Right. This one might be a hard one to talk about for a number of reasons. I will do my best.
The Dog Walker was put on my radar because of a YouTube video that got put onto my feed randomly (well, as random as these things ever can be). Should you not want to watch said YouTube video, the hook of it is that there really aren’t many books being published these days that are ‘male coded’, while ‘Women’s fiction’ is a genre onto itself, and an overwhelming majority of the books these days are largely ‘female coded’. The concept of ‘male or female’ coded books gave me some pause (I thought immediately of Nora Roberts, and the trove of books with well-chiseled and largely shirtless men on the cover. I then asked myself what would be a ‘male-coded’ counterpart to this, and thought to the pretty horrific sci-fi covers of the 50’s, which frequently featured a woman in some state of undress, regardless of to what extent that featured at all in the plot. Such covers are nowadays considered sexist). But the YouTube video goes on to specify that, more specifically, there isn’t much in the way of contemporary, non-genre fiction, that is coded for men. And I gave myself sometime to think about to what extent this was or was not true. I could think of contemporary non-fiction books with male protagonists, but nothing in them spoke to whatever the actual fuck the modern ‘male experience’ is. Also, what in the actual fuck is the modern male experience?
To what extent this is true is something you should go argue elsewhere. Perhaps on the above linked YouTube video.
With all that in mind, the YouTube video promised that RA Stone’s The Dog Walker was about ‘Sex, Dating, and the male identity.”
Oh, fucking bother.
I don’t think I bothered to finish watching said YouTube video before going into the book, so I was largely blind to it. The book opens up to the protagonist having just finished having sex with a woman. It isn’t a romantic relationship, it is solely a physical one, and the protagonist attempts to show her some basic kindness. The woman reacts poorly to it, much to the confusion of the protagonist. The rest of the book is meant to be an exploration of that interaction, and to some extent I think it works.
But right then and there, after having read that first chapter, I began to be a bit concerned with what I was getting myself into. There is a lot of misogyny in the world, and I am not all the interested in engaging with it. But I decided to continue, as if nothing else this would be a pretty interesting piece to consider anthropologically.
The book then proceeds to go over the protagonists sexual and romantic history, with each chapter being names after the woman in question.
If the woman here initially come across in a bad light, the book does a satisfactory job of changing your mind about it, so long as you are at least somewhat open minded. The point it hammers home not too subtly really only functions if you have a rather modern view of sex and romance. In other words, the ‘no sex until marriage’ crowd should sit this one out. It does presuppose that sex and romance are meant to be fun, and if you are not a fan of that presupposition, I suppose you should fuck off. Giving you the answer the book comes with to the question you are left with at the end of the introductory chapter would be spoiling the book, and I won’t do it.
For what it’s worth, the answer made sense to me, nor did it strike me as being all that misogynistic. But for the purposes of full disclosure, I’m a god damned idiot, and perhaps not the target audience for this book to begin with – I have not been in a relationship of any kind in roughly 13 years, and gave up on the prospect entirely about 5 years ago (I was once asked if I was an incel, to which I answered ‘no’, as I have at least enough understanding of the world to blame myself).
I was largely glad I read this. With that being said, I don’t think I need to read anything else in the ‘contemporary male’s fiction’ genre for some time, if not the rest of my life.
Failures in Polymathy 