[adjective][species]

Article de Quentin Julien. Quentin termine deux masters en arts du spectacle et littératures à l’université de Grenoble. Il prépare actuellement un projet de doctorat sur le Furry Fandom. Ses articles seront publiés en français et en anglais.

Le visiteur du musée Weickmann à Ulm attend avec impatience de voir la pièce majeure de l’exposition : la célèbre statue de L’homme-lion (official museum website). Sculptée dans de l’ivoire de mammouth, les experts estiment le chef-d’œuvre ancestral agé d’environ 30.000 ans. Le corps majoritairement humain, sa tête est celle d’un félin. Ainsi l’anthropomorphisme et le zoomorphisme attestent-ils d’une longévité millénaire remontant à l’apparition de l’espèce humaine et faisant donc partie intégrante des linéaments de sa culture. La communauté culturelle Furry, composée de fans d’anthropomorphisme ou de zoomorphisme, s’inscrit donc à la fois dans une époque très contemporaine avec l’utilisation des médias, des arts visuel et digital dont ses membres se servent à des fins créatives, mais également dans la lignée d’un dialogue à jamais renouvelé entre l’homme et l’animal.

Le Furry attentif trouvera de nombreuses similitudes entre la précieuse statue et la forme animale imaginée hybride des membres du fandom. La tête, premièrement, semble entièrement celle d’un félin, lion ou tigre, et ne présente pas de traits caractéristiques du visage humain, ce qui est également le cas des avatars furry. Le corps, quant à lui, est représenté dans une position de bipédie qui, elle, est d’avantage liée à la position humaine: nouveau point commun avec les avatars en question. Enfin, il ne s’agit pas non plus d’un corps bipartite moitié animal et moitié humain selon une limite placée au niveau du cou. En effet, si la sculpture se montre grossière pour représenter les membres, il est possible d’envisager que l’on n’y distingue pas des mains et des pieds mais plutôt des formes de pattes malgré que le doute subsiste quant à savoir quelle est la part souhaitée ou non de cette indétermination. Encore une fois, l’art furry se montre comparable à l’homme-lion puisque les extrémités des membres des Furries possèdent des caractéristiques à mi-chemin entre l’homme et l’animal comme cela est visible sur l’image suivante dans laquelle l’on distingue les coussinets, les griffes et la fourrure de l’animal mais dont la forme allongée de la main rappelle une main humaine :

Mais plus encore que l’art graphique ou la sculpture, c’est la performance zoomorphe qui se révèlerait être la doyenne incontestée en ce qui concerne la représentation de l’hybridation homme-animal. Il faut pour le démontrer revenir de nouveau à l’art préhistorique. Les travaux de Siegfried Giedon identifient sur le plafond de la grotte du Perche-Merle « la plus ancienne représentation connue de fusion entre l’Homme et l’animal. » (ref Gideon, Siegfried., The Eternal Present, New York: The Bollingen foundation, 1962—p.284). Une femme avec une tête d’oiseau y est peinte adoptant une position de dance. En étudiant l’usure de certains murs, exposés à des attouchements répétés ainsi que les traces laissées sur le sol de ces mêmes grottes contenant des peintures d’êtres dansants, les chercheurs concluent que des pratiques de danses avaient lieu dans ces endroits. Richard Schechner, fort de ces informations, fait l’hypothèse suivante (ref Schechner, Richard., Drame, scripts, théâtre et performance., in Performance. Paris : Editions théâtrales, 2008—p.56) :

Si les hommes préhistoriques dessinaient et taillaient des êtres possédants à la fois des attributs physiques humains et animaux, pourquoi refuser de croire qu’ils aient eu de véritable costumes ? Et si l’on va plus loin, pourquoi ne pas supposer que les peintures rupestres représentent leurs danses ou accompagnent la danse à leur manière ?

 

Un lien peut donc être fait entre la représentation dessinée, et par extension sculptée—l’homme-lion—et une forme de danse rituelle. L’articulation entre les deux arts pourrait bien ressembler à l’articulation entre l’avatar, ou le fursona, et le fursuit. Cependant, si l’on considère la relation entre l’image et la performance/danse dans le cas du Furry fandom, on relève une inversion. Richard Schechner considère que l’acte rituel performatif précède l’acte pictural, soit la réalisation de peintures murales. Or, dans le Furry, le dessin digital précède toujours le Fursuit puisqu’il en constitue une sorte de patron. On peut alors interpréter cette inversion comme tributaire de la société de l’image qui est celle du XXIème siècle.

L’acte performé en costume pourrait donc bien remonter à des temps lointains et être considéré comme un geste culturel prépondérant dès les sociétés préhistoriques. Cette mise en regard entre la danse en costume et le Fursuiting, c’est-à-dire la performance ou la dance réalisées en costume d’animal, met en valeur l’ancrage anthropologique du Furry Fandom. Il s’agit dès lors de ne pas marginaliser trop hâtivement ce dernier notamment décrié parce qu’une forme de sexualité déviante s’y développerait. Sans vouloir émettre un avis sur ces questions complexes qui nécessitent des compétences plus spécialisées, certains arguments permettent de dédramatiser la controverse, notamment lorsque Richard Schechner relie les trois pratiques de la chasse, de la performance et de la fertilité. Il écrit à ce propos : « les hommes à l’âge de pierre ne célébraient pas seulement la fertilité animale, mais aussi la fertilité humaine, comme l’attestent les dessins, les figures taillés dans la pierre, les peintures et les symboles retrouvés. » puis, à propos des représentations de la fécondité montrée par les figures de Konarak, encore une fois animales ou humaines, il ajoute : « la plupart des scènes de copulations et de caresses correspondent à des poses de danse. » (Ibid.—p28). Force est de constater que de mêmes piliers fondent l’art Furry, dans lequel l’on retrouve l’hybridation des espèces, la performance et une production pornographique qui lui est propre. La fertilité à Konarak, mais dans bien d’autres civilisations également, était célébrée par des représentations phalliques omniprésentes comme c’est le cas dans ce que les Furry nomment le Yiff, c’est-à-dire les dessins représentant des avatars Furry ayant des rapports sexuels entre eux ou encore présentant un état ostentatoire d’érection.

La chronologie du mouvement construite par Fred Patten (Retrospective: An Illustrated Chronology of Furry Fandom, 1966–1996) circoncit le Furry Fandom en proposant un point de départ dans les années soixante. Cependant, il semble nécessaire de replacer le mouvement dans un contexte diachronique plus large pour reconsidérer sa valeur sociétale. Si l’on s’intéresse aux résonnances possibles entre ce dernier et les résurgences multiséculaires des représentations d’hybridations entre homme et animal, il n’est plus possible de rejeter définitivement le fandom à la marge de la société. Ce dernier n’est qu’une repousse naturelle d’une thématique qui accompagne et accompagnera longuement l’humanité.

