Reuters Actually Published an Article About the Dog Patriarchy Mistreating Female Canines
So you want to smash the patriarchy. Good for you. You’ve joined an antifa group, bought an entire closet of Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre T-shirts, adopted your own gender pronouns and drop the word “mansplaining” into every conversation where someone with a Y chromosome shares their opinion.
But is your anti-patriarchalism truly inclusive? I don’t just mean being intersectional. Have you considered your anthropocentric privilege? Have you thought about the dogs? If not, I’m afraid I’m going to have to call you out — the same way that one of the world’s biggest wire services did.
The article is from February of last year, yet it just crossed my desktop this morning — and I couldn’t help but laugh in a bad way. It’s from Reuters, which means it pretty much serves as another elegy for gatekeeping at major wire services: “Glass ceiling for dogs? Males win Westminster almost twice as often.”
Readers might want to keep it in mind amid all the hype during the run-up to this year’s show (scheduled for Feb. 11 and 12, as if you didn’t know that already).
“After the German shepherd Rumor won the top prize at last year’s Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York, she had her first litter of puppies and retired from competition, like many female show dogs,” the article, by Stephanie Kelly, begins.
“By contrast, most top male show dogs can keep competing for years, and it is no coincidence that they also win ‘Best in Show’ in the prestigious annual competition far more often than females, breeders and handlers said as they prepared for this year’s show, which opens Monday, Feb. 12 in New York,” she continues.
First, I think we ought to call out some of the tacit assumptions here: We don’t know what these dogs identify as. Check your cis privilege.
Second, imagine that — females give birth and males don’t. It’s almost like there’s some sort of biological thing here. Also, the biological age that most dogs give birth is between 3 to 5 years old, which is also the age at which show dogs win most of their awards. Again, imagine your peak child-bearing years lining up with your peak years of athleticism and/or pulchritude. Again, it’s almost like there’s some sort of natural conspiracy at work here.
But wait, there’s more: Female dogs are also subject to derogatory naming conventions!
“Female dogs, known in pure-bred circles as ‘bitches,’ have snared Best in Show at Westminster 39 times since the award was first given in 1907,” Kelly writes. “Males, known simply as ‘dogs,’ have been victorious 71 times, almost twice as often.”
I actually call all three of my female dogs “doggos,” which shows that I’m either progressive or spend way too much time on the internet. I’m going to go with the latter because I still can’t listen to Bernie Sanders talk about anything without laughing uncontrollably.
Oh, and speaking of nature, here’s another problem: Female dogs are apparently less likely to win if they’re in a fertile period.
“A female competitor’s ‘heat’ cycle brings changes in temperament and hormones that can also hurt its chances of winning the world-renowned show for pure-bred canines,” Kelly writes.
“Many handlers and owners will not show a female during its cycle, which comes about every six months, because ‘they’re moody,’ said Wendy Kellerman, a handler and breeder from Hauppauge, New York.” They also shed their hair during the cycle, which can mean they’re not as show-worthy.
“Some people say, ‘I don’t want to be bothered with that, I’ll go with a male,” Kimberly Calvacca, a dog handler, said.
And, of course, the major benefit of entering and winning these shows is that you can breed these dogs for serious cash, so you obviously wouldn’t spay them.
“People don’t like to campaign females because they don’t like to jeopardize their breeding program,” Calvacca told Reuters. “Males can be used to stud anytime, and still show and breed at the same time.”
So what they’re saying is that there are biological differences between the male and the female of a species. Well, thank the heavens that doesn’t translate over to us.
I had originally thought this article, given the silliness of the topic, was going to be written with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Nope. This is a straight-faced examination of one of the most fundamentally unserious things Reuters has ever reported upon. Kelly even has the judge for the Best in Show at Westminster on record denying that there’s an inherent advantage for male dogs, as if this was somehow important.
The invocation of the glass ceiling is meant, almost certainly, to invite a parallel with our own sturm und drang involving gender. Which is interesting, because I don’t think that it’s coincidental that all of the people interviewed for this article were female.
There are few sporting events so bereft of anything resembling “toxic masculinity” as the Westminster Dog Show. The same can be said for dog shows in general: If a competition is parodied in a Christopher Guest movie, it’s usually not awash in testosterone.
Furthermore, there’s not actually any form of privilege here inasmuch as these are dogs, who have been too busy licking themselves for the last few millennia to get anything resembling a civil society together. Given that there aren’t exactly hierarchies of privilege or a history of misogyny (dogsogyny?) in the canine world, it doesn’t really matter to anyone whether male dogs or female dogs win a structured competition being judged, in this particular case, by a woman.
As for the problematic nature of calling female dogs “bitches,” let it be noted that the word goes back to the Middle English “bicce” and possibly an earlier Germanic word, all of which meant “female dog,” according to Merriam Webster. The slang obviously came later.
But I don’t need to tell you any of this this. Why? Because this is ridiculous on its face. It’s the product of a writer and editors who see everything through the lens of identity politics. They view the Westminster Dog Show as a pillar of the patriarchy because everything is.
If there are biological reasons for this, well, we have to fix that. Paternity leave for stud male dogs. Discrimination lawsuits if a judge looks askance at a female dog who’s shed her hair. No more use of the b-word. And if that all fails, it’s time for antifa to barge in and shut it down.
In that last case, I’d almost encourage it. Not that I’m for lawlessness, but at least the dog show would be watchable for once.
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