You guys, my dogs are so heteronormative

What is a modern woman to do when her dogs reinforce the patriarchy?

Dear readers, this is a re-post of an essay from last year. Truth be told, my brain has not recovered from the events of the past week or so, including the travel back and forth to New York. All of it has left me sad, distracted and very depleted. Plus, I’ve gained quite a few subscribers since I wrote this in October of last year, who might enjoy a bit of satire. So let’s all have a bit of a laugh together, shall we?

There are a lot of reasons I’m glad I left the US a decade ago. Call me old-fashioned, but I just don’t see the educational value in taking kids on field trips to gay bars and assigning them books in which high school girls suck dick. 

But there’s an even more directly personal reason I’m glad I left the leafy, genteel confines of liberal Brooklyn for the rugged, rural hills of Northern Ireland. 

My dogs are so heteronormative I would have been banned from all the best Brooklyn dog parks. I just know it. 

Let me explain.

I was always a cat person, my whole life. I guess I was always attracted to their “sophisticated personae” and “advanced theatricality,” as Camille Paglia puts it. Cats have poise. They don’t slobber. I just assumed that dogs were simpler creatures, benign and slavish. 

To my shock, though, my dogs have shown me their dark side. They fully, 100 percent, embody damaging patriarchal stereotypes when it comes to gender. 

I noticed this soon after I got my first dog, a tiny little Dachshund we named Max. At first, he was just cute and small. But after only a few weeks, I noticed a disturbing trait. If an adult human male who wasn’t my partner entered the house when I was alone, Max would go crazy. He would stand between me and said male, biting at the hem of his trousers, barking furiously. He bit the electrician. But if my partner was home and a male would come in, Max would take an entirely different tack and ostentatiously scrape and bow to the stranger. Once, a Turkish neighbour came over to discuss something with Brian, and Max literally licked the man’s shoes. 

Max, keeping a close watch on his kingdom

Bo — our female Border Collie — is smarter, faster and stronger than Max and most other male dogs she meets. But does she own her superiority? No. Quite the opposite. She shrinks herself down so as not to make the male feel bad. Once, we were at the beach when my two dogs encountered another dog, a male Lab. He was big and stupid but Bo was instantly infatuated with him (as was Max, weirdly.) I had brought them to play Bo’s favourite game, which was to run as fast as the wind after her bouncy orange ball. The Lab got involved, which was fine at first, until I saw what Bo was doing. Even though she was much faster than he was, every time she was nearly at the ball SHE WOULD SLOW DOWN SO THE LAB COULD CATCH IT FIRST.

Constantly seeking validation for existing.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was letting this big stupid male privilege motherfucker win at her favourite game!!!! She was basically pretending to be bad at math to protect his ego, like Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls! So every time, this random Lab trotted back to me with the ball in his mouth, all proud of himself. At which point, he’d drop the ball at my feet and Max would jump up on his back and start humping away, furiously. Max is gay for other Alphas. 

Which brings me to the most disturbing part of all. Max is super rapey. It doesn’t have to be a female. It doesn’t even have to be a dog. Once, I was talking on the phone and I guess he didn’t like that. So he climbed up onto my lap, grabbed my forearm with his surprisingly strong, stubby front paws and locked onto my arm and just started — WHAM! — pounding away. 

Also, he manspreads. He constantly has his balls out. He sits up straight on the couch, like a human, little back legs spread, bait and tackle dangling for all the world to see. 

And even though he is brown — which is confusing, I admit — he has all the confidence of a mediocre white man. When we are going for walks on the country roads where we live, if a car comes barrelling down the road, Bo immediately goes to the grass verge and sits there until the car is safely passed, like the good girl she is. Max on the other hand, stands his ground. He cannot conceive of a world in which the car does not magically move out of his way. He’s in charge. He bears down on the road, as the car speeds towards us, while I furiously tug on his leash, dragging him to safety. I bet you any money he thinks that it’s his magic strength that saves him from the car, not my indefatigable female efforts, every time.