I’m serious? Don’t bathe me or I’ll die?? You actually cannot touch my hair right now. Everyone is always touching my hair. “Oh, your ears are so soft.” “Oh, what a nice big boy.” The misgendering is a really nice touch! People think my body belongs to them; that’s dog culture for you, just a lifetime of unwanted touch and verbal street harassment. “Look at that big butt,” they say, and they slap me. My tail is fluffy, sure; that’s its natural texture, it’s not a playground for—do you have a tail? You wouldn’t get it, and I wish you wouldn’t try. I am currently eating chicken bones out of the garbage and nothing on my body exists for your pleasure: not my tummy, not my nose, and certainly not my paws. What were we talking about?
Dog culture. Chicken bones. Baths. I don’t have to apologize for being dirty. The normative cultural paradigm dictating that a dog—particularly a female dog, an average bitch in all her glory—must be clean in order to be acceptable within the human sphere connotes a history dictated by racist, sexist, Puritanical and patriarchal structures, for dogs as it ever was for anyone. So; please; get away from me; turn off the nauseating tap in the bathtub. It’s National Dog Day, I am covered in chicken bones and garbage, and it’s time to let a bitch be so.
Luna is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.
