Of dogs and men

Saying no, people-pleasing, and owning your weird

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Elena and Pinto at the park. Photo by Jorge.

“Can I say hello?”

Our puppy came with a checklist of all the ways we should socialize him. Rubbing his ears. Squeezing his paws. Introducing him to men. To babies. To teenagers. To people of different heights, sizes, hair colors, intensity levels. To plastic, concrete, and brick. To barks, squawks, squeaks, and raindrops. To the unexpected, anywhere and anyhow.

The point is that the puppy is then cool as a cucumber if, say, a toddler comes busting out of nowhere and squeezes his ear, or a middle-aged man with dreads rides an electric scooter down our cobblestone street at 700 miles per hour (this happened! Pup was chill).

The checklist included other dogs as an item, but didn’t go into depth. What I grew up believing was that puppies need to be introduced to as many dogs as possible in order not to be scared, aggressive, socially awkward humping weirdos etc.

I have had several dogs so far in my adult life, because I am an incurable Dog Person who can’t live anywhere more than a few months without starting to google humane societies at 1 a.m. This was the socialization philosophy I followed, without ever identifying it as such or doing any research or thinking about it because I was 24-30 years old and this was generally how I moved through life!

Alas, since I am now a somewhat more responsible forty-three-year-old dog owner, I did a small encyclopedia’s worth of reading and it turns out many dog trainers define “socialization” as your puppy not meeting any dogs at all except for a few well-curated known entities from friends and family. The idea here is that your puppy gets accustomed to walking past all manner of dogs in the park and doesn’t become hysterical with the desire to go say hello to each one. Your puppy grows desensitized – uh huh, cool, that’s nice, just like with toddlers and skateboarding dudes. It’s not a five-alarm fire in which butts must be sniffed right now.

Plus, the trainers argue, it’s actually quite unnatural and uncomfortable for dogs to meet on leash, and many dogs who might be fine off leash could snap or worse when constrained. There are few benefits to introducing dogs on leashes, and a whole bunch of unpleasant dangers.

Okay, okay. I was on board, but this still felt very odd. I get the analogy that humans don’t necessarily walk up to every single random human in the park and say HELLO! What did you eat for breakfast? But it seemed like denying our puppy the fundamental joy of communing with his own.

More problematically, it was socially awkward.

Everyone wants to meet a puppy. Or at least, everyone out for a nice fall walk in a city park wants to meet a puppy. It felt downright cruel to say no.

For a while, I hesitated. Well-meaning people with dogs would ask, “Can I say hello?” while rapidly approaching and I’d freeze and waver and then just let it happen, even though my little guy would sometimes be trembling while he was sniffed head to toe by a 150-pound doodle.

Then one day, I was walking Little Fuzzy Man, aka Pinto Bean, aka Frijolito, and an older couple was approaching from the opposite direction on the trail with a medium-sized schnauzer.

“Oh hello, puppy,” the man said, and immediately crossed the trail to put his dog in Pinto’s face. Something about the gesture set me off.

“Oh, he’s not saying hi right now,” I said, feeling like the epitome of an awkward dog person, straight out of this Portlandia skit.

The man was put out. This was when I discovered that people really, really do not like when you tell them they cannot say hello to your puppy, even if you do it in the most apologetic female midwestern way possible, bending over backwards with absurd excuses (“we’re in the middle of a training session and he might have slight allergies today! I’m so so so sorry!”)

The man sniffed. He did not move his dog back, so I had to wait and kind of shove Pinto off the side of the trail.

“Well, he needs to meet other dogs,” he huffed. My hackles went up.

“Excuse us,” I said. He stepped over the slightest inch and we squeezed by.

For the rest of that walk, I both bristled with irritation and wondered if I was nuts. Was I exaggerating? Was I crazy? Was I too much?

Then, a few days later, it happened again. Another man, another dog. He simply started walking up as if it were a given that we would meet. Keep in mind, the main trails in the park are some ten feet wide – it’s easy to pass with plenty of room and not have dogs be within feet of each other.

This time I gathered more strength. “We’re training,” I said.

The man made a sour face. “He’s friendly,” he said of his dog, clearly insulted.

“Not right now,” I replied. He actually, I am not kidding you, rolled his eyes. It struck me that these men felt entitled to my dog, and entitled to educate me on the proper training of all dogs, and that I was really anxious about not making them happy. I am going to be forty-four years old in July and I’ve written passionate op-eds and spoken to auditoriums and traveled alone around the world and I was uncomfortable telling strange men in the park no your doodle can’t smell my dog’s butt. WHAT?

