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My Life With Horses
Before I knew there were men,
I galloped a pony bareback;
it was a hard winter, but
how sure footed we were, resolute
in frozen emptiness, stamping
the ice with our names.
Years later I lay like a foal in the grass,
wanting to touch your hair;
we clutched like shadows,
I twined the past through my fingers, kissing
great gulps of father, of mother
galloping with nothing to stop me.
Now in the evening, I put on my dress
like a secret; will you see
how my elbow pokes like a hock,
the way I have carefully cut my mane,
the way my eyes roll from fear of you?
I’m trying to hide the animal I am;
and you give me a necklace,
bright as a bit, and you’re
stamping your name
into the earth, and my arm
is around you, weak as a halter,
and nothing can stop me, no mother or father.
Dear Subscribers,
The Animal I Am: Neil Gaiman, mastery and desire.
What is it about girls and their horses? Control, perhaps. But not control in the way society usually understands it: a mastery of others or dominance over another creature. No, this is something subtler, something that should be commonplace but is, in fact, revolutionary. It’s about the kind of control that lets a girl feel her body’s boundaries, its power, its balance between strength and vulnerability.
Riding bareback, I first understood what it meant to inhabit my body fully—its risks, its potential. This was the greatest bodily freedom I have ever known outside of orgasm. And just to be clear for the porn-addled, no, riding a horse is not the same thing as sex. But they are both erotic in the sense that they are both about control and release, about inhabiting the body and letting it fly.
There’s something in this combination—control and freedom—that society finds dangerous in girls. Anything to do with female autonomy is shrouded in silence, as if it’s a forbidden secret. I didn’t know what autonomy was until I learned to handle horses, until I understood that something more powerful than me could yield to my will. A horse is immense, capable of killing with one well-placed kick, yet it can be guided by the subtle gestures of a teenage girl’s legs and hands.
But this freedom—the control over one’s own body and choices—is precisely what predators seek to undermine. The recent explosion of interest in Neil Gaiman, accused of exploiting vulnerable women and demanding they address him as 'Master,' highlights just how deeply society’s neglect of female autonomy runs.
Gaiman’s targets were not the care home girls of Rotherham and Oldham. They were vulnerable, certainly, but educated, articulate, and certainly not children. One was a mother herself. Gaiman seems, from this account, to have despised them, remarking about one that it was amazing that someone like him should be interested in ‘someone like her.’ Misogyny crosses all boundaries of class and race. It’s the base hatred, that simply morphs and shapeshifts to suit the times.
In our society the bodily freedom of girls is not celebrated. It’s too unruly, too dangerous to the order of things. Moreover, it’s not a porn idea (ie. not about men and their pleasure) and therefore not encouraged. Instead, we let girls quietly get on with their horses, while the culture shrinks female autonomy down to a spectacle of consumption or a joke. We police girls’ bodies, shame their desires, and, when they fall prey to men like Neil Gaiman, we demand to know why they didn’t resist.
So I’m not as shocked by Gaiman’s depravity as it seems I ought to be. The relative silence from his peers shows that they aren’t shocked either. What does shock me deeply is his total lack of shame at how ludicrous he has shown himself to be. Demanding these girls call him ‘master’ and mean it, is the action of a petty dictator, using fear to crush the natural ridicule that would come his way from an equal.
This is a man so unembarrassed by his absurdity that he issued a public statement in his defence. That statement wasn’t an apology; it was a boast. To paraphrase: My slaves consented! The truth, of course, is that consent means little when it comes from those who are vastly unequal in status. And, more, can you consent to your own debasement? Lily Phillips, an OnlyFans creator who sparked public controversy by documenting her experiences of having sex with 100 men, also brings this question to the fore. Her story highlights how societal expectations and the normalisation of coercive sexual behaviours erode the very concept of genuine consent. You can read my Letter From A Poet about this here. The invasion of hardcore pornography into our everyday lives has problematised consent to the point of meaninglessness
The girls’ accounts in the Gaiman story disappoint, don’t they, with their passivity, confusion and acquiescence. This is not to criticise them—so many of us have been that girl, pinioned in the no-man’s-land between ‘rape’ and ‘consent’ where predators thrive. Like rape, the encounters described in the recent shocking article in Vulture magazine are about power, not sex. There seems no mutuality about them at all. Sex with Neil Gaiman seems, from these accounts, to have been a very bad experience for his partners. But power is being so terrible at sex that your partners have cried in agony and needed therapy to get over it whilst proclaiming your only fault was not being ‘emotionally available.’
The more powerful a man is, often the more lightly he wears it. Gaiman was widely known as gentle, accommodating, solicitous. Powerful men who wish to obtain something from the resource moving in their field of vision formerly known as ‘woman’ need to be charming: there are laws after all. Predators are often the kindest, warmest people you can meet.
As Germaine Greer wisely said: “Men fear women will laugh at them; women fear men will kill them”. Gaiman chose girl-women who wouldn’t laugh. Girl-women don’t feel much bodily autonomy and are isolated from the simple truth that they are full human beings. Girl-women have no notion of being in control.
The way to resist this is to teach girls what power is—not over others, but over themselves. To teach them what it feels like to be free. Get them on horses, I say. Get them young. Not because it will stop men like Gaiman, but because once you have known freedom, once you have felt the immense, terrible power of something greater than yourself yielding to your touch, you cannot unknow it. Even if you lose it—through society’s pressures, through fear, through inevitable mistakes—you will know it’s out there.
Let our daughters feel their bodies moving through space, strong and sure, before they know there are men. Let them stamp their names into the frozen earth, and take the reins not just of horses -- but of their own lives and desires.
Thank you for reading.
Until next time, friends,
Polly x
You can catch up with all Letters From A Poet here:
Graham Linehan Interview
In this wide-ranging interview (available here), Graham Linehan and I discussed many things, including the Gaiman case and the societal failure that meant a 20 year old woman could doubt her own instincts when faced with the author. Paid subscribers can see the whole interview, along with other unique benefits. A great reason to subscribe today PLUS you will receive 20% discount on a year’s subscription.
Kiss by Polly Clark
Kiss is my debut collection, containing the poems that won an Eric Gregory Award. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Letters From a Poet features many of its poems. You can buy it direct from Bloodaxe Books using the button below.
And finally…
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Until next time, friends,
Polly x
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