[adjective][species]

Guest post by Huskyteer. Huskyteer is a writer, motorcyclist, aviation geek and full-time husky. Her fiction can be found on SoFurry as well as in the pages of Heat, ROAR, Allasso and Hot Dish.

Writing in the furry fandom is seen as the poor relation to art, and there are plenty of articles discussing why that is so. Here’s where we writers score over the artists, though: the pool of furry authors is tiny by comparison, and you could count those operating at a professional level on the pads of one paw. The downside: the market, and the rewards, are correspondingly small. However, most creative furries, whatever form their art takes, get started out of love for the craft, and because they have stories to tell, rather than in the hope of fame and financial reward.

Many furry fiction writers cut their teeth on fanfiction (The Lion King, in my case) before moving on to tales of original characters posted on Fur Affinity or SoFurry. Although the internet provides a way to get your work in front of a huge number of people, from all over the world, in a matter of moments, some of us still crave an appearance in traditional print publication.

One way to make the leap from screen to page is to contribute a short story to a furry anthology. Based on my own experience, I’ll describe about how to go about it, how the process works, and the pros and cons of anthology writing.

An anthology is a collection of short works—fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or a mixture—by a number of authors. It can be a one-off special or a regular annual publication, like Heat and New Fables, both published by Sofawolf Press. Anthologies may have a generalised theme (Heat is for romantic or erotic works of all kinds) or a more specific one, like Sofawolf’s X, whose stories are each based on one of the Ten Commandments.

Anthology editors solicit contributions by putting out a call for submissions, which will include guidelines for the type of story required and a submission deadline. These days, you will usually be asked to submit by email rather than posting a physical manuscript.

Editors are as keen to receive material as writers are to get it published, but it can still be difficult to find open calls for submissions. Keep an eye on the websites of furry publishers—Sofawolf, Furplanet and Rabbit Valley—as well as the Paying Venues page of the Furry Writers’ Guild. Following writers and editors on Twitter or keeping up with their blogs will also give you an idea of what’s happening in the world of publishing. Established writers may even be contacted by the editor and asked to contribute a story. That’s a pretty big compliment. (Still waiting, guys!)

The good news is that a small pool of active writers means a greater chance of acceptance. But it’s likely there will still be many more submissions than slots, so how do you improve your chances of getting in?

First and foremost, follow the guidelines. That means a final word count somewhere between the minimum and maximum, if specified; obeying any requests for particular file types, margin sizes, or fonts; keeping within any specified themes or restrictions; and submitting before the deadline. This all sounds like common sense, and it is. But you will be putting yourself ahead of the pack straight away, simply by reading and following the rules.

Writing something truly original is a good way to get your work noticed. Granted, this is a bit of a tall order. But if an anthology themed around fairy tales receives twelve stories based on Red Riding Hood, only one or two are going to make it in no matter how brilliant the rest. Avoid plot clichés unless you can give them a really good twist, and read as widely as you can in the genre so you don’t accidentally come up with something too similar to an existing work.

Before submitting, get a friend to read through your story. Whether or not they’re a writer, they will be able to tell you what does and doesn’t work for them, and spot the kind of typing and grammatical errors that slip past computer spellcheckers. Fresh eyes will also be better than yours at spotting plot holes, or character names that change halfway through.

When you’re ready to submit, include a short covering letter with your story. Sometimes the call for submissions will tell you what information is required; if not, give your name, a brief synopsis of the piece, and any other writing credits. Usually you’ll receive a brief acknowledgement to let you know your email has arrived safely.

What happens next? A lot of waiting—during which you keep yourself busy writing the next thing and refrain from bothering the nice editor—followed by either acceptance or rejection. (There is a third option, in which the anthology simply never materialises for one reason or another. It’s a shame, but it happens.)

Rejection is disappointing but doesn’t have to be a disaster. If the editor has taken time to include critique, then treasure it, even if it makes painful reading, and think about putting any suggestions into practice next time.

Sometimes the story just isn’t right for the publication, or is too similar to another submission. Try submitting elsewhere. Stories that didn’t quite make the grade can be rewritten or revised before dispatch to a different publication. Still not quite there? Post to your SoFurry or FA account as a freebie.

Even if you decide your story isn’t fit for public consumption after all, chances are that something can be salvaged from the wreckage and recycled for use elsewhere – whether it’s a plot point, a character, or a particularly good piece of dialogue. At the very least, words exist now that didn’t before you wrote them. With every word, and every rejection, you’re practising and improving your skills, both in writing and in being a writer.

When your story is accepted, it’s a wonderful feeling. Allow yourself to bask and gloat; you’ve earned it. But what happens when the glow has worn off a little?

A few weeks or months later, you will probably be asked to revise your story in a few small ways suggested by the editor. You may approve all changes straight away or you may want to argue for your original version. The process can be as quick as approving placement of an apostrophe, as complicated as writing a whole new scene, or as heartbreaking as deleting one. Once both you and the editor are happy with the final version, you’ll sign a contract, either electronically or on paper to be posted back.

More waiting follows, this time for publication day. You should receive a contributor copy or two ahead of release to the general public. When the anthology launches, it’s time for you to promote it—on your blog or website, Facebook, Twitter, and perhaps by posting an extract to your favoured furry art site (best to check with the editor first).

There are plenty of advantages to writing for anthologies. If you’re the kind of writer who has difficulty actually sitting down and writing—like most of us—a cold hard deadline can be a big help. Brainstorming ideas to suit a theme can be inspirational, too, taking your muse in new directions.

During the publishing process you’ll gain experience of the editorial system, and start to build relationships with editors – which will stand you in good stead when it’s time to pitch your novel.

Many writers find publicising their work much harder than the act of writing itself, since we’re a bunch of self-doubting introverts. Appearing in an anthology immediately increases the potential audience, with all the contributors plugging the book to their friends, families and blog readers. If a big-name author is involved, their fans will probably pick the anthology up as a matter of course. All this means an anthology credit is a great way to get your work, and your name, in front of new readers.

Finally, one entirely self-serving advantage: contributor copies mean you get to read other writers’ work for free.

There is a downside to anthology writing, too. The pay tends to be small, whether it’s a flat or per-word rate, and may even be nonexistent, with contributor copies the only reward. Themes, deadlines and word counts can be restrictive as well as inspirational. You may find yourself disagreeing with the editor over requested changes.

To sum up the disadvantages, an anthology represents an editor’s vision, not yours. It’s not your baby and you have no or little control over the layout, price, font, or, where applicable, the artist chosen to illustrate your work. But if your ultimate ambition is to publish a full-length work or story collection of your very own, writing for anthologies can help to build invaluable experience, contacts, and even a fanbase.

Babyfurs are a significant part of the furry community, but they tend to exist below the surface. It’s common for babyfurs to create two identities: a clean identity for use in the furry community at large, plus a second identity for socializing with the babyfurs. So there isn’t much leakage from the babyfurs into the furry mainstream.

The babyfurs that are visible within furry largely fall into one of two categories: the charismatic types who are able to express their babyfur nature without it overwhelming their identity; and the laissez-faire, who are overt and often less-than-subtle. The rest of the babyfurs, the silent majority, are staying hidden.

There is a dilemma for this silent babyfur majority, those who want to express their identity honestly but choose to moderate such expressions in the furry mainstream. On one hand, they would like to be open; on the other, they don’t want to be subject to abuse.

And there is a lot of abuse aimed towards babyfurs from the furry mainstream. Most people reading this will be aware of the stereotypical antisocial babyfur, and will probably have heard some second-hand horror story about something that happened at a convention that one time.

Happily, I’m here to report that the stereotypes are wrong. The mainstream treatment of babyfurs is unfair and largely unfounded. This article is about the real babyfurs.

A few weeks ago, [adjective][species] published an article titled How To Be A Babyfur. In this article I investigated some of the challenges facing babyfurs, but the main point was an attached survey. The survey was shared around by babyfurs on the usual social networks, and (at the time of writing) we had 351 responses. My thanks to those who participated, particularly those who took the time to provide some extra comments. I learned a lot.

We’ve collated the results. While the data isn’t statistically significant, it shows some clear trends. I’ve read through the various extra comments, and I’ve followed up with a few extra questions for some respondents. I believe I have enough information to write a brief but broad summary of the group. Ladies, gentlemen, in-betweens… meet the babyfurs:

1. Babyfurs Are Indistinguishable From Regular Furries

(All comparison data is taken from Furrypoll.com.)

• The median age of the babyfurs is 24, compared with 22 for all furries.

This difference is insignificant, and easily explained by the fact that [a][s] probably attracts a slightly older audience. The babyfur age distribution looks like the furry age distribution: a group of people around age 20 with a long tail. The youngest babyfur respondent was 14; the oldest 55.

• The babyfurs are about 80% male, the same proportion as all furries.

• The babyfurs are gayer: 44% compared with 22% for all furries.

This is an expected result: men are kinkier than women, and there is a sexual element to the babyfur identity for many (but not all). More on this later.

• About two-thirds of babyfurs live in North America. The remainder are spread about the usual furry hotspots: Western Europe, Scandinavia, and Australasia.

Those from non-English-speaking nations are undoubtedly under-represented, because the article and survey are in English. Population data from an online survey is always subject to significant error so I won’t present any comparison data, but in general this result is similar to what I’d expect for the overall furry group.

2. Babyfurs Are Very Social

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that babyfurs are social beasts. As expected, a large majority socialize in babyfur communities online (83%), however there is also a lot of in-person socializing: a full 55% of babyfurs have attended a real-world babyfur event, and 34% have attended a non-furry AB/DL (Adult Baby/Diaper Lover) event.

Very clearly the stereotype of babyfurs as being socially-averse is false. The babyfurs that are poorly socialized are simply the easiest ones to spot. (Thus invoking JM’s Law: the most visible members of a minority are rarely the best ambassadors.)

3. Babyfurs Like To Wear Diapers

This may sound rather obvious, but results show essentially universal agreement: babyfurs are wearing diapers. It is fair to say that “babyfur” is synonymous with “furry diaper lover”.

The term “babyfur” is actually a bit of a misnomer, because many babyfurs do not engage in ageplay, or anything else that called be called babyish. Which brings me to…

4. There Is A Minor Schism Between Ageplaying Babyfurs and Diapers-Only Babyfurs

As far as conflict, aka furry drama (TM) goes, this one is very minor. Everyone seems to be happy enough to be lumped together in the broad category titled “babyfur”, however there are clearly two main subgroups.

Those who like to wear diapers, but don’t engage in ageplay, often prefer to be called “diaperfurs”. This is an important point (thanks to those who pointed it out), although use of the “diaperfur” term is not universal among diapers-only babyfurs. Some are happy to be labelled babyfurs; others see a big difference, to the point that some weren’t sure whether the article & survey were intended for diaperfurs as well as ageplaying babyfurs. (It was.)

Conversely, some ageplaying babyfurs prefer to be called “kidfurs” or “littlefurs”, which indicates that their babyfur identity is age-regressive. I suspect that the special delineation is largely for convenience, because it helps likeminded ageplayers identify one another more easily. There are also some furries who play as caretakers towards the ageplayers, as either an occasional or permanent preference.

The two groups seem to get along well, and nobody seems to mind being collected under the babyfur banner. Given the important difference separating the two groups, I think that the overall spirit of fellowship is rather generous.

The ageplayers have a special challenge: they are flirting with one of society’s great taboos, the sexualization of underage characters. For many babyfurs, ageplay has a sexual component, an interest that (partly) drives demand for cub porn. And this association sees some furs make an easy but completely unfounded leap: they accuse babyfurs of paedophilia.

The vague association of ageplay with paedophilia is one reason why some diaperfurs don’t like the babyfur term. It’s not because they think that there is any connection, just that they know that some people make that connection, and that they’d rather not be tarred with that particular brush.

The connection between ageplay and paedophilia is wrong. But it’s an easy connection to make. I can think of one case where a furry convicted of paedophilia-related crimes turned out to be a babyfur, and I think that it’s reasonable to guess that furry paedophiles are fairly likely to be babyfurs. However the correlation only works in one direction: it doesn’t mean that an ageplaying babyfur is likely to be paedophile.

Consider that violent criminals are likely to enjoy violent video games. But people who enjoy violent video games are not likely to become violent criminals.

For the doubters: if you are uncomfortable with cub porn, or feel that there must be some correlation between ageplay and paedophilia, please (1) consider that people don’t choose their sexual interests, and (2) read my article from last year, In Defence Of Cub Porn.

It’s a controversial topic, and not one I want to explore in any detail here. It’s only tangentially relevant to the subject at hand, and I think it risks overwhelming the main points. Suffice to say that it is false to suggest that ageplayers are doing something ‘wrong’. Which brings me to…

5. Babyfurs Are Unfairly Demonized

The babyfur group as a whole—ageplayers, diaperfurs, and the rest—are routinely accused of being anti-social or having poor hygiene. The stories are often exaggerated, and usually completely false.

One astute babyfur noted that watersports is a relatively visible fetish within the furry community. While watersports fetishists are subject to a certain degree of kink-shaming, they are far less likely to be demonized in the way that babyfurs are. I can only surmise that diapers suggest age regression (regardless of whether of not ageplay is taking place), giving diapers a faint whiff of the taboo.

I’ll add that unfair demonization of babyfurs occurs, to an extent, within the babyfur community itself. Some diaperfurs unfairly dislike ageplayers, much in the same way that some furries unfairly dislike babyfurs as a whole.

There are, of course, some bad eggs. Every group, including the furry community, has some outliers.

One of the (intelligent, moderate) commenters on my article reposted some comments to a Fur Affinity journal (http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4877653/). Here’s part of a comment he received, from a user named Bondagepup:

“Having to smell someone’s stale piss-pants in public is also not the end of the world. Ever been in public? People smell. (Old people especially.) Just hold your nose and move on people.”

 

Bondagepup argues that he’s merely expressing himself, and that he should be free to do so:

“Lastly, just a note to anyone who is offended by seeing anything they deem sexual in a public setting, your moral code is not law. Just because you were taught that sex was naughty and needs to be hidden doesn’t mean it’s true.”

 

Bondagepup thinks he’s being laissez-faire and sex-positive, and he is to a degree. However he is also forcing people around him to engage in his sexual fetish. Sex columnist and ethicist Dan Savage sums up the problem with public fetish play nicely. (I have edited this quote for clarity, you can read the advice in full here):

“Asking people to accept your pastime doesn’t give you the right to force other people to take part in it. That’s not asking for tolerance, that’s demanding participation. And that’s not okay.

 

Not once in our struggle for social acceptance have gays and lesbians demanded the right to have sex in front of our relatives. We want to be accepted by our families, tolerated by strangers, and treated equally by our government. But people who don’t want to watch us have sex aren’t compelled to.

 

This fetish stuff is, at bottom, about sex.

 

Keep the heavy stuff behind closed doors and keep it subtle when you’re out in public. That’s not oppression, that’s common courtesy.”

 

Bondagepup is being anti-social. There is nothing wrong with discreetly wearing diapers (or anything else) in public, but there is plenty wrong with being actively smelly. He is reinforcing the negative babyfur stereotype, to the detriment of the babyfur community as a whole.

The overwhelming majority of babyfurs are discreet. They are not noticed by the mainstream because they are respectful of those around them, and because they understand the boundaries of reasonable behaviour.

As ever, the most visible members of a minority are rarely the best ambassadors.

Consider this final statistic: only 35% of babyfurs have ever taken the simple, reasonable step of displaying a babyfur conbadge. Which means that there are two (or so) stealthy babyfurs for each conbadge you see. Next time you’re at a convention, take a headcount.

“Welcome to the Internet. Where the men are men, the women are men, and —”

Wait, what?

Hang out in the chatrooms that dot the furry landscape, and you’ll find this sentiment expressed not infrequently. Boiled down, it encapsulates the belief that you can’t trust what you see, which is simple enough — but I’ll suggest that this line of thinking is both inaccurate and also slightly troublesome.

If you’re not a roleplayer, this line of discussion is all somewhat irrelevant to you. But according to the 2012 Furry Survey, more than half of furries do engage in roleplaying to some degree, and at some time. This probably isn’t surprising; roleplaying offers a safe space to explore our identities, and it probably goes without saying that furries would gravitate towards this exploration.

It seems to be self-evident that people are willing to accept interacting with people who present themselves as a different species than they really are, and in my experience it’s generally accepted that one’s online sexual orientation can legitimately differ from one’s real-world orientation. So why is gender so problematic?

Well, first of all, what do I mean by “problematic”?

Quantitatively, we notice a strong aversion to changing one’s sex online: 82% of people say that they do not do so, with a strong majority (58.5%) saying they would not do so. Even amongst active roleplayers, 74% hew strictly to the biological sex they were born with — that is, the remaining 18% (26% amongst roleplayers) also encapsulates the (admittedly small) number of transgendered persons who are electing to accurately represent their gender.

Qualitatively, we see statements like, “I’m not a fan of people who are [girls online but] guys in real life” — the backronymic pejorative “GIRL” (Guy In Real Life) applies here — and it is here that we start to see one of the interesting dimensions of the issue, which is that it is expressly gendered and generally heteronormative: far fewer people seem as troubled by the idea that the male winged magic-using bipedal talking sapient fox-wolf mix they’re talking to is actually being operated by a female puppeteer.

