All the Pretty Horse Girls
“I was after girls who wanted to be cowgirls and I never asked too many questions. Ones I tried to weed out were the ones that were in love with horses. You know, the Freudian thing. Lot of parents, about the time their baby daughters start pushing out their sweaters in front, they buy ‘em a horse to divert their attention from boys. What they really buy ‘em is a thousand-pound organic vibrator. A horse is great for good clean hands-above-sheets masturbation, and some girls never outgrow the thrill of it. Those kind just don’t make real cowgirls.” Bonanza Jellybean
“Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” Tom Robbins
I’ve befriended three “horse girls” in my life. You know what I mean by “horse girl” if you’ve met one, and maybe even if you haven’t — that’s the convenience of shorthand. Urban Dictionary defines her as “a very annoying female that loves horses and talks about horses all the fucking time. She draws horses on her binders, dreams about horses, and even has sex with horses.” Male redditors have beat the “horse girls are crazy” horse to a bloody, red pill pulp. Horse girl redditors are left to wonder what gives or to continue to post photos of their horses, oblivious to any other way of being.
I have the authority to talk horse girl because I was one, at least in a sense. I took lessons as the illustrious-sounding, middling Foxcroft Farm as a young girl and later owned a pregnant miniature horse (and eventually a baby miniature horse). My first two oil paintings were of a horse and a broken-down saddle, and I wrote and illustrated short stories about a horse farm. I had a plastic stable of mounts that I made to gallop as play. I was obviously enraptured, as all horse girls by definition are, but I was also noncommittal enough to buoy and turn out as this perfectly well-adjusted human woman. Recently, I remembered my childhood dream of adulthood: one day, I could own my own horse and ride it whenever I wanted to.
As far as I can tell, the first person to use the term “horse girl” as a complete phrase was a phrenologist in 1896 studying a patient who presented as a horse. That is, the female patient acted like a horse, neighing instead of laughing, walking with a horse-y gait, licking people’s hands and “show[ing] a high appreciation of friendship.” Apparently, “horse” as a stand-in for girlhood “friendship” predates Saddle Club.
Black Beauty, one of the best-selling books of all time, was published almost two decades before, kicking off a subgenre of children’s literature known as the “pony book.” The author, Anna Sewell, wrote the anthropomorphized biography of a black horse while laid up from an injury to which she would succumb five months after publishing. Her intent was to stoke empathy, a feminized skill that’s been cited as the reason more girls fall for horses than young boys, who lack the necessary gentleness. Pony books raged starting in the 1920s, marked by an idealized vision of friendship, fantastical worlds where you can gallop away on fantastical creatures.
For me, horses were a literary preoccupation with such fantasy, and not just in the content I consumed. The horse lifestyle was an early foray into world-building, a form of identity tourism. Imagine: life with a built-in best friend, one who doubled as an escape mechanism, a guide to unknown places, a right-hand steed. When head cowgirl Bonanza Jellybean, quoted above, talks about cowgirls in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, she’s talking about a way of being, an aspiration for a type of life that one develops in childhood, the way boys dream of being firefighters or superheroes. In some ways, horse girls are animated in a suspended amber of childhood, never growing out of the obsession. They are cat ladies who haven’t withered yet. Over 101 books in the Saddle Club saga and the characters don’t age. It’s why we say horse girl and not horse woman.
Catherine Held, author of Horse Girl: An Archetypal Study of Women, Horses, and Trauma Healing, posits that wild horses and women lost their freedom around the same time, thus the innate, subconscious fascination. So perhaps the gallop-y, wind in my hair freedom I’m even now getting swept up in is part of that.
But I think there’s a darker underbelly to the horse girl too. Girls do grow up. In the same way the ponytail, a popular teen hairstyle in the 1950s, named for the horse’s tail, was thought to evoke innocence and eroticism in the wearer, so too does the horse girl straddle the line between little girl fantasy and an obsession that reads as more sinister on a grown woman, at least in this world.
One of the horse girls I knew was a neighbor who would go on to compete on Texas A&M’s horse team. We bonded over exercise, weight loss, and not feeling good enough, working out together and swapping poems, diet tips and heartbreak. What I have in common with the horse girls is that we all come from the social periphery like that; she was lonely because she spent all her time in horse world, and I was just lonely. Maybe she and I were both disappointed that the vision the horse gave us, a fantasy life that isn’t real. The “horse craze” was enough of a thing by the time the pony books began to proliferate for Anna Freud to write in 1926:
“A little girl’s horse craze betrays either her primitive autoerotic desires (if her enjoyment is confined to the rhythmic movement on the horse); or her identification with the caretaking mother (if she enjoys above all looking after the horse, grooming it, etc.); or her penis envy (if she identifies with the big, powerful animal and treats it as an addition to her body); or her phallic sublimations (if it is her ambition to master the horse, to perform on it, etc.).”
As long as girls have been “crazy,” and crazy about horses, the fanaticism has had an erotic sheen. It makes sense; horses are sexy and their members are large, and there’s nothing more reviled than a sexually curious young woman. For what it’s worth, the horse girl currently in my life, the one who still displays her dressage trophies in her living room, is a very animated, licensed sex therapist.
For centuries before the invention of the vibrator, the galloping animals were used as a prescription for hysteria, the proto-crazy girl illness of which sexual fantasy was a symptom. Catherine the Great, who was known to take many lovers into her bed, was believed to have been killed while trying to copulate with a stallion before present-day historians recognized the myth as a crock of sexist shit. In addition to well-sexed, she likely straddled horses, giving rise to eyebrows, rather than riding sidesaddle, as was the norm for the women of her time. And then there are all the euphemisms for riding, mounting, etc., plus the cowgirl sex position to consider.
Obsession also colors the “horse girl,” seasoning her particular varietal of crazy. The second horse girl I know is driven, ambitious, and competitive — an intense personality that went for Ted Cruz in 2016, but loves Hillary Clinton. Like the first horse girl I knew, she too was preoccupied with her weight. On her wedding day, she was thin as a foal. Before that, when we were still in college, she booked a venue before her boyfriend proposed. They had already decided to get engaged, and she knew the venue would be booked if she waited too long, but the move seemed a little much, crazy even.
And because horse obsession is tinted with sex, the “horse girl” as sketched by men on Reddit and Total Frat Move and other online forums, takes on hideous, female monster form. They’re not concerned that her obsession is too infantile or too all-consuming, but rather that it may transfer to other areas of her life, to the men she dates. They swear her off for this reason. She’s crazy: girl to sex fiend to loony in a few gallops.
There is something about horse girls that lends them to generalization. Are we inherently crazy, unable to let go of a lost girlhood dream? Is it that we’re dick-jealous? Or dick-thirsty? Is it actually just that we enjoy taking care of something, those maternal hormones inside us raging at the sight of a mane that needs taming? Or do we love being in control of something, of deriving power from an animal that is literally used to denote power?
In coming out as a horse girl, I miss my simple obsession, my fantasy, my thousand-pound organic vibrator.
Taylor Prewitt is a writer, a Taurus, and a real housewife of life. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and VICE.
October 22, 2019
In "Features"
1 Comment
Fun read for this former “horse girl.” Have you heard this piece read on NPR? https://www.thisamericanlife.org/631/so-a-monkey-and-a-horse-walk-into-a-bar/act-two-0
Feels topical.