Is it time to leave dogs out of our dating lives?
“Dogfishing” is back—and in the age of the performative male, it’s never been a worse time to be a dog in some guy’s dating app profile.
I would just like to let the record show that I was anti dogs on dating apps before it was cool. By which I mean, back when a “doggo”/“pupper”–forward social media presence was still trendy instead of peak millennial cringe and a man parading a pup in his Tinder profile was a green flag rather than evidence of “performative male” behavior.
In my case, you might say my own early-onset aversion to dating app profiles that scream “Must Love Dogs” and literally say things like, “Just looking for a dog-mom for Rufus” has to do with the fact that I am “cynical” and “antagonistic” and “have historically performed a dislike of things other people enjoy as a subconscious defense mechanism deployed to make me feel as though I’ve rejected myself before anyone else can.” And you would be right! (Also, as you may be able to tell, I am more of a cat person.)
But in recent years, it seems even socially well-adjusted people unlike myself have started to find themselves turned off by the prevalence of dogs in dating culture. Some—like the author of a recent post in the r/Dogfree subreddit asking why there isn’t a way to filter out dog owners on dating apps—simply aren’t dog people and resent the privilege that being one brings to the dating pool and the stigma that comes with not being an overwhelmingly dog-friendly dater. “So annoying,” commented another redditor. “Anytime I see someone with a dog in one of their photos, it’s an instant swipe left for me. I don’t care how well we match up.”
Meanwhile, others—who may or may not be dog lovers themselves—are getting icked out by the presence of other people’s dogs in dating app profiles.
So-called “dogfishing”—posing with someone else’s dog on dating apps in order to attract more matches—has been a thing since at least 2019, when the term first started making the rounds online. But this deceptive dating maneuver appears to once again be on the rise. Cosmo editor-in-chief Willa Bennett highlighted the trend in a recent installment of her weekly newsletter, “Love, Willa,” noting she’d spoken to five single men and all five had confirmed this is, in fact, A Thing.
Anecdotally, all five men also reported that this dogfishing tactic did result in more matches—and there’s data to back it up. Various surveys over the years have produced evidence to suggest that dog pics can lead to more success on dating apps (although it’s worth noting that many of these studies have been conducted by or in partnership with pet industry companies like TotalVet and Rover). But while the data (however unscientific) may show that dog-based dating tactics still “work” in a technical sense, the broader conversation surrounding dogs’ place in dating culture seems to be viewing the trend through a somewhat more skeptical lens.
While anyone of any gender can dogfish, we tend to talk about it most frequently in the context of men using pics of other people’s dogs to get more attention from women on the apps. There’s some overlap here with the “performative male” trend that’s taken over social feeds in the last month or so—hence, I suspect, why dogfishing has recently reentered the discourse.
The performative male behavior that’s been called out and subsequently memed online can and has referred to anything that men appear to do or express interest in for the sake of attracting women. While pretty much anything can be perceived as evidence of performative maleness at this point, it tends to center around the belief that men are feigning interest in stereotypically female and/or feminist-coded things in an attempt to build their “good guy” cred. The dog thing falls under this category in that, at worst, it may seem like men got the message that women like guys with dogs and are therefore “performatively” leaning into dog ownership to get laid. (This performance is obviously all the more performative when they don’t even actually have a dog and are literally borrowing someone else’s for their dating app profiles.)
Of course, many men really do just like dogs and aren’t merely using them as some kind of ploy to seduce women (obviously). But I think the skepticism at the heart of dogfishing’s performative male era resurgence speaks to the current climate of a very different dating culture than the one that existed six years ago when we first started talking about dogfishing.
For one thing, I think we are, in general, more skeptical, more burnt out, and therefore more cynical daters than we were 5 or 10 years ago. Between dating app fatigue, a TikTok algorithm that thrives on toxic dating trends and horror stories, and increasingly strained tensions between straight men and women, it makes sense that many daters are more likely to be on the hunt for red flags these days than we are to be wooed by a boy and his dog.
Meanwhile, this culture of heterofatalistic dating pessimism is owed, in part, to the impersonal, digital-first era of dating that the apps ushered in and many people now want out of. “Authenticity” is more in than ever and yet simultaneously harder to differentiate from the facade of “relatability” that performs on TikTok. While valid criticisms have been raised re: the performative male trend—like that it reinforces gendered stereotypes and unfairly turns something as innocuous as a matcha latte into yet another thing men are “guilty” of—one of the main reasons these seemingly performative behaviors are annoying is because we are exhausted by the pressure to latch onto the same trends, personas, and hashtags that generate likes, clicks, and matches and are tired of seeing people conform to them.
Early on in the dating app game, presenting yourself as a dog lover quickly became a way to establish yourself as “normal,” nice, and down-to-earth—one of those traits people adopt as a personality that is, in fact, not a personality. These days, after over a decade of swiping ourselves into an increasingly fatigued, gamified era of dating, leaning into the “dog dad” thing can feel like just another tired persona people hide behind online. Add in the possibility that it might not even be someone’s actual dog and this cliché becomes not just hack but deceptive.
Of course, the dogs themselves never asked for any of this. Hence why I suggest it may be time we all kindly leave them out of dating lives.
Credit: Cosmopolitan