The other night, after watching my remarkably powerful partner repeatedly launch his bowling ball through the air so it landed with a concentration shattering thud a third of the way down the lane (he was not messing around; this is just how he bowls), I turned ruefully to my friend, "Sometimes, I just wish I could spend a day in his body. I want to know what it feels like to have the kind of brute strength to break things by accident."
I am a reasonably strong woman. I grew up riding horses, which is code for mucking stalls, carrying water buckets, and throwing bales of hay. I practice yoga and I rock climb. Since I started climbing, I don't regularly lift weights, but I'm no stranger to them. I am reasonably strong. But when I want to move something that weighs, say, as much as I do, I have to work pretty damn hard at it. I cannot always open my own jars. I have never thought I was pulling on something with a normal force only to have it fall apart in my hand. I am reasonably strong, but I am not especially powerful, not physically anyway.
I think this sense of natural power is something many men (and some women) come to take for granted, this trust in one's own physical prowess, not in a pound for pound kind of way, but in an absolute kind of way. I'm pretty sure that if he needed to, my husband could just pick up a car. He's pulled me, two other women, and several men, all linked together in boats and inner tubes, through what seemed like miles of river too shallow to raft, too cold for most of us to walk through. He is, by my definition, powerful. And this degree of power seems to be accompanied by certainty, by trust in one's own ability to act.
I covet this type of power on a regular basis. I just want to know what it feels like. But today I wanted it with a different type of desperation, the kind that stems from fear and insecurity and vulnerability. I wanted to feel that kind of power from the inside, with all the certainty and self-confidence that come with it. I wanted this from the kind of desperate and terrified positionality that I wonder if big powerful (men) can ever completely understand.
My friend J and I were walking the dogs this afternoon when, seemingly out of nowhere, a little spaniel charged us. Having encountered this trouble-maker dog previously when it broke away from its owner and charged my dog, snarling and clawing at her face, I braced myself and positioned my body between my neurotic and unforgetting border collie mix and the charging spaniel. The dog was surprisingly polite to our little group and all seemed fine as we turned to try and return it to its owners just a house away.
But Bagel (my dog) seemed to know something wasn't right (or she was still traumatized by the spaniel) because she pulled her epic slip-the-collar-and-roll-over-in-the-middle-of-the-street-tail-wagging-and-all routine. By the time I processed her fear, I turned to see a huge bloodhound type dog heading straight for us. He went directly for J's dog, the smallest and most submissive of the three, and seemed to be trying to bite her over and over again around her face and her throat. I don't know if he is usually an aggressive dog or if he mistook Lola and her screams for prey, or if he thought he needed to protect the little spaniel, and I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but at the time he was a monster and we didn't know what to do about it.
He broke Lola's skin, ripping her ear open, before J managed to wedge herself between them, draping her own body over her little terrier's in an absolute display of reactive altruism. We shouted at the dog to stop. We tried to create barriers and move it away with our own bodies. I wanted to do what I had read is a safe-ish way to break up a dog fight and lift the dog's hind end like a wheelbarrow, but feared he would turn on me or on one of the two dogs in my charge. I wanted to kick the dog, to hurt him just enough to scare him off, but my empathy coupled with my fear paralyzed me and I stuck to more passive measures. My size and pound for pound a hell of a lot fiercer, this was a dog neither J nor I could fathom managing if he turned his aggression on us.
The hound's owner, a large man in his early 30s, showed up just as J got Lola out of harm's way and the big dog turned his attention to the wily former reservation mutt I was dog-sitting. She seemed unfazed, but I was relieved when the owner removed his dog from the situation and it became clear that my gumption wouldn't be tested.
Walking away, I don't know if I have ever felt so helpless. J and I talked about it, both wishing we had been more aggressive, more pro-active in actually forcing the dog to retreat. I don't know what I would have done had the dog attacked Bagel instead of little Lola. I imagine I would have done just as I have done every other time I've worried my dog was threatened; I would have done as J did and used my body as a shield. I am confident I would be able to protect my dog, even if it meant risking myself, but I would probably not have had the power (physical or emotional or psychological) to remove the threat from the situation.
What bothers me about this is that my response would never be as certain as my husband's when I told him about it. His is a certainty that comes with having a degree of physical power that renders one, not invincible, but certainly less vulnerable. This certainty is something that cannot be learned late in life. It is something that comes with always having strength beyond what you "should," beyond what is "normal," and the weight to throw behind it. But, the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it is more than that. I wonder if perhaps it isn't just about having profound physical power, but also about living in a world that focuses on and reinforces and perpetuates your power on multiple levels. That is, I think maybe it's also about gender.
While I cannot speak for all women, it's fair to argue that part of why the particular type of vulnerability J and I experienced during that dog encounter is especially frightening for and disproportionately experienced by, women, is because we are constantly reminded of our own vulnerability. It is coupled with and exacerbated by structural vulnerability relating not only to gendered disparities in size and strength but to disparate distributions of material and social power over time such that it is imprinted. It is reinforced every time I read an article about women being attacked by men, every time I hear an argument for or against women's rights to healthcare, to child care, to maternity leave, to dress a certain way, etc. It is highlighted when I seek to be empathic and understand the suffering of my fellow women, fellow humans, fellow creatures. In fact, psychologists and sociologists have begun to show that part of women's distinct ways of constructing "risk" - across all kinds of domains (from sports to finances) - compared to men may be attributable not only to gendered differences in upbringing around communication and values and life role expectations, but because of our disproportionate likelihood of becoming a victim of sexual assault, an act that culturally and psychologically compounds multiple forms of vulnerability (see, for example, Gustafson 1998).
So, as much as I still admit to envying the type of physical power that would have allowed me to intervene and protect myself, J, and our group of dogs in a more proactive way, even if I could physically have moved that hound dog, I have learned, I have been taught all of my life, to be aware always of my own vulnerability. And something tells me brute strength wouldn't be enough to overcome that type of uncertainty.
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