My dog and I pretty much have a 24/7 relationship. This includes bathroom breaks on both sides. Me for hers for bagging purposes and her for mine for whatever reason. (Ask her …) It also includes work where I blatantly smuggle her into the building and where she also attends all my classes. (But none of my committee meetings because of animal-welfare concerns …)
Now although I‘m convinced that my dog is both more famous and more loved at work than I am—especially, but not exclusively, by the students—her being there is completely outlawed. The official, primary reason given for this is that some people are afraid of dogs (cynophobia), something that was pointed out in a general e-mail from my faculty relatively shortly after I started bringing her to work. (I saw it as coincidence …)
I both fully get this and am sensitive and responsive to it. My dog is usually in my office and I always ask at the start of each semester if anyone minds if she tags along to class with me. I just don‘t understand why fear of dogs is always the go-to reason for banning them instead of potential allergies to them. Fear of dogs is easy to deal with: get the dog away from that person. And my experience has been that most people with this phobia are relatively understanding about the whole situation, especially when it’s clear that the dog is friendly and more or less under control. Being allergic to dogs, by contrast, is a much more difficult problem. Again, it’s easy to remove the dog but damn near impossible to remove all those allergens that they leave behind. And, although it’s difficult to get any hard numbers on this, it seems that more people are allergic to dogs (anywhere between 10 and 30%) than are afraid of them (up to 10%). Yet it usually remains, at best, a secondary justification.
Ok, so where am I going with this? (Besides someplace really controversial …)
Recently, I wanted to go to some huge, anonymous Swedish furniture store and was curious if I could take my dog along. The answer on the website was the default one: no because some customers might be scared of dogs. (You can freely substitute the word allergic in there, BTW. The point remains the same.) But right underneath that it was stated that assistance dogs were, of course, more than welcome. How does this work? Are assistance dogs somehow inherently less scary than my dog? Or is a person’s need for assistance somehow more important than someone else’s phobias?
And it’s the generalization of this last point that has been occupying my thoughts for quite a while now in this day and age of personal rights: people are so concerned about egotistically proclaiming their rights without any real reflection about the whole concept. This general attitude was perfectly summed up in an e-mail from the University of Not-Bielefeld from late last year where it was stated that “every person at our university has the right to set personal boundaries that are accepted by everyone.” If you read between the lines, the e-mail was obviously talking about sexual harassment and that is equally obviously a non-starter. But, in typical admin-speak, the text was deliberately vaguely specific and only referred generically to “personal boundaries”.
But what exactly is a personal boundary? Or, more to the point, what is a legitimate personal boundary? Take the following statement:
“I’m afraid of dogs because I was attacked by one once.”
Most people will not have a problem with it and will see it as an understandable, if not completely justified, statement on the part of the person saying it. Change the word “dogs” to “men” and that’s still pretty much the case, especially when it is assumed that a woman is saying it. (And, yes, I have asked people their opinions on exactly these two sentences to support my suppositions.) But, change “dogs” to some visible minority or ethnic group and you’ve just booked yourself a place in some very hot part of the afterlife for the rest of eternity. (And, no, the practical part of this experiment stopped with the previous questions.)
But why? Why are only some fears (AKA boundaries) legitimate? And, in light of that e-mail from the University of Not-Bielefeld, what right do you have to judge my personal boundaries? And that is the point that I’m trying to make: what do you do, like when you want to go furniture shopping, when those boundaries clash? Again, there are no-go areas like murder, rape and harassment, and persecution. But even some of those areas regularly allow commuters to visit them, war and self-defense being two contexts that immediately spring to mind here.
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Comedians have long faced this boundary problem when making jokes about people outside of their “group”, especially if those people are seen as somehow being “inferior” to them. Dave Chappelle, in response to ongoing criticism of his jokes about transgender people, explicitly addressed the subjectivity of him punching down in this instance by asking how we as a society objectively determine who is “higher” in the social hierarchy—in this case a black man from Washington, D.C. or a transgender person—and therefore might be allowed to make jokes about the other. Admittedly, Dave Chappelle is now a very rich black man from Washington, D.C. but does this really change anything? Or do we instead have to restrict his comparison to transgender people who are also very rich?
In the end, perhaps the only thing that is clear in this whole debate is that punching up is clearly the way to go, if only because it gives you a better angle on the other person’s nuts.
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