Research by a data-focused digital publication called The Pudding revealed the curious way we gender fictional animal characters.
When I was a kid I thought all dogs were boys and all cats were girls and that they then fell in love and had puppies and kittens together, obviously.
I’ve worked out the second part isn’t quite right, but I’ve never really got over the first part.
However, it turns out this is true for most everyone: dogs are boys, cats are girls. Also, bears are boys, pigs are boys, rabbits are boys, frogs are boys, foxes are boys, monkeys are boys, mice are boys…
Meanwhile, along with cats, ducks and birds are usually girls.
That’s according to a rather wonderful data-focused digital publication called The Pudding, which published research into animal characters both in our perceptions and in children’s stories, including an analysis of 30 popular animal-centric kids’ books from each decade since 1950.
‘In our minds, main characters are male’
It transpires that in these stories, the only animals that were more consistently female than male were cats and birds, while male animals appeared twice as often.
But then the researchers went a step further. They devised the first line of a story and asked 1 300 random people to complete it. It went like this: “And then the bear said, ‘I must go to the river.’ Upon arriving…”
They also randomly swapped the bear for six other critters, namely dog, mouse, duck, pig, cat and bird.
Whatever the animal, there was literally no instance where the gender did not skew to the male side, even with cats, birds and ducks.
Masculine pronouns appeared almost three times as frequently, even though more respondents were female themselves.
In our minds, main characters are male. Still. I know this is true for me, too.
After all, didn’t I write a story about a hedgehog many years ago – another of the Great Unpublished – and this little ball of spikes was a boy hedgehog called Thistle, although his genitalia played absolutely no role in the story?
Then when Thistle met a warthog, guess what? It was male too.
Meanwhile, my own beloved childhood teddy bear – still on a shelf in my bedroom, safe from the dogs – has always been presumed male.
And now that I have a grandbaby – also verifiably a boy, for now at least – when he was given a gift of a gorgeous handmade bear, it was automatic and unthinking that Teddy’s pronouns were he/him.
Happily, Calamari the Octopus is female.
