How We Arrived at My Little Pony Porn

The American toy and game company Hasbro brought My Little Pony to the world in the early 1980s, with the sole intent of turning a profit. The toy line has seen four iterations since its release, and brought with it several prime-time specials, television shows, direct-to-video releases and games — all created as a way of marketing the toys. Unsurprisingly, the franchise has done well for itself — it is second only to Transformers — but no one could have predicted just how well it would do when it was re-imagined this last time, when Lauren Faust (of Powerpuff Girls fame) took over as creative developer.

Faust intended the show featuring the new toy line to be cross-generational so that parents would enjoy watching it with their children, Hasbro’s target demographic. She introduced pop cultural references, things parents would recognize. It worked — the show, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, was well-received by parents. But it didn’t stop there. Soon, clips and stills were making the rounds online, attracting the attention of a completely different — and wholly unexpected — demographic: adults who weren’t sitting through it for the kids, but watching for their own enjoyment.

The most shocking aspect of the burgeoning adult fan-base were the men. It continues to blow the world’s mind that dudes between 13 and 45 can enjoy this glittery, pastel, sweet thing created for little girls. But they do — they call themselves “bronies” (a portmanteau of “bro” and “ponies”) with pride and they hold and attend conferences about ponies and channel the visuals and tenets of the show into their creative work and hobbies.

Actor John de Lancie (whom you may recall from Breaking Bad, Torchwood, Stargate SG-1, Startrek: The Next Generation) lent his deep, resonant voice to Discord, a character on Friendship is Magic (which, incidentally, was modeled after Q even before creators knew de Lancie would be available to voice it). The actor was surprised at the response he received for his role in the show, particularly from older men. This unintended audience echoed his experience with the overwhelming female presence in Star Trek fandom, and de Lancie became so fascinated with brony culture that he teamed up with producer Michael Brockhoff to create a documentary about it.

Though Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony did an excellent job of questioning viewers about our discomfort with men whose interests don’t conform to gender expectations, the intent to make brony culture acceptable to the mainstream ignored a very real — and often vilified — aspect of brony culture: sex. The outlet for self-expression created by this fandom is vast and, as with other fandoms, this will necessarily include the natural biological aspect of sex. Of course, as with anything that puts the words “children” and “sex” in the same paragraph, the reaction to bronies interested in this aspect of their fandom has been overwhelmingly negative. A whole new word has been created for them to set them apart from brony culture and label them as “other”: cloppers.

It’s telling that other fandoms based on works originally made for children that allow space for sexual exploration (Harry Potter, for instance) aren’t subject to so much hand-wringing as bronies (and pegasisters) who see this franchise as a way to sexually self-express. I think a lot of it is tied up in the discomfort we have with men violating gender norms by liking pastel, glittery ponies. “See?” we’ll say, pulling up Tumblr after Tumblr full of clop. “They’re just in it because they want to fuck equine representations of prepubescent girls. We have good reason to take the ponies away from all of them.”

But that’s not what clop is, any more than Harry Potter and Twilight slash (the latter being the place where the Fifty Shades trilogy was born) is some sort of admission on the part of people who create it and consume it that they secretly want to break into a high school or a junior high school and induce all present into an orgy. You know it’s not, just like you know that watching Dexter and binging on true crime novels doesn’t mean you secretly want to kill people.

The question now is how brony culture — especially members who have worked to distance themselves from clop — and mainstream society are going to view porn’s first foray into the subculture. Yesterday, Girlfriends Films released Tasha’s Pony Tales, a film about four women who drink a mysterious potion and disappear into a magical world where they become pony princesses and set out on the rather inharmonious mission of “conquering” the centaurs and unicorns of the realm. (With their mouths and vaginas, I’m guessing, since their assholes are occupied by the anal plug line that this film was created to market — see what they did there? Clever porn is clever. Hasbro style all the way.)

I’m hopeful that this will help shift those who enjoy clop from the shadows and into a place of understanding by introducing more people to the idea of consensually exploring fantasy in a more colorful way, though I’m a little disappointed in the seeming nod to gender roles characterized by the men in the trailer appearing with only onyx horns and ears at most. Whatever happens, it can’t really be as bad as the time porn tried to co-opt Harry Potter. Unless, of course, there’s a vitriolic backlash with Think Of The Children and other tried and tested knee-jerkers emblazoned on it.