“You ever look at who rides and who doesn’t? Who’s good and who isn’t? Look sometime. Look how few ever let the animal run things,” one equestrian tells another in House Rules, the 1994 debut novel by the late Heather Lewis. “Even with a bad horse, you got to let him, you got to at least once, else you never know what he has to give you. But everyone holds on so tight. Doesn’t work, all that fighting. We all know who’s stronger.” House Rules is a stark, saturnine exploration of the underbelly of the American riding set, full of gynecologically described fisting and synthetic heroin and paternal rape; it is also, according its author, largely autobiographical, and this casual comment from its lesbian love interest, Tory, is a sly authorial nod to a theme that runs through all of Lewis’s novels. In equestrianism and in sex, power is exchanged unevenly, and Lewis writes about those instances in which the party you are making the exchange with—a bad horse, a bad man, a bad woman posing as a good, maternal one—is too tough to bring to rein, too big to beat. Suppose, then, that you simply let them win a little; suppose you survived by imagining that you were working them, and not the other way around. If they broke you, surely you could tell yourself you’d wanted it to happen. After all, isn’t the one who is getting what they want, even if that thing is pain, the one who’s in control?
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