Right, this is why Ken is so obsessed with horses in the Barbie movie

And it’s not because of the patriarchy

1 year ago

There are two things Ken becomes obsessed with in Greta Gerwig’s new film: Barbie and horses. From the second he shrugs on his white (faux, but lined with horse print) fur coat and commits to spreading the gospel of the patriarchy, horses don’t leave his mind.

In fact, when Ken finds out horses have nothing to do with male dominance he loses interest in his sexist cause altogether: “To be honest, when I found out patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I lost interest,” he told Barbie. So, what’s going on? Why are horse relevant?

Ken horses Barbie

Ken starts to get obsessed with horses when he leaves BarbieLand and visits California. He sees policemen riding stallions, reads about cowboys riding horses in books, and generally starts to equate them with power.

You could start to hypothesise this has something to do with Western movies embodying stereotypical masculinity and horses being a part of this message, leading to his assertion of the patriarchy, but Greta Gerwig says Ken’s infatuation is much simpler than that:

“They really are in some ways like aliens visiting from another planet,” Greta told IMDb of Barbie and Ken in the human world. “I liked just his confusion about like – you wouldn’t necessarily know who’s in charge. Maybe the horses are running more than you think because there’s an awful lot of horses and statues and horses and paintings and you ride horses like you wouldn’t immediately know ‘well, the rider is the one doing it,'” she said.