Why Do Girls Love Unicorns?

Girls love horses. Ponies? Even better. But there’s one member of the equine family that holds a special place in our collective, red-blooded female heart. Three hints: It’s white, it shoots sparkles out of every orifice, and it has a single, swirly horn.

What is it about girls and unicorns? From whence did this rainbow-flecked love affair spring? After all, there’s nothing inherently cute, sweet, or fluffy about a horse with a dangerous, spearlike appendage.

Women have been linked to unicorns since at least the Middle Ages, but in the early days, our horny friends were decidedly uncuddly, and they weren’t even particularly sparkly. Spend a few weeks poking around in the history books, and you begin to see how unicorns have suffered a centuries-long Cullenization [2]: a slow transformation from a creature both dangerous and seductive to something mincing and insipid, best suited to serve as a decorative motif in little girls’ bedrooms or the apartments of slightly cracked adults [3].

The earliest mention of a four-footed, one-horned animal in Western literature comes courtesy of Ctesias of Cnidus, a Greek physician who plied his trade for the king of Persia. In his fourth-century B.C. work Indica, Ctesias describes an Indian wild ass that had a crimson, black, and white horn some foot and a half in length. This creature is “exceedingly swift and powerful,” he writes, and tears into its enemies with “horn, teeth, and heels”; it “cannot be caught alive,” and if it’s approached in combat, it will “kill many horses and men.” (Ctesias did note that the ass had “the most beautiful ankle-bone” he had ever seen.)

Since the days of Ctesias, one strand of stories and artworks has focused on this notion of the unicorn as a fierce, powerful beast. A Scottish unicorn has been snarling at an English lion on the United Kingdom’s coat of arms [4] for the past 400 years. (Hence the showdown [5] in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 Through the Looking Glass [6].) In the King James Bible, which first appeared in 1611, God is described as having “the strength of the unicorn.” More recently, there was Jewel, the “lordly beast” from the final Narnia book, The Last Battle [7], who impales swarthy, garlic-smelling Calormenes and “tosses them like hay.” Even in the soft-focus 1985 film Legend [8]—starring Tom Cruise as a Mowgli-like boy charged with overseeing a magical forest’s magical creatures—unicorns retain a certain majestic, stallionlike aura [9].

The most popular myth about unicorns takes this image of a tough, wild creature and adds two crucial elements: women and sex. According to this enduring story—the exact origins of which are a bit fuzzy—the unicorn is an uncontrollable beast that can only be captured if a pretty young virgin is dangled in front of him. The girl’s innocence proves so intoxicating that the animal goes all weak-kneed and submissive, at which point the hunters pounce and bag their prey. This is the scenario depicted in the famous Unicorn Tapestries [10] that hang in New York’s Cloisters museum and in countless other works of art.

In one of its earliest and most notable Western appearances, this tale was meant to be understood primarily as a religious parable. It was included in a collection of animal stories known as the Physiologus [11], which was popular throughout the Middle Ages in a wide range of translations and editions. In the Physiologus and the many bestiaries that followed it, the story has an explicitly Christian cast: The virgin stands for Mary and the unicorn stands for Jesus, the implication being that only a force as powerful as Mary’s radiant goodness could persuade the awesome deity to humble himself and be “captured” by mortality.

It’s also a hoary romance novel cliché, of course—the wild savage tamed by a good, beautiful woman—which is why the unicorn proved such a sturdy metaphor for love-struck poets of the medieval era. (“The unicorn and I are one:/ He also pauses in amaze/ Before some maiden’s magic gaze,/ And while he wonders, is undone,” goes the gooey lament of one Thibaut, Count of Champagne.)

Women with power, women being adored—it’s no wonder we females have been drawn to this legend in a way that we haven’t historically been to, say, tales about dragons or wizards. But then, the fact that unicorns have the world’s most obvious phallic symbol sticking out of their heads makes their popularity with the ladies something of a given. It’s also what makes them kind of ridiculous, as the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais understood. In his Gargantua and Pantagruel [12], the younger of the two giants describes a flock of unicorns he once saw in a place called “the Land of Satin”: “Out of each of their Foreheads sprouts a short black Horn, some six or seven foot long,” he recalls. Usually the horn “dangles down like a Turkey’s Cock’s Comb,” but when a unicorn “has a mind to fight, or put it to any other use,” he can make it “stand, and then ’tis straight as an Arrow.” (Curiously, in the most explicit lady-unicorn coupling [13] I’ve come across—from Aubrey Beardsley’s unfinished novel Under the Hill—the horn itself is incidental: The lady in question, no less than the goddess Venus, is only interested in the horse’s undercarriage equipment.)

