The Barbie movie is a big cheat for Horse Girls

As a huge Barbie fan, I loved Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie an absolute delight. All the details of Barbieland, from the way the Barbies move through their dream homes to the costumes that represent real dolls, truly celebrate the joys of girly play. But there’s one little detail I can’t get over.

Namely: What about the Horse Girls?!

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

Early in the film, handsome but dim-witted Ken (Ryan Gosling) discovers that while Barbies rule the mythical world of Barbieland, patriarchy dominates the real world. So about halfway through the movie, he brings what he’s learned about real men back to Barbieland and installs a comically over-the-top macho regime in the formerly 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 focus only on serving Kens’ cold drinks. There are some funny jokes about Ken’s mansplaining The godfatherand play guitar bee their Barbie girlfriends instead Unpleasant them. It’s all a glorious rendition of the overly hyper-masculine world that is Ken-dom – with one glaring exception.

The horses!

After witnessing some cops on horseback in Venice Beach, Ken decides that horses are the epitome of masculinity. So part of Ken-dom’s cartoony macho motif includes horse-themed decor, a hobby horse for each Ken, and endless Casa House videos in the background of stallions and mustangs racing and rearing.

Image: Warner Bros.

Sure, cowboys and buckaroos are masculine, but horse girls are such a staple of girls’ childhood play that it seems silly for the animals to be so immediately heralded as symbols of masculinity. Where are the Equestrian Barbies in Barbie land? Where are the unicorns and horses with flowing white manes streaked with pink, who come to trample the macho Ken herds with their glittering hooves? Justice for the horse girls!

And it’s not like Ken, because a doll has a certain history with horses. There have been many Barbie horses and they are usually all packed with Barbie or her girlfriends. In the animated films, she has had many a horse, from magical unicorns to ordinary horses. (There was also that one time 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 thematically related Barbies already have horses. Over there used to be a Horse loves Ken back in 1982 – but he was just there to round out the Horse Lovin’ Barbie and Skipper dolls.

Granted, one of Polygon’s own rules for recognizing a horse girl story is that “horse girl” isn’t actually a gender restriction. “Horse Girl” is just a state of mind, a passion for horses that doesn’t need to have gender. At the end of BarbieKen himself admits that he lost interest in the patriarchy when he realized it wasn’t all about horses. The fact that horses are so central to Ken’s understanding of masculinity seems like an early indication that he doesn’t really understand patriarchy and that it would never solve his actual problems.

The omission of Horse Girls in 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 girl joy. Perhaps the seemingly out-of-pocket horse association in the movie even talks about what will happen to Barbieland in a possible future. After all, when the movie ends, Ken admits that he needs to figure out his own identity apart from Barbie. But the answer is there: Ken is a horse girl. He just has to embrace that identity. Herds of plastic horses will soon be coming to Barbieland, and both Kens and Barbies can let their inner Horse Girls out into the sunset.