Post by jimmy on Sept 15, 2015 18:10:42 GMT
This idea has been floating around in my head for a while.
I come from a western background with horses in California. For a young man in the California hills, it was important to be a cowboy. If you were a guy, you broke colts, you roped, you worked cattle. Your interest were in stock horses and overall just cowboy working horses and cowboy life.
The "english" world was for girls. About the only reason to get interested in english riding was because that's were the cute girls were. But if you were a guy, to ride like that, your manliness was in question.
As I got older, and my daughter got into eventing, I started to see more men at the upper levels of things. As I studied the history of jumping and eventing, I could see that it was a very manly thing to do. It was military. Nothing sissy about it. I started wishing I could ride like that.
In fact now that it is probably too late, I really wish I had gotten involved in eventing. But one of the silly, if not uncommon, reasons I didn't, is that in the west coast at least, there were no real men as role models that stood out in the hunter/jumper/eventing world, or dressage for that matter. There wasn't one guy I found that I could relate too. And yes, many of them were gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just needed a different role model, and so did the other guys I knew.
As my horsemanship has progressed, I see that the skills involved in jumping, and the attitude, is closer to cowboying than I ever realized. It is unfortunate, and I can't be the only guy who saw it this way, that this stigma of riding in an english saddle became such a feminine thing to do. I know in Europe it isn't this way, and it didn't use to be in the US. But I can tell you, on the west coast, it was not considered manly.
So along those lines, I wonder if there would be more male riders in the jumping and eventing world today, if there was an equestrian school catering to young men, that was more along the lines of military training. A program that encouraged more men to get involved, you know, as if it were football or another sport.
I know we have talked about this before, the feminization of riding in recent history. Not that that's bad either. I don't mean sound mysoginistic. But I'm a guy, and if there were more guys in it, I would have done it.
I come from a western background with horses in California. For a young man in the California hills, it was important to be a cowboy. If you were a guy, you broke colts, you roped, you worked cattle. Your interest were in stock horses and overall just cowboy working horses and cowboy life.
The "english" world was for girls. About the only reason to get interested in english riding was because that's were the cute girls were. But if you were a guy, to ride like that, your manliness was in question.
As I got older, and my daughter got into eventing, I started to see more men at the upper levels of things. As I studied the history of jumping and eventing, I could see that it was a very manly thing to do. It was military. Nothing sissy about it. I started wishing I could ride like that.
In fact now that it is probably too late, I really wish I had gotten involved in eventing. But one of the silly, if not uncommon, reasons I didn't, is that in the west coast at least, there were no real men as role models that stood out in the hunter/jumper/eventing world, or dressage for that matter. There wasn't one guy I found that I could relate too. And yes, many of them were gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just needed a different role model, and so did the other guys I knew.
As my horsemanship has progressed, I see that the skills involved in jumping, and the attitude, is closer to cowboying than I ever realized. It is unfortunate, and I can't be the only guy who saw it this way, that this stigma of riding in an english saddle became such a feminine thing to do. I know in Europe it isn't this way, and it didn't use to be in the US. But I can tell you, on the west coast, it was not considered manly.
So along those lines, I wonder if there would be more male riders in the jumping and eventing world today, if there was an equestrian school catering to young men, that was more along the lines of military training. A program that encouraged more men to get involved, you know, as if it were football or another sport.
I know we have talked about this before, the feminization of riding in recent history. Not that that's bad either. I don't mean sound mysoginistic. But I'm a guy, and if there were more guys in it, I would have done it.
