I know there are some people in here who are better at feminist theory than I am.

[leahbobet]

This is a thought only partially brought on by this video, which is beautiful and strange and still sitting on the edge of a really toxic meme that has been bugging and bugging me more lately. I don't say this to slam said video. I say this because it made me think of the rest and I'm going to lift its symbolic architecture in a flagrant and shocking way to get my point across without a big, ranty, oversharing kind of explanation that you don't actually care about.

I wish there wasn't still this...expected dichotomy between dresses and horses.

I want both the dress and the horse.

I like them both. Simultaneously, even! And more seriously? One of those things alone won't be enough to close the little cartoon hole in me. It isn't enough. It's a choice between kinds of incompleteness, and that's a stupid kind of choice to give someone, and I don't personally want to make it because there's no reason to accept half-rations just because that's what's on offer.

---

So. There a theoretical home for that line of thought?

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

IMO your icon sums it up. But I've been out of the formal theory world for a long time now.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I dunno -- patriarchy's more about them. This is more about me. Even though yes, those things are tangled, etc. etc.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I always thought it was girls that were supposed to be obsessed with horses anyway - something about how learning to lovingly control a creature physically larger than themselves was supposed to prepare them for boys (and to be dominatrices, apparently).

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I always thought it was about how in the time a lot of the canonical horse-and-kid books were written, horses were basically the animate equivalent of a car. Having a horse meant an ability to get places, an independence that you would never have had before, as well as a kind of adult responsibility. You weren't so reliant on other people anymore.

But y'know. I'm coming at this from the outside. I never really had the horse thing.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Girls who are into horses as preteens/early teens and then get out of horses are into horses because they can be symbols and metaphors.

Girls who are into horses and either stay in horses for life or get out for a while and then come back? Those girls get the metaphor(s), yeah, but primarily we're into horses because they're horses.

I have a lot of sympathy for that want-my-cake-and-eat-it-too position, Leah, and I totally share that utter lack of desire to choose. And possibly I'm too close to the subject matter--I can see that reading of it, but I can't unknow what I know about the horse world. Which includes the above, and also includes the knowledge that there's nothing in that world that precludes having the cakes and dresses, too. That is, the causality only runs in one direction. Giving up horses is very, very often directly related to the other stuff, but giving up the other stuff rarely-if-ever (I honestly can't think of a single clear case) has anything to do with the horse.

And honestly, I think the video itself resists the reading. I think the video is, actually, arguing for exactly the same thing that you are. At the end, after all, she hasn't had to choose between the things she loves and wants. She's still wearing that dress and standing in that house as she gives the horse a hug.

[inaurolillium.livejournal.com]

I second this. Especially the last paragraph.

I was into horses in my mid and late teens. I hope to have horses again someday, and still ride on the rare occasions I get the chance. They're wonderful symbols, but they're also warm, living things, with their own lives and feelings and personalities. And when you're riding, and really moving together correctly, that feeling is incredible on all kinds of levels.

And, dammit, you can ride in skirts.

I guess I kind of cheated. la_marquise_de_ mentions below the freedoms we're supposed to give up when we grow up, but I refused to give up the ones that meant the most to me. I'm not married, and I live alone with my dog and cats. I work a job that I chose, not one I was forced into. I carry six packs of bubbles in my car, because sometimes you just need bubbles -- and some extra for friends. Sometimes I buy myself awful sugary cereals -- the kind I was never allowed as a kid -- just because I can (and then end up trashing them, because they're too sweet). I still play dress-up and make faces at people and giggle and jump around. I never gave up the things I loved about my childhood, I just added new things.

Which is not to say that I never feel a bit empty. But it's usually from things I haven't found yet instead of things I left behind. (Well, and the bipolar disorder.)

I found the trying-to-fill-the-empty-with-cake bit to be pretty interesting. Commentary on emotional eating and eating disorders?

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Oh.

YES. There's a place for that theoretical line of thought. On my bookshelf, please.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

...noted. :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

There is this huge contradiction in our lives, whereby we are required to surrender a lot of ourselves at puberty and to believe that it's for our own good, that we don't deserve the freedoms that we (hopefully) had as younger children. And the age at which we're asked to empty ourselves, to tie ourselves down to cultural expectations, gets younger and younger in the West, too. I was looking for books for my 6 year old niece a few weeks ago. When I was that age, the stories were all adventures with living toys or ponies or friends. Now it's all princesses and looking pretty. And it's a con. Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia provides an interesting, if now somewhat dated account of this process and it's toxicity.
We stand up for our horses and our dresses, and hopefully we ride out, skirts flowing, into our own freedom, and offering some choice to the younger women who are even now being taught to cut themselves up in order to conform to our culture's obsession with controlling women.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I loved Emma Peel so much was that she had the dress and the horse. And used them as if it had never occurred to her that one should have to choose.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

...I had never thought of her that way.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I noticed a lot of people saying this is what they liked about the finale of of this season of Dr Who (mild spoiler) - that the companions get married to each other, and then set off to *continue* having adventures with the Doctor.

[pwyrzykowski.livejournal.com]

I actually didn't interpret this as trying to create a dichotomy between stereotypically feminine and unfeminine interests, but between spiritual (horse) and material (house, money, food, dresses) pursuits. Which, if I'm right, is also an oversimplification, but not the one you seem to be commenting on. To state the obvious, material goods won't fill a spiritual hole, but on the other hand it's hard to achieve spiritual fulfilment on an empty stomach...I guess what I would say, though, is that I think the trap is developing a kind of false consciousness that makes it difficult to distinguish what we need from what we think we need...both in terms of material goods and cultural gender norms.
In other news, am back in town. Wanna tea?

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Tea! I definitely wanna tea.

I'm actually heading out to Boston this weekend -- in the airport now, killing time until I board -- but will drop a line when I get home. :)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Okay! I appear to be moved and things are settling down.

Wanna tea?

[eredien]

I wrote a poem after reading this post. I worked with horses a lot, and miss them tremendously now.

I'm wondering about what you said, buymeaclue:
Girls who are into horses as preteens/early teens and then get out of horses are into horses because they can be symbols and metaphors.

Girls who are into horses and either stay in horses for life or get out for a while and then come back? Those girls get the metaphor(s), yeah, but primarily we're into horses because they're horses.

Do you really think that preteens who are into horses for the symbol/metaphor aren't sometimes also into horses because they're horses? The one big difference I've found between myself as a preteen loving both horses and the symbol of horses and myself now loving both horses and the symbol of horses is that if I really want horses now, I've got to choose to make that a high priority among many high-priority things. When I was 12, I had the luxury of having to choose between fewer high-priority things, so I could choose for horses to be a really high priority then in a way that's harder now.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Do you really think that preteens who are into horses for the symbol/metaphor aren't sometimes also into horses because they're horses?

Well, I had to simplify everything a bit, or else the comment would have been six pages long. :-p Obviously every case is going to be different, and there are going to be people who like horse but don't, for whatever reason, make it back. (Although I would note that while kids have fewer demands on their time/energy/resources than adults do, they also have less power over how they deploy said time/energy/resources. So I think the luxury thing cuts a bit both ways.)

Point was that, "Girls like horses because they're a symbol for X," is fairly accurate when you're talking about one set of girls who like horses, but misses a big part of the point for another set, and this is a video about a girl who falls into the latter group.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I should probably say that "Girls like horses because they symbolize (boys)" is just the explanation I've always been given for the girl/horse thing, and may not reflect all realities.