Dog Whistles
(No, Not That Kind)
I mean literal dog whistles.
Readers may remember from “At Long Last, Lenny” that my husband, Matt, and I recently adopted a dog. Lenny is a Very Good Boy who resembles a rottweiler after being put under a shrink ray.1
We’re still adjusting to one another. Lenny is getting used to those strange small flat glowing rectangles2 that are inordinately fascinating to us humans. For our part, we recently discovered that Lenny has an aversion to something eccentric: Wiping.
The first time I cleaned the mirrors after Lenny joined our family, he yowled plaintively. He was hearing frequencies above the range of our limited human perception. Now, anytime I try to wipe anything, he races over, whining and boofing in distress, to put a stop to the terrible noise. Makes me think of Dora the Explorer yelling “Swiper no swiping!”
Why can’t he be afraid of the vacuum cleaner like a normal dog?
Don’t Think of a Pink Elephant
Of course I understand that Lenny freaks out not because he is naughty, but because the sound hurts his ears. Unfortunately, when it comes to people whose perceptions are different from ours, we sometimes struggle to be so accepting.
Try this: Can you picture a pink elephant right now? What does it look like? (Mine is a brightly-colored cartoon in the style of Rocky and Bullwinkle. He’s also raising his trunk like Ganesha.) There is wide variation in our ability to form mental images. People who have aphantasia can’t do it at all.
Larissa MacFarquhar reports that in 1880, Francis Galton asked several scientists to form a mental picture and describe what they saw. To his astonishment,
I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words “mental imagery” really expressed what I believed everybody to suppose them to mean. . . . They had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who were normally endowed, were romancing.
Imagine someone tells you about an ability they have that you lack, and instead of saying, “Huh. Cool! Tell me more!” your response is to assume that they are making it up. These scientists were not being particularly scientific.
Wolf Whistles
We’re all a bit like Lenny, in that our circumstances may sensitize us to stimuli to which other people are blithely oblivious. Dan Outdoors recently posted a Substack note listing “five simple tips for men when approaching women hikers on the trail”—for example that they should announce themselves when passing, not follow too closely, and be predictable. These rules are in fact normal hiking etiquette and important for everyone’s safety.
And yet Dan’s post was met with outrage. Some men accused women of being too “fragile” and complained we were demanding “special treatment.” “Why do we have to accommodate women?” they griped.
As readers know, I hike alone all the time and am not afraid of male hikers. On the contrary, I appreciate how the guys check up on me when I am huffing and puffing. I have written before about men who accompanied me along rough patches to make sure I was safe. One man stayed with me through a perilous section and then treated me to a fondue lunch. But I am tall and strapping, and I live in a remarkably safe country.3 Regular-sized women in the US likely have had experiences that predispose them to worry when they encounter strange men out in the wilderness. Or they read the news.
For an example closer to home, take those wolf whistles. Please. In my twenties when I lived in Chicago, I never once, not a single time, stepped outside without being catcalled (or worse). Most of the men I knew couldn’t understand why this bothered me. “Isn’t it flattering though?” they would ask, skeptically. Frustrated, I would ask them how they would feel if panhandlers relentlessly accosted them the moment they set foot outdoors. Aha! I could see the lightbulb blink on!
And lest you think I’m picking on men, it would also behoove us women to consider men’s perspectives and experiences, for example with dating. Many of us are tempted to lay the blame for male loneliness on male flaws, but the dating situation can be awful for young men who just want a loving relationship. The apps prioritize superficial qualities—looks, height, income—and leave a lot of worthy guys with few prospects through no fault of their own.
Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar
Here’s a thought experiment: You’re walking along, when suddenly a man in front of you has an epileptic seizure. You rush over to help. Someone calls 911, and you ball up your jacket into a pillow so the man won’t injure himself. While you’re kneeling next to him, one of his flailing arms strikes you in the face, hard. How do you react?
A. I ice the bruise but otherwise do nothing. The man has epilepsy, so of course he didn’t mean to hit me.
B. The man obviously hates me and wants to hurt me. He was just using epilepsy as an excuse to hit me. He should be publicly shamed. In fact, we need to protect ourselves from assaults like these, so people with epilepsy shouldn’t be allowed out in public.
I’m assuming you answered A!
Last month, a man’s neurological disorder caused him to do something that upset many people, who responded to the incident by answering B. Yes, I’m talking about the BAFTAs.
