My Trampy Pony
For those of you who've never read Bitch magazine, it's a "feminist response to pop culture" and it's generally pretty interesting and smart even if I don't always agree with the writers. I like it enough to have purchased every issue published over the last seven or eight years. Usually, whether I agree with the author or not, I can at least understand their perspective. However, the most recent issue has an unintentionally funny article about the changes My Little Pony has gone through in the last 25 years and I don't have a clue where the author's coming from. I'll let the writer (Jesse Rutherford) explain: "After 25 years of tinkering, My Little Pony has grown more sexually suggestive with every version. The latest herd of ponies look more like sexually available human children than anything remotely equine. Today's My Little Pony displays upturned, accentuated buttocks; smooth glittery skin; a tilted head; an exposed neck; long eyelashes; lowered eyelids; dilated pupils; long, slim legs; shifted weight; accentuated hair-- even, in some cases, parted lips" (italics mine). Check out the trampy little ponies:
I wouldn't let my husband anywhere near these tiny homewreckers and their "accentuated buttocks." Rutherford hilariously points out that these ponies are displaying their sexual availability with their upturned buttocks and that this is "known in studies of animal mating behavior as mammalian lordosis, and more commonly called 'asking for it.'" These ponies sure are asking for it. They're practically begging you to mount them. Rutherford honestly fears that these slutty ponies are teaching our daughters the art of sexual display. If your daughter plays with My Little Ponies, don't be surprised if she starts posing on all fours with her ass raised in the air. She's inviting any nearby stallions to mount her.
The article gets even funnier when Rutherford wonders if s/he's "reading too much" into the My Little Ponies. (Gee, I wonder.) "Are little girls really going to absorb the physical signs of female sexual beahivor from their toys? Well, here's one way to think about it: Just take off the pony's tail and add hands to the front legs, and what you have is a human doll that could be used in a stop-animation pedophilic porn flick." That's the funniest line in the article. It really says that, I swear. Where the hell did Rutherford come up with that?! Did s/he take Ecstasy before making the mistake of watching a porno and playing with a My Little Pony at the same time?
Rutherford is right about one thing. S/he has made the same observation that anyone with half a brain has made before: girls' toys have become more sexualized over the last 25 years. That's just a fact and My Little Pony is no exception. Rutherford seems to prefer the innocence of the original ponies from the early 1980s:
And that's fine, even understandable. But to sincerely make such absurd statements about My Little Pony completely discredits the idea of feminist analysis. It mocks feminist analysis. In fact, it reads like a really sharp satire of feminist criticism. Too bad it wasn't meant to be funny.
2007-03-13 11:04:42 UTC