Why Millennials Are Masturbating to "My Little Pony" Porn
In the wilds of the sexual prairie that is Pornhub, a subset of porn caters to a very particular breed: people who are turned on by My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic-themed porn.
This group is a much smaller part of a larger, Web-based community known as bronies, a fandom devoted to the My Little Pony franchise. Although bronies are quick to note that their devotion to My Little Pony isn't inherently sexual, there's a small subset of the community known as cloppers who get off to the idea of seeing, say, Applejack get it on with Fluttershy. Pornhub has been tracking data on their behavior — and now the website is sharing it with the wider world.
"Where there is Internet sensation, there is generally a tieback to porn," Pornhub explained in a post detailing its findings.
Those findings are fascinating. Overall, the data reveals a number of characteristics of the My Little Pony porn-loving faction, including where they live, what they search for and how old they are.
Much like the larger brony community, many of the users searching for My Little Pony-themed content on Pornhub are male. In fact, men are 37% more likely to search for it than women, and many of those men are between the ages of 18 and 24:
The age breakdown is similar to that of the larger brony community, the majority of which also skews quite young. (A 2012 "State of the Herd" survey found that 89% were between the ages of 15 and 29.)
As for specific search terms, the results are somewhat unsurprising. "My Little Pony" and its abbreviation "MLP" top the list, as do "clop" and "brony." ("Clop clop" is an onomatopoeia that refers to the act of masturbating to My Little Pony content.)
Other, more specific terms, such as "Princess Celestia MLP," "Pinkie Pie MLP" and "MLP Queen Chrysalis," refer to My Little Pony characters featured in the new iteration of the franchise, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
The findings also reveal that while bronies come from all over the world, a substantial contingent of them appear to live in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. According to the data, My Little Pony porn is a whopping 462% more likely to be searched in Belarus than the rest of the world. In the other three countries, the numbers are 427%, 326% and 179% respectively.
The brony community is more than just its porn habits. While the Internet rule "if it exists, there is a porn of it" certainly rings true for My Little Pony lovers, it's unfair to assume that all bronies watch the pornographic version of their favorite cartoon.
As Mic's EJ Dickson wrote for the Daily Dot in 2014, "[Brony porn lovers] are sort of the black sheep in the community; there's a fear that the small percentage of cloppers will give the rest of bronies a bad name by perpetuating the idea that the fandom totally derives from a sexual fetish."
Though there's certainly a sizable contingent of the community that enjoys adding a sexual aspect to the fandom — Pornhub's findings clearly indicate as much — bronies are quick to point out that the community at large does not necessarily endorse these views.
"There is nothing worse in the fandom than a Clopper," one brony wrote online. "They ruin the fandom. They ruin the community's public image, and they think [it's] funny/normal."
Still, they're not that unusual when it comes to cartoon porn in general. As Mic has noted before, millennials love cartoon porn — and My Little Pony is yet another iteration of this trend. Young people love to trade on nostalgia, and that extends to our porn-watching habits, too.
"The amount of porn from '90s nostalgia hands-down trumps any other genre in volume," DOXOlove, an artist that creates illustrations for the hentai community, told Cosmopolitan.
Anime, The Simpsons, Family Guy and even Disney movies have all come to prominence in the millennial porn world. According to previous data from Pornhub, millennials are 131% more likely to look for anime porn than people over the age of 35.
Think about how many "You know you were a '90s kid if..." or "26 Things Only '90s Kids Will Remember" articles you've clicked on. Cartoon porn — My Little Pony included — is simply '90s nostalgia taking a different form.
