Puppy Thoughts

I am a puppy

WARNING: this page is about sex and kink, if you don't want to read about that please click anything else on your screen!

Puppy goes on a walk and meets people

Walk into most queer spaces in London and you’ll quickly meet at least a handful of puppies. Puppygirls with fluffy ears and wagging tails, puppyboys’ faces covered with muzzles and flaunting leather harnesses. Puppies of all varieties wearing leather or fabric collars, chasing each other, wrestling, sitting adorably cuddling a bone pillow or in their friend’s lap.

Almost all puppies I’ve met have been trans*.

Before I started going to queer spaces, I thought my puppy identity had to be contained in sex, even though it was also secretly my way of calming down at home alone, my way of feeling safe and playful. Meeting so many trans puppies has been transformative in many ways, but it’s also made me wonder: why are so many trans people puppies?

Sitting in the cuck chair

It's possible to be fucking someone and still sitting in the cuck chair. It's especially easy to end up in this position if your eroticized self doesn't neatly fit in gendered or D/s structures. As my erotic self is not easily legible, I try to embody whatever my partner wants. For example, my partner is being a hot woman and wants a man to want her so I’ll embody a man wanting her. But I always feel a bit removed, as though I’m sitting in the cuck chair of the interaction. I can’t truly be submissive or dominant because I’m aware that I’m not embodying my true desire but rather my partner’s imagination of how they want to be desired.

I still find these interactions fun and interesting and hot, but they don’t compare to the way I feel when I’m engaging in puppy play, or even other forms of kink, where I feel more allowed to express my actual desires. I don’t necessarily believe this is inherent to other forms of kink, but perhaps rather that as they are more niche and more specific to my actual desires, I feel more empowered to express my desire and thus am able to eroticize myself. The problem is then to find a partner who will want me as I am…

Pupply play, sex, and gender

There are so many ways to do puppy play, and I aim here to only speak for my own experience. Puppy play has released me from two things that constrain my sexuality.

First, engaging in kink has been a way for me to find eroticism without the constraints of gendered ways of relating. Recently, I read Bettcher’s (2014) work on Erotic Structuralism. In her paper, Bettcher argues that Sexual orientation has a core erotic gendered self. It is this gendered aspect that I would like to complicate. I found that although I deeply related to the trans experiences of sex involving the gendered eroticized self and other, the deeply gendered understanding of eroticism didn’t satisfy me completely. As a nonbinary person, I have found that I often feel pressure to eroticize myself in a gendered way in order to be legible and desired by my partner. I was drawn to kink very early, as it was a way to eroticize myself in a different way, namely as a submissive or a top, and to engage in power dynamics as a way to structure erotic encounters.

Over time, I discovered that although dominance/submission can be very fun and hot, just like masculine/feminine dynamics, it often feels like performance rather than expression.

I discovered the kind of freedom of expression I get from puppy play long before I knew anything about kink or even sex. As a child I often liked to imagine myself as different animals. Quiet and dangerous like a crocodile, loud and talkative like a parrot, prowling and fierce like a tiger. In my head I would become them, and act it out whenever it felt safe to. As a teenager and young adult I kept a very private interest in these things, reading yiff comics and puppyboy smut on Tumblr. I fear I might have revived cringe from the dead with that sentence.

Recently, having met more people who engage in puppy play in queer circles, and having had a partner who was willing to let me explore this for a time, I found that puppy play was a way to find eroticism without the constraints of gender or power play. Most people I’ve met engage in a puppy/owner dynamic, which I do enjoy, but I have found that going into a puppy headspace does not necessarily drop me into submission, but rather into my body, into desire and sensation.

My erotic self is the puppy who is being vulnerable in feeling (pleasure, earnestness) to evoke sensation in my partner who is the eroticized other (sensory, sometimes caregiving, opening their body to be felt by me and feeling my body).

Being a puppy alone

When I’m a puppy I feel safe. I’m more likely to regress in that headspace, but being a puppy doesn’t necessarily mean I’m regressing. Often when I’m alone at home I’ll put my collar on and chain myself to my bed, and I’ll instantly feel safer to cry or to calm down after a long day. Sometimes I’ll put my collar on and play with my chain. Just touching the cool metal, letting the links fall through my fingers onto my chest or my stomach helps me calm down. Other satisfying sensory experiences don’t have the same effect on me. Being in a puppy headspace for me means being in my body, being cared for, having permission to exist.