So here we have a creature that—not unlike the contemporary vampire—gets to symbolize two things at once, both sexuality [14] and chastity, which is why he makes as much sense on a sex toy [15] as he does on Renaissance wedding chests [16], where he betokened that the bride-to-be had yet to be manhandled. Trace the chaste lineage down to our time, and you can watch the unicorn dwindle from a symbol of purity to a symbol of childishness. Today, pretty pictures of unicorns are served up as mollifying “chasers [17]” after particularly disgusting blog posts, so that traumatized Web surfers can be returned, ever so briefly, to a state of innocence. Meanwhile, for atheists, the unicorn—a thing only fools believe in—perfectly captures the inane naiveté of religious faith [18]. And of course, an entire American Studies thesis could be written about the Obama-as-unicorn meme [19], which signifies either the magical-ness of our president or the foolish optimism of his supporters, depending which side of the political fence you sit on.

Part of the blame for the unicorn’s diminishment lies in the way that the New Age movement—typically associated, whether rightly or wrongly, with a kind of dreamy soft-headedness—has so strongly embraced it as a symbol of wisdom and beauty, making it hard for anyone else to take it seriously. A slew of kiddie products in the 1980s also helped fix this unsophisticated reputation. Plenty of women my age owe their unicorn fixation to sticker-and-stationery queen [20] Lisa Frank and her flagship character Markie [21], a goggle-eyed prancer who lived on “Airfluff Island,” hated “bad smells and bullies,” and looked like something you’d lick at a rave. The horned members of the My Little Pony tribe [22] did not do much to increase the unicorn’s appeal among sober-minded adults—or boys.

As girly as they are, though, few unicorns have actually gone so far as to become girls themselves. The only pre-20th century example of a lady unicorn I’ve been able to unearth is in a 15th century Arthurian romance called The Knight of the Parrot, which features a baby dwarf who was suckled by a unicorn and grew up into a giant because of the magical stuff in her milk. You could argue that in 1945’s The Glass Menagerie [23], Laura’s beloved crystal unicorn is a kind of feminine avatar, since in its strangeness and fragility, it’s linked to its strange, fragile owner. But in most cases, ladies and unicorns are locked in an endless romantic loop: We love them because they love us. (Except, of course, when they are gay [24].)

How strange, then, that the most significant unicorn of the last several decades is a girl—and not just any girl, but the girliest of girls. For me, and for many other women who spent the 1980s as bookish, dreamy things, the 1982 animated film The Last Unicorn [25]—based on Peter S. Beagle’s 1968 novel [26]—was the ür-text of our unicorn mania. It’s about a lissome, nameless unicorn (voiced by Mia Farrow) who sets off to rescue the rest of her species, all of whom have been captured by a greedy king. About halfway through the film, a sorcerer transforms her into a beautiful human woman [27], with long, pretty white hair and big saucer eyes. Even her name, in this human guise, sounds like something a 7-year-old would name her fantasy self: Lady Amalthea. Beagle’s heroine is both a girl and a unicorn, and thus we loved her best of all.

Recently, after not having watched it in 15 years, I downloaded The Last Unicorn from iTunes. Some parts don’t hold up as well as others. The musical numbers—performed by America [28]—are all deeply goony. On the other hand, the tale’s sexual dynamics are way darker and more interesting (though perhaps less kid-friendly) than I had remembered. But one scene seemed particularly new to me, now that I’m more woman than girl. In this scene, Molly Grue, a tough-talking woman who will become Amalthea’s most trusted ally, meets the unicorn for the first time.

At first she’s astonished, but then she’s livid. “Where have you been?” she cries.

Where have you been? Damn you! Where were you 20 years ago? Ten years ago? Where were you when I was new? When I was one of those innocent young maidens you always come to? How dare you? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?

And then she weeps.

Back when I was a kid, I never realized how sad this moment is. All I knew was that Molly and the unicorn had a special bond—one that the clumsy wizard Schmendrick could never approach. Boys keep out, is what this unicorn story says. This here club is ours.

Want more unicorn-girl goodness? Here are three recent books worth your perusal:

The Natural History of Unicorns [29], by Chris Lavers

Rampant [30], by Diana Peterfreund

A Unicorn is Born [31], by Trinie Dalton, art by Kathrin Ayers

Correction, Nov. 19: This article originally misspelled Ctesias.