The Outhouse will join with Bronies in a blood pact, declaring war on My Little Pony: Equestria Girls.

Source: NY Times

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a television show marketed at three-year-old girls which has somehow managed to gain a large and devoted adult following, including a group of rabid adult male fans who call themselves "bronies." We're not going to comment on that. We're just putting the facts out there.

The franchise has become extremely popular, spawning a successful comic book series, a brony convention, and all the other nerdbait that comes with popularity with this demographic. It's a success story. Today, The Outhouse learned that Hasbro plans to extend the My Little Pony brand with a new movie called Equestria Girls, in which the ponies are reimagined as purple fuck dolls with fluffy tails teenage girls in way-too-short miniskirts.

Seriously, they're really short. If one of those ponies sneezes, you'll catch a glimpse of their "tanus."

That's the area on a pony between her tail and... you know what, nevermind.

Moving on...

From The Times:

“We are responding to the desire by our fans to experience the brand in more ways,” said John A. Frascotti, Hasbro’s chief marketing officer. “They imagined themselves as which pony they would be or which pony they identified with the most.”

Normally, we'd make fun of something like this, maybe make some "jokes" have some "laughs," but, this time I kind of want to just paste the NY Times article and add absolutely nothing else to it, because this story is ludicrous without any help from me. That would be copyright infringement, however, so let me tell you a story instead.

I'm a father to two girls, ages 4 and 6, and a boy, age 3. My wife had bought my younger daughter a Happy Meal from McDonalds earlier that day, and requested the "girls' toy" when asked which one she wanted. Normally, my wife asks for the boys' toy, for reasons that will become apparent soon enough, but she must have been slacking and let this one slip by.

It was a hair brush modeled on the Nickelodeon show Victorious, and when you pressed a button on the brush, it sang some song (presumably from the show) about wanting to fuck your best friend's brother. Not in those words, obviously, but, basically, that was the point of it. All three of my kids were singing it. My wife was pissed. I took it and threw it out, and she called McDonalds and bitched and made them give us a boys' toy instead. Boys toys were legos or something like that. You know, a toy PERFECTLY GOOD FOR A BOY OR GIRL, and without any kind of sexual connotation.

The boys' toy was just a toy. The girls' toy was institutionalized sexism, a primping tool that sang songs about crushing on boys. Happy meals aren't for teenagers. They're for little kids.

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with a lot of the crap that's marketed to young girls on television, in music, in toys, in fashion, etc. Boys get legos. Girls get Bratz, dolls from a disgusting franchise where little girl dolls dress and wear makeup like cast members of The Jersey Shore. My wife has always hated it. I've only noticed it since I started having little girls to buy toys for. And now I hate it.

So I could make jokes about bronies, or how Hasbro wants to encourage more Cleveland residents to kidnap teen girls, or how I can't wait to see the hentai version, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but, honestly, as a father of two young girls (and one young boy who, as a consequence of having two sisters, is quite a little princess himself - literally, yesterday, he was wearing the girls' "princess earings" and told me "if I have a choice between being a boy and a princess, I choose princess"), I'm just not feeling in a very joking mood about this.

But is it just me?

I asked Outhouse Editor-in-Chief Christian Hoffer for his thoughts. He was already watching the trailer for this movie with his wife, a fan of the franchise. He's familiar with the show. His comment: "They only managed to sexualize the prissy one and the introvert." I've never seen the show myself, but I'm gonna take a guess and say the introvert is the yellow one posing like a schoolgirl model on a japanese used panty vending machine.

I sent a link to the NY Times article (which is a promotional puff piece, not a critique) to my wife, Amy Terror, with no comment, and this was what she had to say: "I just threw up in my mouth a little. Do they really, really, I mean, really, think that they need to hypersexualize these young girls like this? And what I don't understand is that if they are "teenage girls in high school" why should children watch it?"

Hasbro, despite the jokes about bronies, you had a good thing going. You had a television show that appealed to young kids, including boys for what would traditionally be considered a franchise for girls, and, from what I understand, it's a quality show that teaches solid values. Who the fuck thought that what My Little Pony needed was to replace the ponies with sexualized, super skinny humanoid teens? All jokes aside, the primary audience for this is little kids, who are already innudated with this crap from every angle by every form of media.

I don't allow this kind of stuff in my house. It's a decision my wife and I made, and we stick to it, even if our kids might not have the hottest toys in the first grade. But a not everyone has that kind of control or even awareness of the problem.

So, bronies, this is a call to arms. It's an olive branch from ol' Jude Terror, the friend you didn't know you had or wanted. Together, we can put a stop to this. If you're a brony, or, and I can't believe I'm going to write this, a "pegasister," don't buy this movie. Don't watch it. Speak out against it. Let Hasbro know that THIS is not what you like about this franchise.

At least, I hope it's not.

And go see a play or a baseball game instead of watching kids shows all the time. Damn.

And if you're the parent of a little girl, buy her some legos.