It’s so trite that it’s an eyeroller. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Birds of a feather do flock together, even when the “birds” in question lack bills and plumage. I’d guess this is especially evident in my native United States because our population is among the most culturally diverse on the planet. Take my original hometown of St. Louis, for example. During my childhood Italian-Americans lived in a neighborhood called “The Hill”, while German-Americans (commonly referred to as “scrubby Dutch”, and half of my own ethnic heritage) mostly tended to live on the South Side and in the inner southern suburbs. The city’s small but prosperous Lebanese population also lived towards the south end of town, though not so far in that direction as the Germans. Old-money rich folks lived mostly in a now-decrepit area not far from Forest Park, while more recently prosperous families bought homes in the suburbs of Ladue or Brentwood. Artsy types were mostly clustered in a couple little zones near either Washington University or Webster College, in Webster Groves. The gay community was very small in those days, but even so Tower Grove Park and the neighborhoods immediately surrounding it were closely associated with what little activity there was. The North Side of St. Louis, as well as the adjoining suburbs, have been home to most of St. Louis’s African-American population for as long as I can remember and probably much longer.

St. Louis isn’t at all unusual in how the various social and ethnic groups are geographically clustered; choose any American city and you’ll see pretty much the same pattern repeat itself over and over again. In fact, it doesn’t even take a city-sized population for the trend to manifest itself—not far from my current home in Middle Tennessee a group of artists are trying to start an “art village” in what was once a cluster of vacation homes overlooking Kentucky Lake, pretty much out in the middle of nowhere. It seems, in other words, that “flocking” of this sort is a basic human behavior pattern. Sometimes the clustering is involuntary and/or due to economic discrimination and racism, as in the old-style Jewish ghettos of Europe and arguably in the case of many of America’s worst urban nightmare-neighborhoods of today. For the most part, however, the decision to live together in culturally-distinct groups is clearly a voluntary choice by groups of individuals who share much in common and wish to live a lifestyle together that’s optimized towards their own specialized wants and needs.

We furry authors have been taking advantage of this tendency almost since there have been furry authors. The “Blind Pig” storyverse is just one example among many; it’s adventures are centered on what amounts in social-function terms to a gay-type bar located in a distinctly furry neighborhood. (Yes, Blind Pig characters sometimes are not furry and suffer from unrelated issues that have nothing to do with anthropomorphism. But let’s keep things simple for the purpose of this essay.) I’ve seen this pattern repeated in more furry stories than I can remember, and even in stories in which there are no normal humans I often note references to “the canine district”, “Vulpine Alley”, “The Warrens”, etc. “Neighborhooding” is such a basic, familiar phenomenon that it’s hard for human authors to imagine a world in which it does not take place.

Now, let’s take it one step further. Recall the St. Louis neighborhoods I cited. Most were based on ethnicity. But…

…one was the gay district. And another was the “artsy parts of town”.

After attending as many furry conventions as I have and watching the fandom interact with itself, I’ve often wondered. Will we, someday, become culturally distinct enough from mainstream society to form a neighborhood or our own somewhere? Real-life, I mean—not fictionally.

I mean, think about it. Ears and tails, when we choose to wear them, mark us as visibly different from society at large in very much the same way as a Hassidic Jew is visible. Our tastes in recreation and art are also notably different—how many non-furs so love to wear whimsical costumes in public? In a furry neighborhood, game-shops would flourish and suit-makers would operate little boutiques in the most expensive parts of town. People would hug each other openly on street-corners, while perhaps on the busiest street corners professional suiters would “busk” for tips and photo opportunities. Tourists would come from all over to see this, which would in turn mean souvenir shops and nice hotels for them to stay in. Policemen and street repair gangs would be free to wear—or not—ears and tails on the job, while art would be everywhere.

It’s doable, I think. Unlikely, yes—at least in my lifetime. But eminently doable, and probably economically viable as well. A large furcon is a lot like a temporary neighborhood, in that it provides structure and security for a large population for a few days. So, in a sense, a furry neighborhood would just sort of be like a large con that simply never ends. And isn’t that a wonderful thought?

I once wrote a story based on this premise entitled “Pelton”. In it, several thousand furs backed by a multi-millionaire buy large parts of a failing downstate Illinois town in order to create a furry “homeland”. (It’s available at http://tsat.transform.to/stories/pelton.html for anyone who wishes to read it, but I’ll offer advance warning that it’s one of my earliest works and therefore needs re-editing badly. Someday I’ll get around to that…) Between the furs, the poor befuddled Old People who predated the anthropomorphic invasion and the eternal fandom-type drama that was always waiting to rip and rend everything that’d been so carefully built, well… It was quite a challenge for the man unfortunate enough to be Mayor. Yet in the end, like our fandom itself the grand experiment proved capable of giving birth to something… Beautiful.

Do I really expect to live to see it happen? Not really, unless we’re lucky enough to find the kind of deep-pocketed backer I specify in my story. But…

…just on the off-chance, I vote for someplace with a warm climate and affordable housing like Florida or Texas. And… Please call me early, because I want to buy a house with a balcony overlooking the town square!

In which the author describes the meaning of life.

We furries are a creative bunch. A large majority of us regularly engage in some sort of creative activity.

Looking at data from the 2012 furry survey:

• 46% of us are visual artists;
• 39% of us are writers;
• 24% of us are musical artists, and;
• 17% of us are fursuiters.

Assuming that few of the responders are creating exclusively in non-furry spaces, this means that a large majority of furries are actively adding content to our community. (I’m doing my part right now, writing this article on a sunny winter’s morning for [adjective][species].) Very few of us are pure consumers.

There is nothing wrong with being a consumer. All furries are consumers of furry art, from illustration to performance, because it is art that defines our culture. Without this furry-created art—without furry-specific language, without drawn furry avatars, without fursuiters, without conventions—we wouldn’t be able to express our furriness. At risk of being a bit postmodern, the act of consumption gives meaning to the art.

This is what makes our community different from sci-fi fandoms and the like: fandoms are based around pre-existing art, whereas furry is not. If you’re a brony, then you like My Little Pony, and the social aspects of MLP fandom are a nice bonus. Furries have no such common element, which makes our culture dynamic and exciting, if difficult to pin down.

(Here at [adjective][species], with a handful of different writers and over one hundred articles, we’re mostly just exploring the question: what is furry? Or, maybe: what is a furry? Anyone with interesting ideas should visit our Contributing page and make their pitch to our fearless leader, Makyo.)

Furry creatives are collectively putting a lot of time and effort into the community. In the overwhelming majority of cases, that time and effort is donated with no expectation of monetary gain or even wide recognition.

To look at a few examples:

• Kyell Gold and Phil Geusz, who are probably furry’s two highest-profile and most successful writers (as well as being contributors to [adjective][species]). Both are doing well, but the time spent learning their craft and writing their first few books needed to be rewarding in its own right. They are the vanguard of an army of furry authors, most of whom are self-publishing in the morass of Sofurry, enjoying their time in front of the keyboard and appreciating the few readers they are able to find. Phil, who writes for [a][s] as Rabbit, has contributed many articles since joining us last year: he has done so for the same reasons as our anonymous Sofurry hordes, because he wants to contribute to the furry community.

• Potoroo, furry musician and friend of [a][s], runs a regular furry music podcast, Fuzzy Notes (fuzzynotes.podomatic.com). He collates and advocates music created by furries, for a furry audience. Music isn’t really furry in the way that a drawing can be furry, at least outside of the likes of Kurrel the Raven (stop reading and go listen to his Commission Song right now if you haven’t heard it). Yet Potoroo has an endless stream of quality music, by-furries for-furries. For our furry musicians, limiting their primary audience to furries comes at the benefit of contributing to the community as a whole.