If you have just returned from being stranded on a desert island, or if you wisely opt not to fall down every internet rabbit hole, here’s what happened: John Davidson, who has a severe form of Tourette syndrome (TS), attended the BAFTAs because a film about his life had been nominated for several awards. When Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo came onstage to present an award, Davidson yelled the n-word. Jordan and Lindo, after the initial shock, were apparently quite gracious. Other people? Not so much.4
The Substacker Cartoons Hate Her has shared some of the craziest takes—for example that Davidson should always wear a gag when he’s out in public. At the normally moderate New York Times, the top-rated comments to an article about the incident agree that Davidson should have stayed home or segregated himself in a special room so as not to offend anyone. One top comment implies that TS doesn’t cause people to say the n-word, so Davidson must have used it intentionally: “The n-word is an absolutely vile term and in no way comparable to the normal swearing or wordless sounds that those with Tourettes often project.”
This is balderdash, of course. TS tics are like a sneeze you can’t hold back. Davidson “want[s] people to know and understand that my tics have absolutely nothing to do with what I think, feel or believe. It’s an involuntary neurological misfire.” While it’s true that the n-word is evil when used as a racist insult, it’s also so taboo that people have lost their jobs not because they said the word, but merely because they said benign words that sound like it (a synonym for miserly in one case, and a Chinese word in another). When we combine such a strong taboo with a neurological condition that causes sufferers to blurt out taboo words, this is what we get. Davidson’s tic was not a (figurative) dog whistle. Sometimes a tic is just a tic.
The Principle of Charity
We progressives like to construct hierarchies of victimhood. We accord the most honor and sympathy to the least of us. We place the most downtrodden on the top. It’s very Sermon on the Mount of us. But sometimes we judge in error. The most downtrodden person at the BAFTAs was not the Black actors onstage—men who have built remarkable careers and been able to express their exceptional talents, and who are enjoying well-deserved universal accolades for their achievements.
No. Our sympathies most properly lie with Davidson. Yes, he is a white man who shouted the worst word in the English language. But he also suffers from a devastating illness that caused him to drop out of school at age 16, has limited his prospects, and has subjected him to social isolation. He once ticked at a young woman and her boyfriend beat him nearly to death with a crowbar. Let’s not heap more misery on him—and this applies to anyone whose physical attributes make them appear privileged, but whose experiences have ground them down.
When we follow the principle of charity, we assume that other people are rational and have good intentions. If someone responds differently to a situation than we would, let’s not be like those nineteenth-century scientists and accuse them of being “fanciful.” Let’s get curious and ask why they reacted as they did. We might learn something! And when we hear something that upsets us, we can refuse a rush to judgment and choose compassion instead.5 We might learn something!
How about you, readers? Do you have your own dog whistles—experiences that have caused you to react differently to a situation than everyone else? Have you applied the principle of charity? What happened? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Speaking of dogs, our daughter attended a training session whose ice-breaker was a trivia contest: Cheese or Dog? (Casey joked, “The perfect game for Mom!”)
Below is a list of names. Cheese or dog?
Appenzeller
Azawakh
Barbet
Grande Bleu de Gascogne
Puzzone di Moena
Shakerag Blue
Sloughi
Wensleydale
Stumped? See this footnote.6
Matt’s theory is that Lenny is a dachshund-rottweiler mix. How is that even possible, you may be wondering? “Short king!” replies Matt.
My photos app has variously identified Lenny as a dachshund, beagle, bloodhound, basset hound, rottweiler, and—occasionally throwing up its metaphorical hands—just plain dog.
These adjectives are in the Royal Order of Adjectives—a fun feature of English that is instinctive to native speakers and a puzzle for everyone else.
Switzerland’s violent crime rate is .48 per 100,000, as compared with 359 per 100,000 in the US.
This includes the BBC. What possessed them to place a microphone next to Davidson? Why did they edit out the other obscenities but leave in the worst one? Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence—but it sure looks like the BBC wanted to gin up controversy.
I need to remember this too. Of course it is horrible for Black Americans to hear the n-word, even when blurted involuntarily, and they deserve our sympathy. And I was being judgy about those New York Times commenters. They were probably acting out of ignorance and misplaced compassion, not being ableist. To educate readers, the New York Times commendably published an article about what it’s like to live with TS shortly after the incident.
Mari is right to invoke the Principle of Charity. From the response to John Davidson to the persistence of wolf-whistling and 'rage baiting' posts, our public discourse is suffering from a massive empathy deficit.
The 'boys will be boys' mentality is a perfect example of this failure; it excuses behavior that the perpetrators would be ashamed to show their own mother, sisters or daughters. If we view basic respect as a burdensome 'accommodation', we risk sliding into a world where no one owes anything to anyone. And that sounds like a dark place to live. As the saying goes: 'Here there be tygers'.
"Frustrated, I would ask them how they would feel if panhandlers relentlessly accosted them the moment they set foot outdoors."
This is an EXCELLENT metaphor, one that helps me (as a man) put into words how women must feel about being catcalled all the time. And the epilepsy one is good, too. It's shocking how quick people are to bully someone for having a disability while - somehow! - convincing themselves that they're the good guys.