My Little Pony has a male fanbase.

Makes some sense.  Supposedly the GI Joe was created by a man who feared little boys were secretly playing with their sister’s Barbie Dolls.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Bronies are not gay. One might be hard-pressed, sure, when seeing college-age guys wearing pink wigs and furry faux tails walking into a convention center—as this writer saw, outside what turned out to be BronyCon 2013 in Baltimore, an event that drew over 12,000 people—not to look for some LGBT connection. But the vast majority of them are indeed heterosexual, according to scientific studies of the fandom. (Yes, there are major Brony studies, but more on that later.)

The gay thing would be easier to take for… this, I suppose…

Some among the Internet mom squad reacted too, the mental juxtaposition of their six-year-olds sharing a giggly fondness for Princess Celestia—Alicorn pony and co-ruler of the kingdom of Equestria—with an equally arduous 22-year-old bearded man being too weird to take.

The Ponies?

“If you just stripped the ‘My Little’ off it and just called it ‘the Ponies,’ it would be even more successful,” he said. “It’s kind of like watching a Pixar movie, in that it’s got humor for adults, and morals in the stories that a kid can understand. And a lot of throwback to old movies like ‘Star Wars’.”

And three two one…

Some say it’s a trend toward “neo-sincerity,” he observes—a post-ironical appreciation for things because of their purity, even sentimentality, because it feels good. In 1993, author David Foster Wallace described the ethos in part as arising from those “who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.” MLP provides life-lessons, humor, and great animation. So just enjoy it.

Can one ironically appreciate neo-sincerity?

The comments section gets us into the problem of stunted adolescence and how this is works with Obamacare and (oddly enough, considering the nature of the magazine’s isolationist Conservatism) a lack of a military draft.

Is the audience mostly male, or is it just that the hardcore interactive fandom is? I’m certain that there are plenty of fans in the target demographic (5-11 year old girls), it’s just that kids that age do not usually create cross-country organized communities.

Isn’t the Internet changing that?

This is about the most extreme indication of the decline of Western Civilization that I can think of. I can only hope that the devotee who claims to be a Naval Officer, and the devotee who claims a Drill Sergeant is a fellow devotee, are both lying. Another depressing thing is that there are so few dissenting voices in this thread; I think most of the few conservatives around here were so repulsed by this article that they didn’t want to associate with it to the extent of even clicking on it.n

And…

What is truly odd, troubling and creepy is the small-c conservative fandom surrounding Ayn Rand: a hateful shrew who was a militantly anti-Christian atheist, died a lonely woman, and was buried in a casket emblazoned with a dollar sign. Yet no so much fanlove for C.S. Lewis–a devout Christian and writer of many fine ‘children’s’ books, who penned these oft-misquoted words:

Yes.  My Little Pony is the new CS Lewis.

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