A word about bronies.
So I just got back last night from a brony convention in San Francisco. I was working a booth for a vendor friend, and let me tell you what happened:
We met a little girl who was there with her family. She got a button drawn at our booth, told us all about her favorite…
Lots of individual bronies have reblogged this with the “but I’m not a creep defense,” which is to be expected. But this is not about you. This is not about individual bronies being creeps. This is about a larger trend that makes a little girl feel unsafe at an event intended for her. Are we going to go around surveying every adult male in a My Little Pony t-shirt, asking them whether they sympathize with Twilight Sparkle or just want to fuck her? No, because the safe space is more important than your interest in a cartoon about ponies and friendship. JFC.
Side note to Taylor: With all respect, for the individual bronies who object to being stereotyped, it is about them. And it’s also about making events intended for children safer for them. In the real world, things often are about more than one thing at once. When you stereotype a whole class of people and associate them with child molesters and rapists, you pretty much guarantee that many of them are going to object. If your larger goal is something as important as protecting children, it’s worth being careful not to dismiss the concerns of a whole class of people simply because they look like the people who are causing the problem.
The rest of this response is directed at the OP.
Label this Paragraph A for future reference. I’m addressing this to you, the OP, even though I figure it’s unlikely you’ll ever read it. The original post and blog are gone, and 45K notes later everything that might have been said to you about this post has surely already been said. But I had a reaction, and I wanted to share it. Taking everything you say at face value (because I have no other source of information), you were certainly a hero/heroine to help out that young girl. Your discomfort with people who label themselves as bronies is understandable and deserves to be heard, and your underlying message that it is wrong for adult men to appropriate a show intended for young girls, and do so in a way that makes them uncomfortable, is one that I, and hopefully most people, agree with. Finally, it is very much the case that for a few otherwise-privileged people to be slightly disadvantaged so that children can be made safer and happier is a no-brainer.
With that said, I think you did two things wrong. One of them is a big thing, the other a smaller, more subtle thing. But both of them are wrong.
The big thing you did wrong was to limit yourself to merely hiding the young girl, and coldly sending her would-be abductor on his way. That is, you didn’t confront him about his actions, didn’t report him to the con authorities and/or law enforcement, and apparently didn’t say anything about him to the girl’s parents, even though you had access to them.
You seem to recognize that this inaction was problematic, because you try to justify it by citing the girl’s wishes. “At this point I’m ready to set him on fire, but when I ask if she needs me to go report him, she shakes her head. She doesn’t want to get in trouble, or make anyone mad.”
That doesn’t excuse you. You had, by your account, credible information that a large adult man had been following an 11-year-old girl around a convention all morning, had been asking her to come up to his room, and had grabbed her in an elevator in an attempt to physically abduct her. Having obtained this information, as a responsible adult (I’m assuming from your account that you are an adult) you should have taken one or more of the steps listed above. The fact that a frightened 11-year-old girl didn’t want you to is irrelevant. You had an obligation as a grown-up to make a grown-up assessment of the situation and do what was necessary to make her safe.
I’m going to assume that you yourself are relatively young, and not a parent. There’s a lesson you learn really fast when you have a child of your own. You learn that your own comfort zone (which might lead you to want to appear “cool” in a child’s eyes, to accept her into your circle and treat her as a quasi-adult, to respect her wishes, and so on) is sometimes completely beside the point. Sometimes it’s necessary to do something for a child’s welfare that the child, left to herself, wouldn’t do, and wouldn’t want you to do. You do it anyway.
The small thing you did wrong — and it really is a tiny thing in comparison — is that as a result of this experience, perhaps because of the residual guilt you feel about your own inaction, you are now stereotyping older male fans of MLP, in effect tarring them all as potential child abductors/rapists. And notwithstanding the things laid out in Paragraph A, and notwithstanding the fact that the victimization of little girls by adult male sexual predators is a hugely, overwhelmingly more important problem than the unfair stereotyping you’re doing, it’s still wrong.
I’m an older adult male. I think MLP is a pretty cool show, and have unironically enjoyed watching it with my kids. I don’t, and wouldn’t, call myself a brony, but I know people who do, and they are people whom I know to be sane, moral, non-problematic individuals who deserve to be treated as such. By your own account, you’ve encountered many such people yourself.
It’s easy to stereotype those people, especially if they fall into a class you yourself will never be in, and treat them all as, in your phrase, “gross neckbeards.” To decide that they don’t have a right to enjoy this show you’re into. That by virtue of the actions of those other “skeevy dudebros” who wanted to make a children’s show “about their dicks”, that all older male would-be MLP fans deserve to be on the receiving end of your distrust, and even your fury. Though you’ll make an exception, maybe, if they are parents or older siblings or younger boys (until they grow up and start sprouting neckbeards; then fuck ‘em).
I can see the argument that for skeevy dudebros to change their ways, the whole dude subculture has to change, and that for non-skeevy dudes to be inappropriately stereotyped by traumatized victims of the skeevy dudebros is a necessary step in that direction. That is, it may be necessary for some lashing out at dudes generally in order for things to change. It’s still wrong, but it might be a wrong that is a necessary step toward righting the much greater wrong of rape culture.
Please refer back to Paragraph A. I’m not defending the people who inappropriately sexualize the show and its young female fans. I’m not suggesting that those people have any right at all to attend a con. I’m saying that actually it was you, the OP, by your own stated actions, who enabled that. You let a sexual predator roam with impunity and did nothing about it. That’s pretty fucked up.
As a member of the targeted class, I think it’s also fucked up, though in a much smaller way, for you to try to make up for it after the fact by stereotyping a bunch of people who haven’t done anything wrong. It’s your prerogative, and it might even be justified as part of the larger campaign against rape culture I talked about above. But if that’s what you’re doing I think it’s unfortunate, and not just for people like me, because I think you may have allowed yourself to become a version of the evil you oppose.
But that’s not as important. What’s important is that the next time some creepy sexual predator is stalking a young girl at a con, don’t let him get away with it. The way you did this time.
P.S. I think there’s a decent chance the story is embellished for effect, or is outright fictional. Trolls will be trolls. But I think it’s still worth pointing out the problematic things about the account.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1nQYbTp.
Tags: tw: rape, tw: child abuse, tw: mansplaining, tw: privileged dudes crying about the loss of a teency part of their privilege.
