I had a stallion…a very talented stallion who was also a good sire…snap and grab me by the shoulder.
He was a gelding an hour later.
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I think there is a master’s dissertation to be written on how stallions have represented male strength and power and misogyny throughout Western/European history (other cultures put more value on mares). Riding a stallion was proof of your strength, your manliness, your leadership.
It’s interesting how all the famous classical schools of dressage only use stallions, and historically, that’s how it has been done. I’m sure there are practical reasons, like housing mares and stallions together could be a hassle, but can mares and geldings not perform the high school movements? I’ve seen my PRE mare perform a mean levade (okay, I was trying to get her into a trailer at the time, but still…)
Hell, include fiction as well as history, and you got a PhD thesis. When I think of all the horsey books I read as a kid, very few had mares as central characters. The Silver Brumby, The Black Stallion, the Godolphin Arabian, the one about some harness racing colt, Black Gold, Smoky the Cowhorse, Man’o’War… And even though the Flicka series started with a mare, by the second book, she’s taken a distant backseat to the great exploits of her son, Thunderhead.
While I’m on this soapbox (which is a total digression from everything else in this thread), both the Black Stallion and the Silver Brumby series have a grand total of one book in each instance dedicated to a daughter of the titular horse. And many, many more books focusing on the adventures of the famous stallions and their sons. In the case of the latter, the filly in question is saved by her sire and other males multiple times. Unlike the colts and stallions, she’s pretty useless and can’t get herself out of scrapes. And she only lives Happily Ever After when she gives up her headstrong ways and resigns herself to not having adventures, not doing her own thing, and living under the thumb (hooves?) of her mate and sire in the Secret Valley. Meanwhile, male relatives – including her son – get to gallivant off to new parts of the Aussie Alps, create their own herds, their own territories, be independant. It might be dangerous out there, but a cream-coloured stallion can hack it, while a mare must stay quiet and safe. Even 12-year old me noticed the manifest misogyny, and I really loved those books too.
Or fantasy… Remember all those mares in The Lord of the Rings? Me, neither.
So yeah, I think you could say a lot about cultural significance of stallions - taming them, riding them, writing about them.
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Stallions. Add Mustangs to that list as well – Gotta be manly tough or supremely gifted to “tame” a mustang, right? Remember that awful scene in Misfits? Or pretty much any movie that has a horse in it. They are wild. Damaged. Redeemed only by the truly special, and best if it’s a child. Man O’War was a real horse, so even though there’s a kids book (I still have my copy!) he’s not really part of this, but of course, he was portrayed as difficult, which he might have been. I know my gelding would get pretty pissed off the way a lot of horses are handled. He didn’t like track life, but being gelded, he luckily avoided the lonely breeding shed. Chestnut mares seem to also hold a special place in this mythology. Now I do think a zebra could give anyone a run for their money…
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True, Man’o’War, as well as the Godolphin Arabian, were real horses who had fictional novels written about them. But do famous racing mares or famous mares in general get that kind of five star novelist treatment?
How many famous mares can you think of, compared to famous male horses?
The trope of the truly special (usually) man taming a damaged (usually male) horse, however, remains unyielding. Remember Aragorn’s scene with Brego in the Two Towers movie? Or Sigfreid’s ‘horse whispering’ scene in the modern All Creatures Great and Small? I strongly recommend the latter for pure entertainment WTF value. Nothing says ‘what a guy’ like chasing a supposedly troubled, dangerous horse around an arena for five minutes, concluding he’s too messed up to help, but in your last ditch effort to save the horse from euthanasia (hey, you’re a vet, so you’re the professional here), you jump on him bareback and gallop across the Yorkshire moors.
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haha that made me laugh! my dad was a vet – never would he ever… for famous mares, there should be a movie about Winx and Zenyatta, but bet there won’t be. It’s got to have something to do with, well, who’s got the bigger parts…if a man can control the wild beast of a stallion, can he say he’s hung like a horse? i think a lot of what we see in NH is about this, and it’s sickening.