We understand, at least to some degree, that furry chatrooms are not accurate representations of reality, as my last description indicates. In my sojourns through the fandom I’ve seen people who claimed to be Russian when they were really American, people who claimed to be lawyers, people who claimed to be thin, people who claimed to have master’s degrees in esoteric subjects…

It’s pretty much par for the course.

So why’s it gender that sets people off? Why not other areas of body image? Why wouldn’t you put in your profile, “I only want to talk to people who are physically fit in real life”? Possibly because it would seem shallow, and slightly irrelevant for the purposes of light conversation, nondirected roleplay, and typefucking?

Let’s examine some possible answers.

The first is that it’s an inherent dishonesty that is fair to judge people on. That is: if I can’t trust that you’re honest about such a fundamental aspect of your personality, then what can I trust you on? Is it supposed to not matter because we’re talking as two avatars? If we’re only interacting mask-on-mask, then what does anything really matter, anyway?

This seems like a logical statement, until you unpack it a bit. After all, someone’s real-world physical attributes are only actually relevant if you enter every conversation expecting the possibility that your interaction on FurryMUCK could logically lead to a real-world romantic or sexual encounter. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a weird, overbearing, and even slightly offputting mindset to start from.

We are, after all, expressly entering into an abstracted, idealized world when we engage with avatars. Even chatroom sexuality is transgressive: we gain the ability to interact free of many of the restrictions and repercussions imposed by the real world. Make the phrasing honest: “I would like to pretend to be a dog, and for you to pretend to be a red panda-lynx hybrid, and I would like to put some of my pretend bipedal clothes-wearing ambient-music-appreciating dog parts inside your pretend red-panda lynx body but only if I’d be cool doing that in real life, too.”

As pickup lines go, it’s a little awkward.

A more interesting objection, though it’s not often phrased explicitly, is the one that boils it down to the unseemliness of straight men pretending to be women so that they can have straight sex, or to otherwise benefit from the attention they would otherwise lack.

So, then. Fetch me the numbers, Igor!

On the Furry Survey, I ask about presenting yourself in the fandom as a gender different from your biological sex. Five options are presented:

• No, and I would not do so
• No, but I might do so
• Yes, sometimes
• Yes, often
• My primary furry avatar fits this description

As said, 58.5% of respondents gave the first answer — that is, that they “would not” do so. When we limit the response to only straight men, that number jumps to 71.6%. A further 21.4% of straight men say they don’t, but they might consider it. Straight men are a third as likely to say they do it “often” (<1% compared to 3% in the general population), and around a quarter as likely to say their primary avatar differs from their own biological sex (1.5% compared to 5.6% in the general population).

It is here that we pause to note a couple more things about the prevalence of gender fluidity. Firstly, in a proportional sense it’s substantially more common amongst women; women are 2.5 times as likely to have a male primary avatar than men are to have a female one, and 2.7 times as likely to say they “often” represent themselves as a different gender. Only 37.2% of women say they “would not” use a male avatar; 64.3% of men say they “would not” use a female one.

Secondly, it would seem that since straight people are substantially less likely to do, then the slack is made up by those in other portions of the sexuality spectrum. It was suggested that partly this might be because changing genders allows you to explore your own notional homo- or bi-sexuality in interesting — and safe — new ways.

But this is an interesting concept, and we’re going to come back to it in a bit.

If we compare those who say they would not and those who say they always present themselves as a different gender, it’s true that there are certain evident differences. For one, as stated, people who always do so are less likely to be straight (22% vs 43%), and far more likely to be pansexual (24% vs 4%). They’re also three times as likely to be asexual, though — 11.3% vs 3.7%. In real number terms, they make up 5.6% of the fandom, but 22% of the fandom’s asexual people and more than a third of the pansexual members.

Outside of sexual orientation terms, they are also, as stated, more likely to be female. They are older, though by less than a year, and have a higher degree of education. They are 19% less likely to be single and 45% more likely to be in a long-term relationship.

Their positions on an attitudinal survey tend to be more extreme. People with gender-transgressive primary identities are 46% more likely to strongly disagree that what other people think of them is important (14.2% to 9.7%). They are 50% more likely to strongly disagree with the statement “creativity is one of my strongest attributes” (43.4% to 28.4%). They are 88% more likely to “strongly agree” that they are more talented than most of their peers (10.9% to 5.8%) — but also 55% more likely to “strongly disagree” with that statement (18% to 11.6%).

They are not appreciably likely to say that sex is more important to their furry identity (average score on 10-point scale is 4.6 vs 4.3), which circles us back to an earlier point. It may seem like I am, to a degree, harping on this, but I think it’s important to note that, from the evidence, people who change their gender online aren’t doing so for sexual reasons.

So what does it tell us if we think they are?

What first drew me to this topic was how closely the discussion recalls classic and unfortunate interactions transgendered individuals are familiar with. As I said to start with, because the question discusses presenting an avatar different from your biological sex, a small number of those people are transgendered persons — but most of them are not, and I am certainly not going to suggest that gender dysphoria is the primary motivation.

But, in furry chatrooms and roleplaying environments, you see the same classic scripts playing out. You see the same troubling, parochial belief in “traps” — people who are disingenuously trying to mislead straight men into a life of… well, certainly a life of something, anyway, and evidently something more problematic than simply pretending to be a tiger. You see the same stigma attached to gender transgressiveness, particularly in the notion that people make the choices they do because they would be relationship-unsuccessful otherwise (a statement that is demonstrably incorrect).

You even see hints of “trans panic,” with people discovering “the truth” about their conversational partners attacking them, belittling them, and engaging in other behaviors that are designed to reinforce a gender-normative worldview. I ran a roleplaying chatroom for nine years, and I cannot count the number of times, as a moderator, I had someone breathlessly “out” someone to me.

“Oh, bloody hell,” you are sighing into your scotch. You wave the waiter over to bring you your check, shaking your head and muttering: “Here they go on about transphobia again.”

Well.

Yeah.

I’m willing to call this out because, as I said, it seems to be equally parts silly and troubling. I have yet to see a clear articulation of why it should be acceptable to change your species but not your sex that doesn’t boil down to balky circumlocutions around the fundamental issue that people still see gender as immutable and transgenderism as the slightly skeevy hallmark of second-class persons.

That is to say, I don’t see a clear articulation that doesn’t either hem and haw around that issue or reveal a hell of a lot more about the speaker than you’d initially suspect. As I said, your conversational partner’s real-world gender is dubiously crucial if you enter into conversations expecting the possibility that you intend to engage with them in real-life sexual contexts, but that’s a can of worms all on its own.

As the New Yorker‘s Peter Steiner once famously quipped: “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Anonymous communication involves striking a careful balance between respecting the freedom that comes from constructed identity, and being aware of the assumptions we make in our interactions with others.

It’s clearly something that we’re uncomfortable with: anonymity invites its own destruction, and the Internet takes a singular pride in denying of others the right to be anonymous, or to choose on their own terms what they present. And when gender roles come into play, we run headlong into traditional discomfort with people who don’t play by the rules. Hence the invention of new stereotypes, irrespective of whether they are actually accurate — and I have no doubt that some of you who have gotten this far are thinking: yeah, but I know people like that.

Perhaps.

But these seem to be edge cases, and the thing that strikes me about the dim eye turned on those with gender-transgressive identities is that casual chauvinism is still chauvinism, and bears reflection. The fandom has an established and positive legacy of being supportive of all types of self-exploration. How peculiar — and slightly sad — it would be if this is one of the last to enjoy the legitimacy of existing unexamined and uncriticized.

Because in all probability, insisting you will only talk to real dogs is a losing game, of dubious reward.

This is just a quick follow-up with some further information about the Species Selection and Character Creation article posted last week.  I normally post on Wednesdays and I had an article that could have been scheduled today, but with that article likely needing more space than this one and the desire not to distract from it with a simple addendum, I figured I’d swap the two days around and give tomorrow’s real article its time as the featured post!

Last Wednesday, even as the article was going live, I was packing up my laptop for an afternoon at a coffee shop (The Alley Cat, where the phone is always answered with a personable “meow!“) where I would spend a few hours talking with the inimitable Klisoura about furries and data.  Among other topics (some of which will show up here on [a][s] quite soon), we poked around some of the species data a little further, and found some more interesting facts.  That, combined with some input from others both on Twitter and FurAffinity, and some volunteers in private communication, got me thinking that more information is always better than less, and so here we go!

Common Terms

Over the process of exploring the data with Klisoura, we removed several common words such as the name of the species, articles such as ‘a’ or ‘an’, and so on.  However, we left in many additional terms that showed variation between species as they do help show the differences in the ways in which people thought of their characters.  A few of these words, such as ‘love’/'loved’ or ‘personality’ show up on every chart, of course, but at different rates, showing a stronger sense of, say, personality alignment with one species, but with a greater sense of, say, loving with another species.

However, this tends to hide some of the differences in responses that show species perception rather than character perception due to their relative prevalence.  By removing these common words as well, we find that the words associated with the stereotypes or perception of a particular species are emphasized even further, and those differences made plain.  Check it out below!

Additional Surveys, Visualization, and Exploration

The amount of data amassed is quite large.  Current data sets include the Furry Survey from 2009 until present (though we will not be providing information from current data until the 2013 survey itself is finished), the 2012 [adjective][species] Census and Survey, and all of the [a][s] small polls and surveys, not to mention aggregated data from other sources such as the IARP and other surveys, and scrape-able data-sources which we have used in the past.

As I am fond of saying in the Exploring the Fandom Through Data panel*, exploration is a cycle of sorts: from collection of data through understanding, giving back, dialog, and back to data collection.  This is a big portion of that cycle.  When we pull together data from the various sources, that’s a big part of the understanding stop of that cycle, just as presenting visualizations such as the word-clouds is a big part of the giving back portion.  By presenting this data in a form that shows some of the story behind it, we can start a dialog between those who produce the results and those who consume them, which leads right back to the beginning: collection.  This, of course, is a fancy way of saying, we invite comments and questions by posting these results freely.  More than that, we love the feedback, because that’s what helps drive us to ask new questions, explore new topics, and try to understand more of our subculture.

We got several responses to the last post, and I think it would be good to expose some of this process to all so that we can see what goes on in this whole cycle.

• I’d like to see X species/Why didn’t you do X? – We have data for several species, plus several write-in answers for additional species that were not available through the check-boxes.  However, as the number of respondents nears one for each given species, two things can happen to the data: it can either get skewed wildly in inappropriate directions, or it can near the normal distribution of words within any given text.  For example, if we were to take this here paragraph, we’d see a fairly normal distribution of words, with a slightly higher weight on ‘species’, but nothing out of the norm.  However, if you were to respond to your choice of species of “fox” with “fox fox fox fOX FOX FOX OH MAN I LOVE FOXES”, then, as you can see, the distribution is wildly skewed toward ‘fox’.  This was the reason for us restricting data to the more popular species responses out there: we are more likely to see trends that might, in some way, represent those who respond with a given answer.
• This totally jives with why I chose X/I can’t understand why people would answer in such a way! – First of all, these are only general trends that express the reasons for choosing a species to represent oneself.  The are hardly guides, and they often fall along social perceptions of the species in wider culture, outside of furry (thinking of wolves in a pack, speedy cheetahs, or cunning foxes is hardly out of the norm for western society).  Secondly, did you take the Furry Survey? If something seems missing, it could be your response!
• What about fandom perceptions that make species more appealing? - I mentioned in last week’s article that there were what I termed “self-reinforcing stereotypes” associated with many species.  For instance, Altivo mentions those who would choose fox, husky, or horse due solely for their perceived sexual role within the fandom.  This is most assuredly worth an article of its own, but in brief, that is a difficult thing to measure both in the data as explored and also in the responses to the questions asked at the Species Selection and Character Creation panel.  Needless to say, we haven’t forgotten about fandom-specific stereotypes as a factor in selection, simply that the point of the article was to explore selection as a more general topic.
• Have you tried correlating against X?/What further things can be done with the data? – This sentiment is perhaps best expressed by FA user NEXRAD in their comments on the Jackals/Coyotes post on FA.  There is a lot - a lot – of data in all of the responses to the Furry Survey.  In fact there are a stupefying number of data points in any one year of the survey!  We can look for trends, such as we have done with the species, or model relationships based on correlations or clustering as was suggested.  All of these are possible, but they take time and we are, for the most part, lay-critters doing the best we can outside our day jobs, and checking our work before sending it out into the world.  (Additionally, [a][s] has some restrictions that prevented the topic from being explored further in last week’s article: we try to keep our articles at about 2,000 words or under to help with readability and comprehension, and so the best place for such work is in future articles, posts, and visualizations!)

Finally, we’d like to reiterate the sentiment that has been in place with the Furry Survey for several years now.  We do our best to present a fairly solid breakdown of the information provided in the surveys, but we welcome requests for larger data sets from other researchers in the future.  These aren’t available for direct download currently, and will take some time to anonymize and prepare, but they do exist, and the same holds true as with “more information”: more eyes on that information is always better!

* Which, if everything works out okay, I should be able to provide as an updated recording soon.  We have video and audio recordings from RMFC this year, and if their quality is good enough, we’ll pull them together and put them up on Vimeo as we did last year.

This weekend, I had the privilege of helping facilitate a panel at Rocky Mountain Fur Con 2013 surrounding the topic of species selection and character creation. The panel was a delightful discussion about the ways in which we build up the avatars we use to interact within our subculture, and why exactly it is that we choose the animal (or animals) that we become with our character (or characters).

That’s not all, though. I also had the privilege of sitting down with Klisoura, [a][s] contributor of Furry Survey fame, and having not only several delightful discussions on topics as diverse as tennis balls and coyotes, but also a little impromptu hack-a-thon in the hotel lobby on the subject of species selection. This tied in well enough with the panel that some of the results of that were shown during the Q&A after the discussion, and even led to several other conversations with various different furries over dinner and the next day. The whole weekend was a blast, but I’d like to tie up some of these conversation threads and ideas into something worth showing here on [a][s].

The title of that particular panel was the same as this post, “Species Selection and Character Creation”, and was intended to be something new for me, and, I felt, relatively new for the convention as well. Rather than sit behind the table at the head of the discussion room and dictate a set of ideas to an audience, my goal was to re-arrange the chairs in the room into a circle and have everyone participate evenly in a sort of Socratic-style exploration of species and avatar. However, given the hour of sleep I’d had the night before, it worked out somewhere in between. While the Socratic “asking questions to receive answers everyone already knows about themselves” part worked out pretty well, I wasn’t able to make real the truly participatory experience of everyone being able to see each other. I offer this as an explanation for not simply posting the audio from the panel itself, though it was recorded. If I get around to mastering the audio well enough to make it presentable, I’ll post it here and make note of it. I think it’s worth a listen!

I began by asking the room full of furries why they chose the animal they did for their species, and I received a lot of answers that fit in well with my experience of the fandom. Notable among the explanations were the oft-used words ‘identity’, ‘connection’, ‘personality’, and ‘characteristics’. And this, of course makes sense. Many introductions to furry, whether they’re websites (the first introductory website I found was Captain Packrat’s explanation of FurCodes) or friends, explain that although furry is about being a fan of anthropomorphism in general, it often (but not always) specifically involves a personal connection with an animal that leads to the creation of a personal character: an avatar often used in interaction with other furries.

We all know this, of course, but it’s always interesting to see the data bear it out. A discussion with Klisoura prior to the panel led to an experiment: is such a thing visible in the answers provided by respondents to the furry survey? It turns out that it is, in its own way. On the survey, users are asked the species of their character or characters, and then given room to provide an explanation of just why they chose the species they did. Free-text answers are hard to parse down into simple one-way conclusions, and are not necessarily available to be shared as they stand. However, we can draw conclusions about the use of language itself within these answers, and in this instance, we did so by means of one of the simpler means of textual analysis: frequency counts.

We’ve analyzed the responses for many of the most popular species represented in the responses to the 2012 Furry Survey. Breaking this down by species not only helps us spot keywords such as mentioned above, but also helps us see where additional words, especially emotionally or spiritually charged words, are used when identifying with particular species. Let’s start out with one of the easier ones, for huskies, where I can point to a few of these words in particular to explain what I mean:

We see our previously tagged set of words such as ‘traits’, ‘personality’, and ‘always’ (left in* because it often shows up in constructs such as “I have always felt like I was a husky”). However, we can also see several emotionally charged words such as ‘love’/'loved’, ‘loyal’, ‘cute’, ‘playful’, and ‘beautiful’. These figure strongly as compared to other marked words such as ‘cool’, ‘hard’, ‘submissive’, and ‘spiritual’. Contrasting this with the cloud for wolves shows the difference in species selection:

Here we see a shift in the tagged words to ‘connection’, ‘identify’, as well as ‘personality’, which I think shows a different attitude used to approach the problem of species selection when creating a character. Indeed, we see that ‘spirituality’ figures more strongly, along with ‘pack’, ‘strong’, ‘spirit’, and ‘one’/'alone’, while ‘loyal’ and ‘social’ are deemphasized.

