Sexualized Saturdays: A Petition to Stop Using “Bro-” as a Prefix

“You can be affectionate with each other, you can love each other and it doesn’t have to be some – you know, and even if it does turn into something, which it didn’t, then it’s okay… We always sort of flinch at this “bromance” buzzword that’s come up – there’s no equivalent for women, because it’s not weird if women are friends… because of this homosexual terror that straight guys have, it’s ridiculous. Now there has to be this word for it, and it’s crazy. It’s totally sad.”

—Simon Pegg on WTF with Marc Maron, speaking about his relationship with Nick Frost and his feelings on “bromance.” [x]

The concept of ‘bromance’ has been infiltrating pop culture for years now, and like Simon Pegg, I find myself increasingly annoyed with the idea, and well, with most terms that start with ‘bro-‘. They glorify a hypermasculine performance of gender and reinforce the gender binary and they’re just pretty awful. When you think of the word ‘bro’, it conjures up the worst sort of college-age insensitive douchebag, am I right? That sort of linguistic callback is only necessary when you really need to quickly distance yourself from any potential feminine or queer implications.

In Defense of the Alicorn

There’s a storm on the horizon. In fact, many would argue that it’s already here and it as such, has already been given a name: Hurricane Alicorn, starring one Twilight Sparkle.

Yes, apparently there’s a big fuss in the more vocal part of the fandom over the purple pony reaching the mythical level of the Alicorn—some sort of pegasus/unicorn hybrid. And as you can probably tell from that last statement, I’m not in this fandom. I have seen a grand total of three My Little Pony episodes, counting this finale, but I think that even as an outsider I can talk about some of the trends happening in terms of the sociology of the program (perhaps even especially as an outsider). Specifically in terms of this season finale, it’s clear that there’s an interesting disparity happening between the two very distinct parts of the fandom. Interesting in some respects, rather disgusting in others.