• Oz Kangaroo is a fursuit performer, fursuit maker (www.crittercountry.com.au), and organiser of the Furry Down Under convention. Like Kyell and Phil, Oz didn’t start with the expectation of success. His skills have been learned over time, and his early contributions to the furry community were largely anonymous, motivated by the enjoyment of the process.

Furry’s creators—a group which, dear reader, probably includes you—are rarely motivated by personal gain. There is value in contributing to the greater whole, helping define the culture of the furry community. It’s not selfless (and therefore not an act of charity), but it is immensely generous.

Furry, with its cartoon animals and imaginary worlds, is easy to interpret as a childish pastime. But this is missing the point: furry is about internal exploration of identity, something which niftily translates into an external world of intimate human friendships. This external world is something which we create ourselves. Our apparently childish pastime enriches our culture and informs our tight-knit community.

And it’s the community aspects of furry that make it really special. A broad, interesting community isn’t an easy thing to find in the twenty-first century. Today, people tend to exist in urban environments or online, where it is easy to find people who share niche interests. We group ourselves with people who are similar, and often define ourselves based on these delineations: we spend time with people of similar age, or education, or obsession, or professions, or even something as fundamentally unreal (if important) as money. Once you tar yourself with such an brush, it can be difficult to grow as a person, and explore the world outside of your niche.

Furry is a group without such limited horizons. Our community is the product of the things we create. Our decentralized nature means that our creations grow informally, like a meme: ideas become widespread as they are adopted by the separate, overlapping subgroups within furry. And even unsuccessful ideas have value: they are consumed and appreciated by an immediate audience of friends and similarly-minded furries. The furry culture is one that respects the act of creation, regardless of perceived quality.

We creators are serving the community. Our acts of service help build our world, and being a part of this communal effort provides meaning to life. Time spent in the act of creation, the act of service, can be internally rewarding and be appreciated by those we share our lives with. We contribute to our own environment, we build a culture that we can enjoy, and this adds to the feeling of inclusion within our community.

We furries are lucky. Other communities are often not as tolerant or welcoming, a point which leads me to a final story:

D. Michael Quinn is a Mormon historian. His research and publications put him at odds with the Mormon church leadership, who didn’t accept his findings on past actions within the church that were at odds with the church’s current moral stance. (Further reading here.)

As a scholar with a belief in truth and evidence, Quinn continued to publish before his eventual exile and formal excommunication from the church. Stripped of his career, at age 63 he was reduced to sleeping on a sofabed in his mother’s one-bedroom condominium.

Just before his excommunication, Quinn was given an opportunity to testify before the church. He expressed his gratitude to the church for providing, throughout his life, a vehicle for service. The Mormon church, he said, drew him out of his largely monastic life and compelled him to help the men and women he saw every Sunday.

As far as I can tell, that’s a life with meaning.

Furries and music definitely have a thing going on. I’ve wanted to write about it for quite a while now, but I’ve never quite found the right entry point, the right way to piece together a story about how the two might connect. I actually started thinking about the current topic when Klisoura of Furry Survey lore was in town over the week between Christmas and New Years, and the topic came up of how furries have a tendency to consider themselves “ahead of the curve” when it comes to music, television, and video games, or even trying new things, yet do not necessarily consider themselves to be hip or paragons of pop culture (ref). While I’m really as much of a fan of new music as anybody out there in this subculture, I wasn’t quite sure how well this held up. What the data seem to be saying is that furries showed a tendency to eschew popular culture in favor of the type of things that would become popular culture. While some of our number may fit within that category, it’s oddly specific for a subculture that doesn’t, at its roots, have as necessary an intersection with popular culture as might, say, the fans of an actual genre of music, television series, or video game.

A survey is a survey, though, and can only really tell so much about those who really should be telling the story. I turned, instead, to Twitter, and invited an email barrage on myself to see what those who had the stories to tell had to say about the matter, asking “Do you think furries are more or less musical than non-furs?” and “Do you think furries are ahead of the curve in terms of music?”.

Let me take a step back and say that I’ve always been kind of fascinated with the relationship that furries have with music. I spent the time and money (lots of the latter) needed to get a bachelor’s degree in music composition, so I’ve always been, as I glibly put it on Twitter, super into music, and so I’d always wondered if maybe it was the crowd that I hung out with that was influencing my perceptions of furries as rather musically oriented folks, or if maybe it was just everyone. Another thing that piqued my interest, however, was the visible importance of music at conventions and in every-day chatter. The latter could be explained away by the fact that a lot of folks within furry aren’t going to spend every second role-playing, of course, they’re going to have conversations about the things that interest them, and music is a natural topic even outside the fandom. The former, however, intrigued me, even after I started regularly attending conventions. There were dances every night. There were dance competitions, dance competition try-outs, dance competition out-takes, dancing in the fursuit parade, dancing for no reason. Music seemed to be everywhere, from panels to the dealer’s den, and it all made me pretty happy, if curious.

Furries, like everyone can be broken down into two, very rough, categories when it comes to things like music: creators and consumers. The act of creation plays a big role within the fandom, of course. Given that we are, as was famously put, “fans of each other”, we rely primarily on our own membership to create the art and stories appreciated within our subculture. Within music, however, things are a little more gray. The question of whether or not there is such a thing as furry music and what might define it is one for someone else to answer, but needless to say, there are still plenty of furry musicians. There are several out there that create music within the context of furry, post their music to FA, or perform at conventions (such as the jazz combo SuperPack at FC a week and change ago). “[T]he environment seems more conducive to the sharing of content in general, music included. Furry musicians have a built-in audience they can reach that many other aspiring artists might not.” Vincent writes, and I think this is an apt description of at least part of the reason there is a music scene within our fandom, or indeed within many subcultures.

There’s one more smaller subset we should probably take into account given the popularity of dances and the like at cons, not to mention the relative popularity of electronic music within the fandom, and that’s the wide variety of furry DJs out there. The reasons for the popularity of this pursuit are varied, and hinted at by several of those who wrote back. Technological aptitude, diversity, a focus on sharing, and interest in EDM (electronic dance music) as trends within our subculture may help guide many toward DJing as a mode of expression, and notably as a way of sharing things important to themselves.

Beyond simply creating or creatively mixing music, though, we are avid consumers of music, at least commensurate with our strongest demographics. Soto writes, “From a consumption standpoint, I haven’t found furries to deviate much from their non-furry counterpoints in the same demographics. For example, age group. Furries as a whole may be more passionate about music and stay more current with trends, but furries as a whole have that lovely age-skew toward the late teens and twenties, and that age group is generally pretty up on their music as it stands.” That is to say, we’re helped along by some of the categories that many of our members belong to in listening to and exploring music with the sort of enthusiasm that goes along with connoisseurship.

So, what about my two questions? As hinted about in the previous quote, opinions are mixed on the question of whether or not furries are more musical than their non-furry counterparts. In fact, after reading many of the responses, I don’t think the question should be whether or not furries are more musical than their counterparts, but whether or not they have the conception that they are. Zenuel offers, on the positive side, “I like to think that the fandom simply offers more open and honest states of being[...]; a furry posts to a more receptive community like FurAffinity they generally receive more encouraging feedback, as well as having the backing of freedom that the fandom presents to the artist in question.” Vincent acknowledges this, but warns, “This is a pro and a con, I’ve always seen furry as something of a ‘hugbox’ where criticism isn’t forbidden, but it certainly isn’t forthcoming. I’ve found that (at least in the realm of DJing) it’s very, very hard to get good technical feedback on how to improve, and in many instances subpar mixing is lauded as exceptional.”