Another interesting thing to note is that, among the several species** we pulled from the database, some are more strongly marked, such as the previous two, and some are not. Those who chose dragon as their species, do so for many, many different reasons than wolves or huskies.

As you can see, there is less polarization around certain terms, both emotionally marked and the previously tagged words; that is, the cloud is more homogeneous. There are a few potential reasons for this. One is the possibility that dragons have cultural ties to more than just western culture. Wolves have both a strong mythology surrounding them in the west, as well as the advantage of being important in current events, given the re-homing and conservation efforts surrounding the species in North America.

While dragons do have a mythology attached to them in the west, it’s very different than their Eastern interpretations, which will lead to less strongly-marked words and phrases showing up in analysis due to a wider spread. Additionally, while dragons are certainly prominent now in fiction words, they are not nearly as prevalent in current events outside of that setting.

These are just some examples, but I think it goes to show that there are indeed some trends, both general and specific, that go into species selection among furries. That’s only part of what goes into the creation of a personal character, though, as I think we might achieve some similar results by asking ordinary people to justify their choice of their favorite animal. Thus, during the panel, we also discussed the processes of character creation, growth, and change.

One exercise that I think works well is imposing artificial restrictions. This was, after all, one of the foundations for the literary group Oulipo, of A Void fame (A Void being a book written originally in French entirely without the letter ‘e’, and then, perhaps even more impressively, translated into English with the same restriction in place). By imposing on ourselves restrictions, we reduce the problem of unfettered, and thus directionless, creativity. In that vein, I asked participants to describe their personal characters – fursonae, if you will – in one sentence or less. The results are telling:

My persona is a reflection of myself ahead in life which I can use as a goal.

and

My fursona is an extension of myself as I move forward in life.

Some were more verbose and specific along these lines:

It’s a coping mechanism, a way to become someone else and not deal with tough times, or even provide an outside perspective on them.

and

Who I strive to become, always a step ahead of me; as I gain attributes, my character stays one step ahead of me. It is my role-model.

Some people got even more creative:

The person with whom I speak.

or

Convenient, exaggerated wish fulfillment.

or simply,

Me.

The theme of “a better version of me” was repeated quite often when discussing both the ways in which characters are created, and the ways in which they change. I really think that this reflects well on us as a subculture. A lot of my focus, when interacting with other furries, is centered around being what I see as an ideal version of myself, as well as just a fox-person. Some of that’s simple and mechanical: “I wish I were able to more clearly express my ideas” and “I wish I were more glib, quippier” are both aided by social interaction through a text-based interface such as one might find online. Beyond that, however, by being able to have this version of myself that is better than me, I, as others mentioned, have something to strive for, something to grow into.

Discussion along these lines continued after the panel itself, as a few of the attendees convinced me to head out to dinner rather than straight up to bed (thanks for that, it was the first real meal of the day). While we ate, we talked about what people took away most from the panel, and also came up with a few additional ideas to help tie together the two ideas of species and character.

One thing that came up was the idea that some gentle joking about species, a sort of lampshading of stereotypes, helps to reinforce species identity with regards to character. Much, if not most of this, as pointed out by Klisoura later on, is self-deprecatory. This helps to forge familiarity between people, especially among members of the same subculture, or even sub-groups within that subculture. Making fun of the chase-instinct in dogs by, as my roommate (a husky) puts it, “huffing the scent of a new can of tennis balls”, or the face-first pouncing of foxes lending to the overall silliness of the species helps not only to strengthen one’s identity with that species but also to provide a conversational starter among friends, or friends-to-be. This can, of course, be mis-applied or simply go too far. The idea that wolves are a dime-a-dozen, or that foxes are all “sluts” are complex and sometimes self-reinforcing stereotypes that, by virtue of their being stereotypes, can rub many the wrong way and cause no small amount of offense.

We also noted another interesting conclusion from the panel. Every time I run the “Exploring the Fandom Through Data” panel, I bring up the idea of doxa – that which we accept as truth without requiring proof – and how sometimes it needs to be challenged when that which is accepted is not necessarily true. For me and several others, one aspect of doxa in particular was challenged during the convention, and it was particularly surprising that this was the case.

One of the attendees at the panel brought up the fact that, during a time of crisis, epiphany, or great change in life, sometimes one’s character also goes through change (in this case, a change in species from fox to rat), in a sense reflecting external events in an extreme way. Even though several of us were surprised that such things as a turning point in life would be shown in something so fundamental as one’s species, it’s one of those things that makes sense upon consideration. Even looking back, for myself, the one time I truly changed species surrounded a profound change in my life. Moving to college – and all that is entailed in that, such as moving away from parents, getting a job, and so on – affected me deeply. That signified a total restructuring of my life, even to the point where the old character I had inhabited, a red fox with two tails, the tips of which were dyed green, no longer applied. It was high-school-me. It was me-growing-up. It is not me now.

The reactions from around the room echoed my sentiment. While most were surprised and intrigued at the concept of an external factor such as a move or an epiphany having so large an effect on someone as to cause a sudden, major restructuring of their furry identity, many, myself included, confirmed that this is not infrequent. Those who were most surprised felt that a sudden crisis such as this would not lead to a major change, but rather influence the direction in which their character grew. That is, their goals would change both for them as well as their character, though aspects such as species would remain. Unfortunately, we ran low on time before we had the chance to investigate the differences in how these two rough groups dealt with their character’s identity, though it is worth investigating! That there is even the trope of the species-change-journal on FA is proof of this.

As a meta-furry resource, [adjective][species] explores a lot of topics surrounding furry, though it seems of late that the focus has been on topics that happen to be ancillary to the fandom itself. These are all dreadfully interesting, I think, but so is much of the stuff at the core of our subculture, this base layer that helps make us who we are. These are the reasons we seek to meet up together at cons such as RMFC, not simply these supplementary reasons such as being ahead of or behind the rest of the world, any skews in sexual orientation or gender, or even movies about cheetahs, though they may all help. These core facets are worth exploring, as they help to form coherence among all these different animal-folk.

If you are interested in more from the panel, the notes are available here.

* The responses were cleaned of some very common words that tended to skew the word-clouds, such as articles (the, a, an), conjunctions (but, and), and the species’ name and plural form of the name which, of course, show up quite often.

** Cats, cheetahs, coyotes, dragons, red foxes, horses, huskies, jackals, rabbits, tigers, and wolves.

Every three weeks, the Londonfurs hold a meet in a City bar. The bar is closed to the public on Saturdays, so it’s a private party.

Every three weeks, one or two hundred so furries turn up. And just about every three weeks, there is a new member of the bar staff boggling at the crowd.

I recently overheard a new bartender ask, So, are you all gay or something?. And his furry customer responded, Yeah.

(But he was wrong. We’re not all gay. We’re not even mostly gay.)

The bartender made a comment and a knowing face, as if the Furry Universal Gayness Theory explained everything, and the furry wandered off with his drinks. I thought of correcting the bartender as he shaped to serve next in line, but I figured that he probably wasn’t interested in a short lesson on furry demographics. And besides, I was thirsty.

The truth is that about 22% of furries are gay*.

* Source: furrypoll.com (formerly the Furry Survey):

• Furrypoll is online-only, running since 2008.
• The number of annual respondents has varied between 3,000 and 10,000 with no significant change in results over that time.
• I’m counting gay furries as ones who are “completely homosexual” or “mostly homosexual”.
• The International Anthropomorphic Research Project reports a slightly higher proportion of gay furries based on a smaller but comparable sample size (ref). Their numbers are slightly different because some of their surveys are collected at conventions. I discuss this effect further down in this article.

There is an [adjective][species] visualization of this data available here.

Mini San Francisco billboard. It’s interesting, but false: furry is not a queer phenomenon. Courtesy @fluff_dragon.

The Furrypoll data on furry sexual preference is especially interesting if we look at how long the respondents have been part of the furry community. It shows that a lot of furries – an awful lot of furries – change their sexual preference, from straight to gay, within five years of joining the community.

Years in the fandom vs. sexual orientation

This shows that around 50% of heterosexuals joining the furry community will change their sexual preference, mostly towards gay. I’ve written about this in detail before on [adjective][species], in an article titled Re-Evaluating Your Sexual Preference. The overall effect is that older furries are more likely to be gay.

Even with this large furry shift towards homosexuality over time, furry is still just 20 to 25% gay. However we have a lot of furries who identify as bisexual, or at least in the bisexual area of the spectrum.

Bisexuality is a difficult term to define, because it tends to mean different things to different people. For some it means that gender is irrelevant to sexual attraction, others will swing between exclusively homosexual and heterosexual phases, and for others it merely denotes that the gender of their sexual or romantic partners is variable.

Because the meaning of ‘bisexual’ is both reductive and variable, it’s not very useful. This is a problem with a lot of terms associated with sexual orientation, gender, and identity. Unfortunately, when collecting data, we need to lump people into categories. Labelling a large portion of furry as ‘bisexual’ is an unavoidable simplification.

I would argue that, inside furry, an unusually large proportion of our nominal bisexuals are people who are mostly heterosexual, but who enjoy homosexual sex. This occurs because homosexual (male) sex is highly available within furry: we are male dominated, sex-positive, and homosexual activity is normal.

In this way, furry neatly mirrors the non-furry world. In the non-furry world, nominal bisexuals are more likely to be mostly homosexual people who engage in heterosexual sex. This is because heterosexual sex is more available in the non-furry world; a product of a 50/50 gender split, a relative dearth of homosexuals, and cultural homophobia.

So furry encourages situational homosexuality, just like the non-furry world encourages situational heterosexuality. (As an aside, anyone using the term ‘jailhouse gay’ to describe furries is being homophobic, because that term is only pejorative if you think that gay sex is ‘bad’ compared to straight sex.)

The preponderance of gay sex within furry probably explains why real-world furry gatherings tend to be gayer than the community as a whole. A few things happen:

• Gay furries are more likely to experience and enjoy sexual tension, real or imagined, at a furry gathering. This acts as a motivating factor.
• Straight furries who are in a relationship are less likely to have a partner who is also a furry. (Only about 20% of furries are female.) And a furry with a non-furry partner is probably less likely to socialize with the group than an all-furry couple.
• Data shows that female furries are less likely than male furries to socialize in person (see below). The dearth of women means that there is less motivation for straight (male) furries to socialize. Women are less likely to socialize for two reasons: firstly, women tend to identify less strongly as a furry (ref furrypoll.com); secondly, women in the very male-dominated furry environment are often harassed (more on this in a moment).

You can see the differences by comparing furrypoll.com data, which is collected exclusively online, with International Anthropomorphic Research Project data, which is partly collected (45%) in person at conventions.

Proportion of women: 20% Furrypoll vs 15% IARP
Proportion of homosexuality: 22% Furrypoll vs 29% IARP

The differences would be starker still if the IARP data were 100% from conventions.

As an aside, there is one group of furries with no doubt that there are a lot of heterosexuals at furry gatherings: women. It’s common for women to be harassed, not necessarily in an overtly sexual fashion, but certainly in an unwelcome fashion. This is based on conversations I’ve had with women rather than any hard data: they tend to use terms like ‘annoying’ and ‘pest’ and ‘don’t get the hint’. Some women choose to avoid furry gatherings altogether, which is bad for everyone.

Returning to the bar in London, it’s easy to see how our furry reached the mistaken conclusion that we were “all gay”. Men, and gay men, were over-represented. There were plenty of heterosexual men attending that Londonfurs meet, but they were largely invisible. Furries are often assumed to be gay (or bi) unless proven otherwise. This is another inversion of the real world: at furmeets, heterosexuality is always present but largely hidden. It’s easy to draw the false conclusion that it doesn’t exist.

Duma (2005) is Carroll Ballard’s fourth and final great animal film. I’ve discussed The Black Stallion (1979) and Fly Away Home (1996) before; I’ll eventually round out my series with Never Cry Wolf (1983).

Duma is the name of a cheetah, one of the protagonists in the film. He and Xan, a young boy, take a journey through southern Africa.

I want to start this article by talking about Duma, and what I learned about cheetahs from watching this film. I learned that cheetahs are morons.

There are plenty of cat antics in the film. But Duma is no lolcat. He is docile, obedient, and permanently confused/apathetic. He has a blank-faced stare that betrays a lack of understanding, and a lack of curiosity. If you put Duma on a giant roomba, he’d just sit down and look bewildered.

It’s a running joke in the film that Duma is part domesticated, so his survival skills are hopeless. His hunting in particular is portrayed as being somewhere around the “I can’t find my food bowl” level. At one point, he saves the day “hunting”: he lopes after an ostrich and eventually stumbles/gets confused by a nest full of eggs. Success through incompetence.

So you might think that Duma’s boneheadedness is a deliberate plot device, and that he’s merely the Sarah Palin of the cheetah world. Except that a look at the credits reveals that Duma is played by five different cheetah actors, and I think it’s unlikely that the casting call for Duma was along the lines of “Wanted: witless cheetahs”.

I can only conclude that, in the evolutionary lottery, cheetahs traded brains for speed. To put it another way: Usain Bolt can run the 100m in 9.58s, but that doesn’t mean you’d want him to do your tax return.

Duma’s antics provide a modicum of light relief in what is a dark film. Much of the time, his haplessness reinforces the ever-present danger that surrounds our main characters for most of the film. The spectre of death is very real in Duma.

The film starts, as with Ballard’s The Black Stallion and Fly Away Home, with the death of a parent. Xan’s father succumbs to cancer, leaving Duma in Xan’s care. The death of Xan’s father is a bookend, and the film must end with a different kind of death: the inevitable death of the relationship between Xan and Duma. Xan must, eventually, abandon Duma to the wild.

Xan—and Duma—must learn to accept their separation. This is the emotional core of the film, as Xan learns to see death as a transition, a necessary part of life. He starts the movie as his father’s child, and must end it as an adult. Duma starts as a kitten, and must end it as a self-sufficient wild animal.

So it’s a coming-of-age film. Curiously, Ballard never wanted Duma to open with a death. This was a requirement from the studio funding the film (Warner Bros), who saw this as a critical trope to begin an ‘animal movie’ (see The Lion King, The Black Stallion, Bambi, etc). Ballard felt that this requirement ‘Disneyfied’ his film, forcing Duma away from a realist adventure and towards singalongs or action figures. In the end, Ballard gets his way through sleight of hand: the death of Xan’s father is something different from anything I’ve seen in cinema. It’s slow and jarring; subtle and sudden.

There is a secret about adulthood, something that children don’t know: adults are making it up as they go along. Children know that they are ignorant of the wider world, so they look to adults for guidance. Adults, secretly, also know that they are ignorant. Age teaches us adults to hide our incompetence, and act as if we know what we’re doing.

In Ulysses, James Joyce suggests that fatherhood is not about the sex act that leads to birth some nine months later, rather a responsibility inherited from one’s own father. The oldest of each generation is obliged to perform the paternal role.

And so it is with Xan. Xan’s father decides drive across South Africa to release Duma. When he dies, the mantle of fatherhood is passed onto Xan, and Xan proceeds to follow through with the plan.

It’s a terrible plan. Xan makes a series of life-threatening decisions that Duma, his de facto child, blindly follows. They become stranded on a salt plain and are, but for the machinations of the plot, a couple of days from death.

Anyone who has spent time in isolated rural areas, away from fresh water, will know how deadly they can be. This is captured in Duma: the South African wilderness is actively dangerous, malevolent.

Duma and Xan are joined in their journey by Ripkuna, a young father from a small village who is equally ignorant to the dangers of the world. The three form a loose codependent relationship, relying on each other’s skills to hurdle the deadly challenges thrown up by nature.

Xan and Rip’s relationship, despite their ages, is one of equals. They are both resourceful, selfless, intelligent, and deeply distrustful of each other. (Duma provides a physical threat towards Rip, equivalent to Rip’s physical advantage over Xan.) The distrust is informed by race: Xan is white, Rip is black.

Xan and Rip never acknowledge race. The racial tension comes from their clear cultural differences. Xan’s background is very white. His parents are farmers, his family lives in the city, he goes to a fancy school. In a country where less than 10% of people are white, there are no black faces anywhere in Xan’s world. It’s similar for Rip: his racial ‘otherness’ (to Xan) is clear from his clothes (compared to Xan’s school uniform), and their eventual visit to his village shows a world where white people are a curiosity at best, dangerous at worst.

To understand the depths of the racial politics, some insight into South Africa is required. This is a country where a tiny minority of the population asserted the nakedly racist Apartheid policy over the majority. The mindset that led to such a situation is explored by the great South African writer J.M Coetzee in his novel Summertime:

“In those days the white South Africans liked to think of themselves as the Jews of Africa. [...] All false. These people were not tough, they were not even cunning, or cunning enough. And they were certainly not Jews. In fact they were babes in the wood. That is how I think of them now: a tribe of babies looked after by slaves.”

 

and

“…they turned their backs on [history], dismissing it as a mass of slanders put together by foreigners who held [white South Africans] in contempt and would turn a blind eye if they were massacred by the blacks down to the last woman and child. Alone and friendless at the remote tip of a hostile continent, they erected their fortress state and retreated behind its walls.”

 

Anyone who has seen District 9 will note similar themes.

