Finland’s Hobbyhorse Girls
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Up until about the middle of the 20th century there was still utilitarian and military horse riding. Men would learn to ride. Now it seems to be culturally associated almost entirely with young upper-middle-class girls or middle-aged women. Is this the result of toy marketing (My Little Pony from the 80s onwards), or high society, or something else?
What interests me about this Finnish subculture is that it's perfectly cloned the "horse culture", just without any actual horses. It's very close to a cargo cult. Possibly Finland is too cold to have a regular horse culture?
(I probably would have done it, but I'm horribly allergic to horses.)
It's not exactly recent. Black Beauty well predates MLP.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-it-seem-like-more-women-than-...
There is a horse culture in Finland, and as you said, it's heavily associated with teenage girls. Horses are of course quite an expensive anf time-consuming hobby by definition, so I'm sure the affordability plays some role here too.
Further anecdote: in elementary school, we had trips to farms. I would think that it's not out of the ordinary for other schools to have this as well, which could be one factor how kids get interested in horses or farm life early on. Feeding a horse or a sheep, which tended to be the only animals interested in humans, can feel like having an exotic pet. Though horses are probably cooler because you can ride one.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harness_racing 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hylOZ8M68iY 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnhorse
Men seem to focus on events where the goal is on the rider's other abilities, such as roping, while women seem to focus on events that focus on riding skills, such as barrel racing and jumping. There's also very few younger men who do dressage style events.
Of course, we still have an active "cowboy" job, where riding on a (horse/ATV) is still a requirement on ranches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D34OOYXF10
Such a remarkable juxtaposition of people, vehicles, and setting, like watching a schooner drift through a grocery store.
for posterity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThlhSnRk21E
I think it's awesome! Find your passion and do it.
They're boisterous and the bikes are loud, but the larger clubs generally self-police reasonably well. They're usually not doing anything more dangerous than a wheelie and are obviously having a great time.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/02/fletcher-street-ri...
Here's the club's site:
While most males probably prefer the "no hassle" approach of motor vehicles, where you don't have to empathize to figure out what's wrong but only need to check for "mechanical failures".
From what I've read, riding fast horses was much more popular with men before cars.
Correct, and this is the reason for which I qualified my statement. They do, however, apply to the section where western "horse culture" as is being debated arose.
I commented on some of this already, and don't want to pollute the comments too much. Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19780759
I didn't take any position.... I simply said that for that argument to hold true you need to believe traditional gender stereotypes. Of course, as with every topic on this site recently, someone downvoted after being confronted with an opinion that made them uncomfortable or didn't exactly align with their own despite it being relevant
It's my understanding that these "gendered differences" have been shown to be more than mere "stereotypes" in a number of different studies across different fields.
That's not to say there's "male brain" and a "female brain", but it very strongly hints at gender influencing preferences which are not entirely based on socialization but also involves its fair share of biological factors.
If this wouldn't be the case, how are trans-people be able to feel like "being stuck in the wrong body" if all brains and consciousness are alike? If there are zero biological factors at play, then that feeling of trans-people would be entirely imagined on their end, wouldn't it?
I admittedly did use a jock strap when I was first getting started, but within a few months I found that I was better off without it. Even riding bareback (Without a saddle) is completely doable once you have the right muscle stamina.
That said, the girls are very good.
Don't know why, though.
Another poster also mentioned that it is less than comfortable for men. This is true. I would imagine it to be a serious motivation to switch to cars.
Finland's level of cold doesn't preclude horse culture.
Finland only gets down to -50°C in its coldest regions. There are horse breeds that laugh at calling that cold. For example the Siberian Yakutian [1], which are kept unstabled year-round in places that regularly go down to -70°C. (+38°C in summer, so these things deal with a 108°C range!)
I assumed this was why the hobbyhorse culture was female -- whatever the reasons are for horses to be a female interest, hobbyhorses are an imitation and necessarily target the same demographic.