One advantage that we do have that we gain from being a decently coherent subculture is the fact that we are rather diverse in ways unrelated to some of our stronger demographics. That is, age and gender aside, our diversity in terms of backgrounds, social status, education, and so on does help us with the ways in which we deal with music. As Wolfdawn put it, “just being part of a diverse and unusual subculture would have to be a big [plus], since that alone makes people more likely to have been exposed to wider range of musical interests as they’re shared among friends.” I noticed a similar effect outside of furry when I moved away from my rather homogeneous upbringing and high school to college, where much more diversity was to be found. College was where I expanded beyond my own choral background into genres, classical and not, far beyond what I was used to. Furry was much the same, and in fact, much of this article was written listening to a playlist composed almost entirely of music suggested to me by cats, dogs, and all sorts of fuzzy creatures. In other words, are we more musical than the non-furries that surround us? Probably not. However, do we consider ourselves more musical than those around us at least in part because of furry? Often times, I think so, and a lot of these responses echo that sentiment.

As to the second question, you’ll note that I put “ahead of the curve” above in quotes. These weren’t meant to be scare-quotes, necessarily, but I would like to highlight something before I get too far. It’s always very important to pay attention to the ways in which language is used. I know, I write about words a lot (using, of course, as many words as I can), but when I responded to the onslaught of emails with the two questions, I tried to do so using language that would invite people to provide longer, rather than shorter answers, because I think that the thoughts of those being asked are much more interesting than simple yes-or-no answers on the subject. It’s the way that people interpret the questions they’re asked, sometimes, that provides a lot of the answer. I understand that “ahead of the curve” can be a little misleading in terms of being able to provide a concise answer, and I’m sure I could’ve worded it better besides, but the answers I received in reply more than made up for it in their thoughtful and well-put responses.

Are we ahead of the curve? A lot of folks who replied indicated that no, we’re not really all that ahead of the curve, at least not moreso than we might necessarily be given some of our demographic skews. There are a couple of reasons behind this, and one of the big ones is that the Internet and mass media in general hasn’t benefited only furries. “The increased visibility of various scenes took away the relative advantage having a community that encourages sharing,” writes Vincent, and this is echoed by a lot of my own perceptions: my composition professor went on a ‘where is the drop?’ joke spree with almost all of his students once dubstep became a more visible part of the music scene around us (the idea of being separate, here, due mostly to the fact that we were being classically trained in composition). That aside, however, Branwyn suggests that many “are in the same arena as non-furs – they consume music in the same way, influenced by the same sources, regardless of quality.” That is, being furry does not necessarily influence the ways in which we appreciate music, so much as some of the content that we listen to. We listen to the things our circle of friends listen to, in all probabilities, and I believe that much the same happens when it comes to visual art, for that matter; we don’t enjoy visual art that much differently (though we do sometimes place quite a bit of importance on a visual representation of a character – ref), so much as enjoy the things that our chosen family and circle of friends also enjoy.

A possible explanation for all of this is offered by Forneus: “Furries are, I would argue, more musical than the mean, but not moreso than other geek subcultures.” We are, of course, not the only subculture based almost solely around a shared, intense interest. The My Little Pony fandom has created a wealth of their own music, not to mention filking, which as a long and well-established tradition. Several of those who responded to the questions touched on the points of geekdom and technology, along with their ties to the fandom. One respondent talked at length about the fact that there are readily available tools on the market now, and, despite the fact that many, given such tools, will create music that might not be the best in terms of musicality and technical ability, they are still creating quite a bit (my own experiences with Reason are a testament to this, of course). “I think that if you put the tools in front of furries, they are more willing to try creating music than regular people,” echoes Nathaniel Hahn; this does well at pointing out the fact that, rather than being more innately musical or musically hip, we may simply be focused on putting something out there given the tools we have for our subculture to enjoy.

Satori sums it up well, “We have geeks of all kinds, and some geek on their music. Others are too into geeking on other things that they don’t make the time for it much.” We’re just us, in the end. We’re a good mix of musical and non-musical fuzzies, no more or less of a mix than the world at large. We have things working to our advantage, such as our broad social circles, diversity, geekdom, the Internet, and so on, but no matter how large a part music plays within the fandom, we’re still just us, and some of us will create, and others will consume. We’re no less interesting for being a good mix, of course, and music does still appear to be quite important to us, but in the end, we’re plenty good at focusing on being and appreciating animal folk.

Scientific research on human sexuality is a relatively new field. The Kinsey Reports, published in 1948 (men) and 1953 (women) (link), were the first attempt to gather data on human sexual behaviour. These were informally updated by Playboy in the 1970s (link), back when it retained some literary relevance, in an attempt to understand the changes brought about by the sexual revolution, and—of course—to provide some salacious reading material.

It took until the early 1980s for researchers to confirm that homosexuality is largely set at birth (ref). This work, controversial at the time, contradicted the prevailing wisdom that male homosexuality came about due to feminization of a male child, caused by an overbearing mother and distant father (the reverse supposedly applied for lesbians). This conclusion was simple enough to make: researchers interviewed a large number of people, asking about their childhood and sexual preference, then looked for correlations. (They found none.) And yet such simple data gathering took more than 30 years after Kinsey to be published.

The science of zoophilia is much less mature. Kinsey asked questions and gathered data (as did Playboy) however the first serious attempt to understand zoophilia was published more than 50 years later, by Dr Hani Milestki in 1999. Miletski’s book suggested that zoophilia may be a legitimate sexual preference: one defined by love, not sex.

Miletski’s book was followed by research from two long-time specialists in the field—Drs Williams (wikipedia profile) & Weinberg (wikipedia profile), who started their careers studying homosexuality in the 1960s. (Weinberg, literally, wrote the book—in 1981—that showed that homosexuality was set at birth.) The two are highly respected in their field, and their results agreed with Miletski when they published in 2003. Research into zoophilia has increased since then.

(The works of Miletski—Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia—and Williams & Weinberg—Zoophilia in Men—are available in full for free, and are barnstorming reads. They are both recommended, Miletski in particular, although you’ll want to gird your loins for some vivid language.)

The two works are notable for going beyond analysis and discussion of statistics: the authors clearly became sympathetic towards the zoophiles during the course of their research. This sympathy isn’t evident in the results, but it is evident in their discussion of the zoophile lifestyle. They note that the zoophiles face unusual personal and ethical challenges as a result of their taboo sexuality. Williams & Weinberg make a direct comparison with the subjects of their early work, homosexual groups in a less tolerant era:

They reminded us of some of the early gay groups we studied in the 1960s and 1970s, especially when they engaged in banter about sex (in this case, it was not just sex with men).

 

Homosexuals in that era were seen as dangerous sexual deviants, similar to the way that zoophiles are seen today. However it is very clear from the results presented in Miletski and Williams & Weinberg that the relationship between a zoophile and his/her animal partner is based on love, where sex is an expression of that love.

This brings about a special problem faced by zoophiles: if you are in love with a non-human animal, where do you find human contact?

This is clearly a significant personal challenge for the zoophiles, especially given that they must hide their taboo sexuality from most people. Many zoophiles displayed a tendency to anthropomorphize their animals (ref Williams & Weinberg):

When asked “Is being in love with an animal different than with a human?” approximately three quarters answered positively. The features the men mentioned were anthropomorphic in that they described ideal human love relationships. Ironically, humans were often seen as less able than animals to provide those ideal human characteristics.

