My Little Pony Feminism is Magic

Confound these ponies, they drive me to blog!

So, I get that the media uproar surrounding My Little Pony Friendship is Magic has mostly focused on the “brony” movement. Haha, people watching television not intended for their demographic, isn’t the internet silly, etc. Now that we’ve gotten that out of our system, can we maybe talk about how this show is the one of the most awesomely feminist and female-positive works of popular culture I have ever seen? As someone who has had serious problems with a number of other works that are traditionally considered “feminist”, one of the reasons I have fallen so quickly in love with this show is my feeling that finally someone has gotten it right.

Consider, for a moment, my conundrum with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon has gotten a lot of positive press for his portrayals of female empowerment, and while I certainly think he gets a lot of things far more right than Hollywood in general, there are aspects of his work I still find incredibly problematic. Buffy (like Firefly and *shudder*Dollhouse after it) derives much of its feminist cred from having a central female protagonist who beats a lot of people up. There is certainly something to be said for putting to rest the notion that the menfolk do the violence and the womenfolk need the saving (though I feel it is somewhat indicative of how not-actually-subversive Buffy is that most of the people she saves still tend to be women. Show is chockablock with damsels in distress.) However, my biggest problem with this is that it still seems to be defining women by their relationship with men. In Whedon’s worlds, it seems like the only two options women have are Victimized and Vengeful, which means they largely end up being symbols rather than people.

My Little Pony avoids this problem quite brilliantly, I think, and it does so by establishing a world that operates by a completely different set of assumptions than most other modern television. In the interest of properly defining my terms, I will explain a bit what I mean by assumptions. Every television show, whether it takes place in the real world or not, must establish the rules of the world in which it takes place relatively early on in its run in order for the story to be accessible to viewers. These rules can vary from being physical traits of the world itself (the long seasons in Game of Thrones, the existence of the Hellmouth and various evil creatures in Buffy) to thematic traits of the story (The Wire establishes itself as a world in which institutions will almost inevitably fail the people they were intended to serve). These rules can be tinkered with over the course of the series, and even outright subverted in various ways, but changing the rules too often can lead a series to lose its ability to tell meaningful stories, since those stories will be less and less grounded in the series’s own reality (see Heroes, and in my opinion the final few seasons of Buffy).

Which leads me back to the brilliance of My Little Pony. The series takes as one of its most basic assumptions that females are intelligent, capable, and independent. There is never a point in the series at which any of the characters feel the need to prove that women can do anything, because that idea is never even in question. Of the six main characters, several own and/or operate small businesses, and all of them occupy positions of importance within the community. They each have distinct personalities and interests, all of which are treated as legitimate and admirable. The show shows as much respect for the tomboyish and competitive Rainbow Dash as it does for the fashion-conscious, creative Rarity. While other shows might choose to use the two of them to symbolize some clash of gender identities, MLP treats them simply as different people with different (but sometimes complementary) passions and ideas. It is a show that is willing to tell little girls that they don’t have to conform to society’s expectations, but they also don’t have to define themselves in opposition to them. They can just be whoever they damn well please.

Now, some might answer that this simply represents sexism in the other direction, that moving from shows with few to no major female characters to shows with few to no major male characters just creates a mirror image of the problem we had before. I would answer this criticism by saying that it honestly doesn’t always bother me when a story’s cast runs heavily female or heavily male. In fact, I generally prefer this approach to the approach of shoehorning in a character simply to make a story appear more diverse, especially since such characters tend to be poorly-served by their writing. The problem is, heavily-male casts have dominated television for pretty much the history of the medium, and while I like a number of the shows that have them, it’s nice to see a show that’s such a successful argument for female-driven television that can be appreciated by fans of all ages and genders. My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is a good show because it is smart, funny, and has a genuinely good heart underneath all the shine. It is a great show because, without fanfare or self-aggrandizement, it outright rejects many of the poisonous ideas that have come packaged with nearly all of our entertainment for as long as we’ve had televisions.