[adjective][species]

The first notable academic study on furries is six years old. Completed in 2007 (published 2008), Gerbasi et al’s Furries from A to Z (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism) provides a review of furries based on 246 responses (including 217 furries) to surveys distributed at Anthrocon, plus an ad hoc ‘control group’ of 65 psychology students.

The study had two main goals: to test the validity of the usual furry stereotypes, and to investigate whether furries exhibit signs of personality disorder.

Gerbasi presented data to show that furries are an unusual demographic (anthropomorphic & zoomorphic interests; male dominated; wide range of sexual orientation), and that the group doesn’t exhibit any special tendency for known personality disorders. Beyond that, there was one strong conclusion: that up to 46% of furries ‘may possibly represent a condition we have tentatively dubbed “Species Identity Disorder”‘.

The diagnosis of Species Identity Disorder, a term invented by Gerbasi, is defined by her as ‘…considering the self as less than 100% human and wanting to be 0% human [and] is often accompanied by discomfort with their human body and feeling that they are another species trapped in a human body‘. Gerbasi makes a direct comparison to Gender Identity Disorder.

There are some problems with this.

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.

Psychologists understand that people have all sorts of different perspectives on the world, and a wide range of personality traits. An unusual trait is not a problem in itself. The word ‘disorder’ generally means that a condition is bad enough to be disabling.

Gerbasi’s sample of 217 furries are all people who could manage the cost, transport, and social effort required to attend a large convention like Anthrocon. A large subset of these people cannot be mentally disabled: if they were, they simply wouldn’t have been there.

For comparison, 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%.

Gerbasi’s unreasonably large number is probably an issue related to the slight unreality of a convention environment. This argument is made rather pithily in a paper by 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.‘

Probyn-Rapsey’s argument is laid out in her counterpoint, Furries and the Limits of Species Identity Disorder: A Response to Gerbasi et al, published in 2011 in the same journal as Gerbasi’s original paper (ref). Dr Probyn-Rapsey challenges Gerbasi’s tentative diagnosis of ‘Species Identity Disorder’ directly: ‘What might be the “treatment” for such a condition?‘

Probyn-Raspey’s biggest problem is Gerbasi’s link between ‘Species Identity Disorder’ and Gender Identity Disorder. Probyn-Rapsey points out that a diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder is a controversial and politicized one, and that many people regard it a misrepresentation of people on the transgender spectrum (much in the way that homosexuality was formally considered to be a mental disorder in mainstream psychology up until the late 20th century). Gerbasi avoids any such discussion, simply referring to Gender Identity Disorder as if it were objectively diagnosable.

It’s ironic that the mental health of furries is defended Dr Probyn-Rapsey, a feminism theorist. Furry is not a progressive environment for women nor for feminist ideas. We remain significantly informed by moronic (if well-meaning) advocates for ‘men’s rights’, probably because of our crossover with the echo chamber of male-dominated online spaces such as Reddit. It’s a pity, because feminism and queer theory provides a useful foundation for analysis of our community. However this is all a larger topic, perhaps worthy of a dedicated [adjective][species] article or three.

Gerbasi, for her part, doesn’t actually question the mental health of furries or suggest that there a significant subset of us that require treatment. This is a criticism drawn only from her use of the word ‘disorder’ and her link between so-called ‘Species Identity Disorder’ and Gender Identity Disorder.

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. It’s a professional coup to be a leader in any field, and I suspect that Gerbasi simply over-reached in her language. She is certainly a leading furry researcher and her instinct—that something special is going on inside our community—is, I think, spot on.

Her article was the first, and to date only, publication of the International Anthropomorphic Research Project, which Gerbasi heads. 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 (it feels equivalent to a collaboration between people from Brighton and Cardiff). However, ornate naming aside, their research is of great value to the furry community.

The IARP are continually collecting data during regular forays to American furry conventions and online. They are strongly engaged with, and legitimized by, the furry community: their research is touched by the gilded hand of Anthrocon’s Sam Conway (he appears as a co-author in their paper), and they include Laurence Parry (Flayrah head honcho and founder of Wikifur) on an advisory board.

Perhaps most significantly, the IARP include a furry in the their research team: Courtney Plante, otherwise known as Nuka. Plante joined their group in 2011 and is presumably on the way to earning the first ever PhD in furry studies. (We are lucky to have another prospective furry PhD here at [adjective][species], Quentin Julien, who joined us as an occasional contributor earlier this year.)

The IARP regularly publishes data from their surveys, some of which I have discussed in previous articles here at [adjective][species] (link). Their methodology is intelligent and elegant. 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.

You can visit the IARP homepage, browse their results, and see the full text of their paper at https://sites.google.com/site/anthropomorphicresearch/home.

Gerbasi has tilled the ground upon which a field of furry research is starting to grow. I’ve spent the past few days at the British Library reading up on the latest furry research and much of it is fascinating. It’s difficult to imagine this research existing without Gerbasi’s willingness to engage with the attendees of Anthrocon, and her direct exploration of furry psychology and popularly-held stereotypes.

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 (hosted here on [adjective][species]), for example in this Spanish study from 2013. However the focus of the IARP in recent years is more focussed: geared towards understanding furry psychology, rather than simply furry demographics. I’m fascinated to see what they will learn next.

Here’s a scene familiar to most furries (or at least the 80% of us that are male): visit the toilets at a public gathering and you’ll see furries queueing to use a stall. Furries prefer to avoid the urinal.

[This is a pause in my article to allow the reader to creatively speculate why furries might want a stall. Come back once you're done giggling.]

This doesn’t normally happen. Out in the non-furry world, there might be one or two people who prefer to use a stall, but most people are happy enough to use a urinal.

Why the difference? Because loads of furries suffer from shy bladder, otherwise known as paruresis, a condition where they will be unable to pee when someone is nearby. And as it turns out, it’s an easy problem to solve.

Here’s the short answer: when you’re at the urinal, think about sex.

Here’s why it works:

Humans are social animals. In a social group of humans, there is a hierarchy among the males. You might consider high school as an example.

The hierarchy is based on a few things, but in general the biggest, strongest, most aggressive men are the ones at the top of the social tree. Those that act gracefully and helpfully become respected leaders; those that abuse their position become bullies. In either case, those lower down will tend to defer to those higher up.

We also tend to defer to strangers: outsiders, by default, are intimidating. This is a normal social response, and a response not restricted to humans. For example male dogs will act wary around other, unfamiliar, male dogs.

We all find new people to be intimidating. You might notice that, when you meet someone new, it’s difficult to make eye contact. If you are introduced by a mutual friend, you might find yourself making much more eye contact with your friend than with your new acquaintance. And when approaching a complete stranger one-on-one, it’s especially difficult, because you don’t have anywhere else to look.

This is worse if the stranger is taller, stronger, or otherwise deports himself in a manner that could be interpreted as being high in the social hierarchy. It’s worse again if the stranger is of a different race, and worse again if his race is unfamiliar.

The act of urination is an unconscious expression of social status. There is a wealth of data collection and psychological experimentation (ref) related to urination and paruresis that demonstrates this.

You might have noticed this your own behaviour. It’s easy to urinate when standing next to someone familiar that you socially dominate, perhaps a young nephew. And it’s difficult if your urinal-mate is a tall, large stranger of a different race. Like, say, All Black legend Jonah Lomu.

If Jonah follows him everywhere, the guy on the left isn’t going to be able to pee for weeks. (source: Wikimedia Commons)

The guy on the left is peeing right now, but for different Jonah-Lomu-related reasons. (source: RFU hall of fame)

The solution to shy bladder is to think in a way that makes you feel like you’re at the top of the social hierarchy. You can take advantage of the most basic animal instinct of all: sexual behaviour. By simply thinking about sex when you’re at the urinal, you’re imagining the fruits of being socially dominant. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, if you’re thinking of a real sex act or just remembering some pornography: it’s all the same to our animal brain. Just think back and recall some sort of sexual memory.

(And for the kinksters out there, or even just those who have curiously browsed /ah, it helps if you think of an unusual sex act. The weirder the better.)

It’s a simple technique, and one that will come easily to most furries. We’re pragmatic about sex as a general rule, and we’re also familiar with thinking of ourselves as an animal.

Humans believe that they are logical beings. It’s a feature of the way our brain works, and it’s probably an important part of what makes us strive, as a species, to improve our lives through the getting of wisdom. But it’s a false belief.

The furry identity explores this dichotomy: the conflict between our human belief in rationality and the reality of our instinct-driven animal nature. By creating an animal-person avatar, we disconnect from reality enough to explore the idea of ourselves as ideal beings.

Our furry selves tend to be extreme. We imagine ourselves engaging in idealized sexual behaviour (whatever that might be for each person), and we tend to ignore the imperfections and challenges of reality. We imagine ourselves in a physically ideal form. We imagine ourselves as successful, powerful, valuable, influential. Sometimes these idealizations are subtle; sometimes they are extreme and over-the-top.

The furry identity is a kind of roleplay, where we explore a better version of ourselves. When we spend time in the headspace of our furry identity, we’re learning about our real (human, animal) desires and motivations. I have observed that younger furries tend to explore more extreme fursonas, which moderates over time into an identity more closely related to our in-real-life self.

A furry that starts with a 50-ft tall dragon fursona who rules the world and crushes all in his wake, might find himself stymied by logistical problems when emotionally connecting with people exploring less extreme furry identities. Our young furry could start spending time with a group of other 50-ft dragons, but more likely he’ll moderate his fursona, perhaps to a 20-ft dragon who crushes and destroys only occasionally, when the mood takes him.

Like someone with shy bladder, or our dragon, the path to improvement often stems from an understanding of our animalistic drives. We can take advantage of our animal brain to put ourselves at ease at the urinal; we can also learn about our emotional needs by exploring an idealized version of ourselves.

In both cases, it helps to think in a way that seems irrational. Furry helps us think of ourselves as something other than a purely logical being.

There’s an added bonus to this roleplay too: our idealized self—our furry self—provides us with an unconscious goal. The act of imagining the goal helps us see how me might achieve it.

For example: furry gymbunnies. A furry may start roleplaying a big, strong creature, and learn that such a body shape helps him feel good about himself. This might be through pride (an internal thought), or it might be through the reaction he gets from others (external influences). Our gymbunny would then think about how he can change his real-life body to match his idealized body. The furry world gives him a goal, something to work towards.

As an aside, the positive influence of goal-setting is why people think that The Secret works. The Secret, a fleet of self-help books and films and so forth, promises that—and this premise is so dumb that it hurts me to write—the universe will gift you anything you desire if you simply think about whatever it is that you want.

The Secret is, of course, world-class nonsense. But there is one positive benefit: it helps people identify a goal and use their imagination. And maybe the Secreteers, like our 50-ft dragon, will moderate their goal into something more realistic. Or maybe the Secreteers, like our gymbunny, will see the benefits of their goal and so be motivated to work towards it. (But regardless of their goal, and whatever the outcome, the Secreteers will forever be morons.)

The furry way is, at least, honest and fun and worthwhile in its own right. I don’t think that imaginary furry goal-setting will translate into a successful self-help empire, Find Your Furry Fortune perhaps. But if it does, remember this: I thought of it first. Now I’m off to meditate on the idea of a nosebag full of golden oats.

Strange dark night
a fox crawls on the ground
towards a beautiful melon
- Bashô, Summer 1681

 

“We often act as if our animal-person representation really exists” wrote JM in his article, Furries with Physical Disabilities, here on [adjective][species]. In this article, he notes that for “for many furries, there are big physical differences between their real-world bodies and their preferred avatar” and this can be “a liberating experience”. This would be particularly true for furries with physical disabilities. But more than liberation, I would say that the furry I met who had physical disabilities was overcoming his handicap, because his wished hybrid identity was not so far from him as you may think at first sight. Lukio is a young man living in Grenoble. He has discovered the fandom at the age of 16 and is now 20. His fursona is a hybrid human-fox that he drew on his own. Before speaking a bit more about his avatar, I should speak about a very common disorder called dyspraxia.

Christian Ballouard, psychologist and occupational therapist, explains praxia and dyspraxia in these terms (Ref Ballouard, Christian. Dyspraxie, les gestes incontrôlables in Les Grands Dossiers des Sciences Humaines. 2010/9 (N°20). – 27):

Praxia is the scientific word for the creation of gestures. Praxies, or actions, are not just any movements, but movements that are created to perform a specific result or intent (e.g. writing, or cutting meat).

 

The disability affects the planning of the action, and the translation of the intended action into the desired gesture. It is not a hand-eye coordination issue; rather a disruption in the processes that organize the movement.

 

To sum up, dyspraxia can be perceived as simple “clumsiness”. It is not as alarming in children as in adults, because children’s brain plasticity allows them to progress and overcome their difficulty. Dyspraxia for a child, particularly, involves his perception: perception of spaces, perception of his own body and gestures.

I would not have understood that Lukio had this kind of disability if he had not told me. I remember his manner was some combination of shyness, and something intangible, mysterious, that I couldn’t put my finger on. Long silences punctuated our conversation. First, I was a bit ill-at-ease but after a while I accepted the silences, as if moments in time were becoming elastic. Perception was starting to be different, even for me.

We had decided to meet in a café in Grenoble. But after an hour of text messages explaining where I was, giving the address, the tram stop, etc, Lukio was still not here. We decided to meet in the place he was at the moment, where I would easily reach him. Nobody was there when I arrived. That was a true game of hide-and-seek and I began to think: well, I guess foxes are really hard to catch.

My thoughts were to link furry to dyspraxia. I could understand that maybe Lukio was a bit lost because his perception of space was a little different. I am still fascinated how it made me change my own perception of the city. How walking became a game, how normally useless steps became alternative ways to spend my time. I had the feeling of following an animal, as if I was on a trail, as if the city was a jungle. Images came to my mind. He was not lost because he was dyspraxic but because he was a furry.

Let’s go further in this idea. Lukio has now nearly totally corrected his clumsiness, but keeps a sense of mysteriousness about his gestures. Is such clumsiness not comparable to animal moves or animal behaviours? A dog, a cat, or a fox may not be able to eat properly but they are excellent hunters. They will not find their way by reading street signs but by their own instinct, flair, and innate sense of orientation. They are potentially uncoordinated or clumsy, yet powerful and precise when it is needed.

I noticed that, contrary to these many furries who have big differences between their avatar and themselves, Lukio is closer to his than one might imagine. But the connection is subtle, it is in his behavior, in his way of moving, that maybe consciously or unconsciously he incorporated in the furry he became.

