One of the first things I noticed when going out with our new puppy, Lottie, is how people respond to her just like they do to a baby. But with one big difference – boys and men respond just as much as girls and women. I was quite taken aback by a teenage boy describing Lottie as “adorable” in front of his peers. Only girls and women respond in public to human babies in this way.
I had occasion to reflect on this further during last week’s Horizon on BBC2, which was about the human-dog relationship. I learned that dogs, unlike any other animal, look at and read our faces (like babies do), and that we have bred dogs to select for characteristics that we find childlike or “cute”. Dogs trigger in us the same hormonal changes that babies do, for example, a cuddle with a dog stimulates oxytocin in both human and dog. The idea is that we have bred dogs as pets in response to our instinct to nurture.
The Horizon programme described this, but something very odd suddenly happened. Having presented oxytocin as a hormone that increases in mothers – with no mention of men, in whom oxytocin also rises when handling a baby – suddenly all the dog-owners presented on camera were women. Male dog owners simply disappeared the moment there was a comparison between our nurture of babies and our nurture of dogs. This resulted in a short but bizarre episode of stereotyping the love of dogs as a female activity, completely in contrast to the normal narrative about dog-loving, which, if anything, goes the other way – “one man and his dog”.
That led me back to the teenage boy who described Lottie as adorable. It seems that boys and men are socialised to suppress any public demonstration of their nurturing instincts in relation to human babies. We know from experimentation that women and men respond similarly to babies – when they are wired up to measure physiological reactions – but that their subsequent external reaction is entirely different, defined by restrictive social norms. Lottie liberated the teenage boy by allowing him to express his natural nurturing instinct in a way that is socially normative. Perhaps all men who have dogs are liberated in this way.
I never thought I would gain a new insight into gender from a dog! But at least it gave me an excuse to put a picture of Lottie in a blog post!
