Rat-Baggery, or random thoughts on gender essentialism

Every day I walk to work at the university in Aarhus down Jens Baggesen Vej, which you can see at left. The real Jens Baggesen was a famous romantic poet, sort of the Lord Byron of Denmark. But, particularly if I am walking with Sandy, the sight of the name usually elicits a giggle and a mutter of "Rat-Baggery Vej (vej is a street, BTW).

For only having been married for 29 years, with children for 28, we have a very complicated family folklore with a lot of in-jokes. Which is where rat-baggery comes in.

A couple of years ago in Texas, our attic was infested with several different species of rats: grey, brown, large, small, some with white stomachs. Despite tender feelings for all our animal confreres, we got very dismayed about hearing them scampering around every night, chewing unimaginable things in the attic, and eventually started poisoning them. This led to dead rats everywhere.

Sandy is a strong and resourceful person, the main fixer of things around the house, the sort of woman who puts her own dead rats away, thank you. However, there was one dead rat, poking tail first out of the soffit above our bedroom window. She did not fancy having it coming apart in her hand as she pulled it out, so she asked me to do that one. We had been putting them in ziploc bags to keep them from smelling up the garage and to keep dogs from eating them (and getting poisoned, too).

So here is the gendered part: while I considered it perfectly normal to carry the rat inside by its tail, open the drawer holding the rat over it, get out a plastic bag and put the rat in it, Sandy thought that that was an ultimately very guy thing to do. She deduced the sequence after the fact by finding a piece of rat tail on the kitchen floor, after it fell off. She asked "Why do I get the feeling that you carried the rat inside by its tail, opened the drawer holding the rat over it, got out a plastic bag and put the rat in it?" "Why indeed," wondered I, and "so what?"

That was when the really serious gender essentialism got going, You tell me, gentle readers, what is so terribly wrong (and so very male) about taking a poisoned rat into the kitchen by the tail in search of a bag. Why does the ideal technique for rat-baggery have to involve taking the bag to the rat, instead of vice versa?