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Everyone I know who has been picked up and shook didn’t get up very quickly without major help and the horse didn’t quit without intervention. N=3 but still.
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good demo – a couple of acupressure meridians go through that area: Small Intestine and Triple Heater – in both cases the points in that area – SI 16 and TH 6 – address neck pain, stiffness, TMJ and other things.
The only fantasy series I can think of that has solid mares as characters (ish) is the Wheel of Time, now that I think about it. Others, the actual named horses are either stallions, or just random horses that never are named.
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Put this on the bingo card!
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This is why I am a Marguerite Henry Fan
Mares!
Rosalind
Gaudenzia
Misty
Stormy
Misty’s Twilight
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I got to about comment 700. I’ve been reading this thread for 2 hours. So many fb people in equine biomechanics group have pestered me to do the balanced through movement method. Then someone told me to check this thread. The funny thing is I read some of this thread a loooooong time ago and forgot all about it. I’m happy to have dodged a bullet. I never considered getting a refund from the fb dressage group I paid to be a part of and was kicked out for no real reason either. I think from now on if I have to pay to be in a fb group then I am just not gonna participate 
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Wait… So now they’re just removing people for no reason at all… insecure much?
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Nope. Totally different group. However I was never able to get a response for why. So it’s my loss and it sucks but at least I know better than to fall for that again.
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I would bet that there is a significant amount of overlap on the Venn diagram of “followers of the BTMM” and “people who need to believe their horse is severely damaged and needs their redemption.”
There’s a certain group of horse owners that would basically take it as a personal affront if you were to suggest that their horse was NOT severely abused or traumatized before coming into their life, and was instead just a regular horse that was generally cared for well but maybe has some gaps in its training or some soreness from wear and tear or under conditioning.
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Likewise for folks who have actually damaged horses who have gone down every medical path but are like the 30yo motorcycle racers who are tooling around in the back parking lot on Z50s yelling, “I can save it!!!” as they are already sliding sideways across the parking lot and the mini-bike is laughing like a Shetland who has just unloaded another supposedly talented pony breaker.
I kind of get it, and have sympathy for those that get sucked in. I am so glad my young dressage prospect who ended up with a named but not understood disease was around 30 years ago and there were very limited woo woo guru options available and those available were limited to a supplement, a drug, and feed. I may very well have been sucked down all manner of different rabbit holes if I were in that situation now. The disease is still not understood well … And there have been some crazy woo woo gurus claiming cures despite the veterinary world still not having a handle on the root cause.
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I actually thought about The Wheel of Time as I was going to bed last night. I’m in the middle of a leisurely reread of it (given your user name, I assume you’re a fan).
While there are named mares, guess who rides them? Women! Offhand, I can’t think of any point in 14 books where an important or powerful adult male character rides a mare who’s significant enough to have a name. Female characters are noted as riding mares, stallions, or geldings, but men only seem to ride stallions and geldings. Unless you can think of any exceptions. I can’t.
I’m going to speculate that this was almost an unconscious decision on Robert Jordan’s part. Male horses are so deeply entwined with masculinity and representative of power in our cultural consciousness that it probably did not occur to Robert that the Dragon Reborn could ride a mare. He probably put Rand, Mat, Perrin, and every other male king, general, whatever on male horses because it seemed like a totally natural and logical thing to do.
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In the Witcher series, Geralt’s horse Roach is a mare. Though, it appears he names all his horses “Roach”. I think there’s a mare in Legend of Zelda as well, but I’m unsure.
Those are the only mares in pop culture I can recall off the top of my head, though I am not particularly familiar with a lot of media.
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Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series is another exception. I haven’t read those books since I was about 11 but remember them well. If you think of the Companions as super-intelligent telepathic horses, but still horses, there are quite a few powerful mares, bonded to both men and women. The gender of the human does not seem to matter in terms of whether they are attached to a stallion or mare. Lackey was waaaay at the forefront of a lot of social things, like female empowerment, openly gay characters, same-sex relationships, etc.
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To offer a counterexample, the Beduin rode mares as warhorses, and mares were highly esteemed.
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