Red is the color of whores.
That’s an opener, isn’t it?
A little jarring, no doubt. My mother told me early on in my life that I was not to wear red clothes or red lipstick, lest I look like a whore.
In my 30s, I realized she was wrong. I realized of course that her idea of the word “whore” was more a sexually confident woman, an empowered woman out of fucks to give.
She was trying to protect me, I know.
Mom was a quiet, tea-totaling wallflower. She had no idea the woman her daughter would become.
A red-shirt-wearing, foul-mouthed sports writer turned dog photographer.
The red shirt was maybe the most shocking.
The psychology of red
Red is a color that draws attention, something she shied away from. It signifies strength, power and courage.
It’s an energetic color that is often associated with passion, lust – emotions that good Catholic girls should never convey.
Fuck it.
I’m passionate. I’m lustful for life, adventure.
And I see red, the red that’s associated with anger and danger.
The color of love
Red is also the color of love and affection. Roman de la Rose, a 13th-century poem composed by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, referenced a search for a red rose, symbolizing the search for the woman of their dreams.
Meh, men can have their roses and the search for the woman of their dreams, can’t they, girls? When I think “love” these days, I am all wrapped up in the way I look at Bella, my (almost) 10-year-old Maremma sheepdog.
And the way she looks back at me.
This isn’t just floofy woowoo bullshit either. There’s science that backs the way women love their dogs. One research paper published in the Journal of Ethnobiology in 2022 suggests that dogs were always women’s best friend.
And the relationship society has today with dogs is a result of the way we evolved together, woman and dog.
“Humans were more likely to regard dogs as a type of person if the dogs had a special relationship with women,” said Jaime Chambers, an anthropology Ph.D. student at Washington State University in Pullman, just down the road from me. “They were more likely to be included in family life, treated as subjects of affection and generally, people had greater regard for them.”
The research goes on to note that when dogs interact with women in any given society, they are more likely to have names, be treated as family and to be buried and mourned with they die. Across 144 cultures, dogs that interacted with women were 220% more likely to be treated like people in comparison to dogs that didn’t interact with women.
Oh, dogs that interacted with men? Yeah, only 63% likely to be treated like people.
