It’s funny that you’re posting about pets as replacements for people. Before I saw your posts on the subject, I was thinking of writing to you about something that happened to me today that well exemplifies your point.

I was walking down the street in a wealthy, urban neighborhood and I saw an exceptionally striking dog on a walk with its owner. I complimented the owner on the dog’s beauty, and he thanked me, genuinely, I think.

As I walked away, I thought that I, a younger man walking alone, would not have complimented, say, a parent on an exceptionally cute child passing by. The parent might suspect my motives, and instead of receiving my words as a compliment, would perceive them instead as a threat. Depending on the neighborhood, I might not even compliment a man on his car. And, unless I really did intend to ask her out, I probably would not compliment a woman on her appearance. Better to say nothing than to communicate a threat/sexual interest unintentionally.

The trouble with saying nothing is that it deprives you of meaningful, genuine interaction with the people around you. It just feels good to interact well and genuinely with the people you come across during the day. When you say nothing in order to avoid saying the wrong thing, you deprive yourself and others of the good that comes from human interaction.

I concluded that it is sad, thanks to sexual liberation and the resulting spread of perversions like child molestation, that complimenting a stranger’s child is, at least for me a younger man, an unwelcome way of establishing contact with that stranger. Complimenting his pet, instead, functions, albeit imperfectly, as a substitute.

It left me wondering if some people, like maybe that man with the striking dog, use or at least hope to use their pets for exactly that purpose. If so, then they are not using animals as they were intended. There is nothing wrong with striking up a conversation with someone over his pet. There is something profoundly wrong with avoiding conversation with someone because there is no pet around to talk about. Animals are not supposed to be the medium through which humans establish contact with one another.

— Comments —

Greg J. writes:

Bartholomew had several good insights into how everyday social interaction is sharply impoverished by sexual liberation. Since innocent remarks about the beauty either of women or children are always taken as come-ons in our hyper-sexualized milieu, young men like Bartholomew are left with two choices while out for a stroll. We must either pretend not to notice the beauty of the humans all around us, or we must restrict our admiration to less worthy objects like poodles. It isn’t that poodles are totally unworthy of such appraisals, it’s just that complimenting a dog isn’t nearly as satisfying as complimenting a human, for the dog is indifferent to compliments. This silent agreement never to notice or comment upon the beauty of women and children has badly hampered what used to be a wholesome assumption running behind Christian civilization: that all Christian men and women are spiritual siblings, and that the children of Christians belong to a kind of extended heavenly family.

The new assumption is the one promoted by Freud, that all human activity is at least subconsciously sexual. Bartholomew is correct to note that the underlying desire to reach out to unknown people has not been eliminated by the the diseased claim that all human activity is motivated by sex. Instead, our inextinguishable desire to know (and be known by) other people is simply sublimated, only to emerge in distorted and less satisfying forms such as the infantilization of dogs. Lawrence Auster put his finger upon this situation very adroitly in this discussion from a few years ago. He was commenting on the way in which immodest female dress castrates men psychologically by requiring them either to pretend not to notice blatantly provocative attire, or else to risk all that comes from doing what comes naturally. Such attire takes away the possibility of men and women interacting in a wholesome way, that formerly included the male privilege of paying non-threatening compliments to women. I bolded the part that applies most directly, what Auster describes as the vanished “sexual public square.” I for one miss that vanished middle zone.

Mr. Auster wrote:

It seems to me there are at least two factors leading men not to express their attraction to women in public as they once did. One is of course feminism; the man is not supposed to approach the woman. Thus in no movie for the last 15 years has the man initiated the kiss; only the woman does. It’s a mandated form of political correctness as rigid, and as untrue to reality, as the official denial of God in the Soviet Union. The other factor is the extremely revealing female dress, which is a more recent development. When a woman is already revealing to the whole world parts of her body that normally would only be seen by her husband or boyfriend, then, instead of triggering greater male interest, comments, and so on, it inhibits it. I’m not sure I can say exactly why this is so, but here’s an attempt at an explanation. Women’s excessively revealing dress destroys what we might call the “sexual public square.” In older society, men could feel and express their attraction to women, such expressions had a relatively safe social meaning as well as a more dangerous sexual one, it didn’t instantly mean, “I want to go to bed with you.” But when a woman is dressed in such a revealing, whorish way as to suggest that she is prepared to go to bed instantly with any man she chooses, that in-between social space–the space between the situation of two people having nothing to do with each other, and the situation of two people going to bed together–is lost. The man is left with two options: either to tell the woman he wants her, or to affect not to notice her–the very self-emasculating behavior I described at the beginning of this entry.

The upshot is that whorish female dress destroys the normal relational space between men and women.