didn't read that as that character being manipulative, because the author himself is also claiming to be a person who doesn't remember, and that is how the truth of who he is is revealed to the reader.

So I suppose the subverting of the kind of narratives you are talking about is that in this case the lack of facts in someone's explanation has been imposed upon them by society's inhumanity? Although that isn't how I read it at the time, because I was too busy being amazed by how someone could explain who they were through the fabrications of their imagination, and it bring out such a strong response of empathy.

Yes, I think that's a little different. Hard to know without reading it (sorry!).

But that sounds as if he's producing something that's mimetic of his actual experience - there are false memories because he really had those, and it's autobiography, so we know he's telling us his experience.

It is different in a fictional text where we end up doubting the character because of the structure of the narrative, rather than because of the bare facts of what the character does or says.

Put it another way - in my Guinevere example, there is nothing to stop the narrator telling the story differently, such that we don't worry about why Guinevere is lying/telling the truth about a nosebleed. Or, with Veronica Mars, the writers could have decided not to include the flashbacks to what she thinks happened (which allow us to 'see' false versions of events, which then become confused in our minds as we start to doubt her).

With your example, it sounds slightly different - he has false memories, so we know parts of his testimony are not true, but we were never in any doubt that this was the case, and we understand why.

It is obviously closely related and I must read the book - I am reading a lot about false memory at the moment - but I think what I'm interested in is one step away. I'm not sure the book as you describe it would produce cognitive dissonance in us as readers about the character? But I might be very wrong there.

I was also thinking about an Inspector Calls. DS studied it for GCSE and the exam question was on gender roles.

I always thought it was dubious as a 'feminist' book. Firstly because it was yet another set text where something terrible has happened to a woman to aid the character development of others, but her voice is totally absent. She never appears. She is part of the fridged woman trope. And the terrible events of her life are used to promote a political cause that isn't about women in particular (as was the case with every text DS was set at school).

But in terms of what you are discussing, there is a discussion among the main characters about if the events really happened to the woman, if they are even all talking about the same women. Some of the events recounted were of meeting her and the characters not believing what she told them. The tale of the woman is believed not on any testimony from her, but on the say so of the inspector, who is clearly an insertion of the male author in the play.

Oh, yes, 'woman who exists so others learn a valuable lesson' is such an annoying trope.