Self-mastery

I was both fascinated and horrified. I am not, as anyone who has ever met me would probably know within two minutes, a shrinking violet. I am not generally a shy or intimidated or subtle kind of person. I am in fact deeply passionate about what I care about and if I need to learn a social skill, it’s what a beloved editor friend once called tone-softening – the perfect tone-softened term for what my writing often needs and what this friend gave it.

But then out of nowhere this puppy showed me that even while I could be so vocal and righteous and bold in some areas of my life, in many daily encounters I was feverishly people-pleasing right up there with the best of them, just like any of my teenage girl students scribbling “great work!” on their zoned-out bro partner’s peer review with a little smile emoji.

I was scared to be seen as mean, weird, rude, or awkward. I was scared and uncertain of my own values – was I the weird one? Were they? What the hell was this?

In mid-winter, when Pittsburgh was in the thick of the snowpocalypse (over a foot of snow! Negative eight degrees Fahrenheit! The university closed for the first time in a decade!), Jorge, Elena, and I took Pinto for a hike in the park. The snow was so deep he could barely peep his little head of over it. It was a gorgeous hike, bristling with the sparkle of extreme cold. At the very end, just as we were about to finish one of the small mountain bike trails, two dogs came bounding out of nowhere. They were lab mixes of some sort, and big. The owner was nowhere in sight.

I swooped Pinto into my arms and stepped off the trail just as one of the dogs reached me and started jumping up, scratching me and trying to get to Pinto. I held the puppy aloft like a precious trophy while I spun and shouted. An old man appeared in the snow. He said nothing and did nothing. His dog, meanwhile, was leaping up on me, tearing at my coat, circling my feet.

“You’re doing the worst possible thing,” he advised me, cooly.

“It is your responsibility to handle your dogs,” I told him, barely not shouting. “If you have your dogs off the lead, they need to be under your control.” He waded into the brush as if going flower picking, very casual. His dog completely ignored him, lunging and lunging at Pinto.

The dog likely wasn’t aggressive, but he was extremely enthusiastic and surely terrifying for a puppy. The man tried to grab him and failed, tried again and failed. Then, making a leap at him, the man fell. We all kind of gasped as he floundered in the snow. He managed to get hold of his dog from that position and I took advantage to scurry down the trail. Elena and Jorge followed.

Elena was upset – not because this dog had terrorized Pinto, who was shaking, but because the old man had fallen.

“He fell down,” she said, tearful. She is an extremely sensitive child disturbed by witnessing any human or animal suffering. “Why did you do that?”

I explained to her that while it was sad that the man fell, he was responsible for his dogs, and they were being rude and even dangerous, and he couldn’t and barely even tried to control them. What if they’d attacked or hurt Pinto? Or me?

“But he fell,” she said, still sniffly. It startled me to see this age-old societal dynamic playing out in real time with my kid: instead of holding a man accountable, assuming he is responsible for his own actions and behaviors, we blame a woman for holding him to account. We blame a woman for standing up for herself instead of acquiescing to the unspoken and ubiquitous power dynamic.

I kept reiterating this to Elena – if your dog is off leash (which, by the way, is against the law) you are responsible for ensuring it doesn’t harm or impose itself on anyone. No one else is responsible for controlling or protecting it or being polite to you. She understood the point, but she’d felt the old man’s opprobrium – how he made it seem like she and I were wrong, like we were idiots for saying no.

Later, at a puppy training class we took with Pinto, I asked the trainer if I’d done the right thing by picking him up when the dog came racing over.

“Absolutely,” she said. “What are you supposed to do, risk that this dog terrifies your dog or inflicts damage on him?”

It was both affirming and sad to me that I had to ask this question – that I knew, instinctually in the moment and afterward, that I’d done the right thing, but I’d let this guy mansplain me into insecurity, make me feel like I was inconvenient and embarrassing for standing up for myself.

The upside of all this was that I stopped wavering about being weird. Own your weird, I told myself as a kind of incantation before visiting the park.

Instead of wondering if I was crazy, if I was too much, if I should just go with whatever the norm was, I trusted myself.

In a fascinating recent newsletter about her journey with sobriety, Emily A. Hancock wrote about the Greek concepts of akrasia and enkrateia. Akrasia can be defined as acting against one’s better judgement; making a certain decision, but believing, or perhaps knowing internally, that a different choice would be better. Enkrateia can be defined as a state of self-mastery or power over one’s desires and impulses, knowing when they are temptations distracting from larger goals. Hancock writes that she now asks herself, “Am I operating from a state of self-mastery or am I operating from a state against my own better judgement?”

I love this question and its nuance. For a long time, I’ve understood instinct as something I either tap into or I don’t. This tends to be the popular framing: listen to your instincts. Follow your intuition.

