Punching Day: A Man. Kicks. A Horse. In the Penis. 🌭

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT KICK A HORSE IN THE ERECT PENIS, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT IS MID-FUCK.

CONTENT WARNING: HORSE GETTING KICKED IN THE PENIS BY A MAN IN BUSINESS ATTIRE.

I want to talk to you about the dream that was the world wide web and an unknown man who inexplicably declared war on a horse boner.

Before YouTube was even a thing, some primitive video-hosting service showed me a clip I’ve never stopped thinking about. It was called “WEDDING INTERRUPTED BY HORSE MACHO” but it has since been uploaded to YouTube under the title, “Horny Horse Ruins Wedding.” It never went truly viral, as far as I know – this copy has only 78,000 views at the time of this writing. The quality is shit, as you’d expect from the era, to the point that it may not even be apparent what exactly is going on unless you pay close attention:

“What’s to get?” says the skeptical reader. “A wedding party in Russia(?) is posing for photographs in a fancy horse-drawn carriage…

…when a nearby stallion starts mounting one of the carriage mares, causing chaos to ensue… 

…and the driver frantically pulls it off. I had the general idea after the first 90 seconds, if this was TikTok, I’d have been fed twelve more videos by now!”

Friends, I wouldn’t have bothered you with the clip if that’s all it was. The real magic begins at 1:34, when a man enters the frame from the right, skidding to a halt like he arrived at the scene of this emergency in a dead sprint. He appears to be a simple passer-by wearing a tie and gray slacks – a businessman, perhaps, on his way to the office.

He flies over to the male horse – which at this point has already been pulled off of the mare – and starts kicking it in the dick. Repeatedly. 

The carriage driver then pulls the horse away from the scene, its erect horse boner flopping wildly …

… at which point the man follows the stallion and, for unknown reasons, continues kicking it in the dong. 

Look to the left, at the other carriage driver and the bystander in the yellow shirt watching this play out. I know it’s grainy, but you’ll see the carriage driver slowly turn to look away and, just as the camera is about to pan away from them, the guy in  yellow is also turning his back to the violence. Neither of them know exactly what they’ve just watched but instinctively know it was not meant for human eyes.

The clip ends shortly after but it never stopped playing in my heart. Who was this  horsecock-punting vigilante? Perhaps an insurance salesman who showed up at the office later with a whopper of a story to tell, his trouser leg reeking of horse fuck? Or, maybe this kind of thing happens in Russia(?) so often that it’s barely worthy of mention around the water cooler. I don’t mean this exactly, maybe just something in the general category: You had to whip a bear on the scrotum because it was eating a guest at your child’s fifth birthday party, you were forced to masturbate a pack of wolves to dissuade them from ravaging your wife’s funeral. I don’t know, I don’t live there.

I know what you’re asking: “Is it possible the stranger is a Horse Guy and this is actually what you’re supposed to do in this situation?”

If so, I can’t find any reference to anyone separating a pair of mating horses in this manner, even in the negative context of a, “You Need to Stop Kicking Your Horny Horses In the Cock” feature from the May 2004 issue of Defucking Your Horses magazine. I can’t find any other videos of a person doing it, or any articles referring to a time when someone has done it, ever, in the history of horses, fucking or feet. Every possible search term gets me the opposite: Horses kicking humans in the dick.

“Maybe you should interview a horse trainer and ask them.” Motherfucker, I’m not interviewing shit. Don’t you understand that the magic is in not knowing?

I choose to believe this guy improvised. I think he arrived at the scene, felt a primal urge to do something and, before he could make a conscious decision, this was the something his body chose to do. Then, once he started, he couldn’t stop. The feel of a horse boner across his ankle felt good, it felt right. I also believe he had no idea he was being filmed, or that tens of thousands of people have since watched him kick that horse in the dong. I believe he will go to the grave not knowing that in those thirty seconds, he brought me more joy than all of the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe combined.

AGAIN: PLEASE DO NOT KICK A HORSE IN THE PENIS OR IN ANY OTHER AREA OF ITS BODY. They are beautiful, fragile animals. I am only showing you this video because I am confident that exactly zero people will imitate what they see. I am not approving of this man’s actions. I did not ask him to do it, I merely watched it happen from several thousand miles away, several thousand times.

So why am I even bringing this up? I kicked this off by saying this was about the dream that was the world wide web and I meant it. This clip is probably from, I don’t know, 2005? Earlier? It was right on the cusp of the internet becoming what it will eventually be, which is a medium for watching video of anywhere, from anywhere, at any time. Some of you already know this, but my most recent book is about a future in which virtually everyone live streams their day via a tiny camera pinned to their shirt or whatever, all of these feeds forming a single, all-seeing social media network. It’s a world in which everyone spends every moment knowing that they’re performing for an audience and the story is about, among other things, just how much that fucks with people’s heads.

But back in what historians will call the “WEDDING INTERRUPTED BY HORSE MACHO” era of the web, all I saw was the astonishing potential for humans from all over the world to understand each other. That I could sit in my chair in Illinois and watch this dude in Volgograd or wherever dispense a series of Adam Vinatieri game-winners to a throbbing equine schlong was nothing short of a miracle. I thought that once we all got a look at how other people lived, saw that everyone is trying their best, that the world is full of amazing people doing things that might look strange from the outside…

…that we could start to all accept each other as part of a single human family. It really didn’t play out that way. 

This, you see, is what sci-fi writers like me, and even good ones, miss about the future. Anybody could have predicted that we’d have little screens that send video to each other – Dick Tracy had that in 1964 – but nobody could have predicted QAnon disciples staging COVID mask freak-out videos in grocery stories for social media clout. It turns out that these candid looks into each others’ lives are instantly corrupted the moment we all know we’re on camera. At that point, it becomes about playing a character, presenting whatever version of yourself will get the most engagement which, these days, means whatever version is the most alienating to the other tribes. “I hate you and I’m going to make sure you hate me.”

But in 2005, in an era before ubiquitous smartphones, this man in gray pants had no reason to believe he was performing for an audience. He was simply doing what he, in his role as a passer-by, thought was right. And what he thought was right was to kick the fuck out of that horse dick. Life may never be so pure again.

Jason Pargin’s writings can now be found on his new site hosted at Substack, you can read his columns there or have them emailed to you if that’s too much effort. He is the author of Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick and his new book will be out next year.