Barbie Horse Adventures: Riding Camp helped me navigate the dreaded ‘Pink Aisle’

polygon.com:

When you are 7 years old, your favorite color is a big deal. It’s the first thing new friends at the playground ask you about, it decides which shoes you buy, and, most importantly, it is a litmus test for gender expression. But my favorite color was a conglomerate I dubbed “greenorange,” and I was definitely not passing this test.

Growing up as a queer tomboy Gen Z-er, I hated the color pink and I despised every store’s dreaded Pink Aisle, which seemed to limit what it meant to be a girl. And, of course, there was no resident of the Pink Aisle more notorious than Barbie. She wasn’t necessarily my mortal enemy, but I didn’t see myself in her the way I did in other characters — she was a girly girl, and I loved bugs and trains and ordering the “boy toy” with Happy Meals.

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In some ways, I was admittedly afraid of femininity. The Pink Aisle’s dolls and kitchen sets imposed the patronizing idea that girls were fragile and sensitive and destined for motherhood, while boys were tough and adventurous and could play with anything. Committing to girlhood felt like surrendering to a life of limitations. It made me afraid that, if I wore pink, I’d be seen as nothing more than “like other girls.”

So when I was inducted into gamerhood with a light blue Nintendo DSi, I was baffled by my parents’ decision to include Barbie Horse Adventures: Riding Camp among my starting roster of games. But I was also newly 7 and terrible at gaming, so when I ran into roadblocks in every other game, I hesitantly picked it up. Its intuitive arrows that pointed toward objectives made it one of the first