There is a bottomless, unabashed level of passion that is exclusive to the experience of being a preteen girl. As women come of age, those passions are generally dismissed as the byproduct of puberty’s hormonal process and ridiculed as “cringe.” The object of that passion could be anything: boy bands, an obscure Norwegian teen TV drama, or animal-related hobbies, to name a few. To capture some of this passion and analyze what it did for us, I had three friends (very graciously) agree to discuss their pasts as self-identifying Horse Girls: Tara Costello, Julia Pape, and Felicity Freerein.
As a mere observer of Horse Girl culture, I came into the conversation with a few questions prepared and very little prior knowledge. By the end, I was thoroughly fascinated; I ended our Zoom roundtable with more respect and curiosity for a passion that has been overtaking young women for generations. I share this knowledge here to shine a barn-light on the overlooked haybale of the lasting effect of Horse Girl phases.
To start, distinctions and definitions must be established. The first is a distinction between Horse Girls proper, and the girls who wanted to be horses.
Tara: They’re two separate things. Like, no offense, if you like to run around and pretend that you are the horse, power to you. But we are not the same, we are not the same.
Julia: Agreed.
Second, there are several categories (or rankings) of Horse Girls.
Julia: I was definitely in the lower echelon of horsegirl-dom. […] If you were a “real” Horse Girl you did equestrian, or […] did the competitions, or at the very least, you took lessons. Then, there was a level below where you would habitually and pretty frequently go ride a horse. And then you had my level, where you did, like, two lessons one summer and you felt really cool about it.
And then [a level] below me—which I also dabbled in—was what I think is like a Horse Girl-to-theater-kid pipeline setup, where you would kind of play Saddle Club and gallop around the schoolyard.
(For the uninitiated, The Saddle Club was a popular TV show among Horse Girls of the early 2000s and 2010s.)
These rankings of Horse Girls are relative to one’s proximity and access to horses. Felicity mentioned that—along with needing a clean page of Google results for any future employers—putting her real name on this piece might garner flack from family and the “real” Horse Girls back home.
Felicity: I am from a small town, and grew up definitely the most “in the city” of my cousins in the area. So like, I have cousins who grew up on an acreage with horses, and I was just the one who would go visit the horses.
My mum boarded a horse, so I was always in there and all in the thick of it, but I was still in the “city,” and so now that I’m in “the big city,” I don’t need my family finding that I’m attached to something with the term “Horse Girl” on it, because it’s either gonna be like “what are you doing at school, why are we paying for this?” or like, “you weren’t ever actually Horse Girl enough to do this: you never did rodeo, you never had a horse of your own.”
We had to address the misconceptions about what being a Horse Girl meant for preteens, both socially and personally. I had assumed that being a Horse Girl was a source of ostracization as a child, and something not to be spoken of as an adult. Instead, I found that a Horse Girl’s past was not an embarrassing secret meant to be kept; otherwise, this article wouldn’t exist as it is. Horse-girling doesn’t become a source of embarrassment until long after the phase has passed its peak.
Felicity: [I] definitely didn’t experience [mockery] as a kid, but now, if [I tell someone] “yeah I was a Horse Girl [in] elementary school,” there’s a big reaction, like, “Yeah, of course you were a Horse Girl.”
Tara: I don’t ever remember someone making a comment to me, because my Horse Girl phase hit its peak [in] like, grades six to eight. And then it kind of continued through high school, but I wasn’t that vocal about it, so I don’t remember anyone teasing me.
The acceptance of horse-girlery is assisted by the flocking that happens among all tween girls with similar interests. Be they Beliebers or Tumblr grunge girls, we all find our people.
Julia: I also don’t remember anything negative from other people, but that also might be because I just surrounded myself with other Horse Girls, so I don’t really know what people were saying about us. [They] could have been [saying] horrendous things, but I have no idea.
Overall, it seemed that horse-girldom was a positive space for my interviewees. My interviewees looked back fondly on their horse past, and even wished to return to it.
Barbara: Is [horse-riding] something you want to return to as adults?
Tara: Yes!
Felicity: Yes, yes.
Julia: Yes. If I get rich I’m buying a horse—first thing.
The question that remains is: why? Why horses? Why girls? Why does the love endure? Why is Horse Girl such a common identity among young women?
The Horse Girl experience is not merely an obsession with an animal—it is an outlet for teen angst and a route for self-discovery. The preteen experience is a fraught one, especially for young girls who are constantly treading the line between being infantilized for their appropriately juvenile hobbies, and being expected to mature at a rapid rate to accommodate the adults around them.
It wasn’t about the horses, or the barns, or the cute, mysterious, bad-boy farmhand love interest in every Horse Girl piece of media. Okay, maybe it was a little bit. But mainly, being a Horse Girl was the first sense of freedom that some girls ever had.