 

This is a special kind of misanthopy, one where human emotions are projected upon an animal to create an ideal that cannot be met by a real human. This false creation of a perfect, or near-perfect, oxymoronical hyper-human non-human is only going make it more difficult for a zoophile to find real human contact.

Humans are social beings. We have evolved to need one another’s company, and we communicate in subtle ways that meet our social needs. A relationship between a human and a non-human will always be one-sided, regardless of the perception of mutual love.

The zoophiles can end up with an unhealthy misanthropic perspective, a perspective I would compare with that felt by depressed people:

I find the company of animals more pleasing than that of humans – there’s less stress, fighting… Love with an animal is how love should be – a lot less complicated with no strings attached. (Williams & Weinberg)

 

I can identify with dogs a lot more than I can identify with humans. I am thinking a lot like dogs, and therefore I can understand dogs better than humans. (Miletski)

 

I felt I could only trust animals. They didn’t gossip, they didn’t laugh at me, they were available most any time. (Miletski)

 

In these comments you can hear the reflected neuroses of the zoophiles. They feel that humans cannot possibly live up to their expectations, or that they themselves will fail to ‘fit in’ with society, so they regress and find reasons to avoid people altogether.

Marcel Proust, as ever, intuited this, framing depressive misanthropy as a reaction to a need to be part of (an untrusted) society. The following quote is from the second volume of In Search Of Lost Time:

In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passers-by or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities which would make it necessary to leave the house.

 

The sad irony is that those who have the least social contact are the ones most in need of social contact.

The other issue is, of course, the ethics of sexual contact with a non-human animal. Animal sexual abuse can sometimes be a problem (ref), and such behaviour is commonly assumed to be the act of a zoophile.

According to the researchers, making a connection between zoophilia and animal abuse is wrong. The zoophiles were defined by their love for the animals. Miletski states:

The majority of my subjects love their animal-partner. Some see them as a spouse and will do anything for them. Sexual relations with the animal is an expression of love for them, and if the animal tells them, with its body language, that it is not in the mood for love-making, the majority of my subjects will leave the animal alone. In fact, many of them are members of the Humane Society and other organizations that are taking care of animals.

 

The ethical issues associated with zoophilia are important however I don’t intend to explore them in detail here. This is difficult ground because of the strong moral reaction people often have to zoophilic acts (very comparable to the strong moral reaction some people have to homosexual acts). In general, researchers and ethicists on the topic (notably Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, ref) agree that the issue is whether the animal is harmed, and that the sexual aspects are irrelevant. This may be the subject of a future article (although, given my recent article on Why Zoophilia is a Furry Issue I’m a bit concerned about turning [a][s] into Zoophilia Weekly).

There is a small zoophile subculture growing on the internet. Zoophiles are expected to continue to congregate online, due to their small numbers and the benefits of anonymity. Many of them, including some who participated in Miletski’s study, have engaged with the furry community. This makes sense: furry provides what is important to zoophiles, namely a largely online-based culture with strong social connections, an emphasis on intimate friendships, and a safe environment for people of unusual sexual or gender orientations.

It’s no accident that the researchers compare zoophiles today with the GLBT community of 50 years ago. Gay relationships were seen as an exercise in immoral sexual behaviour, however this has changed as homosexual relationships are now largely perceived to be about love. The zoophiles have not reached this stage, but they may find that the furry community provides a social environment where their love is tolerated as unusual but acceptable. If zoophiles can be open within furry, they can provide good role models for the ‘zoo-curious’, helping young people manage and accept an otherwise complex and difficult sexual orientation.

I expect the level of conversation within the furry community to improve over time as the number (although perhaps not the proportion) of zoophiles increases. We will see more intelligent, respected, well-adjusted zoophiles be open about their orientation within furry. Dismissive and offensive language will become marginalized, just like homophobic language has declined in general society in recent years. And conversation topics, online and offline, will move away from the presumption of abuse, and towards the real ethical and emotional challenges of being a zoophile.

It’s often said that the worst day fishing is better than the best day working. In my life, the same can generally be said of fur-cons. While I haven’t kept actual count I’ve probably been to fifty or seventy of the things, and am fortunate enough to financially be in a position where, if I have a weekend off and there’s one within driving range, I can usually go. I consider Mephit to be my “home” con, and that probably says a lot about my taste in conventions. I prefer them small, intimate and inexpensive. While I’ve been to and enjoyed Anthrocon several times and will probably eventually be back, well… I don’t know. Compared to the small cons the large ones feel impersonal. Commercialized. More about flash and gee whiz and Big Name Furs than ordinary people sitting around and making new friends.

Back when my columns were posted in other venues I sometimes wrote reviews of this and that con. Then I ceased doing so when I realized that these columns were garnering me a sort of “VIP treatment” that I didn’t seek. (About the third time the chair of a con looked me up to “make sure I was having a good time” I sort of figured it out. And sure enough, when I quit writing these reviews the con-chair visits ceased.) All I want at a con are reasonable prices, ideally between twenty and three hundred furs to interact with (preferably a few of which I already know), a couple-three fursuiters running around from time to time, and some good (preferably writing-related!) panels to go to. The rest sort of takes care of itself, and most cons are well advised not to mess too much with this winning formula.

I’ve always been especially interested in attending “first-time” cons. There’s an extra-special sort of magic at these, as a rule– even the things that go wrong usually just add more “flavor”. I suspect this is because first-time cons have first-time con staffs, for the most part, who are fresh and unjaded and eager to make “their” convention work well. (I was at the first Rain Furrest, the first Furry Fiesta and I think the first MFF, among several others.) Everything is new and exciting to everyone, including many of the attendees, and a sort of magic fills the air.

Usually.

I have seen first-time cons crash and burn, however. It takes work, but I’ve seen it managed. So I’ll complete this column by telling a few woeful tales and offering advice.

1) Registration

The very first thing congoers experience of a con is Registration. Organizing all those badge sales is difficult, low-profile work performed by people who are in most cases going to miss large slices of the con as a result. (I try to make it a point to recognize whoever registers me for the thankless role they’ve volunteered to accept.) Sometimes poor Registration experiences are inevitable– computers crash, printers fail, etc. But, what’s not inevitable are gross social and customer-service errors. I recently had the worst Registration experience of my life, when I was left standing at the desk for at least three and perhaps as long as five minutes while the Registration staff totally and completely ignored me even though I was the only one there. The staff spent the time chatting and working on some sort of craft-type project even though I was standing less than two feet away looking at them. Finally, at long last, the person sitting opposite me asked what I wanted. “To buy a registration,” I responded.

Their eyes went wide. “Oh!” they said. “I thought you were with the (tool-related) convention! You’re wearing a work shirt!” Then they proceeded to ignore me again for at least two more minutes.

And so, because I was wearing a work shirt (and probably because I’m a good bit older than most con-goers) I started this con off on a totally bad foot. So bad, in fact, that for the first time ever I resolved to inform the con chair about how badly things were being run in Registration.

Then, a little later, I learned that the con chair was the person who’d ignored me.

