Why do people think bronies are only grown-men?

YOU LIE!!!


/sarcasm

 

So they can justify making fun of us.

 

It's that general belief that guys joining the MLP fandom automatically makes them; grown men with bad hygiene, horrifically nerdy, automatic cloppers, and worse of all, virgins. I can debunk the virgin part of it right now. My roommate is a brony and he long since lost his virginity before then. I know there is going to be that small class of dorky virgins out there that are in nearly every fandom, but they don't encompass the entire fandom. It's just a generalization stereotype the people make up to insult fandoms since they don't understand them.

 

I'm aware. I am one myself. I'm just saying in a general sense, it's typically used to insult people in fandoms.

 

And there's nothing wrong with being any of those, except for the bad hygiene part. I myself am a clopper and a huge geek, nothing wrong with it. Anyone who doesn't really know me would never know that. It's kinda like judging a book by it's cover. I don't show off my nerdy side much, at least not around strangers. On the outside, I'd look like a pretty normal person (by societal standards I guess). All they'd be able to tell is that I like sports, since I wear baseball/hockey jerseys a lot. I used to wear my pony t-shirts, but I got a lot of funny looks when I did.

It's weird. It's 2016, there's been a lot of positives things happening to minorites and gays lately, so you'd think that would cross over to MLP. unfortunately not, it's really easy for them to call bronies fat, autistic neckbeards over the internet. But I guarantee the large majority of bronies they came across in real life are not at all like the stereotypes they give us.

 

I wasn't saying it was all bad. I'm just saying that people tend to use those stereotypes as an excuse to poke fun of the MLP fan community.

 

This question is more complicated than most people give it credit for. There are a few components to understand.

1. The Origin of the Term -- This is something more commonly debated than it perhaps ought to be, but the show really first gained traction among people outside its demographic who were also on the internet during its debut on some 4chan threads. Recall that 4chan has a place called /b/, wherein a number of people are identified both inside and out as /b/ros or /b/rothers. Why those words in particular? It's true that there are plenty of women on the internet, but their visibility in this particular sphere was lower in past years than it is now and it's still arguably lower than that of men, at least on /b/. The term /b/rony circulated on those forums for a while, in spite of the fact that the plain word brony won out in eventual common usage.
   
2. The Implication -- Obviously having the term brony itself contain the word (or morpheme, depending on how we classify it) "bro" is unhelpful in asserting gender-neutral context. The addition of other categories like pegasisters and whatnot also have troubling consequences since people tend to want social groups to be clean-cut in ways they never are; it's functionally possibly, even probable, that two different groups have at least some overlap unless they're opposites by definition, but by that rule alone people tend to draw varying lines in the sand over what-means-what.
3. Gender Neutrality as Expression -- Saying that you want a gender-neutral term, or that you want a certain term to be gender-neutral is fine. In fact, it's great! However, there's a pervasive and well-documented trend in western society that describes the consistent affiliation of gender neutral identity with masculine expression. This is not necessarily inevitable but its trademarks are evident; note, for example, that people who are biologically female but wish to be identified as gender-neutral (as opposed to female-gendered) often wear short hair, as is typical for men. They often purchase men's clothing brands. This means that somewhere, deep in our culture, there's some sort of notion of masculinity as the default for certain social situations (again, this is a more and more well-documented and researched phenomena in recent years), which in turn means that there will often be masculine associations with gender-neutral terms.

It's really the combination of these factors that nurture the maleness of the word "brony," although I would agree that stereotypes about heavyset men with lots of acne eating Doritos in front of computer screens while watching talking horses isn't helping any.

 

Regarding the ongoing Cheeto v. Dorito debate, I can only say that I have preferred regular Cheetos to regular Doritos, but also that I like Cool Ranch Doritos and dislike Hot Cheetos.