Neurology is not the only treatment for dyspraxia: psychology plays a big part in the process of recovery. Thus is it possible to suggest that Lukio has sublimated his disability. He celebrates a part of himself, he has transformed positively something that might be negatively perceived. Sublimation is not illusional, it is “a certain form of catharsis, that of the author and not the public, a difficult and necessary work, a conversion of the whole being into what is deeply true on the inside.” (Ref Saint Girons, Baldine. Sublimation in Encyclopédia universalis. 1985. – 310.)

Is it possible that one might be helped to manage or overcome dyspraxia via zoomorphic imagination, via mirror neurons:

The idea of mirror neurons is still new but is the subject of growing scientific investigation.  Mirror neurons are brain neurons that fire when an animal performs a certain action, when the animal observes the same action performed by another, or by simply imagining the action. Researchers think that mirror neurons are particularly important to human beings. (Ref)

 

Although this psychological theory is relatively new, it may be interesting to see how it could be understood in a furry context. If, by the way of his imagination, Lukio can activate some specific neurons linked to movement when thinking about his furry identity, it is possible that this would help to perfect his gestures, his praxia. In fact, all furries are potentially redefining their perceptions through their zoomorphic imagination. This is just a hypothesis but is especially relevant in light of a growing field: that of zootherapy . Zootherapy is starting to become common although is still controversial. Zootherapy attempts to heal people using an animal for psychological support, or to help build and strengthen psychomotor abilities.

In the end, what’s most important is maybe not that finding a deep identical link with a hybrid imaginary fox will heal somebody, but to consider that every furry—everyone exploring an zoomorphic connection—may be developing new perceptions of themselves and the outside world.

Finally, let’s come back to Bashô’s beautiful poem opening this text. This Haiku has been interpreted as having two main meanings. The first one would assert that the melon is a metaphor, a treasure that the fox wants to get, and he has to crawl—an uncomfortable but effective movement—to win his prize. Another possibility is that the image of the fox is linked with the melon and that he is crawling as the melon does, when it slowly grows across the ground. So, the relationship between the melon and the fox is the transfer of the ‘crawling’ characteristic from the second to the first. This is close to the ‘Becoming-Animal’ concept from Deleuze and Guatari’s seminal philosophical work ‘A Thousand Plateaux‘.

At the end of my reflections, I was left wondering what is most important for Lukio: is it the prize of having cured a disability, or is it the discovery of a new range of sensations and perceptions to explore. And are we exploring them too?

This article is a counterpoint to Rabbit’s article published last Friday, Not-So-Distant Cousins.

Rabbit argues that furries and mainstream SF fans have a lot in common, that the two groups are similar enough such that “we should be treating each other as respected and beloved cousins, if not brothers and sisters.”

For evidence, he cites a common geekiness, a shared private language, a similar culture, and finishes by drawing a parallel between fursuiting and cosplay. He says:

“We’re all fen together, is what I’m trying to say. Natural allies, not rivals. I mean, how many places can you find people who not only enjoy discussing terraforming over barbeque, but are good at it? Not many, in this sad and intellectually-declining world.”

I disagree.

I need to be careful when I’m talking about SF and related fandoms. I’ve gotten a bit of grief from fandom insiders in the past about things I’ve written in these virtual pages, most recently when I delved into the psychology of My Little Pony. I get accused, by geeky fans, of being dismissive towards fandoms, or belittling, or elitist. (I suspect that some people would be unhappy with my use of the term ‘geeky fans’, but I think it’s clear enough.)

I don’t mean to be negative towards fandoms, SF or otherwise. I’ve never been involved with a fandom other than the furry community, so my perspective is that of an outsider. The value of a fandom is self-evident: if they didn’t have value, nobody would bother. And fandoms are full of great people too, although I wouldn’t go so far as to claim they are any better endowed with the good and the great, any more that the rest of the world. I’ve certainly met, mostly within furry, excellent people who are also fans. Rabbit counts among that group.

There is important history between furry and SF fandom: furry started its life as a distinct phenomenon as an offshoot of SF fandom. But this is furry’s history, not furry’s present. Nowadays furry is a stand-alone phenomenon, a community of people drawn together not by fandom of pre-existing works of art, but by a common perception of identity. We see ourselves in anthropomorphic animals, we think of ourselves through the lens of atavistic behaviour, and most of us choose to socialize in a half-imaginary world, as if we really were an animal-person.

“Hi I’m JM, I’m a horse” is very different from “Hi, I’m Matt and I like Star Trek“. Furry is personal: fandom is social.

Rabbit’s article is built around a great anecdote. He shares a terrible meal with a group of furries, talks about geeky topics, and has a whale of a time. He points out that the experience could just as easily been that of group of SF fans.

And perhaps it was a group of SF fans: lots of furries geeky sci-fi lovers, including some paleofurs (a great term I’ve gleefully stolen from Rabbit) who have been around since there was much less physical and philosophical distinction between the two groups. A full 60% of furries responding to the Furry Survey (now curated here at [adjective][species] as www.furrypoll.com) categorize themselves as “a fan of science fiction”.

Geekiness and SF fandom is a big part of the furry experience. But it’s only a fraction of furry culture, and it doesn’t define who we are. It’s the furry identity that binds us together.

There is a reason why we furries are drawn to the community, and it’s related to our internal world, not the external world that drives fandom. The furry experience isn’t easy to summarize, but I think it’s one united by introspective, personal things: our predilection to re-evaluate our sexual preference*, our non-mainstream sexual identity**, our non-mainstream gender identity***, our connection to the idea of transformation, our animal-person roleplay****.

* About 60% of furries will consider themselves heterosexual when they discover furry; that number drops to 30% after five years. (link)
** For example, about 15 to 20% of us are zoophiles (link). For further evidence, ask your friends about their f-list.
*** About 20% of us identify as something other than completely male or completely female. (link)
**** These are all just examples of course, and won’t apply to everyone.

Yesterday I had an experience comparable to Rabbit’s SF-filled meal. I visited an old Tudor house on the outskirts of London with a furry friend, to stroll around the grounds in full spring flower, see an animal-themed sculpture collection, and have our very own terrible meal. Like Rabbit, we had a great time, and it had nothing to do with a potato and leek soup that had clearly been made using powdered ‘french onion’ soup mix.

(The exhibit, ‘Beastly Hall‘, runs until 1 September 2013 at Hall Place & Gardens, Bexley, Kent.)

As we walked, we chatted about the furry experience. We talked about furry’s demographics, our collective reaction to death in the fandom, our sexual interconnectedness, the politics of uncommon sexuality, the experience of travelling overseas to meet a love interest, fursuiting, roleplay. We also took non-furry conversational diversions into areas of mutual interest. And I’d argue that’s what happened with Rabbit’s group: they talked terraforming because the group shared a mutual interest, one that happens to be related to SF fandom.

Rabbit also says that we furries share a private language with SF fans. He cites ‘fen‘ (meaning SF and other geeky-type fandom members), ‘mundane‘ (anyone else), ‘SMOF‘ (secret master of the fandom), ‘gafiated‘ (gotten away from it all), and ‘fafiated‘ (forced away from it all) as examples.

I’ve spent a lot of time as a furry and I can honestly say these terms, bar one, are new to me. Of them, I learned fen from a previous Rabbit article, and the other three are completely new, and actually kinda perplexing (what does a fandom master do, and why is it secret? what is the ‘it all’ that people might get away from? is that a good thing?). And the one term known to me—mundane—makes much more sense in a furry context. Compared to an animal-person, regular human beings seem totally mundane. I’m not sure I’d say that about someone compared to a geeky fandom member.

(Lest that final sentence seem too negative, please keep in mind that I’m an outsider to fandom. From what I have learned, within fandoms there often seems to be a wilful rejection of the outside world, a shared belief that being inside the fandom is something special. While I’m sceptical of the value of a group that implicitly rejects the outside world, I’m sure fandoms are spiritually fulfilling places. A bit like an Amish community, perhaps, but with better laptops.)

Rabbit is someone who straddles the furry community and sci-fi fandom. His mundane name is Phil Geusz, probably furry’s most successful author, and one of our community’s biggest names. His books are in close touch with the introspective furry experience: they dive deeply into what it means to be an animal-person, to be a furry.

The artifices of the various Geusz universe are often sci-fi, with technology such as genetic engineering providing an animal-person minority in a human population. But despite the sci-fi trappings, Rabbit writes quintessentially furry books. His themes are the thoughtful, introspective ones of furry.

Rabbit writes about religion: the spiritual aspects of furry (see The First Book Of Lapism). He writes about how it feels to be lost inside a furry skin, be it the intelligent nuance of his rabbits (see Ship’s Boy, which is free on Amazon) or the flighty pride of a cheetah (see Cheetah’s Win, collected in Roar #2). He is using sci-fi as a framework for a furry construction, something maintaining the logic of his worlds but otherwise rather beside the point. And that’s how I see SF within furry: it’s everywhere but it’s not relevant to the true furry experience.

As a final point of contention with Rabbit’s article, I also don’t agree that we live in a “sad and intellectually-declining world”. If that were true, nobody would be buying his books.

***

I came back from my trip to the animal exhibit to find a small group of furries, laptops out, playing Civilization and talking about programming philosophies. We’re a geeky group for sure. But it’s not what defines us.

This is a lightly-edited reprint of a column in Anthro Magazine that first appeared in Issue #14, in 2007.

Perhaps my favorite activity at conventions is having dinner with groups of friends at local eateries. Anyone who knows me well will recognize that I’m pretty fond of my chow to begin with, and to be able to share my dining experience with a (usually) mixed group of old friends and new acquaintances is, well, the highlight of my calendar. Usually, at least once during a con I’ll try and round up a suitable group, and off we go for what is always a memorable time out.

One of the most remarkable such con-dinners I’ve had in recent years took place in Memphis, during Mephit, at the Germantown Commissary. A group of about fifteen of us of mixed ages and of varying degrees of my acquaintanceship formed a convoy and ran across town to this trendy establishment, which allegedly sold the best barbeque in town. On the way our convoy broke up and some of us were separated, causing much anxiety. The Commissary proved to be the most highly-overrated restaurant I’ve ever experienced; it was crowded, the servers were rude to the point of surliness, and the food was okay at best. At any other time I’d have been very unhappy with my evening.

But because of the people I was with, the experience was absolutely magic.

I don’t know what it is about fen (a common slang-term for SF and other geeky-type fandom members), but within minutes of sitting down we were off and running as if we did this sort of thing every evening of our lives. I can’t claim to recall everything we discussed; the conversation was much too witty, free-ranging and articulate for me to remember it all. I do know that we went from ribald jokes to the nature of the universe and back several times in the blink of an eye. It was, in other words, the kind of stimulating and intelligent conversation that I spend most of my life starved for—that most of us fen, I suspect, spend our everyday lives starved for. Certainly, it was for me rain to a desert.

At one point, while we were discussing the finer points of terraforming, a good friend of long standing who’s also very interested in high-tech and has a degree from a prestigious university interrupted. “Wait a minute!” he commented. “We’re furs! We’re not supposed to be talking about this kind of stuff! Aren’t we supposed to be debating which part of the fox is the floofiest?”

The comment got a good laugh, but it also made me think. My friend was right, in that the dinner conversation at this particular meal had a very definite SF flavor. Even more, I realized, the same was true of most of the similar dinners I’ve enjoyed for all these many years now. We’re far more likely to discuss artificial intelligence at these affairs than vulpine floofiness, for example. And while fur-related subjects like gengineering probably get more than their share of air-time, even these conversations wouldn’t be out of place at, say, WorldCon. In other words, while the furry fandom did in fact (as near as I can tell, not having been around at the time) split off from the world of SF, there’s still an awful lot of SF left in us even these many years down the road. While this may not be true of all or even most fur-fans—I do have definite preferences in mind when selecting my dinner-companions, after all, and the ability to discuss a wide variety of subjects both amicably and intelligently ranks high among them—there’s certainly enough of us SF-derived types around to give the fandom a definite and recognizable flavor.

I had this brought home even more forcefully to me at Rain Furrest one year, where I (being one of the guests of honor) interacted quite a bit with the con chairman. He was strictly an SF fan, not a fur, and the local furs had drafted him to run their con because at that time no one else thought they had enough experience. He and I had a quite pleasant conversation about the differences between a furmeet and an SF con… and, frankly, there weren’t many. Furs consume less alcohol, as a rule, and require a little more in the way of costuming support. But all the major elements are pretty much the same, derived almost entirely from the SF cultural parent. Even much of the lingo is the same; I didn’t blink when he used the term ‘SMOF’ (Secret Master of the Fandom), and he recognized my use of ‘fen’ and ‘mundane’ (meaning anyone other than a fen) right off. I don’t recall if the terms actually came up, but if he’d told me that a mutual acquaintance had ‘gafiated’ (Gotten Away From It All) or ‘fafiated’ (been Forced Away From It All), I’d have understood him instantly. In other words, furs and SF fen share a private language.

I suppose I can understand how the split between furs and mainstream SF fans came to be. There are distinct cultural differences, and probably most furs aren’t as hard-science driven as the SF fandom. Even so, there’s enough of us tech-rooted types around that I’ve never had problems putting together dinner-groups at fur-meets which I’d match, man-for-man, against just about any similar SF-based group in terms of general geekiness and science-savvy. It’s a shame we’ve grown apart, in some ways, and even more a shame that in some circles there seems to be actual animosity between the two groups. We may be two distinct cultures, but we’re at least as alike as, say, Canadians and US citizens. We’re non-mundanes, in a world where non-mundanes are all too rare and precious. Therefore we should be treating each other as respected and beloved cousins, if not brothers and sisters. Not calling each other names, as I regret to report happens all too often.

We’re all fen together, is what I’m trying to say. Natural allies, not rivals. I mean, how many places can you find people who not only enjoy discussing terraforming over barbeque, but are good at it? Not many, in this sad and intellectually-declining world. And, while I can’t speak for anyone but myself, I fully intend to treasure such individuals wherever I may find them. Whether that be in a fursuit, wearing an Imperial Storm Trooper outfit, encased in a suit of armor, or behind a deck of Magic cards. We’re fen, all of us. And there just aren’t enough of us around to allow for snootiness when choosing friends.

Guest post by Lunostophiles.

Emotion lives out its life in poetry. It might summer in prose, it might vacation in speeches, and it may even spend a nice weekend wrapped around a pithy quip. But, in the end, emotion’s country of origin is poetry. Even before we wrote stories on paper, far before we recorded everything we created in a fashion archivists scratch their heads at, there was poetry and verse.

The fandom has been slow to adopt poetry, and it’s not without its reasons; too often these days culture equates verse with self-absorbed and self-diagnosed loners who attempt to pour their sadness onto the page in recursive stanzas. Are they wrong in choosing this course of release? Of course not, but these ‘angry emo journal poets’ have eclipsed the multitudinous and varied styles of poetry there are out there.