Which leads well into Point Two…

2) The con is about the attendees, it’s not about the staff or the Guests of Honor

I attended both opening and closing ceremonies at this same con. I usually attend neither, as I generally find them boring. But this time I attended Opening Ceremonies in order to learn what the Con Chair looked like, and then Closing for the same reason that one gawks at a car wreck. At both events the speakers attempted to improvise instead of working from set notes, and the resulting chaos was all too predictable. In the end little to no useful information was transmitted. The staff spent most of the time referring to and congratulating each other instead of interacting with the attendees. They spend some time tossing candy/whatever into the crowd, but the products were thrown hard enough (and some were heavy and sharp-edged enough) to cause potential injury. Several of us attendees – total strangers – met each other’s eyes and shook our heads at each other; it wasn’t just me who disapproved. Apparently, pretty much everyone understands that blinding your guests is a poor way to begin a con.

Another thing I’ve sometime seen at cons, though not this specific one I’ve been citing, is a GOH who does their best to sabotage the proceedings. I’ve seen GOH’s do truly awful things, like get so drunk that I’ve personally had to give multiple panels for them. But worst of all is when a GOH gets the idea in his or her head that the attendees are there for them instead of the other way around. A GOH, in my opinion, owes an even greater debt to the con and its attendees than any staff member save perhaps the Chair him or herself. They’re being honored in a unique and what should be humbling way. GOH’s shouldn’t just be willing to provide art/stories/whatever. They should actively make an effort to circulate, shake hands, and for heaven’s sake show the unwashed masses that they’re pleased to be honored! Good GOH’s can make even a mediocre con memorable. Poor ones can make a wonderful con disgusting. Therefore, it’s essential they be selected carefully and have a clear understanding of their vital role.

3) The Hotel Employees

It’s natural that the hotel employees, especially for a Year One con, should stand with wide eyes and be amazed at the wonderful weirdness of it all. They’re part of the con too, so why should they not enjoy a little of it? Indeed, I try to take the time to speak with them in a friendly way and explain what I can, when I can. Con Staff should absolutely do the same at every opportunity. Perhaps it’s because I’m blue-collar myself and therefore I’m extra-sensitive to such things, but I don’t often see Staffers interacting with the hotel workers in a fraternal way. People may not be aware of this, but when they give snippy, hurried instructions to someone they assume ipso facto must be stupid or they wouldn’t work at a hotel, well… It’s insulting as hell. This doesn’t so much cause problems for a Year One con as it does down the road after repeated exposure, but I mention it here anyway because it needs to be dealt from the very beginning.

Hotel workers may be low-paid, but they’re intelligent, sensitive fellow human beings asked to keep a straight face at some pretty outlandish stuff. They’ve got full, rich lives and interests of their own. At one con, for example, I met a waiter originally from New Orleans who had personally met most of the biggest names in Jazz, was probably a bonafide expert on the subject (I’m not qualified to say) and kept a huge private music library. Such individuals deserve as much respect as any congoer. Again, as a blue-collar guy myself I’m uniquely positioned to note that it doesn’t help in the least when the person being snippy is half their age. And I’m also uniquely positioned to inform you that payback can be hell.

Trust me. You’ll never regret making friends in low places. Especially at con hotels.

4) Programming

It’s incredibly tough to set up programming at a first-year con. Usually there are few rooms available, and often even fewer credible Subject Matter Experts. I always prefer more panels at a con rather than less, on the grounds that then I always have something interesting to do. Therefore that’s what I suggest to the first-year programmer. A poor panelist, so long as they’re polite and civil and smile a lot, is generally better than no panelist.

On the same note…don’t ever ask a panelist to share a room with another panel, or give a panel in a place like the Hospitality Suite. You’re asking the impossible in such a chaotic environment.

5) Atmosphere

This one’s tough, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. I don’t know about others, but I can walk into a room full of people and in a matter of seconds know if they’re bored, happy, hostile or whatever. If you think about it, a very large part of the con experience takes place in the meeting rooms and other public gathering places. It doesn’t take a con staffer, especially the chair, two minutes to physically go to these places, “sniff the air”, and then if necessary do something to improve the situation. He might ask a GOH fursuiter, for example, to swing by the gaming room if it’s “dead”. Or, if the “social” area looks slow, he might sit down and chat with a few individuals, smiling frequently. Atmosphere is an elusive thing, yes. But you don’t have to be passive and accept whatever comes. Go out there and do something about it!

And that’s pretty much it, I suppose – Phil’s take on How Not to Totally Screw up a First Con. I hope someone, somewhere has a better time for it having been written.

I just got back from Further Confusion 2013, and have a few notes to share.  It’s a little meta, and I’ll try to make it quick, but I wanted to get these out there while they’re fresh in my mind from the convention.  I’ll try to stay away from making this much of a con-report, as well, as [a][s] isn’t really the place for that, but if you’re interested on some of the directions we’d like to head in moving forward, read on!

That was…a lot of furries in one place.  There were 3232 registered attendees, and I know that several people also wound up “ghosting” the convention, which probably pushes the numbers up higher.  It was quite the crowd there, which had both its ups and downs, but it was a positive experience, overall, to see that many people interested in such neat things all gathered in one spot.  On observation, one unique aspect of the whole thing was the communication media used to coordinate between individuals at the convention.  Twitter has, and continued to be, an excellent way to coordinate activities among groups of generally diverse furries, and it was quite common to see people walking blind or standing still in the hallways, fixated on their phones, especially before mealtimes.

[adjective][species] hosted a panel this year, titled Exploring the Fandom Through Data. Unfortunately, I set the camera up on the stage, aimed it at where I’d be standing, and turned it off to save battery, only to forget to turn it back on again once the panel started.  For that, I apologize, as the panel did wind up going quite well.  However, the panel materials are available on GitHub here.  We were given the second stage, which seated about 120, and we wound up with about 50-60 attendees* over the course of the 90 minute panel.  The presentation itself lasted about half an hour, and the remaining hour was devoted to questions and discussion.  Lots and lots of good points were raised about the data, the visualizations, and the idea of taking a step back to look at furry, and I’m just pleased as peach that there are so many out there interested in doing so.

I’d like to give another thank you to GreenReaper for helping so much with the discussion and with answering questions for which I didn’t have a ready response.  Thanks as well to the [a][s] readers, old and new, who stopped by the panel to talk through so many neat ideas.  Additionally, I’d like to apologize for being so twitchy up on stage; I was not able to control that as well as I thought I would.

So, what directions do we have to head in, given all that discussion?

• Visualizations – the visualizations for the Furry Survey were completed late in 2010 and are now, honestly, starting to show their age.  They were originally a project that I’d picked up to teach myself the Protovis library, and I think that my novice status on those is doing the data a disservice.  They sorely need to be redone, and now that Protovis is deprecated in favor of D3 (which I work with in my job), this might just be the time to do it.  Additionally, other visualizations might be shifted away from Protovis, or at least cleaned up and locked down (yes, we know about the spammers on the FA Stats visualizer, and that’s a high-priority item, right there!).
• Data – along with the visualization improvements, we’d like to update and help maintain our data-stores.  With [a][s] taking over some of the responsibility for the Furry Survey, we’d like to make sure that we have as much of that data as possible for a few reasons.  First, it’s good to have a lot of that data warehoused in one place, but in addition, we’d like to be able to expand the information that we share with the community, both in terms of visualizations (such as expanding the survey series to recent years) and in terms of openness.  We’d like to set up an explorer for simple queries of the data, as well as be able to provide expanded sets to other researchers out there.
• Surveys – there was quite a bit of discussion after the panel on what information was collected on the various surveys and how.  The Furry Survey was intentionally kept much as it had been in previous years in order to make it easier to track various points of data through time – that’s part of why we ask that people take it year after year.  Even with that, however, it came up several times that there are questions that are easy to ask in such a way as not to prime an answer, and there are many, many more questions where that’s much more difficult.  These are still things we’d like to know about ourselves, though, and so working to find a way that would eliminate any self selection bias and priming as much as possible is key.  We’ll keep working on those to make sure that they get out there as best as possible!