The racial politics of Duma informs the relationship between Xan and Rip but it’s never overt, never even mentioned. It’s just one more challenge, one more threat, for them to overcome. They do, of course, eventually learn to trust one another. It’s testament to Ballard’s brilliant direction that the tension, and its eventual joyful release, comes without any direct acknowledgement of race.

Duma was a failure on commercial release. Ballard felt that Warner Bros mis-sold the film by marketing it as an old-school simple children’s film (“Lassie with cheetahs”). A rave review and some rare personal advocacy from Roger Ebert saw it eventually get a limited release, where it was largely ignored. Ballard blamed the studio: “In my view, they had a terrible ad campaign that was way too soft and made it look like a namby-pamby kiddie movie.”

There are some problems with the film. For starters, there is some solidly lame CGI, particularly a scene that sees Xan, Rip, and Duma caught in a swarm of tsetse flies.

The actions scenes are well directed, and while Ballard never resorts to making quick cuts of shaky-cam in the hope the viewer will get caught up in the appearance of excitement (ala Michael Bay), he clearly struggled to get good takes form his animal actors. In some cases, he cuts between shots of a dangerous animal (a lion, a crocodile, a warthog) and shots of humans acting as if they were in danger. At their worst, these scenes remind me of the Radioactive Man movie, after Milhouse (playing Fallout Boy) goes missing:

Editor: Thanks to modern editing techniques, we can use existing footage to complete the film without Milhouse! Watch…

 

[rolls badly-edited film]

 

Editor: Seamless, huh?
Director: [pause] You’re fired.
Editor: And with good cause!

 

In the end, I don’t think that Duma‘s commercial failure is due to its cinematic flaws or its marketing. It’s more to do with its structure: it starts with a death, and takes a while for Xan and Duma to start their journey. And it’s a dark film: their journey is fraught, the relationship between Xan and Ripkuna is complex, and it ends with the inevitable separation of Xan and Duma. Duma starts and ends on a low key, and slightly depressing note.

The story is about how Xan is forced, by the world, to leave his childhood behind and begin a life as a stony-faced adult. It’s an excellent piece of cinema, but not exactly the sort of whizz-bang ending that leaves audiences feeling happy and buzzed.

The audience, though, will leave with the strong and lasting impression that cheetahs are flummoxed by just about anything and everything. Those scenes are the best scenes: Duma gets confused by water; Duma gets confused by a TV; Duma gets confused by a car.

In that spirit, here is a picture of a DVD sleeve with four pictures of Duma, all looking confused:

Duma is cheap and easy to find. I bought my copy from Amazon for £3.

This is the third of four articles on the films of Carroll Ballard. All four movies are great. Choose your species and join us:

• The Black Stallion (horse)
• Never Cry Wolf (wolf): coming soon
• Fly Away Home (goose)
• Duma (cheetah)

So, you’re a babyfur.

I know, I know: you’re not one of those babyfurs.

You probably like wearing diapers. You probably find that you can unwind and relax when you’re doing childish things. You have probably found that, as time has gone on, you’ve started incorporating “adult baby” elements into parts of your life—clothing, accoutrements, roleplay—to add to your enjoyment of diapers.

Or maybe you just find the art cute, and the characters easily relatable. Or maybe it’s more of a sex thing. Or maybe you like to watch cartoons and talk in baby talk. Or maybe, just maybe, you have a professional ‘adult’ who looks after you in a nursery once in a while.

In any event, you’re probably aware of how other furries react when they hear about babyfurs. They find babyfurs distasteful. And so you probably have a babyfur-only identity that is separate from your ‘normal’ furry identity. Or maybe you just keep it to yourself.

As a babyfur, you probably feel like you can’t be open and honest with your local furry group. I think there are more people in your situation than you realize.

I think that there are a lot of babyfurs in the furry community. I don’t know exactly how many, because no large survey has ever asked. But I think it’s a lot, perhaps comparable in size to the other large minorities we have within furry: the genderqueer, the zoophiles, and the women.

We here at [adjective][species] would like to hear from the babyfurs. We’ve created a short survey—which is anonymous and confidential—and we’d like you to respond. But more on that in a moment.

I have only anecdotal evidence that suggests, to me, that there are a lot of babyfurs out there:

• Babyfur events, usually room parties, occur at every convention. Some of these are G-rated exercises in icecream and Power Rangers; some are explicitly sexual; many are a bit of both. These events occur despite being organized via word-of-mouth, and occur despite the perception that they are taboo within the wider furry community.
• Real-world AB/DL (Adult Baby / Diaper Lover) events, which occur in some cities, are often full of furries.
• Furries who are open about being a babyfur and are also socially presentable often find themselves approached—in private—by friends. These equally presentable friends are either curious about what baby-furriness entails, or they are already clandestine babyfurs.

I know that all this is true because I have spoken to lots of babyfurs.

I think that babyfurs are suffering from something that plagues many marginalized groups: that the most visible members are not the best ambassadors.

By way of explanation, consider the following thought experiment. For each of the minority groups I’m about to list, imagine a stereotypical member: (1) gay, (2) feminist, (3) Fox News viewer. (I have tried to select three categories with little overlap.)

Chances are that you thought of a pretty normal person for those groups of which you’re a member, and that you thought of a grotesque caricature for those groups you tend to avoid. This is a normal response for a couple of reasons:

• Humans are naturally distrustful of the unknown. This instinct is the root cause of racism and homophobia, and it takes a bit of mental effort to overcome.
• If you’re not a member of the minority in question, and nor is anyone in your social circles, you’re more likely to have been exposed to the extreme elements of the group; the bad ambassadors. So, outrageous pride costumes inform perspectives on gay people, feminists are seen as angry and intolerant, and Fox News viewers are mindless gun-toting yahoos.

This totally instinctual human reaction can be seen in attitudes towards gay marriage in the United States. If you don’t know someone gay, you are much less likely to support gay marriage.

From Slate (link): “Research shows that knowing a gay person makes you 65 percent more likely to support same-sex marriage, and having a conversation with that gay person about marriage raises the figure to 80 percent.”

(I should note that this pattern is certainly not restricted to the US, just that it’s a been political football, and the Americans love collecting polling data.)

There’s some science that suggests that babyfurs, like gay people (and like zoophiles), are more likely to generate a negative reaction. It’s a linguistic problem: the sexual practises of each of these groups is suggested in the group’s name.

A study published in 2011 sums up the issue in its title: Disgusting Smells Cause Decreased Liking of Gay Men (full text, pdf). In brief, the study showed that people felt less warmly towards gay men when they were in a smelly environment. The effect wasn’t see towards other minority groups. Essentially, the smell of poo makes gay men seem kinda gross, because they engage in anal sex.

As the study author commented in Scientific American (link):

“I think what’s happening is that the social category of “gay men” (and to a lesser extent, gay women) is one that is defined by the sexual act… I tell my class to imagine if the first thing they learned about a person is that he or she frequently masturbated to pregnant women. The sexual disgust response would likely eclipse every other aspect of the person, such as their also being a fireman, a pharmacist, or Irish.”

 

The problem is similar for babyfurs: those people who don’t know any babyfurs aren’t easily able to create a mental image that goes much beyond the diaper, and the (imagined) smelly contents thereof. And so babyfurs tend to keep quiet about it, because they know to expect an initially negative reaction.

The urban myths that circulate about babyfurs always focus on disgusting behaviour. The stories are inevitably exaggerations, speculations, or outright false. Furry is not awash with people soiling themselves in public or leaving dirty diapers in convention hallways. There is a large minority of babyfurs (perhaps including you, dear reader), and they are being respectful of those around them, and keeping quiet.

This is the point in the article where I say that I am not a babyfur. It shouldn’t matter whether I am or not, but I know from experience that it does. My first article about zoophilia for [a][s] (I’ve written three) was criticized for being self-serving, that I was just trying to justify my own proclivities. I’m concerned that this article will lead people to draw a similar conclusion. There is nothing wrong with being a babyfur, and it’s a bit sad that I feel the need to distance myself personally, but unfortunately I think it’s the best (or least-worst) course of action.

Which brings me to my slightly hypocritical advice: I think you should tell furries that you are a babyfur. There are a few reasons:

• For your non-babyfur friends, you’ll be a good example. You will be disproving the kneejerk babyfur stereotype simply by being yourself.
• For your closeted babyfur friends—and you almost definitely have some—you’ll be a rolemodel.
• For yourself, because you’ll be able to be open and honest with your friends. And that’s good for the soul.

I met a furry named Karis a few years ago, at a convention. He’s charismatic, well-liked, and a generally great guy. He’s one of those furries who seems to be forever surrounded by friends. And he’s a completely open babyfur.

His baby-furriness was gossiped about when he wasn’t present. People were surprised that he could possibly be a babyfur.

Karis was comfortable and happy to answer any questions. He directed people to his website, Karis’ Playground (http://www.karisplayground.com/), which features webcomics like World of Wetcraft. He changed the mind of a few people simply by being open, and I’m guessing that there were some closeted babyfurs present. I’m guessing that they felt a surge of joy at seeing Karis being treated respectfully.

And so I recommend that babyfurs be open, or at least relatively open, because I think that there are lots of you out there. You’ll have plenty of support.

I also hope that this article helps, because it’s never easy to hide a part of your personality. It’s mentally stressful, and it’s easy to start seeing yourself in the grotesque artchetype: it’s easy to be self-hating. It’s never healthy to deny a safe sexual urge: it can lead to stretches of self-hatred and denial, interspersed with bouts of sexual mania. (I’ve written about this before.) Far better, if you can, to accept yourself, respect yourself, and love yourself.

Starting next year, the Furrypoll will have a question asking “Are you a babyfur?”. In the meantime, we have a Babyfur minipoll, which is anonymous and will not be shared beyond  me, an (anonymous) babyfur helper, and Makyo. The responses will be used in future [a][s] articles. Please participate, and help us get an idea of what the babyfur community looks like. Alternatively you can email me directly at [email protected], or just leave a comment below.

Please also share this article within babyfur circles. I’d like to hear from as many people as possible. It’s about time that babyfurs were recognized by the furry mainstream.

The [adjective][species] Babyfur minipoll

Death is important to us. When a furry dies, we—as a group—react strongly.

Following the death of a furry, there is often an outpouring of grief. Much of that grief is from furries who have never met the deceased.

Here’s the first comment on Flayrah’s news post about the death of Lemonade Coyote (link), a well-regarded but not especially well-known American furry:

I don’t know the guy, but I’m sorry this happened and I’m sorry for his family.

This comment is typical of the sentiment expressed by many furries in this sort of situation. It’s heartfelt, it’s sweet, and it’s clear that the commenter has been personally affected by the death of a stranger. The only thing that our commenter and Lemonade Coyote have in common is that they are both furries.

It’s unlikely that our commenter would be similarly affected by the death of a non-furry. This is not to say he would be cold-hearted, just that he is less likely to be personally affected by the death of, say, a fellow college student (that he had also never met). As has been discussed in [a][s] in the past by Makyo (Death in the Fandom), there is something about the interconnectedness of our furry community that makes death affect so many of us so greatly.

I think that there are a couple of reasons why death is so important to us as a group.

For starters, furries are young: about 90% of us are younger than 30 (ref). And like any group of young people, furries are more inclined to spend time with peers rather than the wider community.

We live in a world where our social choices, at least outside of high school, are dominated by urbanization and the internet. We are able to socially discriminate more than at any other time in human history: we can choose to hang around with people of similar interests, similar culture, similar socio-economic background, and similar age. Most of us are not required to participate in a community dictated by proximity, such as in a 1600s village, or a tribe.

This shift in the way that humans form social groups began with the Industrial Revolution, just 200 years ago (the blink of an eyelid in evolutionary terms). It is the cause of significant challenges for many people in today’s world. We share our living space with an overwhelming number of people. Because we can only manage a limited number of social connections, we must be choosy. This process of exclusion makes it easy for someone to feel lonely despite being surrounded by people, or to be rejected from a social clique.

I’ve written previously about how society can be alienating (Furry as an Alternative to Religion). I believe that furry provides a rare social environment that is based on inclusion. It’s one of the great things about furry: everyone is welcome by default. Our culture is more in tune with the idea of community as a whole, compared to the wider world.

Our close community means that we may be personally saddened by the death of another furry, even a stranger. We have lost one of our own, and we know that the death will be felt keenly by other furries.

It doesn’t help that furry deaths tend to be sudden. This is due to our demographics: largely young, and largely male.

The leading causes of death among young men in the United States (ref) are (1) Misadventure (or ‘unintentional injuries’, perhaps from a car accident) and (2) Suicide. This is how furries die too.

Death through misadventure and death through suicide are relatable for most of us. We may have done something stupid, or otherwise been in a situation that placed ourselves at risk. And all of us—yes, all of us—have had suicidal thoughts. We can personally relate to these causes of death, and it’s natural for us to fantasize about them.

When we fantasize, when we fixate on death, we are experiencing a mortality crisis. We fantasize about how the moments before death must have felt, we fantasize about last thoughts, we imagine how we might have acted in the same situation. We find death (when it’s relatable but not so close that we’re overcome by grief) to be engaging.

We sometimes feel bad for being engaged by death. We read through last comments on FA, or Twitter, or Livejournal, and try to picture the subsequent events. And then, sometimes, we feel remorseful, as if our reaction were disrespectful. But our reaction—the mortality crisis—is normal, and normally positive.

In the non-furry world, the death of a celebrity can cause a similar outpouring of grief. Despite the celebrity being a stranger, many people feel compelled to express their personal reaction; perhaps in a comparable fashion to our commenter on Lemonade Coyote’s death, or perhaps in a more overt way. Such expressions of grief are sometimes pathologized: people assume that the griever imagines a personal connection with the celebrity. Such behaviour is sometimes compared to stalking.

FindAGrave (www.findagrave.com) is a website where people can leave comments, virtual flowers, and nauseating animated gifs by way of remembrance. As an example, the amazing screencap below is taken from James Gandolfini’s page:

In this case, it’s easy to assume that these commenters are delusional (along with many, many, many others on FindAGrave). But I don’t think that all those who feel a strong connection to Gandolfini are confused over whether there was a real relationship. It is simply that Gandolfini was well known, so it’s easy to fantasize about his death.

Gandolfini’s death provoked a minor mortality crisis in some people, just like the death of Lemonade Coyote did for some others. Public memorials like FindAGrave (or the comments sections on Flayrah) provide an avenue to express that feeling. Such comments are mostly about the writer, not the deceased.

It’s rare for us to think about the inevitability of our own death. Our innate ability to avoid thinking about death is probably an evolutionary trait. Life would simply be too stressful if we were to consider our own death when engaging in risky activities, like crossing the road. So on the rare occasions where death comes to mind, it can provoke a strong and unexpected reaction—a mortality crisis.

A friend of mine recently witnessed a pigeon’s death. He heard it crash into a second-story window, and watched as it twitched and died on the pavement below. It took around 15 minutes to die as my friend stood transfixed, unable to pull himself away from the grisly spectacle.

He told me that he felt ashamed by his compulsion to watch the pigeon’s death. He described feeling queasy and stimulated, almost excited. In hindsight, he judged those feelings as ‘wrong’, that he should have been less curious, or more respectful. But there is nothing wrong with his feelings. They are the same ones that provoke an emotional response when we read about the death of a furry, or seek out footage of fatal accidents on the internet, or watch clips of the September 11 attacks.

Oliver Burkeman, a British journalist who writes on mental wellbeing (here), argues that thinking about death is healthy. The prospect of death—that of our own or of a loved one—puts the value of life into relief, and can remind us of those things we find valuable. Burkeman suggests that we should take time to consider the inevitability of death. It’s a kind of small, planned, pre-emptive mortality crisis.

I agree that this is a healthy way of managing the spectre of death, and we can learn to live life in a more enjoyable fashion if we are able to consciously acknowledge mortality.

From a linguistic point of view, I think that the term ‘bucket list’ is aesthetically ugly. It’s a clumsy reappropriation of an anachronistic metaphor, ‘kicking the bucket’. But from a philosophical standpoint, a ‘bucket list’ is a good example of Burkeman’s principle in action. We have a limited time on Earth, and the thought processes involved in compiling a personal wishlist can help us broaden our horizons. As always, we make ourselves happy through personal improvement: physical, mental, spiritual.

Furry offers great opportunities: opportunities for travel, for personal relationships, for new experiences. A furry ‘bucket list’ might include a visit to a large convention, or a trip around the world to meet a close friend. Such goals are rarely easy, but they are often achievable for someone who is motivated. Consideration of death can add purpose to life.

Guest post by Amethyst Basilisk, written as a counterpoint to JM’s article, Evidence that Furry Is Leading the Rest of the World.

One of the best benefits from participating in a creatively chaotic community such as furry is the ability to be whoever you’d like to be. It’s an important outlet for many of us – our expressions tend to come out in terms of being who we feel we’re not necessarily allowed to be from a greater cultural perspective. Most of us didn’t fit in, wherever we came from. Most of us were too geeky – too awkward, even. Too loud and boisterous, too strange or too tweaked. As a result, we’ve fled to and cultivated ourselves a safe haven from emotional treachery. The only explicit laws against fantasy in most cultures are typically put in place to prevent fraud and violence. However, there also exists a social hierarchy which takes every opportunity to reinforce one’s alleged place in its expansive machinery. A plethora of societal and financial pressures as well as generalized threats on survival are applied in order to enforce this order whenever possible. A lack of order, as the host species appears to feel, is a formula for destruction.

