Buckle Bunnies

Many public professions and occupations, such as music and athletics, have been recognized for their loyal fans, as well as the more intense version of their supporters known as “groupies.” Specific names for groupies depend on the profession, such [Page 80]as the “Deadheads” (Grateful Dead groupies), “Annies” (baseball groupies), and “buckle bunnies” (rodeo groupies). Regardless of the name, or the game, all share commonalities. Specifically, groupies tend to be composed of predominantly heterosexual women fascinated with the idea of sexual connection with men belonging to their fetishized group. The allure of the rodeo subculture is its adventurous diversion from the mainstream, or the more orthodox. Rodeo offers excitement and danger to all its fans, but to the buckle bunnies, it offers an opportunity to engage in social exchanges of sex for status. While this exchange affects and is affected by the traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity, it also intersects with notions surrounding modern sex roles regarding sexual pursuit and sexual gatekeeping.

Buckle bunnies are female rodeo groupies; they are devoted followers who are captivated by the rodeo subculture and especially by its superior male contestants. For a number of reasons, the behaviors of buckle bunnies are labeled by outsiders to the rodeo subculture as deviant, along with extramarital sex, public sex, excessive sexual partners, and female initiation of sex, using an overt and utilitarian system for rating the desirability of sexual partners. Rodeo cowboys, for their part, are labeled deviant for extramarital sex, public sex, excessive sexual partners, and the manipulation of women (buckle bunnies) for their own sexual pleasure. In a very real sense, the rodeo cowboy has become a modern-day sexual gatekeeper. In the rodeo subculture, there is a clear acceptance that what is being exchanged is sex for status and status for sex. It is also clear who possesses the scarcer resource (status), and the cowboy is thus the person with the least interest and, therefore, the most in control of the exchange.

Buckle bunnies share a penchant for hegemonic masculinity (machismo) in their men. Cowboys who possess high rankings and/or win at major rodeos and who wear the winning belt buckle or jacket as symbols of their superior athleticism in bull riding and steer wrestling are the prime sexual targets for buckle bunnies. The purpose of the sex for bunnies closely resembles that for male bikers in the outlaw motorcycle gangs of the 1980s, where sex is exchanged primarily for status mobility rather than for affectional or relational ties. The rodeo subculture reinforces the symbolic exchange through its normative system; thus, bunnies are enabled to construct “better” identities relative to others within the rodeo subculture by virtue of the men whose status they share via sexual exchange.

Mainstream gender norms have generally functioned to maintain hegemonic masculinity and male power over females and other (nonalpha) males. The rodeo subculture reflects this domination as well, in that cowboys are glorified for their masculinity. However, owing to the existence of buckle bunnies, cowboys now have multiple opportunities to gatekeep sex, a role traditionally played by women.

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