In 2009, the toy company Hasbro decided to reboot its long running My Little Pony Franchise. Targeted at girls aged five to twelve, the franchise had consisted of several pony toy lines, along with a set of television specials. To begin the fourth generation of the profitable toy franchise, hasbro wanted to create a television series with a set of new characters, to do so, they commissioned Lauren Faust, a feminist creator who had previously worked on the Powerpuff Girls. Faust created My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic, and it launched on October 10, 2010 on The Hub Network.
Quickly after the show began airing, Hasbro noticed something unusual. In addition to the expected viewing contingent of young girls, a large group of men and teens between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five were engaging with the show, both on television and online. This group of men began to form a community, and began calling themselves Bronies.
For the past several years, bronies have been a force to be reckoned with. Among fandoms on the internet they are among largest, most vociferous, and most productive in terms of creative output. Much has been and can be said about Bronies as a cultural phenomenon, but I want to focus on the gender demographics of the My Little Pony fandom, and what they can reveal about masculinity and heteronormativity in the Brony community, in fandom in general, and in society as a whole.
The fandom of My Little Pony is overwhelmingly male. The most recent data from 2014, shows that only 17% of Bronies identify as female, a proportion that is far higher than in earlier years. Given the target audience of Friendship is Magic, this statistic seems odd. What can explain the fact that many men are attracted to My Little Pony and the fan community surrounding it. Perhaps we can begin to gain insight by understanding the nature of the show.
For the past several decades, the various My Little Pony television shows, specials, and films had become increasingly infantalizing, relying solely on badly done, low stakes, ‘girly’ tropes. The same was true for girl’s television in general. Faust wanted to ‘deghettoize’ television targeted at girls, and to make a show that both children and their parents could enjoy. To do so, she recalled how she had played with her toys in her youth and used that to inform the show. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic does, to some extent, rely on traditionally ‘girly’ tropes, but it does so without being infantilizing, and without allowing said tropes to become cliché. It combines typically feminine narrative conceits with classic old high fantasy and a pseudo-greco-roman mythos. All of this is to say that MLP:FIM is good. Good enough to make people, especially those who are already primed to enjoy children’s television by the glut of well done animated films of the previous decade give the film notice. A television series simply being good, however, is not enough to explain a massive fan phenomenon such as the Bronies, nor does it give context for the odd gender breakdown of said fandom. For that, we turn to another oddity implied by the statistics.
Most scholars of fan theory agree that when talking about gender in fandom, two terms become relevant: transformative fandom, and acquisitive fandom. In general, Walliss notes in Larsen’s Fan Culture: Theory and Practice, “the consensus within fan studies literature is that male fan creativity tends to be more orthodox in focus whereas female fan creativity tends towards being more transformative”. This would imply a paucity of transformative works given the male-dominated nature of the Brony community, and yet we find the opposite is true: the quantity and quality of transformative works produced by Bronies rivals that of any other fandom.
Does this mean fan scholars are wrong? I doubt it. Rather, I suspect bronies are the exception that proves the rule. To show why, we must understand why the axiom is true. Fozmeadows of Tumblr suggests that “because men, and particularly straight white cismen, are so ubiquitous within popular narrative(s), they have less need to create personal fan interpretations in order to see themselves represented.” If this is true, then the reason for the prevalence of transformative fan works in the male dominated MLP community becomes clear: men, who are so used to being centered, find a piece of entertainment in which the are not, feel the need to transform the work into something that is their own. One way they do this is through transformative works.
On some level, the glut of transformative works coming from the Brony community is, at least in part, men attempting to center themselves in a piece of media that they enjoy, but in which they not centered. This demonstrates that a problem, only partially fixed by transformative works, faced by men who enjoy Friendship is Magic. Another problem that males who enjoy MLP face is heteronormativity. Men in our society are expected to behave a certain way and enjoy certain forms of entertainment, and diversion from this socially designated course invites challenges, both internal and external, to a man’s heterosexuality, normalcy, and ‘manliness.’ These toxic systems are so deeply ingrained that it takes a powerful force to protect men who step outside the heteronormative mold, at least from their own internalized toxic masculinity.
The solution to both these problems, for Bronies lies in community. Male fans of my little pony construct a fandom environment in which males are centered and their own personal heteronormativity is reinforced, at least to an extent. The result is that, despite the nature of the show which they are fans of, the Brony community is a male centered community. When contexualized in this way, it’s surprising that there are as many women as there are in the Brony community.*
There’s another interesting implication of the community that bronies have constructed for themselves: the Bronies have constructed a social environment in which one can safely defy male social roles without risking their own internalized self-perception of masculinity. They have constructed what I term a normative-safe environment. I define a normative-safe community as one in which members of said community can feel safe transgressing certain societal boundaries whiles still being assured (internally, at least) that they continue to fit into a normative social category, in this case, the male heterosexual mold.
In part two, I explore the normative-safe environment and it’s implications in the brony community. Tune in next week to catch the second in this two part series!
*This doesn’t, of course, entirely explain why women don’t just form their own community around MLP. I suspect there are two explanations here. First, recall that I mentioned that a high quality of the show doesn’t necessarily imply a large fandom. For men, part of the draw of My Little Pony, is, in fact, the community as demonstrated by Robertson (2014) (quoting Watercutter interviews (2011)) “All of that is amplified by the ridiculously awesome community.” The Bronies as a social group amplify the attraction of the show. The second possible reason is stereotype threat. That is to say, adult women, trying to avoid falling a stereotype of femininity, which society, in general, has deemed ‘negative.’ Ultimately, the increase of women in the MLP community may be a sign of both a changing society and a changing community. Possibilities I may look at in a later work.
Putney Mediates the Media 