(There is, to be fair, a lot of blame to be laid on the poetry curriculum in schools, but that is a conversation for another day.)

With growing sub-communities devoted to writing verse, I’m confident there is a place for poetry in the fandom in the same way there is a place for prose, art, and fursuiting. There is no end to what poetry can accomplish, both within the constraints of meter and rhyme and without. If prose is the way by which we show others how we view the world, then poetry is the way by which we glean meaning from the world we view. A sunset is just a sunset until you can describe it as something else. Then it is much more.

Whiskey Sour

We cup our claws,
Our talons,
Our nubby, rum-soaked fingers round flimsy cups
Thrust high in praise of the bacchanal;
Of deities borne through chants whispered into bottle caps,
And gods reincarnated with too-loud laughter.

And we, members of a growing cult
That malingers like a skulking formaldehyde dream;
The clan of eternal headaches,
Of moist and sloppy lip-locks in bathrooms,
A brotherhood we did not know we had joined–
All hidden behind locked hotel room doors
Dangling signs to ward away housekeeping just one more day.

The tingling fingers of siren cocktails draw shadows on our eyes,
Their clarion songs promising personality,
Conviviality,
New and absent friends cast in the fires of a molotov.

The party floors reek of high-proof happiness by Thursday’s end;
A massive, sharp-toothed plague that grips us
Like beef bourguignon with the red overflowing,
And in its powerful jaws
Forces from us a vomit of glee.

—–

In my naivete, my swollen days of Massachusetts autumn,
When life was a marbled haze upon my eyes,
New to the north, new to adulthood in its bleak daylight;
It is here I was first thrust headlong into the convention scene.

The smiles of the rogues,
The shade-beings,
Frothing like the head of a fresh-poured Guinness,
With arms outstretched as great bows with no arrows.

“You’re here!” they cried, they shouted!

“You’ve made it!”

“No more are you doomed to a life
Where what you know of us are pixel silhouettes,
Spectres and creations of fervent, bored imaginations
Illuminated to life upon LCD screens.
No more will you play the most dangerous game
With mouse cursor and hyperlink,
A man on wild safari for a beast no one has caught!”

The lobby was Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome,
Husky and dense with delights:
Shrieks of absences making hearts grow fonder
And the soft hum of happy chatter.
This was the soundtrack of a grin.

And this Morphean utopia,
All swathed in furs and memetic shirts,
Laid itself before me prostrate like a lover waiting.
And somehow, despite having never charted these waters,
I spread my fingers wide, the rays of a distant star
Upon the china white body of this vast world made flesh,
Feeling blind corners and sharp elevation changes.

And in my mind, this monolithic and precise relief
Fit jigsaw-snug into the jagged-edged,
Razor-toothed pockets of the conspace–
Just like I knew it would.

—–

The size of the party means you’re having more fun!
Kiss the elbow of the man next to you
(Though you aimed for his lips
And your trajectory erred),
Caress the obliques of a stranger–
Any stranger!–
They know you in spirit.

We pack ourselves tighter into a four-person cubicle,
Sardines with no oil or water,
Just marinating for the main course.

We keep laughing, we writhe our bodies;
We roll our heads, unattached, through the marathon hallways,
Down the stairwells and across the pool chairs,
Colossal sound extricating itself from our maws thrown wide with venom;
Venom and veracity.

Keep laughing, you fools! This is of import!–
Don’t let’s talk, don’t let’s converse.
Imbibe, my comrades.

Imbibe!

—–

Acquaintences met, acquaintences made,
And now a believer in the throes of transubstantiation
I rose from the fairgrounds,
Making careful, tiptoe steps into the elevator
As if wary of nightengale floors.

Rising, rising! like the wind through a flue,
Then left in the dim hallway of an upper floor;
A babe in the clasp of some darkened bosom.

A friendly face?
There, past the ionic columns of pizza boxes,
The tenuous styrofoam skycrapers
And sunken pagodas erected in the conquest of General Tso;
There, through the chalky dark mist, I wandered,
Unaware that this was the land of the forgotten;
This was the desert Moses lost himself in for forty years,
Or a world Euclid would have wept at the sight of.

Hand-scrawled signs on the closed doors,
Effegies of animal-men in cartoon hysterics,
Voiced by a backmask reveille–
Were they speaking?
No, they were barking; mad creatures
All scraping claws on cage bars,
Aching for an exit of this perverted zoo.

A smile across the hall–
My brethren!
They ushered me from the dark and dreary path
And into their light-filled embraces,
All hearth and home.

On the desk, a lanyard graveyard,
Piles of forgeries laid waste in private
To mingle in a flat-ironed spiderweb;
And looming over us all was the altar,
The godless instrument for impassioned debauchery;
A boozy glass harmonica.

I was handed a cup.

In downcast gaze, I saw myself in the milky mirror,
An endless pit just below the surface film.
Its jaws gaped, a chasm, an abyss,
A lion awaiting the head of its master
(And I with no whip or chair).
The drink plumed personality from its depths,
Swarthy and succulent,
Sugar and spice…
…And the hooch was quite nice.

As if I had exchanged lives with a desperate man
Lost in the Sahara, carrying a dry canteen,
Upon seeing the liquid I erupted with need
And the drink disappeared in a fit of magic.
The cup hung as a red flag upon my body,
Too obvious to notice,
Waving defeat in the cold October air.

My thoughts grew hairline fractures, fit to burst at the seams;
The cup was refilled;
And I’d've rather rinsed than repeated
But is it not unkind to turn down one’s host?
The steps to a new and baffling dance snuck on through,
A sway and a hop I had hidden,
Shoved under blankets;
Sandwiched between floorboards.

I guzzled, I glutted,
I quaffed and I chugged and I drank.

—–

Deaddog, deaddog,
Come out to play.
The boy’s in the meadow,
The girl’s in the hay.

The boy’s at the toilet,
The girl’s at the sink.
Deaddog, deaddog!
Just one more drink?

—–

A name, a curse,
Scratched, tattooed in dismantled English,
Tight gypsy glyphs in thick-line Sharpie on cheap red plastic
As if this chalice of consumption,
This cup of infinite holding was mine forever.

But it’s never quite ours forever, though;
Never just quite.
When all the rum, all the gin, all the mixers run dry
And down to the floor we descend in a daze;
When corpses of bottles are strewn on the desktops,
Under beds,
Across suitcases unpacked;
When we have constructed mass graves and catacombs to coquetting
which overflow the trash bins;
Tremendous and terrific mountains to excess
Unfit for us to scale–
More appropriate, as knackered as it is,
To set it aflame like a phantasmagoric funeral pyre,
And let acrid smoke curl through the room and asphyxiates us.

When this death waltz has begun,
We stare from the valley of drunken stupor,
Cross-eyed and infantile,
And we gurgle out our sorrows, intoning our distates,
And the once-bright laughter falls pallid and flat;
Fetal fallen angels neck-deep in Hell’s detritus.

It is possible to reverse transubstantiation–
In those moments, it is possible to eat your own halo.

The spark of newness rubs away quick,
Like the silver ink on a fresh credit card.
Deep in the cavities of the room parties,
Shadowed under the awnings and eaves of hedonism
(May Dionysus his name be praised into the porcelain shrines!),
And the towering she-wolves we suckle from–
Romulus and Remus ad infinitum–
Inside these wounds we lose the virgin edges,
We claw our way into the light of day
And hiss at the sun.

I do not want to become a parody of intelligence.
I do not want this to be our brave new world
Filled with the vapor trails left by regret,
Bitterness smothered in cold flame.
I will not be baptized into the Church of the Dead Soldier:
Not by mother vodka.
Not by father whiskey.

Yet still, I raise a toast–
In a smaller, finer glass–
To friendships forged in the fandom’s smithy;
A fandom sought out by outliers and outcasts–
Those without names and those with too many.
I will laugh a real laugh,
A room-filling sound that is never too loud,
Fringed with the fragile lace of mirth.

And high above us, the dirty angels of the rooms
Pray to their patron saints to let them see the afternoon.

For unlike we folk awake and alive,
They have not learned how to hide their halo
Just behind their backs–
Just out of reach from the cold and clammy hands
That still crush the plastic party cups into cadavers.

No, they have no place for their goodness,
And hide their glow in the bottoms of cocktails;
Just around the far side of the martini olives
That gaze upon them and despair.

And in that moment,
With the very eyes of their consumption cast outward?
Just smile back, take a sip,
And make it the last.

At least for the night.

Furry is a genuinely international phenomenon. There was a time when furry might have been accused of being an English-speaking Caucasian phenomenon, but those times are long gone.

Here at [adjective][species] Zik has put together a review of Furry Cons of the World, which remains the best single demonstration of furry’s worldwide spread. Despite its length, it’s not a comprehensive list, with some oversights and some new cons appearing in the year since Zik’s article was published.

One new con is based in the city where I grew up: Perth, Australia. FurWAG will be held at the Rendezvous Studio Hotel on October 4-6, 2013 (www.furwag.com.au/), a con that has some claim to being the first in South-East Asia.

Perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch: Australia is hardly most people’s idea of an Asian nation. However Perth is geographically closer to Indonesia than any other Australian city, and is in the same time zone as Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Beijing. For those living in South-East Asian nations, loosely collected under the AnthroAsia banner (www.anthroasia.com/), I expect that FurWAG will become a regular pilgrimage.

I know quite a few of the AnthroAsia folk, and I can think of no better example of furry’s spread into culturally diverse parts of the world. Furs from the region tend to travel to Singapore for local meetups, recently including a visit by Japanese furries.

It’s a similar story in South America and in Europe, home of the standard-bearer for furry internationalism, Eurofurence. The 18th Eurofurence, last year, saw people travel from 34 different nations, a record I’m sure they will handily beat in 2013.

Furry is an international community that pays little notice to the borders that divide us. Our community is participating in one of the great upheavals of the 21st century, an upheaval in its early stages: the loss of true national identity.

Country borders are becoming arbitrary. Nobody thinks that there is anything fundamentally different between two people born one mile either side of the USA-Canada border. Few people raised in Alsace will feel either completely French or completely German. The idea that each person ‘belongs’ to a certain country, that it is a fundamental part of their identity, is becoming an antiquated notion. People who identify themselves by their American state or British county already seem old-fashioned or quaint; statements of national identity will become similarly anachronistic as the world becomes more interconnected.

A loss of national identity is, I think, a good thing. We become less prone to broadly stereotyping foreign groups, generalizations that can be insulting, reductive, or racist. Our natural suspicion towards people who are different—outsiders—is tempered, and we do a better job at treating our fellow human beings with humanity.

On the downside, some ancient cultures will be lost in this upheaval. Some of those at risk include marginalized racial groups, such as the indigenous cultures of North America and Australia; other cultures at risk include those that are fundamentally isolationist, such as religious absolutists, perhaps most obviously in the United States and the Middle East.

Those people fighting for the safeguarding of indigenous cultures, and those people fighting to protect their religious culture, are often from the opposite sides of the political fence. However their goal in this regard is the same: that some things must be protected, that these cultures represent something important that should not be lost.

It’s a worthy fight but probably an unwinnable one: the world is inexorably becoming more internationalist. To borrow a phrase from the Australian culture of my childhood: the pooch may already be rooted. But while some cultures are being lost, new cultures are appearing.

For example: furry culture.

New cultures will appear as our world becomes more internationalist. These new cultures will be less based around physical proximity (and often rejection of outsiders), but based on shared interests. Technological tools such as the internet are making us closer, so we can seek out—and contribute to—those cultures we find appealing. Furries, for example, have taken the idea of anthropomorphism—an idea that has existed for a long time, arguably hundreds of centuries (as explored here in [adjective][species]), and taken it in unpredictable directions.

There are many other new cultures appearing, although not all will mature as quickly as furry. We furries are, after all, a community of early adopters.

The emergence of new cultures is one of the most exciting things about the world at the moment. I’m not going to go quite so far as to call this a Golden Age, but I believe that today’s worldwide cultural change is a positive one.

In general, I think that the world is clearly changing for the better. Some will disagree with that assertion. I support my argument with a single quote:

“Global life expectancy at birth, which is estimated to have risen from 47 years in 1950-1955 to 65 years in 2000-2005, is expected to keep on rising to reach 75 years in 2045-2050.” (quote from UN World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision)

The internationalist drive is, I think, a great positive influence on our world. As the world becomes more internationalist, with furries (perhaps incongruously) leading the way, historical cultural rivalries will slowly fade towards irrelevance. A more connected world is a more peaceful one.

If that sounds like a bit of a stretch, consider a hypothetical war starting tomorrow. There will be furries on both sides of the conflict, and some who become caught in the middle. We will know about this because we’re interacting on Twitter, or Fur Affinity, or Weasyl, and wherever else furries socialize.

Our sympathies will be for the affected furries, regardless of whether they are a combatant or innocent victim. War in the mid-20th century was more a matter of choosing sides; this is no longer the case.

Umberto Eco, an Italian author and intellectual, made a related argument in a 1991 essay titled Reflections on War (published in this collection). Eco argues that internationalism has made traditional war ‘impossible’. He notes that a nation cannot build an absolute consensus inside its own borders, and that the cause-and-effect of any war becomes obfuscated to the point that outcomes are impossible to predict. Reflections on War predicts many of the unforeseen outcomes of America’s war with Iraq: a war that, whatever your feelings about it, didn’t achieve the intended outcome in the intended fashion.

Furry culture pays little regard to international boundaries, an example of Eco’s assertion that nations cannot be considered self-contained units. Furries love and respect one another regardless of nationality or culture. We’re not blind to our differences, however these are trumped by our similarities, such as the shared furry culture. It’s safe to assume that Eco didn’t envisage the furry community as a great example of how ‘hot’ war is impossible, but our internationalist culture makes us exactly that.

A second example (and those averse to sports metaphors should skip ahead two paragraphs): the Indian Premier League, a newish cricket tournament. Before the IPL, cricket was played based on geography: state vs state, or country vs country. The IPL is a club competition that works more like soccer: players are sourced from around the globe.

In the blink of an eye—where nationality, religion, or culture doesn’t define the players of an IPL team—people have learned the pointlessness of formerly bitter and hateful rivalries. White South Africans cheer black West Indians; Hindus cheer Tamils and, most notably; Indians cheer Pakistanis (although Pakistani players are technically unavailable for the IPL, there are lots of Pakistani expats: Imran Tahir, Owais Shah, Azhar Mahmood, etc).