Furries balk at this thought. Furries pretend to be whoever the heck they want to be, regardless of what others may think of them – at least non-furries, anyway. The community attempts to shed the societal pressures; intellectual disdain; and hatred toward experimentation; to craft crafts of provocative proportions. As a result, furries are outcasts for the things they enjoy doing, allegedly hated by the rest of the world for what’s perceived as anywhere from fun to enlightenment.

One of the sad ironies of cleverly crafted utopias are their abilities to mimic and even amplify the societal sundries they’re attempting to flee. Furry is Schrödinger’s Island.

Schrödinger’s Island is a neologism piggybacking on the quantum parable of Schrödinger’s cat. Its use attempts to describe a social phenomenon wherein participants of the furry community simultaneously attempt to receive recognition from the greater culture that has allegedly rejected them and equally boast– sometimes to arrogant degrees – about how separated they are from the culture as a whole (e.g., aggressively boasting about furry pride to a group who is perhaps ignorant or just doesn’t particularly care). Essentially, on one hand, actively identifying as a furry is an emotional protest toward the arbitrary boundaries enforced on them in a culture that rejects such sense of freedom to self-identify. Without the element of societal rejection from a puritanical society, it’s very difficult to argue that furry would be what it is today. And yet on the other hand there’s this intense craving to be accepted for who we are – hence the hand-to-forehead magnetism induced by the more stereotypically vocal among us.

This psychological schism doesn’t have a tendency to exist in one person: it’s a social superposition which causes emotional projections of what brought us here in the first place, leading to bizarre circular arguments, self-fulfilling prophecies, and a naively malevolent darkness that allows for all sorts of horrible abuses to happen. To summarize: what is a hero without a villain? And what happens when the hero yearns for villains to confirm their heroic existence? Will they find villains they didn’t know of before, or will molds be formed to redefine their villainy? Let’s go with a common (and easy) villain of the puritanical mindset, as well as the reputation of the furry community as a whole: sex.

Statistics regarding the opinions on sexual psychology in the furry community make this quantum ideology stand out like a sore thumb. Frequently, when furries are polled, they feel the rest of the furry community is way more sexualized than they are personally – which is to say not very much, of course. A cynic would argue blatant hypocrisy, whereas an easy counter-argument is citing statistics regarding artistic production: there are always, on average, much more general audience productions than erotic productions on a given furry site, at a given furry art show or in a given furry artist alley. Yet, as furries, we know a dead horse when we see one, so let’s shirk the stud-shank. There’s an interesting curiosity in having sex panic in the first place. Let’s talk about sin.

Sin isn’t simply biblical. All cultures have sins. Sins are a means of social control enforced by those who feel emboldened and uplifted by their followers. What the leader deigns, the followers enforce, creating exiles in their wake and loyalists for the cause. There are many cultural sins – sex is just one of them. But sex has been used as a means of social control back before the bible, so to declare sex as a weapon of the puritan would make Ghengis Khan cackle.

Sex is used in the furry community in a similar way – though mostly to control the perception of what others think of us. Attempting to portray an opposing opinion on the sexuality of furries…does not usually end well. Trying to enforce it as a good thing usually creates strong opinions one way or the other regarding what others will think of them. It’s rather difficult to have an intelligent discussion about sex in mixed company – and this isn’t even really a furry problem! But the push-back in talking honestly about sex touches on one of the more cardinal sins of the furry community.

Picture a parade. Fursuits and other costumes cruise through. Everything is normal. Try and picture one of the costumers striding past you while performing in character, utilizing the physical mannerisms of their costumed persona to really bring that outfit to life. Then imagine them locking eyes on you with excitement, pulling off their fursuit head and striking up a conversation with you while the parade is going on behind them. What is your perception of the crowd around you?

The first perception that comes immediately to mind is annoyance, irritation and fingered, judgmental murmurings from the rest of the crowd. This fursuiter has sinned. They ruined the fantasy.

But this sin goes beyond fiction. This sin in particular – the ruination of fantasy – has deep, deep roots that go to the core of our emotional utopia and reach further into the puritanical society we feel exiled by, even through attempts to exhume the very thing many feel furry provides as a shelter from attack. To present furry as anything potentially adult to others is a sin: that ruins the fantasy of furry being acceptable by society, and its members as acceptable by proxy. To state that public furry groupings could potentially be an unsafe place is a sin: that ruins the fantasy of furry as a safe-haven from the greater villainy we ran from. To make claim of potential malevolence, be it sexual, violent or psychologically manipulative by another furry, is a sin: that ruins the fantasy that furries are friendly and affectionate. Analogies apply equally to the puritanical society furry attempts to escape.

Yet this inability to even question the fantasies that exist within the furry community itself – combined with the Internet’s infinite appetite for being proven permanently right – allows the very abusive villainy furries fled from to flourish. As is standard in the society furry left behind, the survival response to prevent one’s self from becoming either insane or isolated becomes apathy. A cascade of anti-intellectualism occurs due to a rising desire to become the most apathetic of a given group, and from there the cycle of psychological (and, though thankfully relatively rarely, physical) abuse continues to tumble along in the darkness.

The movie Inception provides a fascinating metaphor for the horrifying phenomenon caused when one becomes consumed by the fantasy world. As the protagonists dig deeper into the dreams of their victim, they go further and further into the many layers of dreams, with limbo being the final layer. But limbo is infinity. Limbo is simultaneously everything and nothing. Limbo is exactly what you make of it. And its perfection is as much beautiful as it is horrifying. Beautiful in its ability to create exactly what you want and how you want it; horrifying from the existential stress imposed from over-pressing the dopamine depressor.

Inasmuch as we may be leaders by actively experimenting with our newfound freedom to abstractly identify ourselves, there exist strengthened and well-enforced cultural patterns from this identicraft that caused us to disobey standard social order in the first place. Yet instead of attempting to address these patterns, they are culturally shoved under the nearest rugs and dismissively declared as drama. In that regard, the furry community unfortunately follows the beat of the same oppressive drum this escapism attempts to shut out: protect the fantasy of order at all costs.

The social order of furry is founded primarily on the quality of fantasy. It is our culturally accepted vice. But what makes us followers instead of leaders in this regard is our inability to give our fantastical society a strong foundation by questioning and maintaining its fantastic structure. Leaders fight for their followers with bold and courageous tactics – not propaganda.

The Stranger, a well-regarded alternative weekly newspaper from Seattle, has just published their Queer Issue for 2013 to coincide with the Seattle Pride Parade.

There’s a remarkable article titled Floating in Shades of Grey, written by Ray Van Fox, which talks about the furry experience. Except that Ray isn’t a furry—his vulpine nom de plume is coincidental—and his article doesn’t reference furry. Ray talks about a largely online community, where he and the other members “are re-creating ourselves in our own image in order to be seen for who we actually are.“

Ray is talking about the well-worn furry ground, where we present as animal-people in furry spaces. This is usually online for furries, but also real-world spaces like a private party or a convention. We choose an identity for ourselves, one which matches our internal perceptions, and we interact as if that identity were true. It is true, in its own way, but it’s different from the arbitrary real-life meatbag with which we are burdened.

This duality, our arbitrary meatbag versus our created identity, is at the centre of the furry experience. Our two faces can be very different: different species, gender, sexual preference, size, colour, personality. (Many furries précis their new identity by naming it using the convention [adjective][species].)

We furries may be the first large group to collectively choose to socialize using identities of our own original invention. We’re certainly experimenting with the limits of identity in a way that no other group (of comparable size) is. Our genesis came when furries moved away from the first wave of ‘furry fandom’, made up of sci-fi fans who liked anthropomorphic characters, and towards today’s second wave of furry as an identity. It’s no coincidence that this change coincided with mainstream adoption of the internet: the online world allowed us to form our community.

The rest of the world is following in our footsteps. People are learning that the identity through which they socialize can be a different, truer one than their arbitrary meatbag. Second Life is an obvious example—there are plenty of furries but there are also plenty of other people keen to explore the freedom of an identity that can reflect their true, internal nature.

Grindr is another environment where people project a different version of themselves. A Grindr identity might be a hypersexual version; maybe a little hornier, a little better-endowed, a little younger. And the social environment in which Grindr users meet is (presumably) a space where those identities are ‘real’, and where mundane aspects of life don’t intrude.

It happens on Facebook, too. Users show a version of themselves that reflects their true interests and identity. For example, someone who is a young parent can choose to use their baby as an icon. This allows them to reframe the dependent relationship as one of equals, just at different stages in life. The adult is a former baby, and the baby is a future adult. (Similar things can happen later in life, when the child becomes the carer for a dependent elderly parent.) Something similar can happen with pet owners too, where the human can reframe their own life in the context of the love and luxury they are able to afford their domestic animal. In both cases, the Facebooker is expressing that their care provides a sense of internal wellbeing, something important and worthy.

It also happens in queer communities. Ray Van Fox is genderqueer, and his community has grown on Tumblr. He has found a community where he can express his true identity:

“Somehow these folks, without even knowing some supposedly basic things about me, have created a safe space where I can be my most authentic, uncensored, almost fully ungendered self.”

 

(A quick note on pronouns: I’ve chosen to use ‘he’ for Ray, because that’s how he mostly presents himself out in the real world. It’s not perfect but I think it’s better than using a gender-neutral neologism, which I find to be jarring. Neither option is perfect, so I’ve chosen what is least-worst, at least from my perspective.)

Ray’s description of his ‘safe space’ sounds a lot like the furry spaces in which I spend much of my time.

Here is his description of his safe space:

“Lots of us have names and personas and pronouns that are different from the ones we have in “real” life, but we aren’t using them in order to deceive anyone.”

 

And:

“I’m exhausted with all the tiny lies and self-betrayals involved in trying to squeeze myself into an identity that isn’t quite mine. Why would I leave the house and deal with that, when I can get online and interact with others without having to package myself in any shape but the one I’ve got?

 

Tumblr provides a level of anonymity in the act of self-creation — of constructing my blog persona — that gives me freedom from others’ preconceived notions based on my body. Because it’s all about what you say, not how you look.”

 

In all these examples—on Second Life, on Grindr, on Facebook, on Tumblr—groups of people are taking advantage of the online world to experiment with identity in the way that furries do, and have been for the last 20 years or so. We’re not exactly leaders—people aren’t walking around with WWFD bracelets or consulting the latest advice from furry think tanks—but we are the first to cross this new ground. And so we can expect that non-furry groups will experience the positive and negative aspects of our furry experience as time flows on.

I think that fellowship is the biggest gift the furry community has given to us. We are able to be ourselves and be treated with respect, in a way that many of us cannot easily find in non-furry spaces. I think that this change is already affecting mainstream culture: as more people learn the value of self-expression, those on the fringe are finding more acceptance. As examples: there has been a seachange in attitudes towards gay people; there are signs that the world is starting to move beyond gender binaries (although there is a long way to go); an inclusive, intelligent third wave of feminism is gaining traction.

People in these three cases (gay people, trans* people, women) are all on the fringe, and are exploring aspects of identity. Members of all three are having to make compromises in the way they present themselves in society, something which they are not required to do in the ‘safe space’ of their respective communities. Some will refuse to compromise (to their own detriment—they will be given the perjorative label ‘militant’), and some will not explore their true identity. But the majority will balance two identities, internal and external, and they will have to deal with the challenges this presents.

There has been a lot of talk here on [a][s] recently about how we, as furries, manage our internal animal-person identity with the need to conform to society’s expectations. I won’t cover that ground again here. Suffice to say that compromise is necessary, and that there is no perfect solution.

The requirement to balance a true internal identity with a curated external identity is challenging. It can require vigilance, especially if we want to keep ourselves googleproof. There are techniques and tools, however they are yet to reach maturity (Google Plus looked promising before they decided that we wouldn’t be allowed to socialize under an invented identity). But the tools will improve as the mainstream world catches up with the furry community, as people learn the freedom and happiness that a safe space and self-consistent identity can bring.

As Ray Van Fox puts it:

“That space may be made up of a bunch of “strangers” who might look different than I imagine, but I can bank on the fact that their reasons for befriending me have nothing to do with my body. And I can’t tell you how comforting that is.”

 

You can read Ray’s full article here. He lives at http://www.rayvanfox.com/.

One of my classmates in college was pursuing what I believe was a double major in engineering and music composition. He was a pretty great guy, at his most helpful when it came to the discussions on sound and acoustics. He was also a huge nerd, but so were we all: we were the first class to help get the composition department at the university up and running, so we were the ones actually pushing to get the degree program started – my nerdiness took the form of running the composition lab.

For his junior recital, one of the two we were required to give consisting entirely of pieces we composed, he performed an extended three-movement piece for solo French Horn titled “Journey To Arelle”. It’s one of those titles you have to say out loud to get the joke. The song was a tone poem about what mental processes a character left to idle on Word of Warcraft must go through when their player went off to “deal with RL”.

The idea of RL – “Real Life” – in opposition to things furry is, I think, an interesting and telling one. There’s a lot to be said for immersion when it comes to gaming, for sure, but many furries apply it to much more than just an experience that can be had sitting at a console. We’re hardly the only ones, of course, but it helps in understanding just how the fandom works to know that it occurs in a context that is not always “real life.”

Role-play in and of itself is usually set as an opposite to real life. The idea of something in opposition to structured activities such as role-play is not a new one; this is easily seen in the previous example, of course. One is spending the time and effort to pretend to be this character within the set bounds of the game, computer or otherwise, in which that character ultimately resides. There is a literal role to play of some other living (or perhaps undead) being, here, and to attend to daily tasks that may be wildly out of character if not outright out of period is certainly returning to “real life”. There just isn’t the connection tying the two lives together, there.

The difference between a strict role-playing type scenario and furry, however, is that furry has no rules, no objectives, and no canon. This isn’t to say that it can’t, of course, as plenty of folk I know within the fandom play furry-themed RPGs such as Ironclaw or Usagi Yojimbo, or even appropriate not-strictly-furry games to their own uses, creating new species to be used in, say, Star Wars themed pencil-and-paper role-playing games.

Furry lacks a central story, though: there’s no canon to guide us other than the shared interest that ties us together. In our case, though we often play the roles of our created or chosen characters in various ways, from interacting with them in text-only chat rooms and MU*s to commissioning artwork or dressing up in giant animal bags at conventions, we don’t have rules or story to separate out a perfectly livable daily life as an animal person from a perfectly livable daily life as someone pretending to be an animal person.

I think this shows that furry is something beyond just role-play: it’s a whole separate context, a separate life lived in opposition to what a lot of people still think of as “normal”. We incorporate role-play as a tool rather than as some sole form of interaction. We live our lives out as furries here and there, but for the large part, much of our interaction within the fandom remains a form of escapism. Beyond that, however, furry as a subculture is still seen by many both inside and outside the fandom as an interest that’s bizarre at best, downright abnormal at worst.

This isn’t an opinion held by just those outside, as I’ve said. The fact that we maintain such a strict separation of concerns when it comes to our shared affinity for anthropomorphized animals and day-to-day interaction with those who don’t share our interest shows our own willingness to accept what we consider a normal life alongside the lives we lead within our chosen subculture. It’s willful and, as JM and I both point out, hardly negative and not without utility. A sense of normalcy pays off just as much as all that we gain by virtue of this transgressive subculture.

This isn’t the type of thing that furry is alone in creating. There are other hobbies and lifestyles – especially the latter – which readily fit into a separate context from everyday life. These are the types of things where one might find oneself being reminded, “don’t cross the streams”. The further something is from being regarded as a part of the main-stream (you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, here), the more likely it is to be seen as constructive when one prevents it from overlapping with day-to-day life. Philately, while definitely a bookish and stereotypically nerdy sort of hobby, is something one might freely talk about with friends and coworkers outside the stamp-collecting subculture. One’s collection of firearms or bedroom proclivities rarely mix well in so-called polite company without also being some sort of transgression.

This holds especially true for lifestyles. In recent years, even in this last year, being lesbian, gay, or bisexual has hardly entailed the same amount of hiding a core part of oneself at work and with friends, separating out a portion of life from what’s considered normal by society at large. This wasn’t always the case, though, and it’s humbling to look back, as someone who grew up fitting more or less solidly into one of those categories, and see how differently the world works today in terms of “crossing the streams”.

The interesting thing to consider with this analogy is the level of choice involved in furry as compared to sexual orientation. I used the term “lifestyles” intentionally above, though it’s fallen out of favor when referring to one’s orientation, because of the fact that there exists a significant portion of the furry world that lives furry, identifies as furry, and feels that they don’t necessarily have a choice about doing so, much in the same way that many live gay, identify as gay, and feel they don’t have a choice in the matter. One can look at a hobby from the outside and see it as something that someone chooses to do and generally be correct about that, but not always. For some, those often called lifestylers, it truly can be seen as something more akin to an orientation or identity than a simple hobby, and thus be harder to separate from every day contexts.

