Included in my 2011 FurAffinity art dump were a frustrated jackal doing laundry with an unseen husband and a lion with an unseen wife enthusiastically sweeping a floor while wearing an apron. It took me over a decade to decide that they were paired with each other and not their own species.
Casting the jackal as a housewife was an extremely conscious decision as I'd only recently learned jackals mate for life (and was soon to learn the same was true of foxes and wolves too, contrary to widespread stereotypes). The lion doing housework was a play on the idea that a lion is a king and a man is the king of his own household - so I simply had him doing a basic domestic chore with extreme confidence and bravado.
Complementarity is important. Usually a man leaves the home for long periods, doing something difficult (physically, mentally, or both) and repetitive (emotionally difficult) for other people and being compensated with money; women tend to be less suited to a lot of these jobs both physically and emotionally. Women meanwhile tend to be arguably working just as hard on a wide array of low-impact tasks, where mental flexibility, keen senses, and fine manipulation being more valuable in the cases of home maintenance, food preparation, and child rearing.
Sometimes, to everyone's ultimate frustration, money is in such demand that the wife needs to leave the home and also do some grueling work for forces outside the family. Much more often, there are simply things around the house the husband is needed for despite being exhausted from his work, and it's a matter of duty that he has to do these anyway. Not every society can be as prosperous as the mid 20th century USA where we were able to divide labor so cleanly and so clearly the issue was basically black and white, and even then a man would generally have to do a good bit of homestead carpentry, appliance repair, automotive maintenance, and other assorted "men's work" on his days off or time right before or after work.
I don't know where I'm going with this ramble about the importance of teamwork in a couple, but I do know I never gave these characters names. And maybe you could see this as a bit of an inversion of the traditional animal symbolism that cats are feminine and canines are masculine?
Keywords
male
1,193,639,
female
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male/female
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size difference
67,945,
lion
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panties
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straight
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couple
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jackal
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briefs
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underpants
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grey fur
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orange fur
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red fur
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apron
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gray fur
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smaller female
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larger male
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married
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married couple
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broom
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stain
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stains
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laundry
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stained
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m/female
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male/f
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Details
Published:
2 years, 8 months ago
12 Jun 2022 14:03 CEST
Initial: 0fcb23e112fe9f9dff05cd66c21a24e6
Full Size: 717dd4b3b24abcaeae5394daf404098d
Large: d5785a8ae159e6f1caf2904faf5186b6
Small: aab72b111aea2ac3beea4e420932dacf
Stats
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