Internationalism brings people together and makes historical flashpoints look petty and trivial. Furries are coming together in a way unimaginable a generation ago. We are exposed to a range of races and cultural backgrounds, helping us moderate any persisting short-sighted beliefs fostered by parochialism.

It’s more than that too: our internationalist furry culture means that we are good rolemodels for new furries, and we provide support to the vulnerable. Consider my favourite generic example of someone unlikely to fit into his local culture: a young gay furry from a rural American community. Our young fur will meet other gay men who are happy and comfortable with their sexuality, and he will take solace that he is not so isolated after all.

The furry community opens up options, to all of us. Our internationalism offers experience we can draw upon and learn from. And we’re providing the same service to others when we interact with furries from outside our own culture.

We’re spreading our internationalist culture, one that comes with peace and respect as standard.

There are always key moments in any human relationship, whether said relationship is rooted in business, romance, politics, or pretty much anything else. When I was an adolescent, one of the most current memes in society was that a person’s first impression of someone or something was the most crucial moment of all. While of course I can’t recall all this in encyclopedic detail, at that time the market was flooded with books on how to improve your first impression, and said books were filled with charts “proving” just how vitally important this was to success in life’s endeavors. The principle was even carried over into academics—kids were given “fun math” to do on their first day in school, to improve that vital initial impression. I recall this pretty well because, being a teen at the time, it provided me with my first-impression of the self-help book industry and, well… We all know how lasting a first impression can be, no?

At any rate, it’s inevitable that furs coming into the fandom tend to undergo a whole series of “firsts”. One of these, which was often life-changingly profound to people of my own age, was the first discovery that there were other people as crazily in love with anthropomorphic art and stories and costumes and such as we were. Perhaps the power of this moment has lessened with time; in my own case I discovered the fandom at an age in excess of 35 because of the simple fact that until then there was no Internet access where I live. After over three decades of isolation, well… I was practically turning somersaults with joy! I was also even more socially awkward than I am now and had no idea whatsoever how to handle myself online at all, much less among furs. A handful of individuals (to whom I remain eternally grateful) helped me along, were patient when I wrote them too-long and too-personal e-mails, etc. These people formed my first impression of the fandom; had they brushed me off it would’ve just about broken me.

My next “first” was meeting other furs in person. In my case I met two on the same night. It was their first time too, and clearly we were more than a little scared of each other. But the event was a success overall, mostly because we all worked at making it so. More happy memories, more growth as a fur.

After that, there was really only one “first” left, and that was my first furmeet. It happened to be Mephit—I’m not certain but I think it was #3 (counting the infamous pizza party as #1). That experience really pushed my limits, but it also made me certain that I wanted to be part of this fandom in the long term.

While I didn’t sit down to write an autobiography—my original planned title was “Going to your First Furcon”—the more I remembered my early days as a fur. Which in turn reminded me of how tremendously grateful I am to those who held my hand, who listened to me prattle, who put up with my poor social skills and generally made me fit to become part of this wonderful society. I’ve always tried to remember how much I owe these folks—some of whom I’d be embarrassed to meet today—and have attempted to “pay it forward” by taking the time to chat with newcomers to the irc channel I frequent and actively try to get to know lost-looking people wandering around the corridors at cons. Because they are me, you see—me as I was, and me as I’d have remained had I decided that I couldn’t possibly fit in with the furry crowd and ought to go off and be alone again. Sure, sometimes it backfires—the chemistry can’t always be right. But I try to help, and it’s through my efforts that I honor those who helped me.

So, here’s my challenge to both of the readers who I expect will still be with me at this point in the article…

Remember that you too once wandered the chatrooms and convention halls as an awkward misfit, if only because you were a teenager and all teens are awkward misfits. Remember that you were too shy to hug the fursuiter, and sat and ate your lunch all by yourself because no one sat down at your table with you. Remember that its entirely possible to be lonely in a crowd; indeed, it’s inevitable until someone lets you in and makes you part of the crowd. Remember that you sat in the panel afraid to raise your hand and ask what you really wanted to know. And as you remember these things and see them reflected in the eyes of a stranger standing by himself in a corridor and looking a little dazed, remember that he’s forming his first impressions of our fandom. His most powerful impressions, in fact. The ones that he’ll carry with him and judge us by forevermore.

I was damned lucky to get such a wonderful first impression of furdom. Or perhaps not—as I said, numerous individuals went far out of their way on my behalf. But at every furmeet and convention you ever go to, there are first impressions being formed all around you at every moment of every hour. I do my best to make them good ones, as I’ve said, as much as anything in an effort to honor those who did the same for me.

Do you owe the fandom any less than I do?

There are always key moments in any human relationship, whether said relationship is rooted in business, romance, politics, or pretty much anything else. When I was an adolescent, one of the most current memes in society was that a person’s first impression of someone or something was the most crucial moment of all. While of course I can’t recall all this in encyclopedic detail, at that time the market was flooded with books on how to improve your first impression, and said books were filled with charts “proving” just how vitally important this was to success in life’s endeavors. The principle was even carried over into academics—kids were given “fun math” to do on their first day in school, to improve that vital initial impression. I recall this pretty well because, being a teen at the time, it provided me with my first-impression of the self-help book industry and, well… We all know how lasting a first impression can be, no?

At any rate, it’s inevitable that furs coming into the fandom tend to undergo a whole series of “firsts”. One of these, which was often life-changingly profound to people of my own age, was the first discovery that there were other people as crazily in love with anthropomorphic art and stories and costumes and such as we were. Perhaps the power of this moment has lessened with time; in my own case I discovered the fandom at an age in excess of 35 because of the simple fact that until then there was no Internet access where I live. After over three decades of isolation, well… I was practically turning somersaults with joy! I was also even more socially awkward than I am now and had no idea whatsoever how to handle myself online at all, much less among furs. A handful of individuals (to whom I remain eternally grateful) helped me along, were patient when I wrote them too-long and too-personal e-mails, etc. These people formed my first impression of the fandom; had they brushed me off it would’ve just about broken me.

My next “first” was meeting other furs in person. In my case I met two on the same night. It was their first time too, and clearly we were more than a little scared of each other. But the event was a success overall, mostly because we all worked at making it so. More happy memories, more growth as a fur.

After that, there was really only one “first” left, and that was my first furmeet. It happened to be Mephit—I’m not certain but I think it was #3 (counting the infamous pizza party as #1). That experience really pushed my limits, but it also made me certain that I wanted to be part of this fandom in the long term.

While I didn’t sit down to write an autobiography—my original planned title was “Going to your First Furcon”—the more I remembered my early days as a fur. Which in turn reminded me of how tremendously grateful I am to those who held my hand, who listened to me prattle, who put up with my poor social skills and generally made me fit to become part of this wonderful society. I’ve always tried to remember how much I owe these folks—some of whom I’d be embarrassed to meet today—and have attempted to “pay it forward” by taking the time to chat with newcomers to the irc channel I frequent and actively try to get to know lost-looking people wandering around the corridors at cons. Because they are me, you see—me as I was, and me as I’d have remained had I decided that I couldn’t possibly fit in with the furry crowd and ought to go off and be alone again. Sure, sometimes it backfires—the chemistry can’t always be right. But I try to help, and it’s through my efforts that I honor those who helped me.

So, here’s my challenge to both of the readers who I expect will still be with me at this point in the article…

Remember that you too once wandered the chatrooms and convention halls as an awkward misfit, if only because you were a teenager and all teens are awkward misfits. Remember that you were too shy to hug the fursuiter, and sat and ate your lunch all by yourself because no one sat down at your table with you. Remember that its entirely possible to be lonely in a crowd; indeed, it’s inevitable until someone lets you in and makes you part of the crowd. Remember that you sat in the panel afraid to raise your hand and ask what you really wanted to know. And as you remember these things and see them reflected in the eyes of a stranger standing by himself in a corridor and looking a little dazed, remember that he’s forming his first impressions of our fandom. His most powerful impressions, in fact. The ones that he’ll carry with him and judge us by forevermore.

I was damned lucky to get such a wonderful first impression of furdom. Or perhaps not—as I said, numerous individuals went far out of their way on my behalf. But at every furmeet and convention you ever go to, there are first impressions being formed all around you at every moment of every hour. I do my best to make them good ones, as I’ve said, as much as anything in an effort to honor those who did the same for me.

Do you owe the fandom any less than I do?

There are a lot of ways to think about furry. Tons and tons. It’s a bit confusing at times, trying to sort out how best to talk about what we are and how we fit together as a subculture. Even the choice of the word “subculture” is loaded with its own meaning, just as is the word “fandom”. Both imply certain ways of thinking about how furry works. It’s a bit confusing, but, well, it’s certainly served us well here at [a][s]: we’ve got plenty to write about, after all.

One more way of thinking about furry is to think of it as appropriation – or, rather, a series of appropriations – that help provide something of a common core to our being a relatively coherent group. Appropriation is a big and complicated word, and there are several connotations attached to it that I’ll get into closer to the end of the article, but first, I’d like to explore furry through this lens and see what can be gleaned from thinking of ourselves in this light.

One of the easiest forms of appropriation to see is commercial appropriation. Commercial appropriation is what happens when elements of commercial products are adopted by people in a way not necessarily intended by the producers of that commercial content. In a way, this is how many fandoms work: a producer will create and release content of some type intended (insomuch as intent matters) for entertainment or something similar, and a group of people will appropriate that content or object as part of their identities. With as loose of a group as furry is, it’s not surprising that commercial appropriations within the fandom happen often. Watching something such as Balto, The Lion King, My Little Pony, or Sonic The Hedgehog while holding in your mind this affinity for anthropomorphism, it’s easy to see why, too. This goes beyond simply creating TLK or MLP characters, too, but also in adopting and creating things within the newly formed fandom (or sub-fandom, in our case, as I’m speaking specifically of those who identify both with furry and also this appropriated creation). Even those who do not overtly participate in this appropriation can subtly add to it through their acknowledgement and interaction with those aspects of the fandom; JM’s recent articles on My Little Pony fall along those lines, in their own way.

Another form of appropriation that crops up within our subculture is that of cultural appropriation. One of the ways in which this crops up is through appropriation of spiritual or the adoption of ideas central to spiritual practices within a non-spiritual context. This can happen both overtly and subtly. Overtly, I’ve seen quite a bit of shamanistic art and design going into certain characters, reflecting north and central American native culture. To be more specific, a number of coyotes that I’ve met of late have talked of Coyote, a spiritual persona or even deity of many Native American tribes. Beyond these obvious connections, however, there are more subtle, subconscious appropriations that fit more neatly within those of us who reside firmly within Western culture. It’s not uncommon to see clever foxes and coyotes, or smug, aloof cats, or even the concept of lone wolves. This isn’t universal by any stretch, but it does show a reflection of western society’s collective mythology adopted in a very literal sense within our anthropomorphic inclinations.

There are other ways to think of cultural appropriation, as well. We adopt and adapt widely from the culture around us, much of which comes from the consumer culture of the western world, but some of which is new, and taken eagerly from what we know and consume. For instance, the fandom surrounding the My Little Pony franchise has mingled with the furry subculture within the last few years, mixing stylistically and idealistically in both directions. There are more subtle indications of cultural appropriation.  For example, some of the participants of FurCast (hey guys!) have argued that there are aspects of hermaphroditic characters furry fandom that have appropriated portions of the trans* experience into their characters and identities (though see the note on this below).

Even the idea driving furry itself, or at least a seeming majority of it, is one of appropriation: appropriating characteristics of animals and applying them to oneself in ways extending beyond their original “purpose”. Adopting ears is one thing, but appropriating a keen sense of hearing in role-play can indicate an entirely new purpose, and the same applies to scent, pack behavior, hierarchies, or even species specific talents, such as tracking, alertness, or affinity for shinies.

Appropriation is a complicated subject (as many things with their own Wikipedia disambiguation page tend to be), and it should be noted that there are a lot of different ways of thinking about the topic, and each has their own connotation to go along with it. The ideas of cultural and spiritual appropriation, for instance, are often viewed in a negative light. It’s not just that one is “stealing” or “not doing it right” by not participating in toto, so much as, by attempting to maintain one’s cultural identity, having an external party appropriate a portion of that identity for their own means can be seen as weakening the worth of the whole. On the other side, many disagree with this, especially when it comes to the concepts of commercial and social appropriation, as the current way of thinking is nothing if not cynical: by appropriating portions of art and commercial products, we are creating something new, something beyond, something worthier. I think that this is a lot of what drives fandoms in the current day and age. By taking something that was intended for a single, often financially oriented, purpose and making it a portion of our identities, we are giving it a life of its own as breathed by its more spiritual participants. And sometimes, it’s simply standing on the shoulders of giants: if we have seen further, then that is often the reason.

None of this changes the fact that, when we take a step back and look at it from a far, a lot of the core of our culture is based on appropriation, good or bad.  We’ve built ourselves up out of what we were given, in a way, and that helps to provide us with a set of ideas that many of us hold as part and partial to both our identity and also what we expect from others within the fandom, whether they’re producing things for us to consume (as in expectations in art, literature, and so on), or interacting with us as fellow members (as in social expectations adopted or character attributes appropriated). So much of furry is appropriated from elsewhere, though it’s the way we put it together and make it work that makes us who and what we are.

In the end, as with many topics as far reaching and variegated as this, it’s hard to tell whether or not this is a good thing for the fandom or not. It certainly applies, at least to some extent – after all, we are not a culture built totally on appropriation: all it takes is a glance at our own readily accessible productions. Even the examples that I’ve tried to look into, with my own limited scope, must be taken on an individual basis It has its positive and negative connotations, and it can be seen as both adding to and hindering our constructive growth as a subculture. All that said, though, I stand by what I stated earlier in that taking a step back and looking at furry as a whole in all these different ways can help us understand the ways in which we do grow, constructive or otherwise. By understanding that there are those whose productions we are appropriating for ourselves, or whose societies whose cultures we are adopting bits and pieces of, we can understand how we have gotten where we are now, and by looking at the things we are doing at this moment, we can help see where we might wind up in days to come.

Note: I know that I really shouldn’t get into this too much here so as not to derail the article too much, but I do feel that this comment is worth explaining further. The trans* community, of which I’d consider myself a part, is really quite new, and even much of the underlying theory of gender goes back only a century at most (though there were certainly descriptions of both before, it is important recognize the start of a cohesive idea or set of ideas, however). Those that I’ve talked to, along with myself, don’t agree one hundred percent that those who have hermaphroditic characters are appropriating portions of the trans* or intersex experience into a lifestyle or role-play so much as exploring non-normative gender as expressed though a character’s biological sex, but that hardly implies universal agreement, and there are certainly aspects of fantasy, particularly sexual fantasy, that can impinge uncomfortably on reality for many, many individuals. However, this is a very large topic, and [a][s] may not the place to explore it outside its own article, and so I’ll leave it be, with the warning that this is bigger than it might appear on the surface.