Horses are expensive; it seems natural to me that enthusiasts who don't have real horses might be drawn to an imitation.
The result of mostly girls hobby riding might just naturally follow from that.
Large hairy beast who does what you ask and wants to make you happy. Horses resemble your taste in men.
I wouldn't want to guess for how many that is a factor. But the number is not zero.
Something whose sound makes your spine shiver, is fast enough to feel on the edge of control, and looks a million times better than you?
"The number is not zero."
Interestingly, the earliest fighting of the first US war of the 21st Century featured soldiers on horses. Horseback riding is apparently now part of Special Forces training. [0]
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/22/horses...
it looks like playing to me as well, and not sure why the community would see that as a problem. even professional sports players know they are playing a game. an interesting and unusual perspective for sure.
I guess much in the same sense that people would probably not be amused if you ran around a Comic Con telling everyone this is just make believe.
And yet, this is what an outsider would think (as someone who does not go but has friends who do). Some people would call tinkering with computers "playing", though my spending years on it resulted in a career path. I don't see the issue with "playing". At some point, if you're not doing it for a pay off, that's what it is, and that's fine.
Unless you mean housewiving, no one can be unemployed for life (save perhaps welfare queens). I still consider housewiving to be a job; it is quite a bit of work. To what are you referring?
Yes something was lost. In Finnish there are different words for children's make-believe plays ("leikkiä") and sports/adult games ("pelata"). Your example of comic-con is spot on, I think.
> “If someone says we are playing, it strips away everything we made, it strips away the reality,” said Ms. Aarniomaki.
She’s objecting to being compared to comics instead of soccer, hence “the reality” being stripped — you’re accusing what they view as akin to gymnastics as being mere fantasy.
not sure why the community would see that as a problem
Or you might see it as playing at being Bruce Lee. Hiiii-Ya!
Needless to say, the former perspective implies more respect for the people doing it!
But there's not a bright line between 'serious' activities and non-serious ones - and hence, not much a sport can do to choose where on the spectrum they lie.
This extends to many other sports and activities: you can practice at a serious level or an amateur one. The difference here is that I see no serious level for this. Same thing with comics, which I saw some one else mention earlier.
I guess if the kids are having fun, fine. This does seem incredibly weird, but I guess it's between them and their parents. However, I don't understand this demand to be taken seriously. It's a hobby; they do it for fun, and that's fine.
What difference would that be? Real-world application? No-one hires martial artists for demolition work.
They're both recreational activities. Doing them well is difficult enough that your ability can be (and is) assessed competitively. Seems much the same to me (at least, if the competition results are consistent between judges).
Is it recreational in some way? Sure. But again, it has real benefits, while I don't see any in riding a toy stick (aside from enjoyment gained).
Some martial arts have some application to self-defense, but I don't think that's the real distinction - people don't seem to treat e.g. Naginata as a less serious martial art even though you'd never use it in practice. And many non-martial-art sports (I mentioned cycling in a parallel thread) are treated with the same seriousness.
> It's also exercise, which has extensive and proven benefits. It also has huge benefits in terms of bone strength and density.
Aren't those equally true of this hobbyhorse-dressage?
Many of the martial artists whom I know began training for purposes of self-defense. Some began as adults, and some were placed in training by their parents after being bullied.
> cycling
That's totally out of the scope of this conversation; I made no claims as to the seriousness with which cycling ought to be treated. I think most sports are given too much credence.
>> It's also exercise
> Aren't those equally true of this hobbyhorse-dressage?
No, not from the gif of a "competition" at the top of the article. It does not appear to contain any serious exertion.
Most sports involve pushing yourself physically. This does not involve such exertion and improvement. If kids want to do it, that's fine (all though still weird as all getout). But I don't think them saying to not "say they are playing" because it "strips away what we've made" is really reasonable. Kids are playing dress-up; it's fine to remind them it's just dress-up. And it's ridiculous to compare it to real sports.