There really is a lot to be done when it comes to information about furry, and I think that there’s a lot of momentum in that arena.  There are several good resources out there, and many, many excellent fuzzies (and so on) working on various projects that are pushing forward our knowledge of ourselves, our past, and, of course, our future.  It’s all very exciting, and I do hope that people will stick around and keep asking all the interesting questions.  Cheers, and thanks again to everyone out there, both panel attendees and our readership: keep on being awesome!

* Edit: Apparently, a reporter from Kotaku visited the [a][s] panel!  Whoa!  Check out their write-up here.

How to find a Makyo

Another quick note! [adjective][species] is at Further Confusion 2013 in the form of Makyo! We will be giving one panel, Exploring the Fandom Through Data, on Saturday at 4:00PM at the Second Stage. Come check us out! Also, if you see Makyo running around with an [a][s] clipboard, introduce yourself and you can snag the clipboard for yourself. Cheers, and hope everyone’s well, both at the con and away!

Zoophilia is fairly visible within furry.

Most obviously, so-called ‘feral’ art is ubiquitous, and some animal characters—the cast of The Lion King comes to mind—seem to be minor sex symbols in some circles. More personally, furries sometimes actively denote themselves as zoophiles in social media, perhaps on their Fur Affinity page.

Klisoura’s Furry Survey, which at its peak received over 9000 annual voluntary responses from furries worldwide, shows that 13-18% of furries self-identify as zoophiles. This does not mean that all these furries have had sexual contact with a non-human animal; these furries are probably just reporting sexual attraction. However this is significantly higher than the general population.

Little research has been performed on zoophiles. Serious attempts to study the phenomenon are limited to the last ten years or so, at a level that academics compare to analyses of homosexuality in the 1960s (ref). All of these newer studies rely, in part, on Kinsey’s landmark 1948 study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (link) for data on the incidence of zoophilia.

Kinsey estimated that 6% of American men have sexual contact with a non-human animal during early adolescence. The overwhelming majority of these cases were in rural areas. Such contact later in life quickly becomes vanishingly rare.

(There have been other studies, but none of any consequence. Notoriously, Alvarez & Frienhar—ref—in 1991 reported rates of bestiality within the general population of 10% to 15% however this was based on a pitiful sample size of 20, all psychiatric staff.)

Kinsey attributes cases of sexual contact with non-human animals to young men lacking an available human partner. This is known as ‘situational sexual behaviour’: sexual behaviour that takes place because of a dearth of otherwise preferred options. Such situational sexual behaviour is not limited to zoophilia. There are many other examples, gay sex in prison probably being the most obvious.

Like prison, situational homosexuality is common in gender-segregated communities. Gay sex is endemic in the armed forces of countries that have compulsory military service, Iran and Saudi Arabia in particular (ref). (The Singaporeans have a particularly unusual way of managing homosexuals in their National Service: openly gay men are given restricted duties that depend on whether they are ‘effeminate’ or ‘non-effeminate’. Straight but effeminate men, or otherwise nonconforming men, are also given special duties. I like to imagine that there are whole platoons of drag queens in the Singaporean army, possibly defending Orchard Road from last season’s shoe fashions.) Homosexual behaviour between young heterosexual men is also widespread in Muslim East African nations (notably Sudan) and single-sex boarding schools (notably England).

Situational homosexuality occurs inside the male-dominated furry community too. I’ve written a full article looking at the availability of men (and unavailability of women) within furry—It’s Raining Men—detailing the plight of the heterosexual male furry. Suffice to say that their options are limited. Furry is an open environment that fosters intimate friendships (regardless of sexual preference), so it’s not surprising that many heterosexual young furries will engage in mutually enjoyable sexual contact with male friends. The blunt categories of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ are not strictly applied in the furry world (like they are in general society), so a heterosexual can engage in same-sex behaviour without risking the ire of his peers, or provoking an unresolvable identity crisis.

Situational bestiality also occurs within furry, partly due to furry zoophiles making their animals available for sexual contact. And, as Kinsey showed, it’s common for young men with access to non-human animals to sexually experiment during adolescence. Further: frank depictions of zoophilic activity are easy to find in the furry community, as is frank discussion on the topic. Given this availability, it’s inevitable that some young male furries will explore this side of their sexuality.

Kinsey’s estimate of the numbers of adolescent men having sexual contact with non-human animals (6%) was published in 1948. This was widely considered to be out of date by the mid-1970s (ref) and is even less relevant today. The reason for this is simple: we live in better connected and more sexually liberated society. The sexual revolution significantly improved the availability of women (and men) for young men; the proportion of people living in rural areas has declined; the spread of television provided a homogenizing influence on moral behaviour; the internet has significantly improved the connectedness of rural communities. The preferred mode of sexual contact is more available to more people, so situational zoophilia is much less common (ref).

Zoophiles today are different from Kinsey’s farm boys. Those people engaging in sexual contact with non-human animals are much more likely to be pursuing it as a sexual preference. The number of zoophiles is small, and so congregation via the internet is common. The influence of the internet is the biggest difference between Kinsey’s sample and today’s zoophiles: the farm boys may have been influenced by a culture where sex with non-human animals was common, however this did not define the community (ref). Today’s zoophiles congregate on the basis that their sexual orientation is an important part of their identity (ref).

And that’s fair enough. Recent research strongly suggests that zoosexuality is a legitimate sexual orientation, a conclusion reached for homosexuality only in the late 20th century. I’ve written an article on this topic here on [adjective][species]—Zoophilia in the Furry Community—so I won’t repeat myself. In short, studies over the last decade show that zoosexuals meet the requirements for a legitimate orientation in terms of sexual preference, fantasy behaviour, and love and affection (ref).

Zoophilia as a sexual preference will apply to some of the 15% (or so) of furries that self-identify as zoophiles. As I mentioned earlier, this question was probably interpreted by most responders as relating to sexual attraction only. This isn’t the common definition outside of furry: non-furry zoophiles tend to differentiate between ‘bestialists’—those who engage with non-human animals for sexual gratification only—and true zoophiles, who are concerned with welfare, perceived consent, and the sexual gratification of the animal (ref). However some of the furry 15% will meet the definition of zoophilia as a sexual orientation, and this number will be significantly higher than the general population, optimistically estimated to be 1% (ref).

Zoophilia is therefore a furry issue because zoophiles are a significant and visible part of our community. Like other unusually prevalent features of our community, as explored here in [adjective][species]—homosexuality, Asperger’s syndrome, fluidity of gender, online relationships—the presence of zoophiles helps create and inform the wider furry culture.

Researchers into zoophilia have also made a connection: furry is included as a subset of zoophilia under a classification system proposed in 2011 (ref). Furries are specifically included as ‘Class I Zoosexuals’, along with other people who engage in psuedo-zoophilic human-animal roleplay (e.g. pony play). Alarmingly, the author suggests that furries might be ‘treated’ through behaviour modification therapy.

