Perception. Yours, mine and theirs.

Time for a good old fashioned rant!

For years I’ve had to listen to idiots dribble on about how romance novels are unrealistic and paint the wrong picture of what women should aspire to and how these novels create a too high expectation of love and raises the bar too high in what we should look for in a man.

We, as authors of such smut, smile, nod, try not to slap the silly out of them and move on to people whose opinions are knowledgeable and well thought out. They. Are. Love. STORIES! If you don’t like them, don’t read them! Same goes with horror, erotica and every other genre of anything even written or recorded by anyone anywhere. It pisses me off!

 Then I see this outrageous post a while back about the My Little Pony cartoon show. The blogger states:

 My Little Homophobic, Racist, Smart-Shaming Pony So overall, these are the lessons My Little Pony teaches girls:

• Magical white ponies are suited for leadership; black ponies are suited to be servants.
• Stop learning! You will overcome any obstacle by resorting to strength in numbers (of friends).
• Girls that wear rainbows are butch.
• You need the government (ideally a monarch invested with supreme ultimate power and a phallic symbol strapped to her forehead) to tell you what to do with your life.

You can read the dribble here (and I should point out it is a feminist's website):

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/12/09/my-little-homophobic-racist-smarts-shaming-pony/comment-page-1/#comments

Holy shit! She goes on about how there are no black ponies, that Rainbow Dash looks like an angry lesbian and only beautiful white horses are suitable for leadership. This is the kind of feminist who gives everything a bad name. I would have liked to have heard whether this chick actually has children or not.

My five year old is in love with My Little Pony. She has all the baby ponies, hard and soft talking toys, books and dvds. The lessons they teach are about cooperation, not lying, a little bit of karma and above all, friendship and what it takes to be a good friend. Lovely stories for little girls. There is no question of equality among sexes, no question of racism and it certainly does not make my child ask questions about angry lesbians. As a mother, it is my job to answer questions but thanks very much to the idiots who plant the seeds in the first place. She doesn’t know anything about being gay! That is how I would like to leave it until those questions are raised naturally by her own curiosity and level of understanding.

She doesn’t know about sex.

She doesn’t know about being a racist or to taunt fat people or the disabled.

She takes her cues from me and I don’t behave like that. Sure, little girls and boys with two mums or two dads would be taught the difference between heterosexuality and same sex partnerships but not with all the graphic details. If you did, you would be a BAD parent! By the time they are old enough to know and ask these things, they won’t be interested in My Little Pony anymore! They’ll never look back at the show and say “where were all the black ponies?” Also, why do we have to represent every race? Is an Australian show not just allowed to have Aussies in it? Is it racist that all of my heroines to date are white? No! It’s because I write Regency. It’s also because I don’t know enough about African-Americans or Aboriginals to write from their point of view. But I guess that just makes me ignorant doesn’t it?  

In this case, I think the blogger just wanted something to pick on. I could find that in at least a dozen kid’s shows. Strawberry Shortcake is mostly females, they all live together and talk to fruits and vegetables. Does this make them a bunch of insane gang-banging dikes? Doubt it!

Does the fact that Ben 10, when he grows into a teenager, only get crushes on girls represent a bigger issue about his sexuality? Doubt it!

Is there racism in Transformers because they only fight for Americans? When Nathan from High Five sings a song about playing with his noodle, does my five year old think he is talking about his dick or does she see that he’s holding a pool noodle and that the songwriter used a poor choice of words? When my mother-in-law calls the cat with “here pussy, pussy, pussy,” do they giggle hysterically? No! (But I do)

Let’s leave our kids as kids rather than explain away their innocence with issues they don’t need to know about or think about for so many years to come. If we never teach them to hate black people or throw rocks at gays, they’ll never do it. There is the pathway to world peace… And the real lesson here should be, if you don’t like it, don’t watch/read/listen to it! The reason we have so many choices on this planet in everything from food to movies to books to colours to sex and right back to food is that everyone likes different things. I don’t bag out people who don’t like bacon (although I am shocked). I also don’t openly make fun of people who have different cultures or tastes or skin colours. It must be exhausting for people to hate everything about everything… Love it all and go with the flow!

But then that’s my opinion. Love it or hate it, love me or hate me, I have better things in this in life to worry about than acceptance in every circle on the planet =)

You can also read a rebuttal by another blogger here:

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/12/24/my-little-non-homophobic-non-racist-non-smart-shaming-pony-a-rebuttal/


Peace out!