But instincts and intuition can be easily warped and overpowered by both cultural pressures and a lack of deep self-understanding and self-trust. Saying okay when you actually want to say no can feel like instinct because it comes from a very profoundly rooted desire to appease, to be safe.

As Gabor Maté writes in The Myth of Normal, most of us learn from our earliest childhoods that we must temper our own desires in order to accommodate our families and cultures. Over time, we lose touch with these desires, and with who we actually are and what we actually need and believe.

Jorge recently met a dad who was shocked by the fact that we only let Elena have thirty minutes of screen time per week. His wife would never do that to their child, he explained – not because they think screen time is good or healthy or important, but because his wife does not want to be “the weird parent.”

There is so much to unpack here I could 100% write a dissertation on it, but let’s begin with: not wanting to be weird or do anything that makes anyone uncomfortable is actually what perpetuates problematic social norms of all kinds? Because a lot of what is “normal” is actually, in fact, quite weird? Because it used to be normal to grab women’s butts in the workplace and smoke in restaurants and use racial slurs and blame women’s assaults on the fact that they were wearing short skirts (okay this is still the norm but we’re working on it) and then someone decided to do something uncomfortable and say, hey, this is not okay?

Maybe this seems a bit extreme (tone softening!) but the point is that instinct can quickly be painted over with the desire not to be weird. Sure, those YouTube videos seem like a bunch of AI-generated junk but I don’t want to be the weird parent. Sure, the trainers say don’t let your dog meet other dogs on leash but I don’t want to be the weird dog person. Sure, that coach makes me feel a little off, but I don’t want to be the one asking the awkward questions! Beyond the actual, tangible ramifications of this hesitancy, there is the damage it does to your instinct. Especially as a woman.

The less weird you are willing to be, the less you are willing to do what you want and need when it feels uncomfortable, and then the less in touch you are with what you actually want and need.

The more you doubt and question yourself, apologize and appease, the less capable you are of seeing when you are in akrasia or enkrateia, when you are practicing self-mastery and when you are swimming upstream against the current of your instincts, spitting out water and coughing and telling yourself this is alright this is just what everyone does.

This also works the other way: the more you’re willing to acknowledge and embrace your weird, the clearer the distinctions become between a) what is socially acceptable and “normal” b) what you think you want and need and believe and c) what is actually healthy for you.

Practicing weirdness

When I started saying no to men with dogs, I became a bit more capable of saying no in other situations.

I am one who does not typically get X-rays at the dentist. Maybe once every couple of years, but not every six months. Routine X-rays are not the standard of care in any European country and are largely, surprise surprise, the result of a for-profit healthcare system in the United States.

Recently, the American Dental Association finally came out with an official recommendation that routine dental X-rays should not be done, especially on children, and in fact that X-rays should only be taken when there is a clinical need (e.g., when a cavity is suspected).

Still, I face significant attitude every time I say no to these X-rays. But now I do it with much greater ease; I usually call ahead and give a heads-up that I’ll decline, calm and clear, and sometimes the person on the phone goes into a little tizzy and sometimes they don’t. If the response is too outlandish, I find another dentist.

I used to feel stressed and vexed by this and now I know, this is how I am, what I believe, and I don’t have to feel any which way about it. I don’t have to apologize, defend myself, or get angry. Instead, I practice self-mastery. When I come at it from this perspective, not cringing and hoping or blaming and resenting, people actually seem to take it better – okay, this is just how she is.

I also try and practice being a little weird as much as I can. Maybe I sat in a seat too close to the railing at the lecture and now I want to move, but will people judge me if I get up and try three different seats for the best view? Will I look weird? The second I ask that question, I know I have to do it.

One-minute mindfulness exercises at the start of my class (are they judging me as an absolute freak, or worse, a cringe old lady doing earnest things?). Covering my ears when the super-loud tractor passes me in the park (what a nerd, are you kidding me?). Letting my kid walk to the tea shop five blocks away by herself (what if some snoopy nutcase calls the police?).

It’s not so much a yes or a no as it is a compass: what is my instinct, and do I dare to follow it?

I first heard the term “instinct-injured,” I am ashamed to admit, on the Free Birth Society podcast. The term has such a cringe wellness podcast-y vibe, but it’s also kind of helpful. Many women, including myself, might describe themselves this way. It comes from the long-term suppression of one’s own instincts in order to please someone else, often in a position of authority, often male. Asking the doctor, “Could we please not do this?” Asking the guy at the party, “Could you please stop?” Simpering voice. All the charm. Saying yes when you mean no. Wondering if you’re wrong or you’re crazy if you disagree, if you don’t want to.