JM and I have both discussed the usefulness in both accepting and rejecting a separate context for furry in our lives, depending on the scenario, and I think this acceptance of our subculture as a slightly-less-than-real life when stood up next to what so many of us refer to as “RL” is worth taking a step back and looking at. It’s hardly a big thing, or an exciting thing, or a new thing, but it does show the ways in which we differentiate furry from other things in our lives, and even define the boundaries of what each of us considers to be the furry fandom.

Guest post by Newfur.  Newfur is a fluffy red fox and college student who, true to his name, is relatively new to the furry fandom. He reads voraciously, writes unsteadily, loves music, mathematics, and molecular biology, and is an avid participant in Bookmarfs!

Reading through JM’s and Makyo’s posts here got me to thinking about the nature of presentation and the public face, and from there to one simple tenet I have lived by. Having lived in many ways and in many places, from my often rocky relationship with my family and cloistered visits to famously conformist South Korea, to my time in the furry fandom and in other such gloriously tolerant places, at some points I have had to live by this tenet by force, but thankfully more often, by choice:

The face we show one person need not be the face we show all people.

I know, I know, plenty of ink’s been spilled over “authenticity”, and we’re told from childhood that “honesty is the best policy”. In the end, though, only the demands of others to know all they desire about you and childhood conditioning drawing from this motivate these feelings. It is, in the final estimation, relatively easy to stay true to yourself while, in a calculated manner, making sure that some people don’t see what you don’t intend for them to see. At first blush, this may seem like a suspect notion, even one indicative of sociopathy. Think for a moment, though: does anyone really want to hear about what you had yesterday for lunch?

The telling of such lubricative lies and stories along with the careful holding-back of information is integral to this bewildering phenomenon called society, regardless of how we feel. Naturally, this sort of lie is crucial because it allows people to interact with each other without the abrasion that would result if we were as true and open as many purport to seek to be. We build up, consciously or otherwise, a public face: a mask that we show others in place of our true face. Those that fail to do so, whether through a lack of capability or desire, generally end up marginalized: out of work, shunned by others, or, occasionally, dead.

As furries, then, we find a tactic used time and again in the animal world: camouflage. Camouflage of dress, of speech, and of action. These aspects of disguise are the tools and the material with which we build the edifice that we intend others to see. They form the public face, as furries or even just as people. For if we must craft a mask just to function in society, we must craft it as best we can, rather than just letting the cards fall where they may. Hoping blindly that we’ll be accepted, no matter how awful it feels to choose to deliberately manipulate the emotional reactions of those we meet, will do us no good.

Balance is required, though. We find in ancient Greek mythology an apt picture of our dilemma: that of Scylla and Charybdis, the famed great hazards of the Strait of Messina. Scylla, it was told, was a terrible sea monster with six heads, and Charybdis, a terrifyingly deep and powerful whirlpool. And so too for us: to one side, the Scylla of too little – indiscriminately wearing and doing what we please anywhere and at any time, the wearing of collars at all times or barking at strangers – threatens us with ruin. More dangerous to my mind, though, is the Charybdis of too much, of selling your soul and losing what makes you delightfully unique, of wearing business clothes everywhere because you’ve forgotten what anything else feels like. Judiciousness is required, too. A three-piece suit would be almost as out of place at a furmeet as a collar would be at a job interview.

We draw inspiration, then, from the delicate art and subtle science of the lie. To put it poetically, a well-crafted lie is a story told about an alternate world which is easily confused with one about the real world. So too for our camouflage of word and deed : a story told in speech and movement of someone who is an ordinary member of society, about whom it cannot be said that something suspicious or untoward is going on. We must be careful, though, of Charybdis again: the lie bites both ways, and it isn’t unheard of to wind up living the lie you have accidentally convinced yourself you believe.

So what’s to gain from all this trouble taken? It seems to me that the presentation of a false face to the world is the only way to balance your true self with the demands of society, and in so doing guard yourself from society’s assimilative pull. Even better, it allows you to hide your true preferences from someone who might seek to use them against you.

It can attract friends, true ones, too: people will enjoy knowing you more if you still have the decency to treat them properly as a fellow human being even if you don’t really feel personally invested in the way you’re interacting with them. And oftentimes, those you meet out on the fringes as they sail carefully between Scylla and Charybdis, or even find some small success taking Odysseus’s famed daredevil route, will be some of the best friends you’ll ever make.

It’s hardly as bleak or as do-or-die as I’ve said here – at least, not most of the time. Society is often forgiving: in practice, people have a Somebody Else’s Problem filter for the strange and unusual, which those like us can gleefully exploit. A good example of this is the noted example of the residents of every college town whose residents have become inured to strange happenings, have seen it all, and now don’t even blink at the strangest happenings. The important thing is to keep the transgressive and the truly strange out of view, which seems to be the rather successful tack the furry community as a whole is consciously taking, and that many other subcultures have taken with varying degrees of consciousness and success in the past.

And thus in the end, it’s important not only to know the rules of the world, but also to know when you can bend or shatter them. A life lived placidly within imagined and self-imposed boundaries is barely a life lived at all. It is, after all, only in the lighting of a little non-conformist lantern that you can signal to those other interesting strangers that you’re someone worth talking to. Just don’t let it turn into a ship-consuming bonfire, of course, and you should be fine.

Love ? Sex ? Fur is a new project by [adjective][species] to explore relationships, sexuality, and some of the finer points of personal interaction within the furry fandom. It is intended to be a safe space for authors to write about the ways in which these topics interact on social, cultural, and personal levels, helping us to leave no stone unturned in our explorations.

The intersection between our subculture, sexuality, and love is complex, and all the more interesting for that fact. A lot of what motivates us in life is the pursuit of happiness in all its varied forms, and the fact that we are so varied is what helps make all of this so interesting: things don’t always line up, or they line up beautifully, and the reasons for that are worth investigating.

Furry does not take place in a social vacuum, of course, but it does act as an attractor in a chaotic system: those of us who get close tend to stay close and find happiness within this system that is bound up in our happiness. We have a tendency to date within the fandom, to fall in love with other furries, and to enjoy our time together, always seeming to steer down the same path. It’s hardly a new phenomenon, either, but it’s still very pertinent.

These are the types of things that LSF will attempt to explore. The safe space bit of it helps to encourage authors to write what they want to write about with the understanding that that is what the site is all about. So, with that said, come and join us for exploration of the intersection of love, sex, and fur.

Check it out at http://lovesexfur.com!

Okay, so the title is a bit grandiose.

I want to address some of the ideas that JM’s previous article brought up for me. It’s a magnificent read about the ways in which the mainstream can benefit those who participate, touching on privilege, presentation, and what we do in private. JM and I seem to come to a firm agreement that his articles are the more immediately applicable, whereas I’m busy navel-gazing; furry does not occur in a vacuum, though, so perhaps I ought to talk some more about the wider social implications of furry.

As with anything that can be simply negated by adding ‘non-’ or ‘ab-’ (you know, like Abby-Normal), there are two sides to the coin, and more often than not, the interaction between the two is hardly a simple binary, often involving friction, and sometimes quite a lot at that.

As many readers can attest, there has been a wave of “be yourself” propaganda pushed on children and young adults in America over the last thirty or so years, appeals to the sense of non-conformity that each of us carries within us to some extent. Much of this, of course, was awful, saccharine filler that served no purpose other than to make someone money, and blanket non-conformity is hardly something I’d advise someone to undertake. However, just as in the rest of the world, furry has something to benefit from careful application of non-conformity.

Non-conformity and subculture have mixed for a long, long time. Anyone who has been part of the goth scene, or the punk scene before it, or the rock scene before that, or the jazz scene before that, knows this. These are, of course, examples that take the idea of non-conformity and spread it throughout the very interest that brings them together, turning it into something of a fandom itself. Even beyond the idea of fandom, though, non-conformity and its close cousin, transgression (an act that goes beyond generally accepted boundaries), have served groups within society as long as there has been society; one need only look to the history of early Christianity to see that. Non-conformity and transgression are hardly artifacts of modern western society.

There are, in fact, a lot of things about furry that can be seen as transgressive, both within and outside of the fandom. Some minor transgressions, acts that take place outside accepted boundaries, are seen as core ore close to our subculture in many instances: street-fursuiting, a propensity for collecting stuffed animals, or even hanging tasteful furry art in the home or office (these two pieces grace our walls right in the entryway, along with a ton of pictures of our dogs) are just a few ways in which we can step into furry space in a non-furry context, even if only a little bit. Minor transgressions, to be sure, but it’s easy to see the roots of transgressive behavior within our fandom. What could be more non-conforming than not conforming to the generally accepted species, after all?

This is, I believe, part of the reason for the relatively accepting nature of furry as well. A group which is, in a way, transgressive at its core is often a safe space for those with a stake in otherwise transgressive behavior. This is more than just “falling in with a bad crowd” – after all, we’re not that bad, are we? Rather, this goes along with the idea of finding a safe space for oneself. A safe space is, in some ways, a space in which one can engage in either transgressive behavior or discuss, think about, or otherwise wax metatextual without fear or repercussion, or at least in the hopes that that’s the case. This is the purpose of the safe-space signs in schools, which serve this purpose in a subtler way, after all: in a place where acknowledging LGBT issues positively might be seen as a transgression, or at least a form of non-conformity, these signs show that the educator is attempting to create a place free of that association.

When it comes down to it, the ideas of non-conformity and transgression serve an important role to minority identities. As this article bluntly puts it:

Queerness is not just about whom or how you fuck. It is also about not being part of that mainstream culture, about being decidedly against that mainstream culture. It is about disruption. It is about putting things at risk.

Of course, both that quote and my own words are incautious: minority identity, and in this example, queerness, are generalizations used to described trends in identity shared within a social group. I know there are several individuals who would disagree. I have my own hesitancy, here. There is an uncomfortable stage for some in the reclamation of a word where it still carries some of its old connotation before the new one has gained general acceptance. “Queer” is in that space for me, because it still has its connotation of “weirdness”, it still denotes transgression. I’ll hasten to add, though, that this is an ongoing process, within myself even as it is within society at large. The word “straight”, after all, has been largely accepted to simply imply heterosexuality, despite its prior connotations of “going straight”, where homosexuality was seen as crooked or deviant (which has been notably lamp-shaded by the movie Bent).

However, I think that the word “queer”, and others like it, are important in the sense that this sort of non-conformity is vital to identity. When it comes to arguing identity (that is, discussing the point with the goal of changing minds, not necessarily having shouting arguments – though sometimes that too), it is advantageous for the argument to be cast in one’s own terms. When the argument from a minority is cast in the terms of the majority, the minority often only receives relatively small concessions, rather than recognition. Transgressive language and non-conformity help to recast the argument so that there is a greater likelihood of one’s point being made forcefully.*

While conformity is generally the province of the majority, non-conformity is hardly detrimental to it. The culture of the majority is a static behemoth, whose only purpose is to remain precisely where it is, as it is. This is all well and good for those within the culture who benefit from that stasis, but this isn’t the case for everyone, and often isn’t even the case for the actual by-the-numbers majority of individuals wrapped up in society. Minority culture and identity, subversive and transgressive, have the job of pushing the majority culture forward in such a way as to improve life for more and more of those in society, attempting to break that stasis to benefit those involved with their culture and identity. A lot of social progress that humanity can claim comes from this tension and friction; the majority promises safety, the minority promises progress. Both have a purpose.

So, let’s tie this back to furry and the idea of conformity.

When it comes to JM’s article, I really must stress that I whole-heartedly agree with it. There is a lot to be gained in terms of safety by conforming to the majority. One furthers one’s standing within that culture by not, say, wearing a collar to one’s interview. This helps in terms of personal progress: a better job, perhaps a greater amount of respect from those around you, and yes, even the possibility of using that progress towards one’s goals within the fandom (EF2015 sounds like a good idea – JD’s been talking about it for a while now).

Non-conformity is nothing to feel bad about, however. Neither is conformity! Both have their purpose in our lives, and every single one of us expresses both in some way or another at different times and in different aspects of our social interaction for our own reasons. Even furry. Transgressive acts such as street-fursuiting, publicly visible gatherings such as conventions, and even talking about furry from a critical theory standpoint on a publicly visible website have helped to legitimize furry as an identity, a membership, a subculture. Conformity, on the other hand, helps many the individual members of furry to keep things moving forward by benefiting from what the majority has to offer to those who go along with it.

* Note that this is a very reductive view on critical- and queer-theory, topics very much worthy of their own post(s). I have to get to the point somehow, though! If this sort of thing is interesting to you, I highly suggest prowling around more: there’s a ton out there.

 

Money does buy happiness.

More specifically, money buys happiness up to around US$75,000 per year. Beyond that, money has very little effect. (Ref, full text.)

The generally accepted reason behind this phenomenon has nothing to do with money ‘providing’ happiness, rather that a lack of money makes people unhappy. At US$75,000 pa (and beyond), day to day money problems are essentially nonexistent: when a bill arrives, the bill can be paid.

A 2011 paper, written by Dr Marla Carlson and published in Theatre Journal, “Furry Cartography” (full text here), discusses the important of money in the context of the furry community. I originally intended to review her paper as part of my occasional series of “Furry Research” articles here on [a][s], but her field can be written about with far more authority by my fellow contributor Quentin Julien (and my recent article reviewing the International Anthropomorphic Research Project, or more specifically the rejoinder by IARP member Nuka, shows how I, as an amateur, can get it wrong).

Briefly then, Dr Carlson talks about the need to earn money, and how (in a capitalist world) “one must be an individual, but one actualizes that individuality through the purchase of appropriate name-brand products“. She sees furry as a version of this concept. Our ‘performance’ as furries, the way we actualize our furry identity in the real world (perhaps a purchased fursuit or a commissioned work of art) “fuels the buying and selling of commodities both real and virtual“. Here, she is talking about the furry economy; goods and services sold to help people pursue their furriness.

Furry is personal. It’s about identity, or as Dr Carlson puts it: “for some as an expression of an inner essence and for others as escape from a restrictive human persona“. Yet public and outward displays of our furriness are important. Dr Carlson argues that “the fandom manages its public image in order to remain edgy but not out of bounds“, which roughly defines the range of expressions we allow within the furry community: the extent to which people can express themselves while still fitting in. So an animal-themed t-shirt in public is okay, whereas ‘anatomically correct’ gear is not.

External expression of identity is important to everyone. People in the mainstream are often flummoxed by expressions from the fringe. Why, they might argue, do gay people need to make such a big deal about their sexuality; why can’t they just leave it at home and act ‘normal’ elsewhere? The answer, of course, is that people in the mainstream also express themselves, just that they are lucky enough to conform to society’s norms without having to make any special effort.

(As an aside, this blind spot is known as majority privilege. To choose another convenient example: the subset of gamers that get fired up whenever someone points out that women aren’t fairly represented in the gaming mainstream—these guys are used to games being male-dominated, so anything challenging this feels like it’s pandering to others, so they complain that they’re being marginalized. See also: straight people who begrudge redefinition of the word ‘gay’.)

It’s sometimes difficult to express furriness in a public space. Furry spaces such as conventions, private parties, and corners of the online world, are environments where we can express ourselves without having to worry about conforming to the mainstream. Furry spaces can act as important relief valves: they allow us to vent the pressure of acting ‘normal’ (or ‘normal enough’) in the wider world. We understand that we may need to mask our furry selves in some circumstances: maybe at work, or around extended family.

Some furries, of course, manage to ‘opt out’ from the requirement for conformity by largely excusing themselves from society. Many of us fantasize about this (just read Rabbit’s dreamy ‘what if’ article from a few weeks ago, speculating on the founding of a furry town). A typical fantasy involves a big rural space away from other people, an idea that probably requires a big chunk of cash, to say nothing of the psychological challenges of isolation. For most of us, the fantasy will remain a pipedream.

For those of us who can’t escape, there is a balance to be struck. The need for personal expression must be tempered with the requirement to meet society’s norms. An external expression of identity that fails to meet mainstream standards can be costly: wearing a collar will probably harm your chances of getting that office job.

The way you present yourself affects how people react to you. If you fit in, people are more open, lowering the barrier for a social interaction. People are more likely to engage with someone who doesn’t scare the horses, so to speak.

(There is also a phenomenon called the spotlight effect, familiar to anyone who has found themselves underdressed for a social gathering. Most people become anxious when they feel like they are presenting themselves in an inappropriate fashion. This social pressure is often more about self-perception than about the others: it’s also felt by transgender people trying to ‘pass’ for the first time.)

This article, then, is an argument for the value of meeting the expectations of mainstream society. This article is an argument for conformity.

I argue for conformity of appearance, not conformity of thought. The two are often confused. The sight of identically-dressed commuters is often derided, as if all commuters were mindless automatons, as suggested by pejorative terms like rat race. But nothing is further from the truth: each commuter has a personal identity, one that is not on display. A furry in a business suit is still a furry, just one in a different costume.

This is an Andrew Baines painting, “Escape of the Corporate Battery Hen”. They look like furries, fetishists, and deviants to me. You can buy it at www.andrewbaines.com.

I believe that meeting society’s norms—conforming—increases personal happiness. It’s a compromise, and the requirement to moderate external expressions of identity can be challenging. But the reward is a better, broader, happier life.

