The last issue of my newsletter focused completely on My Little Pony and clopping, or the pornographic side to the brony life.  The clopping world is vast, complex, and at times disturbing: but what sexual fetish isn't at one point or another.  I'm not writing about this because it's simply another unusual fetish I've uncovered.  It's because I'm an enormous MLP fan.  And because I understand the sexual appeal of the brightly colored ponies.  If anything, it's completely logical to me.  Logical not because I'm sexually stimulated by it, but because I have an appreciation of the ponies and can understand how easily that appreciation could become sensual, and by extension sexual.

Let's start with basics.  Clop portrays the ponies in three different forms:

Anthro is the only form that is not depicted in the show or its movies.  The porn can be extremely graphic or very loving.  I have yet to find a lot of extremely graphic images, but there is a lot out there yet to excavate.

In the pony form, the characters seem very young, whereas in the human form they seem at least age of consent.  I'm sure if there were no laws about minors and sexual imagery, there would be clop depicting the ponies as young as they are on the show.  

I've browsed through bestiality subreddits and found many questions about bronies and bestality: are bronies into animals, and the ponies are an extension of that?  Both sides hotly deny being the other, and this makes sense to me, too.

My Little Pony isn't about animals: it's about magical little speaking ponies with complex characters that have adventures.  That's as different from a horse as it can be. 

All I ask is keep an open mind.  Forget that it's a show geared toward children.  It's more complex than that.  People are more complex than that.  Ponies are more complex than that.

This lovely article showed up in my Facebook feed the other day: A Handy Guide To Sex In The Middle Ages.  The article focuses on church edicts which prohibit certain sexual acts in the population, and accompanying penances. This is my favorite:

There are others, covering masturbation and women using foreign objects in their vaginas.  I prefer to look at these rules/laws as a indirect guide to what people in the middle ages were doing sexually.  After all, you don't make laws prohibiting things people aren't doing.

Using the above example, there was gay behavior.  There was bestiality (I'll avoid arguing over equating these two behaviors; that's a different blog post.)  

Women were crafting or finding objects to serve as phalluses.  There were blow jobs with swallowing.  There was masturbation, casual sex, and prostitution.  Sex within marriage (the only appropriate place for it) had restrictions, acceptable on certain days of the month and only in the missionary position.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say there was quite a lot of sex.  I'm also going to give the church the benefit of the doubt and say that there were more reasons for these restrictions other than church doctrine and ultra conservative beliefs.  

There are practical reasons for restricting sex:  syphilis is an enormous one.  There was no cure for syphilis and it killed thousands.  There are other sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes and gonorrhea.  And this controlled the population and rates of pregnancy.  At this time, too, women dying in childbirth was a real, constant threat.  

With all these doctrines in place, with specific behaviors having very specific punishments, and with the threat of disease and pregnancy, imagine how exciting sex would be.  How difficult it would be to find a safe spot to do it, and the high risk of being caught.  Forbidding sex can make some of the most exciting sex ever experienced.  Anyone who has committed adultery can attest to this.

"Me and my sister and my mare" is one of the best " true" stories I've read on reddit.  Located under the /r/incest subreddit, the story runs a few thousand words and teaches one much about how to fuck a horse. 

Click on the above image to get to the story.

I strongly doubt this is a joke.  The short story (this is not a novel) is written seriously and with some serious choices which are based on scientific theory: the T-Rex has feathers, for example, alluding to theories that the dinosaurs evolved into birds.  However, the fact that humans and dinosaurs coexisted is, of course, a fantasy created for the sake of the erotica genre.  

Beast erotica is a legitimate fetish, and roleplayers pop up on reddit's DPP at least once a day looking to be fucked by a fantastical beast.

Therein lies the catch:  according to pornography laws in the US and the UK, bestiality is not permitted.  But monster porn/erotica is.  The monsters have to be mythical or ancient creatures: unicorns, dinosaurs, dragons, hydras, etc.  They cannot be animals that live in current times.

I fail to understand this distinction, and, when I'm in a good mood, I find it utterly hilarious.  What is the core of the objection to bestiality?  The cross species sexual contact?  Why would that be improper?  Because of the possibility of breeding, of creating human/animal hybrids (even though this isn't possible)?  Is it based on Christian theology and the idea that sex should only be between a man and wife (yes, homosexuality and other sexual orientations not allowed)?

Personally I worry about animal cruelty, but that's not an argument I hear very much against bestiality.  In fact, I hear the opposite.

When I was teaching Theatre History at a university in Texas, a student came up to me after class and said he had a problem: a guy he had a crush on was in a sexual relationship with a golden retriever.  "I really like this guy though." 

I swallowed and asked, "Is the dog being hurt?"

"No!  He loves it.  He's always on this guy humping his leg."

"Perhaps," I said and took a deep breath, "you should look at this in terms of a human relationship.  If this guy was fucking his roommate, would you be okay about it?  Would you want to be with him?"

"No."

"There you go."

And there I went: judging and arguing that bestiality is a sexual orientation, and once which should be seen as identical to a sexual relationship between two humans.