Recently I spent an afternoon watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, in an attempt to understand why ponies have become so visible in the furry community. (Read the Prologue and my Verdict.)

Criticising the show brought one expected reaction: MLP devotees thought I was unreasonably negative and dismissive of the show’s qualities. But the fact is, I had a blast: the show is charming. Plus I was drunk.

In that spirit, I am proud to present the Official [adjective][species] My Little Pony Cocktail: Vodka is Magic. (Alternate subtitle: The Party Cannon.)

It’s bright pink, sweet without being saccharine, and will put you at peace with the world. This recipe is enough to get one person very drunk.

500 mL (about 15 fl oz) beetroot-infused vodka
100 mL (3 fl oz) sweet white vermouth, perhaps Martini Bianco
juice and peel of 1/2 lemon
1 tablespoon sugar

Directions: Shake over lots of ice until the sugar has dissolved. Strain out the lemon peel and serve, perhaps with another block of ice. Commence MLP:FiM viewing marathon.

***

You’ll need to make your own beetroot vodka. It’s easy, and thrifty: the infusion process will mellow cheap vodka into something perfectly drinkable.

First, cook one medium beetroot: the easiest way is to wrap a raw beetroot in aluminium foil and pop it into a moderate oven (160 °C / 320 °F) for an hour or two, until it’s tender (timing isn’t critical). Slip the skin off under cold running water.

You may be able to buy pre-cooked beetroot, sometimes sold in vacuum packs. Do not use pickled beetroot from a tin. That would be bad.

Slice your beetroot, add it to a bowl or a jar, and pour your vodka over the top. Cover it with an airtight lid (cling film is fine). Leave it to infuse at room temperature for a couple of days. Again, timing isn’t critical: anything from a few hours to a week will be fine.

***

Vodka is Magic will announce itself with an incongruous whiff of beetroot, and a bracingly strong first sip. From there, it’s warming and comforting.

You might serve Vodka is Magic in a martini glass, but it’s not a martini. It’s more a sister drink to the Cosmopolitan, stronger and less sour but equally appropriate for time spent in the company of pastel equines with ludicrous manes.

Happy drinking.

I don’t normally watch children’s cartoons.

Yet I sat down and watched several hours of My Little Pony, in an attempt to understand why it has become so visible within the furry community. Here is what I discovered.

(This article follows on from last week – My Little MLP Adventure: Prologue.)

I learned that My Little Pony is a cartoon aimed at an audience of young girls. It’s very well made: high production values, good animation, talented voice acting, robust and logical stories. That’s basically all it is.

Except that it has gained a huge adult following, including a high proportion of furries. The adult fans are largely male, young, and geeky; a demographic that not coincidentally describes a big swathe of the furry population.

I asked a few pony lovers why MLP is so popular. I received responses like ‘the brony community is great‘; or, ‘because MLP has critical mass online, so you can’t avoid it‘; or, ‘because it’s so childish that people like to make fun of it‘. All of these arguments may be true but they require there to be a large pre-existing MLP audience: none of them explain why so many people started—and kept—watching and caring in the first place.

The appeal of MLP can be inferred by looking at its audience: girls, and young geeky men (with some exceptions). MLP is a big deal because its art style and subject matter make it easy for people to identify with the characters. MLP appeals to people who are developing empathy.

Allow me to explain.

1. They Have Big Eyes

The ponies have big eyes: big, big eyes. Their heads are the size of their bodies; their eyes take up half their heads.

We humans are social beings. Most of our communication takes place through body language, especially facial expressions. We see faces in inanimate objects all the time: in sand dunes on Mars, or a slice of toast.

Faces in inanimate objects: sand dunes on mars; the Virgin Mary on toast; a building.

The ability to infer human faces from little visual information is an evolved human trait, akin to the way zebras identify close family members by stripe patterns.

Eyes are especially important. For example, disembodied pictures of eyes, presented with no context, have been shown to have significant effects on behaviour. One study showed that pictures of eyes caused people to triple their voluntary donation for a cup of coffee, compared with pictures of flowers (ref); another found that posters of eyes in a cafeteria halved littering incidents, compared with pictures of flowers (ref).

Service industry workers relying on tips would be well advised to sketch a smiley face on each customer’s bill.

The ponies have huge eyes, and these eyes make it clear what they are thinking. This is narratively elegant—we don’t need everything spelt out—and it makes us feel like we understand the pony. This is empathy, and it’s why MLP is so engaging. Cartoons in general provoke a similar feeling, but MLP is more effective due to the huge, expressive, well animated, and well directed eyes.

It helps that the characters are female too, because…

2. The Idea of ‘Masculinity’ is Kinda Dumb

The gender of the ponies is relevant, especially for the original target audience. Girls watching MLP can identify with the characters, and engage in play as an imaginary participant in the pony universe.

It’s also relevant for the unintended audience—the young men—because of the state of masculinity in the 21st century. To be masculine, traditionally, was to be a force of change of the world, to be a creator. This has changed, and being masculine is now about being a detached observer of society, a trait that correlates with cynicism, sarcasm, and snarkiness. This can be (and often is) intelligent and worthwhile, but it’s not healthy. It creates a world where men are driven away from participation, because participation can lead to failure, and failure breaks the detached observer facade. (The only other option is to be a flawless hero, fine for cartoons.)

The female characters of MLP can explore friendship and creation without a requirement to be heroic or detached: they can ‘have adventures’ and succeed or fail on their own terms. A male version of MLP couldn’t do that, and still ring true.

As an aside, it’s nice to see that the gender of the characters isn’t relevant to the male viewership. Women are simply portrayed as the norm in the context of the pony universe, and that’s okay.

So beyond its core audience, MLP attracts…

3. Geeks with High IQs

People with maturing social skills may find empathetic experiences to be rare. This is common among intelligent male geeks because:

• Men tend to mature socially more slowly than women.
• Geeks may use their intelligence as a crutch to manage social situations, relying on their analytical skills rather than their developing emotional skills.

Such geeks may prefer to socialize where interpretation of subtle body language is less important: perhaps online, or otherwise where behaviour is constrained by rules (stereotypically over a game of Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering).

People with limited empathic skills will often find social situations to be stressful and exhausting. If you are relying on an analytical brain in a social situation (rather than an empathic brain), it requires a lot of concentration, especially if there are more than a few people present. Geeks often find socializing stressful, and will sometimes incorrectly misdiagnose themselves as being introverted, or having mild autism. They’re not: they are just lower in empathy than most people, something that will grow given time.

***

My Little Pony, then, is going to meet an unconscious emotional need for many young men: the need for empathy. Young and geeky men will tend to find MLP very engaging, as they will be able to easily understand and empathize with the characters.

And if some of the fans are geeky, a subset of them are going to hyperfocus on the show, like Trekkies or any other geeky fandom. These hyperfocussed geeks make up MLP’s committed and intense following of bronies.

For the rest for us, MLP is engaging and easy to follow. We can ‘see’ what is going on inside the heads of the main characters—eyes being the windows of the soul—so the show is pleasing and familiar. It’s a relaxing viewing experience, almost hypnotic. As an experiment, my fellow viewers and I watched for a while with no sound, and we were able to follow the story with no apparent loss of fidelity.

For all its value, MLP is not high art. The humour is childish slapstick, a pre-teen version of Ow My Balls. The characters are simply drawn and simply motivated. The morals of the show are relentlessly, mind-numbingly positive. As an adjunct to our no-sound experiment, we also tried looking away so we were only exposed to the soundtrack: the script, the songs, and the foley artistry are nauseating, pandering, moronic. Like America’s Funniest Home Videos without the videos, but less fun.

Even with its limitations, the resonance of MLP with many members of the furry community is genuine and valuable. I suspect that its influence on furry culture will grow: like The Lion King or Robin Hood, MLP will be a gateway to furry for many people. The MLP fandom is innately limited by its subject, and many pony-fans will find the furry community to be an environment that allows them to grow beyond the constraints of the MLP universe. Pony lovers will easily fit into the furry world, a world which allows them to explore their connection with anthropomorphic animals on their own terms. As I’ve written in previous articles for [adjective][species], furry is a community that can help personal growth and maturation.

Such opportunities for personal growth will be greatest for younger MLP fans. Typically, people reach emotional maturity at about age 30, although this isn’t a hard limit.

I would argue that older fandom geeks, and they exist in any fandom, are limited people. They have failed to develop broader emotional skills that would allow them to look outside of their own interests and into the wider world. Such people limit their intake of culture to a small number of simple artefacts (MLP, Star Trek, whathaveyou) and are prone to hyperfocus on the minutiae of that culture. This doesn’t make them bad—such people are often great servants to their fandom—but they tend not to be well-rounded people.

There are broader horizons out there. Most geeky young men will fit the stereotype of the high school nerd who turns out to be the hunk at the 15-year reunion. Geeky young men remain intelligent and capable human beings, gaining empathetic skills later in life. They grow and shed their social awkwardness, learning to fit in without compromising their identity. The ‘sexy geek’ is a well known phenomenon, to the point that fashion houses try to package and sell the ‘geek chic’ formula. More simply, furries can take a look around and observe that the older members of the group are often confident, happy, and sexy.

Furry provides an environment for such growth. We’re diverse. We can engage with cultures like MLP without being defined by them. We can equally decide that MLP isn’t relevant to our personal interests and look elsewhere. This is what’s great about our community: we create our own culture. Many MLP fans will discover furry over the coming years, and learn such joys.

My Little Pony has become a visible part of the furry community in the last few years. Since 2010, when the TV series was rebooted by Hasbro and Lauren Faust, ponies are everywhere. It’s not just that they’re easy to draw (although I’m sure that helps), they are popular to the point of ubiquitousness online and at conventions. They have become an important feature of furry’s cultural wallpaper. And they are, of course, anthropomorphic too.

And yet MLP is clearly a children’s cartoon.

So why is it loved by so many intelligent and thoughtful furries? Why has MLP joined the likes of The Lion King as a furry touchstone?

I’m going to try to find out.

Fortunately I am friends with one of the great furry pony-lovers, a UK furry called Artax. Artax is one of the founders and an administrator of a popular MLP forum at www.canterlot.com (4,900 members, 286,000 posts), as well as being a longtime pony geek. I asked him how a pony-sceptic should make a virgin approach to all thing M, L, and equine.

Artax is my Dr Pony, and he has prescribed me an MLP marathon: we’re going to sit down and watch as much MLP as I can stand, starting with Season One Episode One.

I am filled with curiosity and terror.

The ponies, you see, are a bit personal for me. As a horse furry, I identify with my equine self as a source of quiet personal strength, physical and mental. The horse is the foundation of my identity; it’s what makes me a furry. Popular perception of the ponies undermines the formerly staid horse archetype. People find out that I’m a horse and they don’t think I’m an impressive equine: they ask about my cutie mark.

Now you might find this all to be hilarious. But it’s taken some adjustment on my part. It’s as if I met a dragon furry, and I went on to imagine a pastel Baby Yoshi. This would be at odds with the intimidating expression of outsiderhood presumably intended by my fantastical friend.

Even before the new series of MLP starting taking over my world, furry friends would poke fun at me by harking back to the ponies of the 1980s. They did so because they, correctly, sensed that it contradicted my relationship with the horse. And, in the manner of friends sensing a good-natured but genuine weakness, proceeded to satirize me as a pony at every opportunity. I had no choice but to grin and bear it.

My tormentor-in-chief has predictably become a modern-day pony-lover. She was all too happy to draw JM as a pony for this article (you can see more of Rainbird’s pony art here):

Pony JM. According to Rainbird, Ponified JM stands for ‘Juicy Mac’, a bizarre moniker inspired either by a type of apple or the fact that I was an early iPod adopter. I do not endorse this name.

MLP is a children’s TV show, and I rarely choose to consume media created for children.

My cultural interests generally veer towards the highbrow: I subscribe to literary magazines; I read good quality fiction; I sometimes watch ponderous European cinema. And I know that this can make me seem hopelessly pretentious.

But I’m not snobbish about it. I don’t think less of people who prefer their media to be lowbrow, be that Harry Potter or Transformers. If anything, I’m worried about being subject to a kind of reverse snobbery, where I might be made to feel ashamed for my interests. To quote Thomas Pynchon: “Except for maybe Brainy Smurf, it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual.”

I’m not going to apologise for choosing to consume media created for adults. I’m equally won’t suggest that there is anything wrong with consumption of media created for children. My preference is personal, and I don’t think that people who love the lowbrow are any lesser in intelligence, or any other supposed measure of the value of a human being.

I don’t have any specific objection to animation or children’s TV, except to say that I often find it, well, childish. There is a scene in Life Of Pi (the novel, I haven’t seen the film) where our castaway, in desperate hunger, tries to eat his own faeces. His plight is such that he doesn’t register the taste, he simply learns that it contains no sustenance. I feel much the same way about children’s TV, from Barney the Dinosaur through to Family Guy.

And so the prospect of a day dedicated to My Little Pony fills me with terror. I understand that the show is set in a pony-only universe, and that the characters (who have names like Rainbow Dash) go about and have adventures. Everything is going to be colourful and high-contrast and jolly, which sounds to me like a kind of longform Nyan Cat.

Fear.

But I am curious too, and that curiosity comes from the rather amazing culture that has sprung up around MLP. Artax, like many of my pony-loving friends, is an intelligent and grounded guy. I trust that his love for the show must come from something more worthwhile and nuanced than its physical aesthetics.

Perhaps there is an undercurrent of Ghibli-style magic, where an emotional thread lurks below the fantastical creations? Maybe there is a clue in the show’s subtitle, and that the show explores how friendship creates something special, magical about life? (Please, please please please, don’t tell me that actual friendship in the pony universe is actually magic. Please please.) I’m all for well-told morality tales that reinforce the value of friendship, one of life’s true joys.

There are some obviously positive sides to the show too. It’s rather excellent that the main characters are exclusively female (or close to it), and that they are embraced by a diverse audience. It makes for a refreshing change, especially given that popular cartoon shows among furries are often contemptible bro-fests, where women are treated as if they are an alien species (sometimes literally). MLP is a breath of fresh air among the likes of Adventure Time, Regular Show, Spongebob Squarepants, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Phineas & Ferb, et al ad nauseum.

Also, I love the pony fandom’s embrace of the so-bad-it’s-good neologism ‘brony’. Brony is a great term, enthusiastically ludicrous, and neatly co-opts a masculine word base to become at least partly gender-neutral. It’s a miracle born of the unlikely coupling of 4chan-style snarkiness and political correctness.

