A Bitch's Best Friend - Why the Female Dog Metaphor Keeps Falling Flat
Words: Ariana Martinez
Make it stand out
In the beloved fall film When Harry Met Sally (1989), the two titular friends fight at their respective best mates’ wedding. Having impulsively hooked up with one another, Sally is still irked about how it went down while Harry insists on moving on. He asks, “You know how a year to a person is like seven years to a dog?” to which Sally angrily replies, “Is one of us supposed to be a dog in this scenario?”
When Harry confirms the metaphor, Sally shouts, “I am? I am the dog? I am the dog?!” Their confrontation becomes so heated she finally says, “Fuck you!” and slaps Harry across the face. Sally, usually the poised and proper type, is disarmed by Harry’s pitiful comparison, but his calling her a dog allows her to tap into a frustration she previously could not articulate. She draws a firm boundary and he is the one left barking on the other side of the fence.
The connective tissue between the feral animal and a woman’s primal rage has been explored countlessly across several forms of media. Marielle Heller’s latest film, Nightbitch (2024) takes this metaphor to its literal – though I would argue not extreme enough – length. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Rachel Yoder, it is a vulnerable reflection of the exhausting reality of early motherhood, and the film follows Amy Adams’s unnamed Mother character overcome her guilty dissatisfaction with maternal life by “becoming” a dog. Yet Nightbitch thrusts Mother into a dog-like persona that feels rushed, unearned, and insufficiently unmoored.
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Womanhood through the supernatural lens of the werewolf – a mutation in which bones break, flesh rips and one suffers an excruciating transformation - gives us the chance to delve into the exciting and subversive realm of body horror. In films like Ginger Snaps (2000), women literally claw at the cage of their femininity. Yet the female dog in media struggles to overcome the reek of domestication. Restrained and subdued, it’s a dream of rebellion that’s still soft enough to allow for eventual assimilation.
This is not a phenomenon siloed in cinema, as music has also been lyrically attuned to the female dog. Kate Bush’s most successful album (not including her greatest hits) is Hounds of Love. On both a technical and narrative level, Hounds of Love deals with the push and pull of feminine self-assurance. The album would see Bush’s second time self-producing, her first being The Dreaming in 1982. Having received mixed reviews, she was discouraged from self-producing again, an unbelievable fact in hindsight. Hounds of Love’s existence, even recorded in Bush’s own studio, is a marvel of musical risk-taking, carved out of resistance and in favor of assertiveness. The song of the same name in the album elevates dogs to hunters, hounds chasing you in the dark. But as exciting as the image of a hound that can “ rip you to pieces… [and] have your guts all over the floor” is, canines are ultimately symbols of tenderness in Bush’s work, beckoning you toward love and understanding. The hypnotic album cover of Bush draped in lilac with her two pet weimaraners is dazzling, yet it still inhabits an air of placation - the photos only achieved by the dogs having fallen asleep.
“Yet the female dog in media struggles to overcome the reek of domestication. Restrained and subdued, it’s a dream of rebellion that’s still soft enough to allow for eventual assimilation.”
Following in her bestial footsteps, several modern artists have embraced this canine imagery within their songwriting. Halsey’s newest album, The Great Impersonator, has a track titled “Dog Years.” Directly inspired by PJ Harvey rather than Bush, who is honored by a different track, it’s a psychosexual song that touches on a familiar theme of the female dog trope: the gender and sexual politics of men and women. Lyrics such as “Well, they say all dogs go to Heaven/ Well, what about a bitch? What about an evil girl/ Left lying in a ditch?” and “I'm on a real short leash, but I like it tight/ You know I'm such a sweet girl, but I can really bite,” more authentically toy with arousing connotations of doghood, unafraid to acknowledge the inherent dominance at play within the dynamic.
Nightbitch’s idealised notions of ‘wild and free’ pack living while only featuring pure-bred dogs – Mother is depicted as a red-haired Husky – is another missed opportunity. In Nightbitch, doghood is still mostly prim. Even on a visual level, the film lacks boldness and grit; safe in its cinematography and starved of exciting surrealism. The biggest pitfall of the female-dog relationship in media, however, is that it is most often utilised in stories about white women. In Nightbitch, Mother looks for answers about her corporeal changes at the library and finds a book about women’s mystical relationships with dogs. The kicker is that the two examples highlighted by the film are about women of color’s cultural affinities for doghood. It is another in a long line of films using women of color's deep ancestral ties as a footnote in a white woman’s interior life that eventually ends with finding comfort and autonomy in her suburban lifestyle.
One song that stands out among this assemblage is Mitski’s I’m Your Man. Mitski, too, engages the terrestrial and heavenly, contrasting the dog on all fours against the label of God she rejects. In the song’s first line, “You're an angel, I'm a dog,” she brands a hierarchy among the relationships, one she immediately reverses in the next line, “Or you're a dog, and I'm your man.” Throughout the song, rather than view the image of the female-dog as a sign of strength, she wields it as a weapon of self-loathing. She surrenders her fate to “judgment by the hounds,” revisiting Bush’s notion of authoritative mysticism and acquiescences to it. Eventually, Mitski’s vocals trail off, replaced by a glorious choir and then a symphony of barking and outdoor ambiance. Rather than attempt a false sense of feminine power or reflexive obedience, she uses the dog metaphor to inherit a masculine space.
Mitski noted that she feels everyone has the “voice of a patriarch in your head” and wrote this song from the perspective of the “toxic” one in hers. This pursuit feels more successful, not because dogs are a man’s best friend and the allegory is strongest when it's masculine, but because it is not tethered to this sheltered form of gendered rebellion common to the trope. In articulating a perspective that is not inherently feminine, Mitski crafts a feeling more distinct than average - even white feminist - gender dynamics and instead speaks to the complex fluidity of gender itself. In deciding not to feature her vocals throughout the entire song, Mitski allows for a sustained transformation reminiscent of the more fruitful werewolf trope. There is no return to the human form she took before, only the animal in its stride.
Women can and should be radicalised by semiotic and enigmatic forces, it is not wrong to explore the fortitude of the feminine in myth and media. But it seems, as far as recent work is concerned, that dogs are rarely the path with which to accomplish that. Unless a diverse range of artists commit to challenging their manipulation of this form, old dogs may prove hard to teach new tricks.