Someone who puts on a good ‘normal suit’ will be less constrained by the wider world. A good ‘normal suit’ doesn’t mean you are normal. It simply means that you restrict what you show to the outside world. Most people would argue that it’s a bad idea to share teenage sexual exploits in a public forum—Facebook, say—because they may linger on the internet to be discovered by future employers, lovers, or family members. Someone who refrains from sharing details of a raucous 18th birthday is simply keeping their ‘normal suit’ on.

Those furries who are meeting society’s expectations are giving themselves more opportunity in life. They are likely to earn more money, be freer to travel, and have more options to express themselves as furries. To put it another way: would you rather wear a collar to a job interview in 2013, or a fursuit to Eurofurence in 2015?

It’s not very romantic to suggest that the best path is through engaging with the mainstream; through moderating one’s appearance, through earning and spending money, through ignoring the philosophical messages of Rage Against The Machine. It’s especially distasteful if you, like many furries (including me), are most at home in the fringes of society.

The argument for conformity is a pragmatic one. It’s about balancing an individual interior with an acceptably bland exterior. It’s about, on one hand, working within society’s constraints and, on the other, finding appropriate outlets for self-expression.

Andrew Baines says that conformists “head off to work nine to five every day and they’ll do this until they turn 60 and then they’ll probably get a gold watch and drop dead“. I think this is false. Instead, I think they experience the relief and benefits of conformity, and never look back.

Every now and then, it’s important to take a step back and gain a little bit of perspective. It sounds cliché, of course, and there are a lot of people in my life I can imagine scoffing at the type of post I’m about to write, if not that very phrase itself. In fact, there are plenty of other posts that I have in the docket, but they can wait for another time, and I hope you’ll begrudge me a fluff post while I gain my perspective.  Also, a trigger warning for some brief but frank discussion of suicide, and excessively sentimental foxes.

There’s a lot that can be said about emotion. Hell, there’s a lot that has been said about emotion; so much so that there is only the most minuscule of portions that bear repeating. If there is one thing worth noting, though, it’s the intensely dire sensation each of our own emotions carry to us. They press against us and burden us with incredible weight, and even though there’s a lot of really flowery prose one could write about just how much our emotions impress on us, it really just boils down to the fact that an entire portion of our brain is focused on feeling things at all times, almost without rest. This dire aspect makes it quite difficult to accept commiseration, to comprehend that many of us try to understand those around us be way of relating their experiences to our own. To hear someone say that “what you’re feeling is just like when I felt something exactly like it!” Or “that’s something that everyone goes through.” To hear that this burden isn’t yours and is hardly unique is not a comfortable thing to hear, no matter how true.

I go through bouts of depression about once every six or seven months that last for about a month. I freely admit that this is hardly uncommon. Freely because I’m actually feeling really good right now, and have been for a bit. I can remember the urgency and importance of the way I felt, even when it’s not something that’s pressing on me right now, as it was then. This difference is sometimes a vague feeling: like, “yeah, feeling good is different than feeling bad”. Sometimes it’s a very concrete sensation, such as now being able to tolerate heights as something that’s merely scary, and not “oh God am I going to jump!?”.

Being able to take a step back, no matter the cliché, is the sort of helpful thing that lets me see and understand what exactly is going on, and, understanding, helps provide me with a path forward. Not a solution, of course, just a path. I don’t do meds; I have a deep-seated paranoia of that attempt at a solution despite seeing them work wonders for someone very close to me. Their reason for taking them is very situational by their own admission: given a very nearly unsolvable problem and no time to work on it, one takes what space one can in order to move forward.

That’s what the step back grants me. Even though the source of my own overwhelming emotions is something decidedly innate, something more biological, the space gives me the room to take that into account. If, for example, I give myself the room to understand that those feelings of hopelessness and dread that seem to be stemming from work are more just the handicapped sense of self involved in depression, then I can more easily make the choices I need to stay healthy.

This is really new to me, honestly, and thus my fascination. I started to understand it last year in October and November when I was going though a similar period, but it occurred alongside a work trip to Copenhagen that left me no room for myself. Heathrow’s terminal 5, with it’s glass-walled balconies and walkways, and the hotel’s looming 15 degree tilt made me frankly fear for my life. The previous March saw an attempt at suicide, and the very limited amount of space I (figuratively) had to step back into was hardly enough in November for me to work with this problem constructively, and it took getting kicked back by the motor tic in my neck coming back after an absence halfway through the trip and forcing me to slow down to understand just what this space meant to me.

April and May were much different. Things started to go pear shaped in mid-April, and, though the tic had once again left, I knew right away what I had to do. I slowed my velocity at work (with my boss’s blessing), held off on writing any articles, and took the space I needed to stay healthy. There was another work trip on the middle of this, but it was out in California, where, even though I was still working my tail off during the day, I had more of a support network than Copenhagen had to offer outside of work hours. While things got their worst after that trip, I still had my space, and so everything was different. The aching pressure in my chest was far less than before, along with the sense of dread and suicidal ideation. Things were off, but as long as I could take that step back, they hovered a notch or two above ‘bad’.

That’s a lot of words, and not one of them was ‘furry’, ‘subculture’, or ‘fox-person’. For those of you still reading, I appreciate your tenacity, because honestly, it’s this furry subculture, this ability to be a fox-person among friends that provides the framework I need to remain grounded while taking these countless steps back, lest I just withdraw completely into myself.

Toward the end of the summer of last year, it was JM who IMed me to ask how I was doing. My emotions were coming through in my articles, he said: I was on point when I was happy and maudlin when I wasn’t (I know this is basically the most maudlin thing I’ve ever written, but stick with me here). I took time off then to gain some space and work on improving things, but having this framework kept me from zooming off to far into the distance. Most poignantly, it was the death of my friend, Margaras, that helped prove the worth of maintaining the ties I had with those in my social circle, furries all.

The fandom as a subculture plays a very unique role in or lives, I’ve noticed, in that it provides a sort of skeleton that we can use to help give our lives their structure. I found myself discussing this with two LDS (that is, Mormon) missionaries who stopped by the other day, when I asked them how their faith fit into their lives in terms of identity; I was raised by two staunch atheists, I didn’t experience religion as a community until a brief stint attending a Unitarian Universalist church in my early twenties. Their conversation lead to the topic of chosen family, that closest of social circles. They said that their growth out into the world had structure, pacing, and direction that they felt would have been missing without the framework of their church.

I said at the time that I agreed with them: having that missing from my life led to the described lack of direction in my own growth.  My time in the dorms was a stark example of that. However, in light of these last two months, and all that I’ve learned over the last year and a half, I’m not sure that I had told the truth. Furry is lacking a lot of things that make a church, and so yes, my growth within the fandom was hardly predictable; no mission for me. But that said, it was still just that: growth within the fandom. I have this framework in my life to add meaning and direction. That’s what kept me and so many others going after Margaras’ death, what got me through last march and the end of the year, even what helped me during this last sprint. I still had structure, even if I didn’t feel well. Something to hold me up and keep me from deflating completely.

A few weeks ago, I tried to explain some of these thoughts in the form of a small experiential game, a little bit of interaction intended to convey a point, called A Full Life. In it, your goal is to make the fullest life you can, even when there are things standing in your way preventing you from feeling fulfilled, your sense of ‘full’ handicapped. I think that these frameworks – the church for those missionaries I’d talked to, furry for me, and countless others – help us out. They don’t necessarily solve problems (and may often cause them), but they help keep that handicapped sense of self from constricting too small and squeezing out everything that’s good in life.

So. Apologies for the wash of an article, and thank you if you’ve made it this far, but do me a real big favor: sometimes, when you’ve got a bit of time, think about the ways this fandom is meaningful to you. Think about the ways you must be meaningful to those around you. Maybe take a moment to talk about it with someone, or if not, at least just appreciate it. I know I do.

Guest post by Gallen. Gallen has been a photographer for over a decade, and has been actively photographing fursuiters since 2009.  He runs www.fursuitphotography.com.

Hi everyone! I was recently contacted by [adjective][species] to write about fursuit photography. Originally, a title of “How to do Fursuit Photography” was suggested. This rubbed me slightly wrong as I felt that photography, like any artform, has no one singular approach. Tastes in photography, and art, differ between each of us. So I want to stress that this article is simply about how I approach fursuit photography, not the be-all-end-all of fursuit photography.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the little thing we actually need for photography, called a camera. You can choose anything from a compact camera built into a mobile phone, all the way to expensive interchangeable-lens cameras.

There are things to consider apart from the camera, depending on how serious you want to take your photography. For example: software to process the photos (I use Corel Aftershot Pro); a good solid 8 bit per channel IPS LCD monitor (commonly available lcd monitors only allow a limited range of colours to be seen); or a colorimeter to calibrate your screen.

If you are interested in printing your photography, consider calibrating your inks and papers. I personally went with profiled inks and paper, bypassing this (really expensive) step.

At this point, you may be thinking ‘hold on, I know this particular photographer that does brilliant work with just his camera’. And so do I. Some of my photographer friends deliver jpegs straight from their cameras that are simply brilliant. I can’t for the grace of the wolves above understand how they do that. Once again, photography is an artform, and there are many ways to do it. You may decide to just start with a camera and whatever software it comes with, then slowly move on, or spring for the whole shebang.

Now it’s time to take photos!

Photography has very strong technical roots. But the items mentioned above only allow us to accurately view and process the final image. When taking photos, there are other technical challenges to consider: exposure.

Exposure is the selection of ISO, shutter speed, and lens aperture. With today’s cameras, and their “automatic” modes, many photographers don’t bother learning about exposure. But if you understand their relationship, it will help you take sharp, well lit photographs in nearly any situation (if that is what you are after!).

Exposure is not a subject I wish to cover in this article. I can however, recommend a website that deals with this subject (Cambridge in Colour) as well as a book (Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson). Once you understand exposure, which is quite straightforward, I suggest exploring using artificial light, i.e. flash with your photography.

Flash photography is always thought of for use indoors, in the studio, or at night, but you’ll be surprised how useful flash can be when outdoors. Nearly all my photos are taken with flash. It is an acquired taste, and some photographers utterly dislike flash. And there are many, many wonderful photographs taken in natural light as well. So once again, it is up to you to decide depending on your own preferences.

Finally, there is the small matter of actually taking a photo: the composition of an image. This is perhaps the most important aspect, but I seem to have marginalized it by talking about equipment X, exposure Y, lack of nice looking wolf plushies, etc.

Photo composition is a subject I am less confident about, as I think my photographs feel very raw and unfinished (unlike photographers that I aspire to). But let me give it a go, in the context of a LondonFurs fursuit walk.

The LondonFurs organize a furmeet every 3 weeks that draws over a hundred furs to a large pub in central London. The fursuit walks are highly organized and are guided by a group of dedicated volunteers. These volunteers figure out the routes, and keep all the fursuiters and attending furs safe, guide them through crossings, as well as managing PR with the public and police.

Broadly speaking, I encounter two types of opportunities during such walks: posed shots, and candids. Posed shots are pretty obvious. Fursuiters love to pose, and with the magnificent backdrop of London, the possibilities are endless. The route we take is very familiar to me, so I sometimes suggest where the fursuiters should stand and pose. Some more experienced fursuiters already know how to pose along the route, which makes things much easier!

Candid photography is much, much harder, and very often the results I get are quite poor. However once in awhile a gem shines through. Candid photography (some might call it street photography, but I digress…) is my main focus nowadays, specifically on fursuiter/public interaction. It is challenging and rewarding to capture a slice of time depicting a fleeting smile, a momentary expression of joy.

I feel that my favourite candid shots are largely luck, combined with knowing how my equipment works, as well as good old practice. For example, I tend to shoot with both eyes open; my left eye gives me a broad overview of what’s going on, and my right eye, looking through the viewfinder, allows me to setup the autofocus as well as compose the shot.

It is difficult to explain in words. I tend to be “in the zone” when doing candid photography as it is highly difficult to individually think though everything: exposure compensation, flash compensation, ISO, flash sync speed, autofocus point, framing/composition, is there a bus behind me, etc. It boils down to practice, and a large aspect of my practice does not come from furmeets, but from shooting in zoos and wildlife parks.

In terms of actual composition, I only loosely follow the so-called “rule of thirds” (google it!). I’ve tried following it strictly and the resulting photos felt very static. (On the other hand, there are many other photographers following the rule and getting great results. This is another example of needing to find out what fits you, and not blindly following the pack.)

I also try my best to create the illusion of depth. This means having a photograph with a distinct subject, but with elements in front and behind. This really helps bring the viewer into the photo, but it is rare that things fall into place perfectly.

I also love to push for perspective. A lot of my shots tend to figure some exaggerated perspectives, simply because I shoot as close as possible to my subjects (another thing to google: “If your pictures are not good enough, you are not close enough”). This, combined with a rather wide angled lens (24mm equivalent) gives me the perspectives I enjoy. Note that perspective is a matter of distance between the camera and subject, not focal length! Wide focal lengths are required to capture such perspectives, but lenses have no play in perspective.

Another thing to think about is position. Keep moving! Shooting from various positions will introduce you to different viewpoints. They may be better, they may be worse, but the possibility is there to catch something different.

To keep things unique, there are some things I generally avoid. If there is a crowd of photographers shooting something, I don’t go there. I don’t see the point in capturing a shot that is slightly different from what a dozen other photographers are taking.

Next, nearly every photographer I see shoots with the camera to his or her eye. Why? Shoot from the waist, shoot from above, shoot tilted, shoot on your belly, shoot upwards while lying on your back. Crouch down to the height of a small child, to capture the view through their eyes, nearer to the ground. Climb up from above, see what things look like from a hundred feet above. Or stand on tiptoe and shoot one-handed with the camera raised high and tilting down.

Unique viewpoints will reward you with unique shots, even though you might look stupid while taking it (why is this idiot crawling on the ground?). This is especially true when shooting wildlife; you want to shoot at the eye level of critters for the most intimate shots, and thankfully fursuiters don’t go as low as hedgehogs.

Panoramics is another side of photography that I occasionally deploy. This comes from years of doing hand-held panoramic photography outdoors and indoors. I do not have a pano rig, so rely on knowing exactly (or so I believe :P) where the pivot point is for my lens, giving the least amount of parallax error. This has come in handy many times, when there are large groups of fursuiters, too wide for my lens at its widest setting.

I also study photographs from the masters, and other photographers whose work I enjoy. Why do some photos appeal to you? Why do some not?

Join photography forums (those dedicated to composition, not equipment forums) and follow along their weekly/monthly challenges. Look at what other people have done, and think how you could learn from their experiences. Read up how professionals approach their photography. What can we use from those tips they’ve shared?

Finally, let’s talk about the final ingredient in the mix: the fursuiters.

As I mentioned, I nowadays go mainly for candid shots that depict fursuiter/public interaction. If a magnificent fursuit is just standing around, looking like an oversized plush toy, I tend to not bother. Instead, I follow fursuiters who can perform and understand how to interact with the public.

Through four years in London, I’ve seen several “walkers” (as I term them) blossom into strong performers. These changes did not come overnight. Some naturally improve, others were mentored by experienced fursuiters, others followed on walks unsuited and observed their peers. And some simply shuffle along in the same way, meet after meet.

Some fursuiters I have spoken with have an exercise regimen, so they can perform adequately in fursuit. These are the performers who do handstands, backflips and other amazing physical feats.

Other fursuiters like to practice at home in front of mirrors, to understand how to develop strong poses. And let’s not forget about the dance furs, who can, amazingly, dance in fursuit. I don’t get many such opportunities as I don’t go to cons much (plus the con goers will hate my flash :P), but major props to those fuzzies who not only choreograph a dance, but to get multiple fursuiters working in unison. Magic.

In closing, fursuit photography, or just photography in general, is like any hobby: you can shoot for fun, or follow Alice down the rabbit hole. It is a very enjoyable hobby, and it can get expensive if you choose to let it.

Thankfully I’ve not had equipment lust for years, and am focusing on developing my inner photographic eye with what equipment I have. Till the next time, keep shooting!

Furries play a starring role in a 2006 paper that explores ‘animal geography’, an emerging field of cultural research related to human-animal interaction. The paper’s author believes that furry phenomenon is on the leading-edge of changes affecting society as a whole: the replacement of human-human social contact with human-animal social contact.

The paper, written by Dr Heidi J. Nast and published in ACME, is titled “Loving… Whatever: Alienation, Neoliberalism and Pet-Love in the Twenty-First Century” (link to full text). If that sounds like tortured prose, then, well, you should read the article itself. It’s not easy going. But hidden under the unwelcoming academic language is a fascinating perspective on the furry phenomenon.

Nast’s point mirrors one I’ve made in a previous article, Furry As An Alternative To Religion. She notes that traditional community structures—archetypically the rural village church—have broken down in the modern world. People have moved into cities, lost connection with the people around us, and this has left us feeling alienated and alone. It’s a sad irony that many people feel lonely, while simultaneously being surrounded by other human beings.

I argued that furry provides that missing sense of community, and Nast makes a similar argument although she sees furry as one example of a wider cultural shift. She thinks that people are projecting human characteristics onto animals, as compensation for a lack of real human contact.

