"The Human Pony" by Rebecca Wilcox

Posted by Tanos on Fri 14 Nov 08, 11:05 PM

Tags: books, openairbdsm

Rebecca Wilcox's new book has been getting a lot of coverage in Open Air BDSM and Pony Play circles, and I received my copy last week. I am very impressed by the quality of this book, and that's speaking as someone who isn't a real pony play enthusiast.

On my books page, I gave this summary: "This book sets new standards for the presentation of BDSM on the printed page. Gone are the designs that could have been run off with a wordprocessor in letter mode, with a few line drawings in the text and a set of colour plates sewn into the middle of the book. This is more like a modern book about home or garden design: full colour throughout, side-boxes to expand on key points, step-by-step and side-by-side pictures to illustrate how to do things and to compare different options. I'm not a lover of the high-fetish side of pony-play myself, but this book will gather converts."

"The Human Pony" focuses on what we might call the pony roleplay elements, with lots of in depth coverage of pony headspace and advice for trainers in handling ponies. The final chapter has ideas for starting your own events and the appendices have Muybridge style photographic sequences showing different pony gaits (trot, gallop etc.)

However, there are some additional things that would need to be included to make a fully rounded book about the subject. For example, whilst there are lots of (gorgeous) photographs of ponies with carts, there aren't any detailed descriptions or diagrams of exactly how ponies can be hitched to carts. Nor is there any discussion of the relative merits of carts pulled by hand or by a torso harness with hands bound - although both are illustrated. And certainly nothing about designing carts and the issues to consider.

(Incidentally, these specific questions are addressed by Guy Masterleigh's excellent "Pony Cart and Harness Design Guidelines" which is in the files section of his Real Pony Girls UK Y!Group.)

I don't think any of these omissions harm the book though: as the back cover says, it's a "lavishly illustrated introduction to outfitting and training the human pony."

Personally, I'm not sure where I stand with pony play. It's clearly an activity that Bridgewood will encourage, but I'm not very big on roleplay in general. But I loved my extremely brief experiences of being pulled in a cart, and so maybe I'm a latent rickshaw rider rather than pony trainer? Maybe if we do enter a golden age of Open Air BDSM in the UK - and all the signs are there - more options like this will emerge

Edited Wed 18 Nov 09, 12:32 PM by Tanos

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