Tara: This is something I’ve thought about recently quite a bit […] I don’t think there’s any freer feeling—at least for me—than cantering on a horse. I don’t know, something about that was just such a vibe. The first time I ever did it was an accident, because the horse I was riding got spooked, and I was so afraid to do it. And then, once I learned how to do it, it was—it’s like the most out of control but free feeling that you [can] feel. And I want to ride again just to feel the rush.
An integral part of the Horse Girl identity was partaking in Horse Girl media. Plenty of this media served as wish-fulfillment for the many girls who may not have had the money or ease of access to horseback riding lessons. It also often belonged to the not like other girls genre, a common trope in coming-of-age narratives. The villain was usually another Horse Girl, but one who was less worthy, or in it for the wrong reasons.
Tara: I remember vividly reading this one book (I don’t remember the title), but it was typical—the protagonist was like [this] poor Horse Girl, you know, just trying to clean stables to afford her lessons. And then there was [the] mean rich Horse Girl, and they were lowkey fighting over this one horse and then in the end the mean Horse Girl got completely owned because the poor main character’s bond with the horse was stronger. And I remember reading that and being like, “This is the best feeling of my entire life.”
Julia: That reminds me of all the episodes of Saddle Club, [and that] Veronica—
Tara: Yes!
Julia: The one episode where they almost send her to her death because they find fool’s gold—remember this?
Tara: Yes!
Julia: And they think that it’s real and she literally falls and breaks all her bones.
The Horse Girl narrative is about the bond of horse and girl being stronger and more enduring than money, training, or status. A salient aspect of Horse Girl narratives was validation, since they told preteens that they were enough: not because they had the money, but because they had an instinct that was intrinsic to their moral character. For the many Horse Girls without the money and access to a horse, this core message secured their hopes. They didn’t have to have money—they were already inherently good.
Julia: That was always the thing—there’s an unruly horse, [that] has a special connection to you, and so, even though it’s not your own horse, you’re the only one that can ride [them].
The fantasy has a unique appeal to girls between the ages of ten to fourteen. The peak of a Horse Girl phase often coincides with the most tumultuous years of puberty, when young people are trying to find themselves and their place in the world. The Horse Girl experience offered another path, where validation came from the protagonist’s connection with the horse, rather than a love interest or change in social status.
Felicity: It’s an underdog story, but it’s also absolutely a girl story, where usually there’s some sort of girl-on girl-bullying and […] boys aren’t really involved […] It is for a tween or a kid who’s not yet concerned about relationships or other aspects of identity, [but instead in] finding a path through that feeling of awkwardness. [There’s] a very clear hero’s journey, but also there’s horses—which you love! [That] is the appeal.
Growing up, we are often scared to put ourselves out there. But with Horse Girls, the fear of falling was matched by the courage to get back up and keep riding.
Tara: [Riding] taught me so much about perseverance. I actually had kind of like a typical Gorse Girl arc […] in the sense that I fell off my horse once, and I remember being like “this is the moment I have to get back on” and like I got—you know—scared for a couple lessons after that because I was like “I don’t want that to happen again, that hurt.” So much about [riding] is just trusting the horse, […] communicating to the horse what you want to do. But trusting the horse is a really good tool [for] teaching how to work together, how to communicate non-verbally with something.
Horse-girlery was never just about the riding boots or cowboy hat aesthetic. It wasn’t about having the wealth to own a horse. Horse-girling was an outlet, a means of self-discovery that young women have been seeking out for generations.
Julia: I always think about why this was so much of a thing for girls. And then I was talking to my dad about it, […] I asked him and he said that there were other girls that were like that too when he was a kid. So it’s not a new thing.[…] I think that [the] fantasy of empowerment is part of it, too. Because […] my peak phase was between like first grade to fifth grade […]. At that time, I don’t really remember much of the empowering girl media being around.
I think that there’s kind of nothing more empowering and powerful than taming this wild beast and being in control […] being connected to nature (like all the [Disney] Princesses were) but in a really self-fulfilling and exciting way—I think that was part of the fantasy, too. And I don’t know why we get flack for it, because the boys get to be car boys and I think it’s the same kind of ideology. The boys get to like their cowboy movies, so why can’t I like my horsey?
Horse Girls are girl power at its most concentrated. The bond between Horse Girls provides a baseline of I get it, I get you. It’s a jumping-off point for building relationships and fostering goodwill.
Barbara: Very important last thing! We must know: favorite horse breed?
Julia: Mine’s a clydesdale—
Tara: —mine’s a clydesdale!
Felicity: I was about to say clydesdale.
Julia: We should kiss, I love a clydesdale.
To be (or have been) a Horse Girl is to identify with countless girls and women from all generations and walks of life, and to be part of a tradition of self-discovery through forging a bond with a beast of nature as a means of coming of age.