When I ask my brony friends about MLP, I get a range of responses. Some feel that it’s genuinely great TV, some seem to enjoy it as a guilty pleasure, others have referred to it as audio-visual valium. This makes it sound vaguely like the glacial Koyaanisqatsi, a film that—at least in concept—seems like the artistic polar opposite of MLP (except perhaps in the ‘stoner classic’ category). Whatever the truth, such descriptions have piqued my curiosity.

So I’m approaching my ponyfest with an open mind, without setting my expectations too high. Artax has suggested that I prepare by bringing a stuffed animal and a very large quantity of vodka. So I should end up with a warm glow one way or the other. I’ve even infused my vodka with beetroot to give it an appropriately pink hue.

Wish me luck. I shall report my results next week.

Guest Post by Tenza. Tenza is a fox, but he’s the truest epitome of bricolage.

On March 8, 2013, a certain tweet resulted in something much different than the normal circle-jerking, chicanery, or otherwise aloof things furries usually do. Yes, it was an awful joke about women. Furthermore, the poor handling of the situation by the tweet’s author gave many of us the impression there wasn’t really contrition there, rather it had to come about from arm-twisting. Many of us dug in and were serious for once. Even though I’m referring to one particular incident, I decided to turn inward and think about this in a wider furry context. That’s when it hit me: can we really have nice things after all?

The common moniker about “furries ruining everything” has only as much truth as you’re willing to give it. Let’s look at this another way: if the fandom has been effectively slandered by those outside it (e.g. the mass media), then why would so many in the fandom be willing to empower such patently false attitudes? The very fact that so many of us are compelled to “come out” as furries attests to the fact that there’s this notion that the fandom is tainted in some way — granted that may be phenomenologically dependent on one’s experiences in the fandom.

However this notion of a tainted fandom is what underpins “furries ruin everything”. Many of us (I’ve said it in the past, admittedly) have probably uttered this phrase seriously or sarcastically, but have we really critically examined it? It’s only a matter of time before the next mass-media interview or documentary about furries is broadcast and when it does take place, there’s going to be much commentary about it. Why? Because when the lens is turned upon us, many are compelled to defend the furry fandom — by extension, it’s also self-defense given its the venue by which we express ourselves. So then if the furry fandom is then very much a ruined thing, then why are so many of us ready to pick up the banner when it’s besmirched?

One thing that’s unique about the furry fandom is that it’s an amalgam of both creative products and personality facets. We don’t need to be top-down and fully reliant on canon like other fandoms. We are a burgeoning resource of both original and fan-created work. What attests to the vitality of the furry fandom is that there’s a market for these works. Many would even argue that furry isn’t a fandom with respect to other bodies of organized fan practice. There’s also a sizable lifestyle element to the furry fandom as well. It’s what compels us to annually visit conventions for camaraderie, to organize gatherings in smaller locales and in more extreme cases, this “second home” is why some furries are even alive. For some of us, it’s clear if our involvement is predicated on production or socialization. It then makes for a defined division of participation. For others, it becomes a bit more complicated with overlapping elements of each dimension.

I’m not trying to revive old and morally pretentious arguments here, but I really think the furry fandom absolutely lacks a compass. When compared to other fandoms, the composite members of the furry fandom don’t know what they want as goals for the furry community. When you have a community that has no compass, it then has no sense of direction. What happens (and is still on-going) is an ever-growing a litany of conflicts and incidents that take place in order to determine what exactly the direction is. For example, some of us that have been in the furry fandom for a considerable amount of time have seen the transitions between various galleries and the transition from furry-created websites to social media. Another reason that I feel the furry fandom doesn’t have much of a compass is that it doesn’t know where its been. For many participants, significant furry milestones or forerunners are not well-known. Most understand recent events, but for example, how many of you know about Albedo Anthropomorphics or Mark Merlino?

One pervasive trait of the furry fandom seems to be that there’s always an air of contention that can be found. In other words, when something particularly salient hits the fandom we all seem to react to it. I have jokingly tweeted that the furry fandom is like World War I in that when something major happens, you get to see where all the alliances show up and who defends whom — turns out I was very much right in the case of March 8. In the domain of the furry fandom, there are seldom clear-cut cases of both championed and reviled people. Often, there’s a metaphorical hung jury when it comes to disputes. There’s an unwillingness to put aside personal sympathies or the gains of popularity for transparency. The result is usually no sort of middle ground in between. I find it troubling that many people feel the “all or nothing” proposition is an acceptable one. This transpires time and again when there are disputes about who did or didn’t deliver/was genuine about commissioned work, who decided entertain the mass-media’s latest interview, or any furry that transgressed in some way but can rely on their influence to keep them beyond rebuke. In other words, by relying on our sympathies and our alliances too much, we cannot then effectively police ourselves.

Addressing social issues, severe violations of conduct, bad consumer practices and even aesthetic principles should not be seen as faux pas in the furry fandom. It needs to be encouraged so that we can suss out a trajectory for its products and its participants. Some furries are so worried about creating a fuss that they’ll do anything to avoid any sort of discomfit at all. Why? Well, to rock the boat is often met with derision because it takes the focus off of the escapist aspects of the fandom. That is, if the furry fandom is an escape from the mundane activities and stresses of the real world, why do anything to upset that? Even when something did in fact need to be said, there is a fear by many that they’ll be branded as hostile or combative. With that said, I’m not supporting spiteful contention for its own sake, but rather we need to present points between ourselves for a greater good and commensurately chastise those that negatively impact the furry fandom outright.

While incidents such as that tweet and its reception are often viewed as an unwanted stress, if you do not want this fandom to collapse under its own surfeit or hesitation then more instances of this will need to happen. It seems strange that furries want to uphold simultaneously notions that this fandom is deprived and depraved yet at the same time incredibly diverse and incredibly creative. In short, what is it do you really want? Instead of accepting a falsely construed fate of “furries ruin everything”, have some nerve to address things, clean house and flourish. Otherwise, you are all complicit in the process of living in a shadowed fandom and maintaining the status quo you frequently complain about.

Furry as a subculture may not be “mainstream”, but neither is it small. The fandom has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few decades with expanding easy access to the Internet, the proliferation of furmeets and conventions, and even just plain old word of mouth. Estimates put the current size of furry at somewhere between 20,000-50,000. This is, of course, a very rough guess based on responses to The Furry Survey and other polls out there, but even at this size, we’re talking about a good-sized town (Fort Collins, Colorado, where I live, has about 70,000 people living in it, and about 25,000-30,000 of them attend or are otherwise affiliated with Colorado State University, so maybe we can guess at the size of a popular American university), with one very important distinction. A city in America has a council and a mayor, and belongs to a congressional district and a county, which fit within a state, which fits within the country, which is part of several overlapping groups of nations, all of which are (currently) stuck on one world. It’s as if much of our culture here comprises a series of nested centralized forms of leadership and government. Even the university analogy works similarly.

Furry as a subculture, however, is almost completely decentralized. Many of us meet up and talk on the Internet, where we share our art and ideas, but many of us do not. Many of us meet up in person at furmeets, conventions, or even unrelated events such as parades, but again, many of us do not. The whole concept that “many of us do, but many of us don’t” is consistent across all of furry and can be applied to creating art, role-playing, fursuiting, or most any activity that takes place within the fandom. Given this decentralized and diverse fandom which nonetheless holds itself together, how does the concept of leadership fit in?

The word “leadership” has a formal ring to it, but can be used to describe any form of guided social interaction, however informal or unintentional. In fact, one of the primary ways in which leadership is shown within the fandom is that of small groups leading through their own interactions. This way of leading by example is often a good source for the spread of memes, ideas that pass from person to person. It’s almost a type of group-think at times, as after all, we’re already trained to think along similar lines, given that we’re all generally interested in this one larger trope of animal-people. There are those with the social currency or visibility that can wind up leading these trends within the fandom in their own way, however unintentionally. Trends such as the rise in popularity of streaming artwork or Your-Character-Here commissions, or trends in the music we listen to, or even the ways in which fursuiters act (there was, for quite a while, a swishy sort of “fursuit walk” that would cause the suit’s tail to wag which seems to have diminished in popularity over the last year or two).

Another similar form of leadership within our community is that of incidental leadership, and this is primarily shown through the intentional promuglation of ideas, which can take place through content production or actual leadership within events such as furmeets or cons. This can occasionally be bound up in the idea of popularity (a muddied word if ever there was one), but that certainly isn’t always the case. This is, I think most visible within the area of visual arts, where artists will influence styles that will persist and grow based on their popularity, such as the paintings of Blotch or the fur detail in Ruaidri’s art. However, this extends far beyond that, and fursuits are another place in which this is visible. A certain manufacturer’s fursuits may be readily picked out of a crowd, such as those made by One Fur All Studios, or certain expressions may become more and more popular, such as the “Pixar Look” or the sunken “3-D eyes” style. All of these things point to the subtle leadership that goes along with content creation, especially in a culture such as ours where it’s not only common but almost expected for such content to be published for the widest possible audience on sites such as Weasyl, SoFurry, and FurAffinity. Even [adjective][species] could be said to fall into this category, as it is our intent to publish our works in an easily accessible way for the widest audience, even though we have no intentional designs on leadership.

Finally, there are some instances where there are quite formally defined leadership roles, whether it be the committees running conventions, or site administrators and volunteers such as those that run FA or Wikifur. These are the instances in which the leadership aspect gets closest to actual governance, in that the board running a convention does so by having each member fill a specific role, heading their own team of volunteers, in order to accomplish a certain goal. The administration of a content-hosting website faces similar challenges, often solving them in similar ways: by delegating certain tasks to people in specific leadership roles in order to accomplish a goal, such as content moderation. These are pretty common and well established practices as well, with few systems working in different ways – Reddit is a good example of a content-hosting website that eschews leadership (for the most part) in favor of quality-voting; Discourse, a forum, works similarly, by letting users with more points do more in the way of moderation. However, these examples of con boards and site admins are very specific to their purpose and rarely escape beyond their bounds and into the wider world; though to be sure, some leaders within these roles also carry additional social status due to their roles within their domains (viz, Samuel Conway or Dragoneer).

Is this bad? Having a decentralized subculture with a fluid sense of leadership? I don’t think so. It’s certainly not just a furry thing, as there are countless examples (just as there are countless counter-examples) of groups of people such as ours being decentralized with a fluid leadership. However, I think that it is central to our identity as far as it can be, in such a decentralized group. How, then, does it benefit us? That is, how does this affect our forward motion with regards to change? That is a complicated sort of question to answer (given how many words it took to ask!), but I think one worth looking into. How is it that, given our lack of a sense of centralized leadership, or even a cohesive…well, anything, that we have perceptible shifts in artistic styles, convention habits, or even the shared interests or our new membership.

When it comes to art, we benefit from the lack of canon, the lack of a need to utilize any particular set of characters, clothing, style, or even content to any of our visual art. In a way, that seems to give us a little too much freedom, in that “overwhelming choice” sort of way. We’re nothing if not inventive, though, and I think that there has been a large increase in the amount of artists and the quality of the art produced over time despite the fact that we have no guiding canon to work within. Much the same goes for fursuits, and this is helped out even further by the fact that many of the techniques and standards are being created out of whole cloth by the makers within the fandom. Not just the makers, either, as fursuit performance has changed in its own right over time. Of course, writing benefits from this as well, given the additional challenge of creating well-written furry works that are truly pertinent and not just incidental – that is, not just a story where the characters happen to be furries; something which has been accomplished in increasingly wonderful variety over the years.

It’s not just content creating that has changed, though, but our styles of personal interaction, both online and off. The ideas of characters have shifted in prominence due to the shift in online interaction from that of the more purely art-based worlds of Yerf! and VCL, to the mix of art- and social-based worlds of FA, SoFurry, and Weasyl, to the mostly social networks of Twitter and the like. These are, of course, generalizations, and certainly applicable outside of furry as the Internet matures, but given how much of the fandom does take place online as well as how many of us fit into the “early adopters” category, it’s certainly affected us as well. The same could be said for offline interaction, as the common and socially acceptable behaviors at conventions (two things which don’t always overlap). What is generally recognized as a proper con-going attitude has changed with the increased prevalence of conventions around the world and on just about any given weekend.

There is a constant stream of new members to the subculture as more and more people find furry through the Internet, through friends, or just invent it independently on their own. For those who find it through others, however, they are influenced immediately by their first impression, gained from their acquaintance with someone experiencing the whole of furry at a certain point in time. As these new folks join the fandom, they also help steer it by adding weight to whatever drew them to the fandom in the first place, and I think that this accounts for some of the ways in which our culture grows. If you were to find the fandom through, say, an artist, and thought of furry primarily as a group of individuals who put prime importance on art, then that might be your defining furry aspect. This is how it was for myself, and it took me nearly ten years to really even understand the whole fursuiting thing and why it was even a big deal. This sort of bias helps to reinforce and further some of the aspects of our subculture. Sure, “new talent” is joining the fandom, but so to is someone interested in a certain aspect of it, adding their own weight and input to that area. We don’t move forward in the same direction all at once.

In reality, this is a large part of what furry is all about for a lot of its constituents: the fact that the fandom is decentralized allows one to make their own way, but we are not without social direction, given our guiding interest in anthropomorphics and animals. It runs counter to enough of what we face in day to day life that it’s refreshing in a way, for a good number of us, to be a part of something that doesn’t quite follow the same hierarchical strictures of so much of the rest of society. It’s a place where anyone can be in a leadership role without necessarily needing to be a leader. Talking with others, producing content, or even acting in a governing position of something such as a con or website are all things that we can do here that, in their own way, wind up giving back to our subculture and helping make it what it is.

Tolerance is one of the great features of the furry community.

We need to be tolerant. Our community contains a lot of people who are sometimes marginalized in general society: gays, transsexuals, zoophiles, kinksters, even geeks.

This tolerance is sometimes positive acceptance, but it’s often simply neutral, the absence of rejection. Furry behaviour is often more tolerant than general society simply through such tacit acceptance. This is clearly demonstrated by the language we use, especially online where less direct methods of communication are less significant. Put simply, intolerant or offensive language is not appropriate in furry spaces.

There is one significant exception: women. Some furries, especially online, use sexist language. Worse, it’s being ignored, perhaps tacitly accepted, which fosters an environment which is unwelcoming towards women. Furry culture might reasonably be considered a sexist one.

To clarify: I do not think that furries are sexist. But I do think sexist language is common within furry.

