BFFs and Bromantifications

Last night, I was checking up on my Deviantart account, and "So You're A Cartoonist" creator has many journal entries about and doodles featuring characters from "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic".  I vaguely remember watching the 80's original, and owning a turquoise coloured pony with sailboats on her arse and a streak of white hair that turned magenta in the sunlight (between two yellow streaks...ah, the 80s and your lurid colour schemes....I won't miss you much).  I believer her name was Main Sail, and she was a first generation MLP toy released in the 1988/1989 season.

Anyway, I decided to check out the new version, and, whilst up to my neck in sparkly, magical pony muck, I came across this website: http://bronies.memebase.com/.  For those of you wanting to know what a "brony" is, it's a portmanteau or squishing together of the words "brother" and "pony".

This sounds like a weird way to get onto the topic I'm about to launch into, but it is a point of modern culture that interests me...Bear with me on this one guys...

As far as sexualities go, on the most basic level, you can be: straight/heterosexual, gay/lesbian/homosexual, or bisexual ("but, what about the "T" in LGBT?" I hear you cry; Being transsexual is not about sexual preference/attraction, it's about how you feel physically in your own body - you could be a transsexual lesbian, for example). Of course these labels are 100% to do with sexual or romantic preferences, and not really associated with other lifestyle choices.  However, there is still a societal attitude that unfortunately prevails even now in the 21st century; that being, that what one chooses to do outside of his/her sexual or romantic life somehow defines the sexuality of that person.  With this attitude has evolved what I am going to call "micro-labelling".

Again, let me explain.  Most people have a label.  I personally am "straight/heterosexual".  So far so good.  However, sometimes I fancy girls a bit, but not very much or often.  This makes me not quite bisexual, so I then become "bi-curious" (as opposed to "a little bit gay sometimes").  I also like to game, which as far as I am aware, has got nothing to do with who I might want to have sex with at any given point in time.  This is, for some inexplicable reason seen as a pretty much exclusively masculine activity, so whereas I should be able to say that I am a "gamer", I tend to have add the word "girl" or "chick" onto the end of it.  As if it is really necessary to point out that I am in fact an actual female and not a man with boobs and child-bearing hips.  This form of microlabelling is, in my opinion backwards and sexist, as it creates a division between men and women in the gaming community - that's a blog for another occasion, I bring it up just as an example.

On the other end of the stick - the male end - if a man decides that he likes something considered "girly" he is immediately considered gay.  And now we loop back to "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic", and the Brony community as a whole.  There is method in the madness...

I find it quite tragic that there is a need in this day and age to have to label oneself in a particular way just to avoid being labelled as something else (i.e. gay).

Why can a man not stand up and loudly proclaim for the world to hear: "I like 'My Little Pony'"?  Without risk of having his sexuality called into question?

More commonly used than "Brony" is the "Bromance" - again the portmanteau involving the term "bro" is an immediate disclaimer of non-gayness.  "I'm not gay, I'm just really close to my mate okay?!".  Interestingly as far as the term "Bromance" is concerned, there doesn't seem to be a female equivalent (I have come across, on urbandictionary.com, "womance", and the far more insulting "hoemance").  I'm not entirely sure why this is, but my guess is that having a friend with whom you connect with on a deeply emotional level, so much so that you feel the need to touch each other at all, isn't considered societally unusual for a woman.  They're just BFFs, yay!

It isn't just applicable to homosocial relationships, but heterosocial ones as well.  Recently I was very good friends with a lad.  The friendship bordered on exclusivity, and we shared a lot of things emotionally.  I later found out that the majority of people assumed we were sleeping together, which wasn't the case at all.

What is wrong with loving someone deeply, but platonically?  I have this argument with people who are desperate to believe that there is some form of slash going on between Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee in Tolkien's Lord of  the Rings, because Sam tells Frodo that he loves him.  Yes he does, that doesn't make them gay!  It also doesn't mean that it has to be labelled as anything else (such as a bromance), other than what it is - a friendship.

Hairwire

PS:  Check out *TomPreston on DA here: http://tompreston.deviantart.com/