It’s part of why such a toxic culture persists in birth: at such a vulnerable time, many women willingly violate their instincts because of fearmongering and mansplaining and talking-down-to and talking over. It takes tremendous strength to speak up and follow one’s weird when everyone else is insisting it’s wrong, it has no basis, it’s dangerous.

In the car last weekend, Elena and I were listening to the Texas Monthly podcast “America’s Girls,” about the rise of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and the questions they pose about female power, beauty, and sexuality. Elena is obsessed with the Netflix show about the cheerleaders, which is a mostly sanitized and corporate-approved version focusing on inspirational messages and hair.

The podcast was much more nuanced and I was delighted that Elena was equally spellbound by it. It featured many cheerleaders who had absolutely loved their jobs, but also struggled with eating disorders, faced constant criticism of their bodies, dealt with racism, or questioned the outrageous double standards the cheerleaders had to live with (shaking their boobs in halter tops on the field; angels of moral purity off it).

Episode 5 of the show concludes with the story of a cheerleader, Cindy Villarreal, who gets invited by Jerry Jones, the new owner of the cowboys, to accompany him and a group of businessmen on his private plane. Although Villarreal has spent essentially her whole professional life performing for men, this felt wrong. It felt different. On the field, she was a performer. On the plane, she was “eye candy” for a group of close-up leering men. The distinction mattered to her.

But you don’t say no as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. You say, “Yes m’am!” Villarreal turned to Debbie Bond Hansen, the assistant coach, for advice, telling Hansen that it had been her dream to be a cheerleader, clearly hoping Hansen might offer her a way out. Hansen did not. “You have some choices to make,” she told Villarreal. And so Villarreal made her choice.

“I think what [Jerry Jones] was doing was he was showboating,” Villarreal told Sarah Hepola, the podcast host. ‘Look at all the girls. I just bought this team. I own these girls.’ And he didn’t own me.” She quit. She never heard from anyone on the team again.

“Good for her!” I shouted at the radio on I-79.

“Ugh, Mom, stop it!”

I reined myself in before I utterly ruined the moment with feminist mom moralizing. But I circled back to it later with Elena. I talk to her a lot about being weird, which is pretty much the most horrifying thing one can be in sixth grade. She is most certainly not weird, wearing Uggs and leggings and a cloud of suffocating vanilla perfume like every other girl in her class, but I know there is weird in there. What I want is for it to stay alive.

Not just in the big things – I know she is more than capable of standing up for any injured human or animal, for defending what she believes in – but in the little things, too. In her discomforts and her preferences. Her understanding of the world.

When we were in Spain last year, she had a sleepover in our house with two older girls. One was 12, one 14. Elena was delighted to be included. They wanted to watch a horror movie and I could see on her little ten-year-old face that she was terrified. Elena could barely watch Harry Potter just a few years ago. She would have nightmares for weeks.

(I also remembered when my big sister made me watch Legends of the Fall when I was in sixth grade because she had a crush on Brad Pitt, and she told me it was “no big deal,” and then people were getting attacked by bears and soldiers were dying horrible deaths in World War I and I spent three-fourths of the time covering my eyes and crying and whew boy did she get it from my parents! That was the last R-rated movie I saw for a long time.)

Elena looked at me beseechingly and I told her to ask for a different movie. You could tell that the asking for another movie was almost more painful than enduring the horror flick, but she did it. She asked for what she needed. Such a minor practice, but one that should be up there with flossing one’s teeth and eating enough veggies.

Are you honoring your weird? Are you politely allowing yourself to be approached by a man’s sniffing doodle despite discomfort? Are you saying no when you need to? Are you embarrassing your children enough? Have you felt that minor-key thrill of self-mastery when you do the awkward thing, you eat the second hot dog, you turn down the invitation, you run headlong into the surf despite the gazes of polite strangers, you sing?

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Recommendations

Anna Brones and Mason Currey on art and money. Oof.

On becoming a bad investment – wowza Maria Bowler did I need this.

“‘Steering your course’ just means making the choices that are actually available to you, in the real situation in which you find yourself, with less deference to the inner judge, and more focus on what makes you feel alive.” Oliver Burkeman.

“Yes, it’s good for young women to hold babies. But it’s also good for young men, old women, old men, and teenagers to hold babies. It’s good for everyone to hold babies, because babies are amazing! And we’re in a bizarrely baby-free phase of our collective human history.” Loved this piece on “vitamin baby” from Darby Saxbe.

“Ours is a culture that lauds people who dedicate their lives to caring for people, and offers little visibility, respect, curiosity or support for those who care for a person or two.” Excellent piece from Elissa Strauss.

On the desire for silence, and a lovely prompt for writing an erasure poem, from Suleika Jaouad.