To start with, I’d like to compare sexist language with other offensive terms:

1. Faggot

• It is a homophobic term, largely because of the inherent implication that being gay makes you less of a person.
• It has aggressive, confrontational connotations that suggests gay men are not welcome.
• Once commonly used, it has fallen from favour through the indirect forces of political correctness.
• Anyone using the word ‘faggot’ in a furry space can expect to be shouted down.

2. Nigger

• It is a racist term, largely because of the inherent implication that being black makes you less of a person.
• It has aggressive, confrontational connotations that suggests black people are not welcome.
• Once commonly used, it has fallen from favour through the indirect forces of political correctness.
• - Anyone using the word ‘nigger’ in a furry space can expect to be shouted down.

3. Bitch

• It is a sexist term, largely because of the inherent implication that being female makes you less of a person.
• It has aggressive, confrontational connotations that suggests women are not welcome.
• Once commonly used, it has fallen from favour through the indirect forces of political correctness.
• Yet ‘bitch’ is fairly common in furry circles.

A quick semantic aside: ‘bitch’ can refer to a female dog. This makes it an appropriate term under some circumstances, much in the same way that a sheep might be referred to as a ewe. This usage is not relevant to the use of bitch as a sexist term.

(I’ll add that ‘faggot’ is a fairly common British word: it’s a kind of meatball made from liver, lungs, heart, and stomach lining. Yum.)

I have a couple of examples of furries using ‘bitch’ in public forums. Both are recent.

The first is from a Flayrah comment thread, written in response to an article on a recent death in the fandom. Please note that the comment is a blunt and emotional one (not that Flayrah comment threads are typically known for their dispassionate nuance), however that’s not my focus.

Tim’s comments are directed towards the driver of a car involved in a fatal accident. She survived. The comment is angry, then becomes offensive with the sexist language exacta: ‘bitch’ and ‘cunt’. There two words suggest that Tim believes the driver’s gender is relevant, and perhaps partially to blame.

Tim’s terminology suggests that he is angered by the driver’s gender as much as by the accident itself. Many women reading his comment will have felt that anger directed towards them, by association.

Nobody comments on Tim’s sexist language, although he does get reprimanded for being generally unreasonable: someone steps into to call him a ‘stupid asshole’, at which point a moderate intervenes.

(I’ve edited some intervening comments in the thread for clarity: you can see the full exchange here.)

To keep this in context, this is a nothing but a comment thread on an emotive topic, no more than poorly-thought-out expressions of anger and impotent frustration. However I think it’s instructive that Tim’s sexist language was ignored while the namecalling wasn’t. Consider if Tim had used homophobic language, something the furry community doesn’t tolerate: if the driver of the car were gay, and Tim had called him a ‘faggot’, his language would have been firmly corrected (and Flayrah’s comment-rating system’s six votes wouldn’t have scored him 3/5).

My second example is a tweet sent out by a friend of mine:

I’m met this bitch before, she snatches shit out of other customers hands and then snarls at them like a rabid dog. Fucking crazed OAP bitch

— Sphelx Komodo (@sphelx) March 2, 2013

 

I asked Sphelx about his comment, and he told me that the sexist slur was at least partly deliberate (I don’t really see how [bitch] is explicitly sexist, at least anymore… I think it’s been replaced with ‘cunt’… I was actually going to say ‘cunt’ at first, but then I decided to tone it down), but that his general intent was to express anger, not to be offensive.

Sphelx is not a fundamentally sexist person. He has used this sexist language for the same reason that many furries use it: he has not been exposed to a coherent argument explaining why it’s harmful.

He’s hardly Robinson Crusoe. His language is pretty typical of a visible minority in the furry community. Behaviour only changes if it is challenged, and challenged in a friendly and non-judgmental fashion, which allows the person to consider the counterargument in their own way and in their own time.

It’s easy to take sides and look at such people as ‘wrong’, or ‘bad’, especially when you don’t know them. But it’s worth considering that the world doesn’t contain many people who identify as sexist. (A common refrain is some variation of “I’m not sexist, I love women”, a phrase comparable to “I’m not homophobic, some of my best friends are gay”.) And if someone doesn’t think of themselves as sexist, a direct accusation will simply provoke a defensive reaction, likely followed by a frustrating and counterproductive argument.

The issue here is not enforcement of universal goodthink, it’s simply language and behaviour. A good person like Sphelx looks intolerant when he uses sexist language. If you wish to challenge someone, challenge the issue—their language and behaviour—not their thoughts or motivations.

Furries, being rather young and male and techy, get exposed to a lot of fundamentally sexist online cultures. The gaming subculture is one overt example, but there are many others. Such online communities are often informed by the so-called ‘men’s rights’ movement.

The men’s rights movement is a crude backlash against feminism. It challenges discrimination applied against men, presuming that the forces challenging discrimination against women are sufficient. Such groups are essentially the gender-based equivalent of other contrarian equality movements, using the logic that steps taken to help female/black/gay people are discriminatory in themselves, and that we should all be gender/race/sexuality blind. They are typically focussed on positive discrimination measures, or government spending on minorities: examples include women-only gyms, racial quotas, and LGBT-only support.

Concerns over such discrimination would be spot on, except for the fact that this isn’t Star Trek. Discrimination towards women (and gay people, and racial minorities) exists, and action needs to be taken to reverse this discrimination.

Men’s rights groups frame the problem in an us-versus-them fashion: they see feminism as an extremist movement driven to help women at the expense of men. Similarly, nationalist political groups think that there is an extreme movement to help racial minorities at the expense of the majority. And (some) religious groups think that there is an extreme movement to help homosexuals at the expense of heterosexuals. I’d argue that they are misguided but, fundamentally, they are all driven by the desire for fairness: in this way, the goal of men’s rights groups and feminists is the same.

Consider a hypothetical gender quota, where an employer must hire a certain percentage of women in an otherwise male-dominated field (perhaps IT, or politics, or business). In such a field, senior management tends to be almost exclusively male, simply because of mathematics: there are far more men with experience to choose from. A general lack of women means that any new female starter will be an immediate outsider; a dearth of women in upper management means that she has limited role models.

(In comparison, it is a lot easier to be a black highschool quarterback nowadays, compared to the 1980s. An aspiring black quarterback is no longer so unusual: a black quarterback is now simply a quarterback.)

Recognizing that it is more difficult for women entering a male-dominated field (because of their outsider status and lack of role models), recruiters can choose to hire a greater proportion of women. This has two positive effects: firstly, they will be hiring women who have reached that point in spite of their inherent disadvantages; secondly, they will be creating a workplace with more female role models, reducing and ultimately removing the problem.

This is all great, except when you’re the talented male candidate who is passed over for a less capable woman. And it’s easy to see the trees, ignore the wood, and conclude that the system is sexist against men. It’s not.

Certainly such a system is discriminatory, and the man is being discriminated against. However this is in recognition of the discrimination against women that takes place in a less direct fashion. In an ideal world—Star Trek again—neither form of discrimination would occur, and gender politics wouldn’t play any part. We don’t live in such a world, but we’re getting there, and positive discrimination accelerates its arrival.

Feminism isn’t about the rise of women over men: it’s intelligent humanism. The ways in which the world discriminates against women are subtle, complex, and ever-changing. Feminism is a reaction to that.

The furry community doesn’t have much of a visible feminist element, but we should. A friendly flock of furry feminists would help us improve our collective behaviour towards our female minority. Language is one of the easiest ways that we can improve. Let’s start by consigning ‘bitch’ to the same scrapheap as ‘faggot’.

Some words of unwarning: this article is not about plushophilia, at least not in the sexual sense.

I like to mention sex in the first few sentences of my [adjective][species] articles when I can. I think it provides an engaging hook, something to help keep the reader enthusiastic while they wade through a convoluted premise, or parse paragraphs of statistics. (I sometimes even imply that an article has salacious content when it doesn’t.)

Plushophilia, in the sexual sense, does exist within furry but it’s marginal, at around 8% of furries according to the Furry Survey (ref). My guess is that stuffed animals are a true paraphilia (i.e. sexual fetish) for a small subset of this small fraction. In furry’s first wave, media coverage would often look to equate furry with plushophilia, in a clumsy attempt to explain our community as an entirely sexual phenomenon. It’s safe to say that any conflation of furry with plushophilia is wrong, and that the collective furry groan whenever someone refers to us as ‘plushies’ is thoroughly justified.

A lot of furries, of course, own stuffed animals. It’s one of the ways that the furry identity manifests itself in the physical world. And it’s normal for furries to have an emotional attachment to their stuffed animals, without the sexual objectification associated with paraphilia.

I’m an example: I’m a competent adult who owns a dozen or so stuffed animals, and I’m emotionally attached to them. I like having them around: I have a stuffed zebra with me at the moment to ‘help’ me write this article. He provides a faint presence, social but without any social requirements. He is a substitute for quiet company.

A different person might like to have the TV on in the background at a low volume. The illusion of motion and life is equally unreal, but it provides enough of a reminder of a real presence to make us feel warm and appreciative, preventing a room from feeling cold and unwelcoming. It’s a phantom of a human connection, just enough to work on a subconscious level.

I also like to take a stuffed animal when travelling, especially when travelling solo. They make me feel less isolated.

Happily for me, we live in a world where it is mostly okay for a grown man to discreetly carry a stuffed animal around. They are not a societal norm in most non-furry spaces, so I don’t openly display them, but I don’t actively hide them either. If one of my stuffed animals were to be revealed in the presence of, say, a work colleague, I wouldn’t expect a negative reaction. It would be a minor eccentricity, nothing more.

There are some objects where it is completely socially acceptable to reveal an emotional attachment. Such objects are often said to have ‘sentimental value’, an indication that an emotional attachment makes the object worth more to the owner than to a disinterested third party. Examples might include a childhood teddybear, or a motor vehicle, or sports memorabilia.

On the other hand, some objects are not socially acceptable. One example, one that parallels with furry in some ways, is the ‘reborn’ subculture. This group, largely made up of post-menopausal conservative women in the United States, own and care for ultra-realistic baby dolls.

Image from Rebecca Martinez’s Pretenders series, click through to gallery

Like furry, the reborn subculture is occasionally profiled in the mainstream press. They receive a common reaction, and an interesting one: people find it creepy.

Creepy. Disturbing. Repulsive. Yet no harm is being done. Clearly, these dolls are providing their owners with an emotional need. So why are people – possibly including you, dear reader – reacting negatively to something which is unambiguously positive?

Outside of some internet-savvy groups, furries sometimes receive a similar reaction. This reaction is the reason why furries are regularly asked to appear on freakshow/reality TV shows: the producers know that the viewers will have a strong, visceral reaction. (Such TV shows and media often play up the sexual component of furry for the same reason.) Like members of the reborn subculture, we furries are harmless, pursuing an unusual interest because it makes us happy.

So why the negative reaction?

Given that the reaction is automatic, this suggests it is a normal feature of human social behaviour. My guess is that people innately react negatively to people who are ‘different’, and that this has an evolutionary biological explanation. People with unusual emotional needs may be less socially able, perhaps where this is sign of mental dysfunction. Unusual behaviour can weaken, or even destabilize, social groups. The negative group reaction, therefore, may act as a social countermeasure, to ‘normalize’ the outlying individual. Some outlying individuals will successfully moderate their behaviour within the constraints of whatever the social group considers normal, while those that fail to normalize are outcast.

Gay people faced this problem in most parts of the world throughout the 20th century. Society has become more accepting over time, however it is still a problem in some parts of the world. It’s a component of racism. It’s an ongoing problem for many people with unusual sexual identities.

For we furries, societal pressures are a common consideration, especially in non-furry spaces. Some lucky furries with internet-centric lives, perhaps those with work in the IT sector, might be able to be completely open with no negative consequences: like my travelling stuffed zebra, it might be considered to be a harmless eccentricity. For most of us, furry is something best kept largely private, or perhaps shared only among close friends.

Many people in my living and working world would, I believe, find furry to be creepy. I like to have control over my outwards-facing facade, and so furry is something I wouldn’t choose to be a subject of gossip. Conversely, I’m completely open about my homosexuality – I’m lucky enough to live in a society where anyone reacting negatively would find themselves to be the outcast. So I’m ‘out’ as gay to everyone, but ‘out’ as a furry only to a few very close friends. Such compromises are a normal and necessary part of living in a social world.

I think it’s an important skill to give the impression of ‘fitting in’, without compromising those things that are internally important. As Kurt Vonnegut said in Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” It’s not always an easy balance, although sometimes it’s just a matter of keeping your stuffed zebra in your luggage.

Just as importantly, we can notice and moderate our own natural negative reaction to outsiders. We can’t change our subconscious reaction, but we can control what we say and how we act. It’s the first step towards a more tolerant and accepting world.

I probably shouldn’t even attempt to write this article. I lack any real background knowledge on the subject, and have no academic credentials of any kind whatsoever. While I enjoy writing and contributing the occasional essay, I really ought to be devoting the time to my fiction-writing career instead just now; it’s at a crucial point, and not in a good way. Nor will many people will read this compared to my works of fiction. I’m beginning late at night after a long, hard shift at work knowing full well that I’ve got to get up extra-early tomorrow, and this after going short on sleep last night for other reasons entirely. In short I’m a damned fool to be sitting here typing this. And yet here I am, pounding out the words into my iPad at the local 24-hour eatery.

Why? Because I feel a strange compulsion to do so. A compulsion, I feel, that has much to do with not only who I am as a person, but also why I’m a fur. And it was inspired, of all things, by a coincidence in timing. Just days after finishing the final draft of a novel that in large part deals with the taboo of human cannibalism, I watched with wonder as the British media erupted in outrage over the discovery of horsemeat in the human food chain.

Now, after writing hundreds of pages dealing with the ethics, morality and psychological aftereffects of consuming human meat under survival conditions, well… I have to admit that at first I found the controversy more amusing than anything else. A late Canadian friend of mine was a big fan of horsemeat as a delicious, healthy and cheap alternative to beef. (And yes, as a matter of fact he was an equine-type furry. Whyever do you ask?) This same friend was always mildly amused that horse was banned as a foodstuff in so many countries. For my own part, I spent a couple years working for a fast food chain that was up until that time perhaps best known for having one of their Australian suppliers caught substituting kangaroo meat for beef patties. The tainted shipment never made it to the public, but a good decade or so after the story broke people were still joking about “bouncyburgers”.

