My sister Kath, who has a keen eye for the cultural oddity (both home and abroad) pointed me towards a fairly peculiar Finnish subculture that was chronicled in the NY Times on Sunday. Her comment was “and you thought the Japanese are bizarre.”
Not that we find all the Japanese bizarre. Kath’s reference, of course, was to idiosyncrasies like the young men who date stuffed pillowcases with the image of a video game or anime girl. The fellow last fall who married a hologram. (Congratulations and best wishes with that one.) And then there’s the fetishization of school girls, and the worship by young women of all things Hello Kitty.
It’s not, of course, that Americans aren’t bizarre. But the bizarrities of our culture – like gun worship and conspiracy theories, Nazis and incels – tend to run along the axis of evil, not the axis of weird.
And I’ve got to admit that Finland’s hobbyhorse girls are somewhat weird.
But the more I think about them, the more good weird this group is.
The hobbyhorse girls, like many of their adolescent and pre-adolescent counterparts, are into horses. At recent event:
A dozen girls waited in line in a Helsinki arena for the dressage competition, ready to show off their riding skills, their faces masks of concentration.
The judge put them through their paces — walk, trot, canter — and then asked them for a three-step rein-back, that classic test of a dressage horse’s training and obedience. The judge looked on gravely, occasionally taking notes. (Source: NY Times)
But instead of real flesh-and-blood, nostril-flaring, carrot-munching steeds, these girls are “riding” hobbyhorses. I.e., a stuffed-animal horse head on a pole. The kind of toy that most kids outgrow by the time they’re four or five. Except in Finland.
Admittedly, it’s a bit oddball. Especially considering that they’ve got vets advising the girls on their horses’ vaccinations and nasal discharge. And the girls compare “hobbyhorse bloodlines and hobbyhorse temperaments, hobbyhorse training routines and hobbyhorse diets.”
But the dressage parody? The hurdle jumping? The galloping around the woods? Why not?
Whether they’re intentionally parodying dressage or not, if ever a “sport” called for parody, there it be. And here are the hobbyhorse girls sending them up and, unlike dressage, which is rich girl and snobby, anyone can get in on the act. All they need is a horse head on a stick.
It looks like fun.
Fanny [Oikarinen] and her friend, Maisa Wallius, are training for summertime competitions. They have choreographed a two-part dressage routine to a song by Nelly, the rapper.
And running around for an hour pretending you’re riding a horse is pretty good exercise.
Of course, part of the appeal is being whatever the female equivalent of Peter Pan is. Riding around on your hobbyhorse is sure a way of telling the world “I won’t grow up.” At least not for now.
Not growing up has much to recommend it, especially in the world where terrorists blow up churches and hotels, the polar bears are trying to survive on incredibly shrinking ice floes, adolescence as ever is a hormonal minefield, and teens get totally clobbered by social media.
When the hobbyhorse subculture started forming, maybe a decade ago, the girls who participated had – kids being kids – fun poked at them. But then hobbyhorsing around took off and now, in Finland, it’s a thing. An official thing. There’s a national championship, and it’s also a Finnish export. It’s taking off in Sweden, Russia, and the Netherlands.
And it’s not just the oddballs who are into it.
Asked which types of girls are drawn to hobbyhorses, [Nelly choreographer] Maisa [Wallius] thinks for a while before answering.
“Some are sports girls,” she said. “Some are really lonely girls. And some can be the coolest girl at school.”
Selma Vilhunen is a filmmaker who focuses on the lives of adolescent girls. She came across hobbyhorse aficionados on the Internet, and made a documentary – Hobbyhorse Revolution – about it. Here film (2017):
…captured its subjects in long spells of raucous joy…
“Little girls are allowed to be strong and wild,” she said. “I think the society starts to shape them into a certain kind of quietness when they reach puberty.”
Every childhood should contain plenty of those “long spells of raucous joy.” Plenty of time to sit around mooning about boys and worrying about your unibrow.
Sure, it’s bizarre, but it kind of makes me wish I were 11 again and could take off with my friends Bernadette and Susan, tearing around the woods that bordered our neighborhood, riding our hobbyhorses and screaming our heads off.
Giddyap, go!
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