The horse gags in the Barbie movie are a trick for Horse Girls

As a huge Barbie fan, I found Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie an absolute delight. Every detail of Barbieland, from the way the Barbies move around their dream homes to the costumes that resemble real dolls, truly celebrates the joys of girl play. But there’s one small detail I just can’t get over.

Namely: What about the Horse Girls?!

[Ed. note: This post contains significant spoilers for 2023’s live-action Barbie.]

Image: Warner Bros.

As the film begins, handsome but somber Ken (Ryan Gosling) discovers that while the mythical world of Barbieland is ruled by Barbies, the real world is ruled by patriarchy. About halfway through the film, he brings his findings about real men back to Barbieland and installs a comically over-the-top macho regime in the previously pink and feminine world. This means that Barbie’s DreamHouse is now Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House. All the barbies are stripped of their cool jobs and only focus on serving the Kens cold drinks. There are some funny gags about Ken’s mansplaining The Godfather

and play guitar at her barbie friends instead To them. It’s all a glorious rendering of the over-the-top, hyper-masculine world that is Ken-dom – with one glaring exception.

The horses!

After witnessing some police officers on horses in Venice Beach, Ken comes to the conclusion that horses are the epitome of manhood. Part of Ken-dom’s cartoonish macho theme includes a horse decoration, a hobby horse for each Ken and endless background videos of Casa House stallions and mustangs racing and rearing up.

Sure, cowboys and buckaroos are masculine, but horse girls are such an integral part of girls’ childhood games that it seems silly that the animals are so immediately touted as symbols of masculinity. Where are the Rider Barbies in Barbieland? Where are the unicorns and horses with flowing white manes and pink strands that trample the macho ken herds with their glittering hooves? Justice for the horse girls!

And it’s not like Ken as a doll has any particular history with horses. There have been many Barbie horses, and they are usually all packed with Barbie or her girlfriends. In the cartoons, she had many horses ranging from magical unicorns to regular horses. (This happened once in 2005 Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus where her older sister was turned into a Pegasus.) Meanwhile, Ken dolls only get horses if their themed Barbies already have horses. There was A Horse Lovin’ Ken Back in 1982 – but he was only there to round out the Horse Lovin’ Barbie and Skipper dolls.

Admittedly, one of the inherent rules of recognizing a Horse Girl Story is that “Horse Girl” is not actually a gender restriction. Horse Girl is just a state of mind, a passion for horses that doesn’t have to be gender specific. At the end of Barbie

Ken himself admits that he lost interest in patriarchy when he realized it wasn’t all about horses. The fact that horses are so central to Ken’s understanding of masculinity seems to be an early indication that he doesn’t really understand patriarchy and that it would never solve his real problems.

The omission of Horse Girls from the original Barbieland doesn’t detract from my overall enjoyment of the film, in which Gerwig and the rest of the filmmakers clearly celebrate femininity and the joys of girlhood. In fact, perhaps the film’s seemingly self-made horse association gives a clue as to what might happen to Barbieland in a possible future. Finally, at the end of the film, Ken admits that he needs to figure out his own identity separate from Barbie. But the answer is right there: Ken is a horse girl. He simply has to accept this identity. Herds of plastic horses will soon be coming to Barbieland, and both Kens and Barbies can let their inner horse girls run wild in the sunset.