Both then and now, I have a great deal of trouble understanding why people get so worked up about this sort of thing. Dead flesh is dead flesh, and even if we limit ourselves to the Western tradition of cuisine we consume a staggering variety of the stuff. Within the past year I personally have eaten dead pig, dead cow, dead chicken, dead sheep, dead shrimp, dead fish of more varieties than I can name, dead clam, dead scallops, dead crab, dead lobster, dead frogs and even dead alligator. (Sorry, I’ve never tried dead snails. Though I’d be willing!) This list covers all five orders of vertebrates plus several invertebrates. And you know what? It all tasted pretty much the same. The invertebrates less so, granted. But if cooked in unfamiliar recipes, I doubt that I could name any of these meats solely by taste. They’re all pretty much pure protein; if you want variety in taste, the vegetable kingdom is without a doubt the place to look.

Obviously, then, our preferences in meat-animals are driven largely by factors other than flavor. Most Europeans salivate over hot roast pork, a Bedouin licks his lips at a platter heaped with roasted camel, some Indian gourmets reportedly roll their eyes over monkey-brains, and in certain parts of Asia nothing makes a diner happier than well marbled dog steaks. While I’ve never tried most of these…

…how much do you want to bet they all taste pretty much the same?

Ethically, I have to admit, I consider them all pretty much the same as well. While I’m very much a meat eater, it’s not because I think that routinely killing self-aware beings is a good idea. The fact is that I am a creature of very little to no dietary self-control. I’m grossly overweight as well as being a carnivore; being so fat is merely another manifestation of my own lack of self-discipline. As a six-year-old I once wept at the death of about a half-dozen trees that’d stood for years on my grandparent’s property; they’d grown too large to be safe, and so had to be cut down before they fell on the house and crushed it. Part of me has never quit weeping at the uncounted thousands of creatures I’ve consumed or otherwise killed since. And yet…

I also recognize that I’m a born carnivore as well. I’ve taken a couple-three classes in anthropology and read numerous books on the subject. This is more than enough to make me fully aware of the massive behavioral, cultural, and even physical effects that the act of hunting has had on the development of mankind. A major change of diet is a radical thing in terms of evolutionary pressures, a massive driver of change. When our ancestors were insectivores, we were tree shrews. When we were (mostly) vegetarians, we were apes. When we became hunters, we became men. That’s an oversimplification, yes. But it’s not all that much of one, which underlines the importance of diet to who and what we are as a species. I’m the son and great-great-great to the nth power grandson of the finest, deadliest hunters this planet has ever produced. My genes, my very identity and the manner in which I view the world necessarily reflects this truth. Should I be ashamed to eat meat? More ashamed, say, than a Bengal tiger who’s not half as capable and versatile a hunter as I am?

There are a thousand million arguments in regard to the ethics of meat-eating, and I don’t intend to even begin to deal with them all here and now. Suffice it to say that I, as a dedicated technologist, believe that the single greatest techno-ethical advance in human history lies not far in our future. Soon—within my lifetime, I very much hope, though I don’t have all that long left— we will finally perfect the “vat-grown” meats and meat products that science fiction has been predicting for fifty or more years now. Meat that’s grown with no brain, and comes packaged with no conscious mind that must be snuffed out prior to consumption, in other words. On that great day, perhaps the seven-year-old in me will finally take a day off from weeping at the tragedy of it all and enjoy a nice guilt-free t-bone steak. It’ll be the finest one I’ve ever had, I assure you. Make it medium-well, please!

Some meat-linked eating traditions are easier to understand than others. Despite the fact that thousands of protein-starved adolescent midshipmen of who knows how many navies thrived on them during the Age of Fighting Sail, one can appreciate why most cultures frown on eating rats. My own Ozark-mountain ancestors, perhaps up to and including my grandparents, almost certainly relished a well-cooked opossum. Yet today only a small fraction of American households would even consider eating one; the more one learns of the dining and personal habits of the common ‘possum, the more understandable this viewpoint becomes. I know of no culture that eats much in the way of voles and mice; they’re not worth the effort of catching and cleaning for at best a forkful of meat. But the world’s religious prohibitions on meat, well…. They’re pretty much beyond me. From where I stand, they look almost… Random.

One other thing I’ve noticed about food animals over the years is that they seem to get very little respect in our fandom. While many ancient Amerindian cultures are totally centered on the corn plant and it’s essential role at the root of everyone’s lives… Well, let’s put it this way. How many fursuiters do you see at the average convention dressed as a cow or a chicken or a pig? Rabbits excepted, you see almost no food animals of any sort (and you can be pretty sure that the bunnies don’t as a rule hold the nutritional benefits of their species-of-choice foremost in their minds). How odd, that the animals we benefit from most of all are the ones that most commonly serve as the butts of our jokes and get the least respect!

Culture, evolution, food… All are intertwined so perfectly and so thoroughly that the closer we examine them the more the threads merge and become one. What a wonderfully complex and mysterious world we live in!

Over here in the UK, there’s been an extended brouhaha after many cheap TV dinners, known as ‘ready meals’ locally, were found to contain large amounts of horse instead of the promised beef. Some of the meals contained 100% Pure Horse.

Nobody knows how long the horse has been there. It only came to light because a branch of the Irish Government performed some DNA tests and announced the presence of our equine friends in mid-January. And it’s been in the news since then.

I think it’s worth discussing here on [adjective][species] because it relates to our relationship with animals. Also, I’m a furry horse, so I get asked how I feel about horses as a source of meat.

The short answer: I feel ambivalent. The longer, more entertaining answer: I’m fascinated how this scandal has come about, been reported, and—most importantly—how my furry friends have reacted, often wildly differently depending on their relationship with their species of choice.

It’s easy enough to understand how horse ended up labelled as beef: the European Union, which includes the UK, is an open market and goods (including meat) can mostly be traded freely. In the UK, our big supermarkets compete in a desperate race-to-the-bottom to be the cheapest, regardless of quality. They advertise that a pint of milk is 1p or 2p cheaper. A tin of tomatoes will cost me 30p, but they’ll be unripe. I can buy a mass-produced chicken for £2, whereas an ethically-raised one the same size will cost me about £15. The drive for a lower price drowns the desire for a higher quality.

It’s the same drive that sees high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) everywhere in the USA. HFCS is sweet and cheap. Nevermind that alternatives taste superior, or that HFCS is metabolised in a way that reduces feelings of satiety: people want to pay less for their soda.

Horsemeat is perfectly legal in the UK. It’s also about half the cost of beef and, apparently, is indistinguishable in flavour. The meat used in ready meals is largely sourced from outside the UK, because it’s cheaper. And so horse has found its way into beef products via suppliers competing for supermarket business, where the strongest criterion for success is price.

The British press, for their part, have been competing to see who can generate the most outrage. The tabloids have dealt in the usual xenophobia, while the broadsheets look for something—anything—that allows them to be upset without dabbling in racism. Is there even a problem with horsemeat? After all, it is routinely eaten, if a bit déclassé, in France and elsewhere to no apparent ill effect. So the UK newspapers have decided that horsemeat is unsafe because UK horses are sometimes treated with a painkiller that isn’t safe for human consumption… eliding over the fact that the ready meal horses are sourced from elsewhere, and that there is no problem with such chemicals elsewhere in the horse-consuming continent.

I’m sure that there are countless other examples of cross-border intrigue and scandal all over the EU, and I’m sure they seem as equally quaint to disinterested observers.

Some will argue that there is an ethical issue with horsemeat, that it’s wrong to eat companion animals, or that horses have special capacity for pain, or fear, or some other form of suffering. These arguments are valid—moral arguments always are. However anyone who hesitates at horse yet pounces on pig—the porcine are at least the equal of equine in intelligence and companionship (if not HP)—might politely be called self-contradictory.

Yet the fact remains that horses are special for many people, including many furries. The furry identity is usually attached to a specific species (or two), and some horse furs have a special affinity for their pony pals. For rhetorical purposes, I’m going name such hypothetical horse hangers-on as Gullivers, after Swift’s eponymous traveller who ultimately shuns human habitats for exclusive equine esteem.

Altivo, one of our favourite commenters here at [adjective][species], is a Gulliver. I think/hope he’ll have his say in the comments, so I won’t speak for him here. If you’re interested, he’s written eloquently on the topic in his journal.

Another furry friend of mine is a more vehement kind of Gulliver. His response to the idea of horses as food:

The whole concept fills me with horror and revulsion, and I have to say I felt suddenly sick at the sight of the topic… I think you know of my professional involvement in animal welfare, and I am not a vegetarian. I know some allege this as hypocrisy, and I know issues such as comparative intelligence and whether animals have names or not are not reasons to discriminate what one eats and what one doesn’t. There are, however, welfare issues in the transport and handling of slaughter horses which have a direct bearing. These are matter of scientific fact. [...] Even without these important issues, on a personal level I draw no distinction between eating horse and eating dog or cat, or, indeed, human. I would do none of these things (although personally the idea of eating dog, cat or human horrifies me less), and the very idea makes we want to vomit.

 

That response is taken from an old journal of mine, where I pondered the idea of eating basashi, a sort of Japanese horse carpaccio, which was offered to me while visiting Tokyo:

(I didn’t eat the basashi. I’m vegetarian, contributing my part to the predictable phenomenon that sees furries twice as likely as the general population to avoid meat altogether, as discussed in an [a][s] article from last year.)

Some furries have the opposite reaction from the Gullivers, and actively consume their own species, sometimes as an expression of their furry identity. (Most common, in my experience, among furry deer and bulls.) I haven’t come across any horse furs who look to devour horseflesh, however those in UK looking to express themselves in such a way have more options nowadays: the scandal has seen horse openly introduced to menus across the country, as pubs and restaurants cater to the curious.

There is nothing wrong with being horse-curious, no more than there is being vegetarian, or being a Gulliver. For those that think about it at all, meat is a moral issue, by which I mean that it’s unreasonable to apply universal definitions of right and wrong. There are cultural norms and politics at play here: imagine the hypothetical reactions among people you know to eating dog, or guinea pig, or scorpions. The consumption of animals—living, breathing, tasty things—provokes strong responses in many people. The righteous might keep that in mind before they start telling the rest of us how to think.

It’s the thinking that’s important. And I’m interested to hear your thoughts below.

Post by Quentin Julien. Quentin is currently completing two MAs at Grenoble University, in performance studies and in literature, while preparing for a PhD Project on the furry fandom. His articles will be published in French and English.

Visitors to the Weickmann museum in Ulm, Germany, can look forward to seeing the exhibition’s highlight: the famous Lion Man (link to official museum website). Sculptured in mammoth ivory, experts estimate that the masterpiece is about 30,000 years old. The body is mostly human, with a feline head. Its anthropomorphism and zoopmorphism is evidence of a tradition, thousands of years old, going back to the early days of the human race, and therefore an integral part of our culture. The culture of the furry community, consisting of fans of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism as it does, is a contemporary example of this, with its creative use of visual and digital arts, and its exploration of the dialogue between man and animal.

Those familiar with furry will find numerous similarities between the sculpture and the imagined animal-person of the furry fandom. Firstly, the head of the Lion Man is largely that of a feline—a lion or a tiger—with little evidence of human features. Secondly, the body of the Lion Man is bipedal, a human shape, typical of furry representations. Finally, the Lion Man is not a simple bipartite body, human below the neck and animal above. Indeed, the sculpture is unrefined at its extremities, making it possible to imagine different options for hands and feet, and doubt remains as to the intention of the artist. This parallels with furry: the resolvable extremities of the Lion Man possess characteristics of both human and non-human animals, and furries similarly include such features, for example the pads, claws and fur of an animal, but within the lengthened shape of a human hand:

More than graphic art or sculpture, it is performance that might be the oldest human exploration of a hybrid animal-person. In order to demonstrate this, we come back again to prehistoric art. Siegfried Giedon’s research into cave paintings take special notice of the drawings in Pech-Merle, a cave in de Cabrerets, Lot County, France: ‘the oldest representation of a fusion between man and animal‘ (ref Gideon, Siegfried., The Eternal Present, New York: The Bollingen foundation, 1962—p.284). A woman with a bird’s head is painted there, adopting the crane position. By studying certain walls, considering wear due to touch and the tracks left on the ground in these areas, researchers concluded that the area was used for dance. Richard Schechner, an American professor of Performance Studies, hypothesizes as follows (ref Schechner, Richard., Drame, scripts, théâtre et performance., in Performance. Paris : Editions théâtrales, 2008—p.56):

If the prehistoric men painted and sculpted beings with a combination of human and animal physical attributes, perhaps they would also dress in this way? And if we go farther, perhaps the cave paintings are representations of their own dance, or perhaps are meant to accompany the dance in some way?

 

Accordingly we can draw a link from the cave paintings, and the Lion Man sculpture, to a ritual prehistoric dance. The link between these two arts could well look much like the link between today’s drawn fursona and constructed fursuit. However, if we consider the relationship between the furry image and the fursuiting performance, we find an inversion of the supposed prehistoric behaviour. Schechner considers that the performance of the ritual dance precedes the pictorial representation, a mural depicting behaviour. In the furry fandom, the drawing always precedes the fursuit, as it establishes a basis for the costume and subsequent performance. We can interpret this inversion as societal, a difference between the time of the Lion Man and the twenty-first century.

The primacy of the performance in costume, in prehistoric times, is evidence that this was more important in society at the time. This suggests that the act of putting on an animal-person costume and performing—i.e. fursuiting—is anthropologically important. Sex is often considered to be an important part of furry, a point that can be marginalized because of the negative connotations associated with a so-called ‘deviant’ sexuality. Without wanting to opine on this complex subject personally (perhaps a topic for someone with specialist knowledge), there are arguments that allow us to extract the drama from the topic, particularly those made by Schechner who connects the three key subjects of the prehistoric art: hunting, dance, and fertility. He writes: ‘the people of the Stone Age celebrated not only animal fertility, but also human fertility, as evidenced by drawings, figures cut into stone, and associated symbols‘. He makes special mention of the figures in the Konark Sun Temple in India, once again both human and animal: ‘most of the scenes of copulation and human contact correspond to dance poses‘ (Ibid.—p28). One notes that such depictions make up a large proportion of furry art, where we also see hybridization of human and non-human animals, performance, and—of course—pornography. The fertility scenes depicted in the Konark Sun Temple and many other civilizations celebrate sexual intercourse and phallic representations, as is the case with furry yiff art, depicting animal-people engaged in sexual activity or otherwise in an obviously sexually aroused state.

‘Retrospective: An Illustrated Chronology of Furry Fandom, 1966–1996‘, curated by Fred Patten, places the origin of the furry fandom in the mid-to-late twentieth century. However it seems necessary to consider furry in a wider context, one that emphasises the connection to our prehistoric past, and therefore the societal value of furry’s culture. If we consider the resonance between early and current depictions of animal-person hybrids, it is not possible to consider furry as something separate from normal human society. Furry is a natural regrowth of an important part of human culture, one that has accompanied us for a long time, and will continue to accompany us for a long time into the future.