Why Do Girls Love Horses, Unicorns And Dolphins?
by The Kitchen Sisters
People have long speculated about why girls love horses, according to Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.
By identifying with these dynamic, strong animals, Orenstein says, girls are expressing their own power.
"They're all active, they're all sources of power and motion and transformation," she says.
Laurel Braitman, an MIT graduate student in the history of science who writes about animals and what we think about them, says girls' fascination with these animals is more than power — the animals fuel girls' imaginations.
"Horses and dolphins and unicorns — these are all borderland creatures; gateway animals to other worlds," she says. "They help us imagine wonderful other ways of being in the world. They let us be cowgirls and oceanographers and mermaids and princesses."