There's a difference between saying that something helps with with being bullied (many disciplines achieve that by offering a structured environment, a framework to develop experience, consciousness over one's body, controlled confrontation, and a controlled experience of pain; I personally found taking up fencing helped me a lot) and saying it's a practical self-defense technique.
> That's totally out of the scope of this conversation; I made no claims as to the seriousness with which cycling ought to be treated. I think most sports are given too much credence.
Very few people regard martial arts as "more serious" than other sports. You dodged my example of naginata; do you consider martial arts that can't be used for practical self defense to be "less serious"?
> Most sports involve pushing yourself physically. This does not involve such exertion and improvement.
I wouldn't be so sure - maintaining precise control over one's body can involve a lot of physical effort. Often making something look effortless is part of a sport's aesthetic, but actually involves a lot of hidden effort to achieve. Consider figure skating or gymnastics, or indeed "real" dressage.
Also, where the hell you live that there are so many muggins, street and bully fights? All the while countless bullies are easy to fend off by junior trainees while the trainees themselves don't become bullies or something?
Cause as someone who done martial arts, it takes more of pure aggression to win against bully (or successfully bully someone) or in street fight rather then technique on junior level. And also that people training martial arts are no less likely to bully others then general population.
Moreover, majority of what is done and taught in martial arts lessons is not for self defense. A lot of it would land you in jail (cause it is about literally killing people), a lot of it is pure sport with little street fight application and a lot of if king of like gymnastics with no fight application at all.
There are not "so many" muggings/fights/etc., but I do know several people who have encountered them. That's not so many; don't you? With respect to bullies, there is tons of bullying in every school. Any one who tells you otherwise is lying to himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_wrestling
"The matches have predetermined outcomes[11] to heighten entertainment value[12] and all combative maneuvers are executed with the full cooperation of those involved...These facts were once kept highly secret but are now a widely accepted open secret. To promote and sustain the willing suspension of disbelief by maintaining an aura of verisimilitude, the performing company avoids discussing the true nature of the performance in official media"
And these are adults.
These girls may continue their hobbies in adulthood too (like most people keep playing the games they like at older age...)
I also do long-distance cycling, which is just as much of a purely recreational activity (even when competing for points). But no-one calls that "play".
It certainly never occurred to me this simple refinement could make an annoying experience into something a kid could actually enjoy.
It seems analogous to that rhythmic gymnastics discipline where they do routines with a long ribbon attached to a stick.
I'm glad for surprises like this even though I don't quite (or at all) understand them!
Too often my knee-jerk reaction to unexpected things is "There's no possible cultural value in this." But it usually pays off to put in a bit of effort to try to understand what the practitioners are getting out of it.
For the record, I'm all for fun physical activities like this, just don't try to compare it to rock'n'roll.
Sometimes it starts getting more formalized and attracts slightly older kids. People usually think it's weird, then they get used to it. ...like dungeons and dragons.
Skeptical articles lean into the knee-jerk reaction that "something must be broken with society."
Ultimately, lots of stuff is wierd if you approach it from a judgemental outsider's perspective. Wtf is golf all about, for example?
Just don't be a dick about it.
Square dancing, freestyle canoe [2], cosplay, cross-stitch etc. These are all activities that people do for the sake of the activity itself without any extra motivation except maybe to be able to hang around with others.
Also I think most that of those mocking Morris dancing probably do it from a safe distance!
so it's like bitcoin 'investing' before computers.
Then the internet came. Now we can find it real time. Imagine it and it may exist, find things you never imagined and they do exist.
All comes down to all us being better for it all. Think of how much exposure that all the conflicts bring about as we learn about people we would have only had a by line about. Now we get video of who they are, how they live, what they like to do.
Many talk about the good old days, heck we are living them
At first, I even had trouble with the act alone, but I do remember doing silly things as a kid because they were fun, so that's understandable, even if they look silly doing it. I certainly looked silly a lot as a kid.
