Gender & power, or why I sometimes wish I were a 200+ lb man

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.

The dog day

So, late last week, we moved into a new house in a new neighborhood and so far, Bagel the dog is beyond in love with her new (bigger and less landscaped) back yard. Since the house didn't yet have a dog door into said back yard, Mike and I went to the hardware store to get the necessary door along with other just-moved-in items like paint and potting soil. Because we have a great dog and are eternally trusting optimists regarding human character, we simply left the back door open so Bagel could come and go as she pleased.

As I was getting out of the car upon our return home, I heard Mike say, "There's a dog in here. There's a dog in the house other than Bagel . . . " Huh? Note, Bagel does not particularly like other dogs, so while my first reaction was amused surprise, my second was one of minor concern (were they getting along? was Bagel ok?). We walked into the house's front room to a happy, tail-wagging Bagel and a nervous, barking heeler/pit mix who was backing his way through the house toward the back yard. Because he had a collar with tags, we assumed he was just nervous/scared at having maybe gotten lost and somehow landing in our yard/house. But after spending about a half hour trying to coax the very wary dog with treats, we were never able to grab his collar to get the necessary information to call his parents. So, we called the humane society (nobody had reported a dog like him missing) and decided to try one last ditch effort at catching him before having them come pick him up. This last ditch effort was to somehow get a leash around his neck, so we again coaxed him with treats, dropping one in the middle of the leash's circle, and when he went to eat it, Mike tried to slip the leash on him. This failed miserably and the dog simply backed up, glowered disdainfully at us, walked to the back of the yard, and ably climbed the chain-link fence to let himself out. This dog was clearly a pro, and he made it clear that he would rather have his freedom than food or treats or praise. Bagel, meanwhile, wiggled and nudged the treat bag at my hip, and licked my hand, making her own preferences known - she loves having a home with her humans and she was pleased that other dog had left. For me, however, the dog's departure was upsetting for a couple of reasons. First, struck by his wariness of people, I worried the dog would return (or be returned) to his own less-than-loving humans. Second, despite my own cerebral questioning of the way we tend to keep dogs (and, arguably, ourselves) leashed, fenced, etc., I found the idea of this dog as lost or homeless unsettling as well.

Lately, Mike has been pointing out that the very idea of having this little (50lb) animal live with us is really kind of strange. But, it seems that what is unusual about it is less that we share a life with her and more that she helps herself to the bed/love seat/couch/papasan chair, etc. She also eats pretty much whatever we will give her - appropriate veggies and fruits included - and would rather hang out with us than other dogs or non-human animals in general. Perhaps the strangest, especially given her affinity for camping, backpacking, hiking and the like, is that she simply does not like to sleep outside. When it's bed-time, she wants to be in a bed, in a car/house/camper/tent. When we go on climbing trips, she does not spend evenings curled up beside us by the fire; at home, when we are up late, she grumpily makes her way to our bedroom on her own. So, perhaps, what seems odd on the surface is that we seem to have a dog who has adapted quite well to the trappings of human luxury.

But, is her attachment to these things really so strange? After all, at 32 I might be hesitant to spend a spontaneous night wrapped in a stray blanket on a beach though I was happy to do so nearly a decade ago in Morocco. Mike and I also transitioned recently from spending our climbing trip nights sleeping in the back of his truck to spending them in a camper (a slip-in, but a camper nonetheless). As I trepidatiously leave my youth and veer toward middle age, I have come to appreciate comforts, and as a species, humans have done the same, becoming increasingly sedentary and dependent on things that facilitate . . . (eating, commuting, communicating, etc.). All of these markers of "culture" have come, in turn, to serve as symbols of our humanity, as ways that we differ from or control nature, including animals.

Anthropologists have spent the last century plus studying what it means to be human, and this has meant first and foremost constructing a category of "human" that is delimited by factors beyond biology, factors such as language and culture. Yet, from an anthropological perspective, the dog (perhaps the animal with whom humans seem to have most closely evolved) becomes a problematic because it challenges our presumed relationship with nature in two ways. Our society's concern about and fear of/for the independent wanderers and "stray" dogs like the one found in my back yard this afternoon may reflect a fear that culture really cannot contain nature. After all, the very premise of modern American society is based on this idea - some striking individual and community-level exceptions aside, we have not shown ourselves to be a culture that seeks or even recognizes an interdependent relationship with nature. On the other hand, our view of Bagel's behavior as "strange" could represent a concern that dogs and humans are less inherently distinct than we would like to believe. Both of these examples blur the lines and presumed relationship between culture and nature, human and non-human. In doing this, they also illuminate the ways we define ourselves.