Nast sees this happening most obviously in the first world’s growing trend for pet ownership. She argues that domestic animals are much less likely to be working animals, and much more likely to be a humanized ‘member of the family’. Pets are de facto children to many people, offering a big advantage over real, human children: pets are less inconvenient. She writes:

“…pets (especially dogs) today supersede children as ideal love objects; they are more easily mobilized, require less investment, and to some degree can be shaped into whatever you want them to be”

 

Nast points to a growing marketplace for inessential pet ‘care’ as evidence. If she were writing her article today, she might also point towards the tendency for people to create a social media presence, like a Twitter feed, on their pet’s behalf. And she argues that people are spending time and money on animals, instead of spending that time and money on humans.

The time and money being spent on non-humans is also institutional, including scientific research and charity. Cats can be cloned (for a price); you can take your pooch to a ‘dog psychologist’ (for a price); urban animal welfare is increasingly focussed on minimizing euthanasia (at a cost to human taxpayers). Nast suggests that this time and money would be better spent on minimizing human suffering.

Nast feels that, by humanzing and infantalizing animals, we become less connected to other humans. She goes further to suggest that this is linked to consumerism, where animals are a convenient replacement for human beings because the relationship is uneven. We can, essentially, spend money on our non-human family without having to worry about whether it’s useful in any way. As Nast puts it:

“…the hypercommodification of pet-lives [and our]… post-industrial lives and places… [are] tied firmly to neoliberal processes of capital accumulation more generally and the attendant growing gap between rich and poor.”

 

Which sounds a bit like something you might read on an Occupy Pet Warehouse flyer.

To put it in a less tortured fashion: Nast sees our human-like engagement with non-human animals as evidence for the inhumanity of a capitalist world.

The furries fit into her argument because our human-to-human contact takes place through an animalistic lens. We are humanizing (virtual) wild animals and using them for our own ends. As she puts it:

“In the case of furry fandom, humans [present themselves as animals], this transmogrification apparently being needed in order to facilitate human contact, sociality, and love.”

 

Like the people who humanize their pet dogs, we furries are focussed away from human society. We focus on ourselves, or on the part-human versions of our fellow furries, or on non-humans altogether.

Furry, in Nast’s eyes, is a product of our dehumanized capitalist world. We socialize through the guise of animal-people because our world doesn’t allow us to (easily) directly socialize with human beings.

***

Now that all sounds like Nast has gone off the deep end. But plenty of evidence from the furry world supports her ideas.

Firstly, ever notice how much easier it is to interact with a fursuiter than the person inside? Most of us (and many non-furries) find it more natural to initiate social contact with the animal-person.

Secondly, furry’s spread throughout the world broadly correlates with deregulated capitalism. First in the USA in the 1980s, then other modernized western nations such as the UK, Australia and Germany in the 1990s, then the remainder of Europe and South America in the 2000s, and more recently capitalist Asian nations such as Singapore, Malaysia and Japan.

Thirdly, we furries are relatively alienated from greater society. That’s because, as a group, we often don’t meet society’s norms: perhaps it’s because of unusual sexuality, or geekiness, or distaste for mainstream culture. This alienation reduces our engagement with fellow human beings.

That’s not to say that Nast gets everything right. She lumps furries into three broad categories:

1. “egg-heads with more or less intellectual interests in how and why a society or group anthropomorphizes animals“
2. “furries [who] assert a particular animal identity, either playfully or believing that they were animals in a former life, or that they are an animal trapped in a human body“
3. “persons erotically and/or sexually invested in their animal-identity“

It’s not hard to poke holes in her categorization, an exercise I leave to the reader.

She also asserts that furry “involves largely ‘white’ adult populations“. While mostly true, this misses the point: furry is not a monoracial phenomenon, as evidenced by its spread across the world. However I can see how she could draw this conclusion from her happily unscientific data collection method: looking at “photographs of furries reproduced on various websites“.

***

The biggest flaw in Nast’s ideas is, I think, her willingness to tie everything back to capitalism and consumerism. She presents it as a fait accompli, which I suspect is normal for academics performing research in the field of cultural geography. I don’t want to explore the validity of this point of view—I’m sure that readers will hold a range of strong opinions—but suffice to say that I don’t think Nast makes a compelling link.

To be fair, her focus may be geared toward the sensibilities of the journal that published the paper: ACME. ACME has the following mission statement, which you read at your peril:

“The journal’s purpose is to provide a forum for the publication of critical work about space in the social sciences — including anarchist, anti-racist, environmentalist, feminist, Marxist, non-representational, postcolonial, poststructuralist, queer, situationist and socialist perspectives.”

 

So ACME is not exactly aiming for political moderation.

As an aside, check out ACME‘s unintentionally ironic guidance for prospective authors: “The style that ACME advocates emphasizes clarity, accessibility, and care in writing.”

Happily, Nast’s article is written to a higher standard than that. However it’s not an easy read by any means. So I can’t really recommend it, despite its worthwhile and unfamiliar approach to the furry phenomenon.

Dr Nast is writing a book on the topic: Petifilia: Volume 1. Presumably furries will make another significant appearance. I’ll read it with interest.

Guest post by Courtney “Nuka” Plante, PhD social psychology student at the University of Waterloo, furry, and co-founder of the International Anthropomorphic Research Project. This article is a response to JM’s recent article, “Furry Research: A Look Back at Dr Gerbasi’s Landmark 2007 Study“.

Hi there! I read through (and quite enjoyed the insight in) your recent article and felt compelled to provide my take on things, (keeping in mind that Dr. Gerabsi’s article pre-dates my involvement with the furry research). Given that I’m in the lucky position of being at the forefront of our team’s research, I may be able to provide another perspective on this issue.

I’ll structure my comments in a point-by-point fashion.

“The most obvious problem is the use of the word ‘disorder’. This implies that there is some sort of problem. Gerbasi seems to be pathologizing furry, or at least a large subset of furry.”

 

I both agree and disagree with your statement. I do agree that the use of the term ‘disorder’ is (and has always been) problematic in this regard. I disagree, however, that the term has pathologized furries, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment. But to start, I’ll agree that ‘disorder’ is problematic in its use here.

The stance of the IARP is that furries are neither inherently pathological nor is furry, in and of itself, a disorder. Just like a hobby, a religious belief, or an aesthetic preference, there is nothing “wrong” with furry. Where furry, like anything else, becomes problematic is if, and only if, it begins to cause clinically significant distress for the people who engage in it.

From Dr. Gerbasi’s perspective, she did the right thing for a scientist: she simply asked furries to indicate whether, as a result of the belief that they were not entirely human (for the ones who believe this), there was a persistent feeling of distress or discomfort with one’s physical body. Such items were drawn from a Gender Identity Disorder (GID) scale because this research had been asking an analogous question, albeit in a different domain, on the subject of felt conflict between one’s mental representation of self and their physical body. Asking the question “could there be something analogous to GID for furries?” is not the same thing as claiming that Species Identity Disorder (SID) exists, that it’s something that needs to be “cured”, or that all furries have it—it is a necessary part of testing the hypothesis that some furries may experience discomfort or distress analogous to what those with GID feel—even if only at subclinical levels.

The data reveal that, for at least some furries, they do report significant levels of distress regarding the apparent disparity between how they see themselves in their mind and their physical bodies. Dr. Gerbasi did not claim that furry itself therefore pathological, nor did she go on to claim that furries who do experience this distress are therefore diagnosable. Instead, the intention was always to merely raise awareness that within this fandom there may be some who experience this distress to a significant degree, and were this the case it would be worth taking this person’s distress seriously (for the most part, any clinician hearing about furries might otherwise dismiss it as so much nonsense). The majority of furries do not experience a discrepancy between their “felt species” and their “actual species”, and the majority of those who do feel this discrepancy do not experience distress at anything resembling a clinical level. The point was only to illuminate the possibility that there may be some (and, in fact, there have been cases) who do experience significant enough distress because of this discrepancy to seek clinical assistance.

To summarize the point, Dr. Gerbasi was not intending to claim that all—or even some—furries “had” any condition; it was merely to entertain the notion that, given the content of the fandom, there may exist some who experience a discrepancy between mental representation of self and physical self that is comparable to that seen in GID, and that for some this discrepancy may cause clinically significant distress.

“…the 2011 Furrypoll, which was completed online by over 4000 furries, showed that about 11% of furries consider themselves either non-human or part-human. This is a long way from Gerbasi’s 46%.”

 

More recent numbers across five different samples over two years (with numbers as large as 4,500+ furries in some of the samples) suggests that between 25-45% of furries consider themselves to be “less than 100% human”. These numbers are not incompatible with those of Furrypoll, as the questions asked were different: Furrypoll asked whether people considered themselves “non-human” or “part-human”, while we asked if a person felt “less than 100% human”. A person who felt “95% human” may answer “no” Furrypoll’s question while still answering “yes” to our question. Neither question is “more right”, they’re simply placing the threshold for “human/non-human” in different places. Our measure is more sensitive to any feelings of being non-human, whereas the Furrypoll question seems more sensitive to the distinction between feeling non-human to a significant enough extent that it changes the label you apply to yourself. Put another way, Furrypoll’s numbers may be a better measure of “being a Therian”, whereas the IARP’s question is a better measure of the presence or absence of any feeling of being non-human.

“Dr Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, who disagrees with Gerbasi: ‘There are a myriad of reasons why furry participants at a furry conference might identify as “less than 100% human,” not the least having a hangover from furry drinks the night before.‘”

 

I feel that the argument I made above better accounts for the discrepancies between Furrypoll’s numbers and our numbers than the argument that a convention environment is somehow meaningfully different. We have done a number of studies where the same survey was administered both at a convention and online, and have found only minor differences (primarily having to do with age of sample or available financial resources), and almost no differences with regard to how “furry” a person was or their inherent “human-ness”. Frankly, I felt Dr. Probyn-Rapsey’s statement about “furry drinks” was insulting and trivializing to those who genuinely feel not entirely human. This insult was further compounded by the fact that Dr. Probyn-Rapsey’s research was based on relatively little contact with furries (in comparison to Dr. Gerbasi’s continued treks to Anthrocon and non-stop dialogue with hundreds of furries in any given year), and Dr. Probyn-Rapsey seemed more focused on attacking GID than on actual concern for furries.

“Dr Probyn-Rapsey challenges Gerbasi’s tentative diagnosis of ‘Species Identity Disorder’ directly: ‘What might be the “treatment” for such a condition?‘”

 

It should be pointed out that Dr. Gerbasi never claimed that “furry” was something to be “treated”—this is a straw man built up by Dr. Probyn-Rapsey. Dr. Gerbasi only claims that for those furries for whom the feeling of being discomfort with one’s physical body is causing significant distress, it might be worth considering it somewhat analogous to the way one would address a person who felt discomfort with the gender of their physical body. There is no attempt to “normalize” non-furry or to “pathologize” furries, only to state the very obvious: if a person’s particularly troubled by not feeling human and being trapped in a human body, it’s worth taking seriously.

What makes Dr. Probyn-Rapsey’s point so ironic is the fact that the IARP has recently had an article accepted for publication in a clinical psychological journal where we appeal to psychologists to avoid pathologizing the “furry” in furry clients, who are often seeking a clinician for completely unrelated reasons (e.g. depression, anxiety issues, etc…). Our team’s stance is that “furry” is not pathological, not unless an individual furry feels that being furry is causing them distress.

“Probyn-Raspey’s biggest problem is Gerbasi’s link between ‘Species Identity Disorder’ and Gender Identity Disorder.”

 

There really is no link intended between GID and “SID” beyond the fact that it served as a convenient analogue for comparison and a source of some existing questions to ask. Dr. Gerbasi had no intent of validating or discrediting the diagnosis of GID, or of debating the merits or worthwhile of it as a diagnosis. Instead, she was merely observing that it was a condition that clinical psychologists recognize, and that a comparison might be made between folks experiencing distress over their felt gender and the gender of their body and a furry who was experiencing distress over their felt species and the species of their body.

To avoid beating a dead horse here, I’ll point out that a full rebuttal was published to Dr. Probyn-Rapsey’s article called “Why so FURious?” (ref); those wishing to obtain a copy can contact our team ([email protected]).

“It feels to me that Gerbasi has chosen to introduce ‘Species Identity Disorder’ because she was hoping to be the first to identify a new psychological phenomenon.”

 

Actually, I think the answer is simpler and less self-aggrandizing than that. When publishing within a field, it is necessary to tie your research to what exists within the field. If you fail to do so, you run the risk of nobody in the field caring about what you’ve said, even if it’s of potential relevance to them, because they don’t see the connection.

For example: Dr. Gerbasi initially conducted the Anthrocon study in response to a clinical psychologist who approached her with a furry client who was experiencing distress over being furry (if I recall correctly, the person did not want to be furry anymore, but could not escape “furry” feelings). If Dr. Gerbasi had gone ahead and simply published an article dispelling stereotypes about furries, no one in the field would have cared: they would have said “what the hell’s a furry and why should I care?” However, by mentioning GID, anyone with an interest in self-body discrepancies, or body image issues, or clinical psychologists more generally, now has a reason to read the article, because its potential relevance to them is made apparent.

It’s not necessarily for the sake of being “the first” (those who’ve met her in person know that she’s not attention-seeking or self-aggrandizing), but instead was likely a device to ensure that the people who might have found it the most relevant would be drawn to it, and to more firmly establish it within an existing body of psychological research (rather than some orphaned article on a topic no one really knows).

“Her article was the first, and to date only, publication of the International Anthropomorphic Research Project, which Gerbasi heads.”

 

Actually, to date the IARP has three confirmed publications in peer-reviewed academic journals (four if you count the rebuttal to Dr. Probyn-Rapsey), one currently in a “revise-and-resubmit” status, two currently under review, and two currently in the process of being written up. This is in addition to presentations and posters given at eight different academic conferences. The topics of the other published / reviewed articles focus on the use of furry community as a coping resource for members of a stigmatized recreational group, a qualitative study of furries presented to the clinical psychological community urging them to avoid trying to “cure the furry” in furry clients, and articles investigating fan group involvement and global activism and socio-structural characteristics within stigmatized minority groups. So we’ve been keeping quite busy!

“The IARP is a grand title for three researchers operating from a small community college. And calling it ‘International’ is bit bullish seeing as it’s based on the fact that they have scientists from the United States and Canada”

 

The choice of the term “International” was meant to reflect the more than 70 countries from which respondents have come (including all six continents—ignoring poor Antarctica), not to reflect the “international” nature of the researchers themselves, who all reside in North America. Additionally, we are currently in the process of establishing a translated version of our surveys for use in Japan for the purpose of a cross-cultural comparison of “Furry” culture and “Kemono” culture.

I’ll also mention that, to date, the IARP consists of four “regular” members (myself, at the University of Waterloo, Dr. Stephen Reysen at Texas A&M University – Commerce, Dr. Sharon Roberts at Renison University College and Dr. Gerbasi at Niagara County Community College), and has worked with / is continuing to work with more than a half-dozen other collaborators from fields as diverse as social psychology, anthropology, sociology, clinical psychology and English.

“Plante joined their group in 2011 and is presumably on the way to earning the first ever PhD in furry studies.”

 

*laughs* Actually, my PhD is in social psychology, as I’m an experimental psychologist (who, when not doing research on furries, also studies video game violence and fantasy engagement). I don’t suspect a degree in “furry studies” would get me very far! It’s also important to recognize that while I may be a furry, and while I’m passionate about researching furries, I am a social psychologist first. This is important to understanding the questions that drive my interest in the fandom and my own particular bias.

“Most recently they have kicked off a longitudinal study, where they will be following furries over a significant period of time. I expect their study will dig up some interesting data, showing how we mature as members of the furry community.”

 

Indeed! More specifically, we are hoping to track what happens to furries as they get into the fandom, spend time in the fandom, and (for some) choose to leave the fandom. Changes in attitudes, beliefs, and identity are just some of the many topics we’re hoping to watch unfold over time!

“The IARP dataset from 2007 is no longer considered to be particularly large or useful. Of all the available datasets, today’s researchers are most likely to use Klisoura’s Furrypoll”

 

Indeed, the original 2007 study is quite small by comparison, though we conduct studies two or three times a year which regularly have more than a thousand furry respondents! I’ll point out here that Furrypoll is a fantastic resource, and represents a wonderful complement our own research, given its larger sample size (owing likely to its running year-round as opposed to our surveys which are only open for a few weeks at a time) and its ability to ask questions of under-18 furries (which, unfortunately, we are prohibited from doing due to the nature of ethics boards). Comparing our research with Furrypoll is like comparing the work of biologists and organic chemists: both are valid approaches that solve different questions and, when combined, provide an even richer understanding of the areas where they overlap!

*phew* That was a long response! Thanks very much for the thoughtful criticism and for taking the time to comment on and link to our research! I’ll also encourage you to check out our latest results (Furry Fiesta 2013), which include some brand new issues in the furry fandom (e.g. pornography, employment and living arrangements, relationships, fantasy engagement, etc…). If you’re interested in participating in one of our future surveys (or in signing up for our longitudinal study), feel free to check out our website: https://sites.google.com/site/anthropomorphicresearch/