Then, my issue was that there are apparently whole competitions as if this were a real sport. But then I realized that there's no reason it can't be. We have all kinds of sports that require things that ultimately look like dancing... And that's basically what this is, in the end. Dancing with certain other rules.
I also stopped and considered it compared to LARPing. I mean, they're play-acting a scenario and using actual physical skills and routines. It's actually probably a lot more educational than a lot of things they could be playing instead.
But in the end, I'm getting old and new things are making me feel uneasy increasingly more often.
At least it's better than parents turning their adolescent daughters into sexualized dolls on the children's beauty pageant circuit.
A virtual horse is just a webpage for a fictional horse. There are usually pictures of the horse that hobbyists find on the internet/buy on forums/illustrate themselves [1]. The horse obviously also has a name and usually a description of its personality. Horses sometimes age "in real time" but most stables seemed to have a somewhat arbitrary aging rate (e.g. the horse would turn 4 within a few weeks of its "creation", but after that age normally). Horses can also be registered in a database called "Virtual horseback-riders society" [2]. You can use the "Virtual horseback-riders society" to advertise your competitions. A horse/horseback-rider can usually participate in any competition by just signing up (by sending an email to the organizer) and the winner is randomly picked. Another way to interact with other stables is by "taking care" of somebody else's horse - meaning you write a story in a guestbook about what you "did" with the horse, e.g. "I took Cupcake for a walk in the forest. Cupcake was in a bad mood and really reluctant to leave the stable, but cheered up when it saw a patch of grass". You can always create a new horse (obviously, you just create a new webpage), but to be in with the cool kids, you "buy" horses from other hobbyists. The "best" horses are ones that have a long family tree that has been documented in the Virtual horseback-riders society database. There is no currency, there are "selling topics" in the forums, where you try to provide compelling arguments as to why you should get the horse.
The forums were pretty active 10-15 years ago and most hobbyists were girls in their early teens. The community is much less active and older now. However, the community is more tech-savvy than back in the day - people have their own domains and use a database to track their horses (back in the day, most pages were static sites hosted on Freewebs). Some stables have been running for 15 years, the most iconic one being Ionic [3], a stable with around 800 horses.
There is probably something to be said about virtual stables dying out as the Internet has become more centralized. Virtual stables also introduced a lot of young girls to coding and for example, the owner of Ionic works in IT now.
[1] http://www.seppele.piirroshevoset.com/hevonen.php?id=298
They are:
> she is at home in the world of hobbyhorses, where boys and grown-ups have no place.
Citation from another article:
""" There doesn’t seem to be that many boys riding hobbyhorses?
Alisa: I think it’s quite sad, actually. It feels like boys aren’t allowed to do this thing that is considered to be a girly thing. At the same time, I think it also means we have a strong sense of feminism in this community. It’s a place for girls to do what they want. But the boys we do have are very much welcomed and included. """
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/36050/1/h...
Society and entourage treats a boy doing this far worse than it would a girl doing it. I can only imagine the kind of bullying I would have opened myself up to by doing this in my childhood (say at 10+ years old). I remember some of my friends being laughed at by their own parents for playing "girlish" games. Bullies were far less forgiving.
It's a good case study to understand why many women avoid certain fields not because they're not up to it but because society "guides" them another way.
If competitive hobbyhorse riding officially became a sport here in Sweden it would have to follow some recent laws dictating affirmative action within the sport organization. A minimum of 40% men and women. No exceptions.
Recent survey show that two national organizations that manage a major sport has failed to comply. Ice hockey and horse riding. 80% men in one, 80% women in the other.
They could, but my guess is that they get more into cars. Some of the best motorsports athletes of all time (Raikonnen in F1, Makinen in rally) have come from Finland.
- Per the guide-lines : "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports"
- Per usage
"For years, a subculture of teenage hobbyhorse enthusiasts flourished under the radar."
-- Bill Walsh
That seems to apply here.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic., https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The first highlight is the good, general rule, the second highlight the one that applies to the submission in question, in my opinion.