Fortunately, doctors and therapists are very accepting of unusual sexual behaviour. Even in the event that the classification of zoophilia formally includes ‘members of the furry fandom’, it’s highly unlikely that any form of treatment would be administered by a halfway-competent doctor or therapist. As things stand today, treatment is not generally recommended for any zoophiles (or other paraphiles). Any furry, or zoophile, seeing a therapist with a different opinion should strongly consider finding a new therapist.

A final disclaimer: I am not a zoophile. I have never had any sexual contact with non-human animals and I’ve never had any desire to. This disclaimer serves two purposes: (1) I don’t want to be subject to the abuse that zoophiles are often subject to; (2) I don’t want this article to be seen as self-justifying. Thanks for reading. It’s not an easy topic.

Hi folks! Time for a bit of a meta-post with some neat news.

First of all, thanks to everyone who took the opportunity to fill out the 2012 [adjective][species] Census and Survey!  There’s…a lot to go through, and it’s going to take us a while to write up a full report, but we’ll get one all pulled together soon! The C&S is now closed, but what about a 2013 survey? Well, that’s where the news bit comes into play

The Furry Survey, as run by Alex Osaki/Klisoura, has been going strong since 2007, with 3,267 respondents in 2012 alone. It’s a well-constructed demographic census that drives a lot of the information behind our articles and visualizations. Running a yearly survey, complete with advertising, comment-handling, and pulling together results, however, takes time and effort, and so starting this year, we’re is happy to announce that [adjective][species] will be helping to run the Furry Survey as an [a][s] project right over here on furrypoll.com!

The survey remains much the same as previous years with only a few changes.  Notably, one of the goals is to make the survey more international in its reach.  To that end, we’ve added more international conventions and are aiming to reach out beyond just a few countries to a wider audience.  Alas, the survey remains English language only for now, but if there’s interest (and translators), hopefully that can change in the future.

As for the [a][s] Census and Survey, a long-form survey does have its place in the future, and it will certainly come back with new questions for new folks to answer.  Keep an eye out, as we’ll be sure to make an announcement for that, as well!

With that we’ll set you loose: take the survey, pass it around, and talk it up!

Guest post by Forneus. Forneus is a man pretending to be a fish who is actually a cat.

It started, as these things do, with a realization about myself.

I realized that I had feelings for someone else. Not the sort of feelings that one would call “love”, for sure, but certainly the kind that are at least as strong as your average crush-that-warrants-more-exploring. Furthermore, I felt bad for having feelings for someone who wasn’t my boyfriend, and in that kind of emotional avalanche that only humans seem to be capable of performing, I felt bad about feeling bad about noticing someone else. Because hey, I know several people that have multiple romantic partners, and even more people somewhere along the axis of “I’m ‘attached to’ one person, but we’re open.”

“But wait!”, you say. “Why is this on [adjective][species]? What does this have to do with furries at all?” I’m glad that you asked. It turns out that furries, as a group, are incredibly polynormative.

First, a definition, if necessary: one of the great things about English is that I can make up a word like “polynormative” and its meaning should be immediately obvious, but in case that isn’t the case, I’m defining it here as “more accepting and understanding of poly* cultures than the mean.”

It is also relatively important that we make a distinction between “multiple romantic partners” and “multiple sexual partners”, because as we’ll discover, the difference in numbers is relatively significant. For the purposes of the survey, and this article, we call the former “mono/polyamory” and the latter “mono/polysexuality.”

Both of these pairs are interesting, as each contains its own spectrum. The -amory spectrum runs from total monoamory, through sets of couples who consider one person to be a “primary” partner, to total romantic freedom. Similarly, -sexuality runs from total exclusivity, through what one commenter called “same-room openness” (both partners must be present, but they welcome a third or fourth sometimes), to total sexual freedom.

So now that the definitions are out of the way, let’s talk numbers.

Unfortunately, the go-to group for sexuality surveys, the Kinsey Group, has done exactly one survey on polyamory and polysexuality. It’s relatively fresh, being from 2000, but has one major issue: it was commissioned from Kinsey by a polyamory lifestyle magazine, and the respondents were all pulled from that magazine’s subscriber base. It seems at least somewhat likely that subscribers to a poly magazine are already interested in the subject, which makes the Kinsey survey’s extremely high numbers questionable. However, there are still a few things we can glean from this data: support for polyamory and polysexuality skews young, and skews male, both of which are the prime demographics of the fandom.

Even so, we should find a different source for a decent base number to compare against. One of the standard first-pass texts for people interested in polyamory and polysexuality is a book called The Ethical Slut, first published in 1997, but recently updated in 2009. This book references several studies, a few of which I’d like to highlight:

• The Finnish Sex Survey indicates that 8.9% of respondents believed that they could support a polyamorous relationship, and 8.2% felt that it was actually best for them at their current stage of life. This survey was only given in Finland, and thus only accounts for Finnish social norms, so take that as a caveat.
• Blumstein and Schwartz report that 15-28% of married couples surveyed allowed for non-monogamy in certain cases. This jumps to 65% for gay men, which is highly relevant to the standard furry demographic.

By comparison, the numbers in the small survey we ran here at [adjective][species] paint a much different picture:

 

 

Comparing these two gives us a few interesting points, in isolation:

1. Twice as many furries self-report as polysexual than as polyamorous.
2. Three times as many furries report as polyamorous than in mainstream society.
3. Twice as many furries self-report as polysexual than in mainstream society.

An interesting aside: before writing this article, I did an informal Twitter poll of “do you identify as monoamorous or polyamorous, and why?” The results, though I only got about two dozen responses, closely mirror the results of the [a][s] survey, which is great. The body of respondents very likely does too, in that, of n responses, n-1 of them were from furries. My follower ratio is slightly less furry-tilted than many that I know, at about 70/30 furry/non-furry, so we can informally posit that furries are also more likely to talk about these things, too.

To move on, I’d like to see what we can explore from the points we gleaned earlier.

1. Being a furry conditions us to think that polysexuality is more normal than the mean.

Recently, I was at a friend’s place for a weekly thing. The attendance list was “eight furries”, as it usually is, plus or minus a few, but the point is, this is an event where furry social norms are in full force. Everyone greeted everyone else with a hug, there were 16 names for 8 people, all that jazz. At some point during the night, one of the attendants groped me. It wasn’t incredibly invasive, as these things go: I told him to stop, people looked uncomfortable for three or four seconds, and that was that. He apologized, it didn’t happen again, and all was good.

The interesting part of that event wasn’t the event itself, but the discussions of the occurrence that happened after.

The host: “This is why I wish that I had some more non-furry friends.”

This is a sentiment that I hear with alarming frequency, and could probably get its own entire [a][s] article. In general, it’s assumed that furries are hypersexual, or at least more sexual than the average bear. This is also true of our assumptions of how the outside world sees us (ref), and statements like the one above do absolutely nothing to dispel that. “Well, if it had been a group of you and seven other random non-furry people, they wouldn’t have assumed that you were okay being touched.” The idea being put forth here is that, as a group of furries, physical contact is expected, and therefore, we’ve normalized it to the point that a random grope is as mundane as a handshake is to someone outside fandom.

This is an unfortunate supposition. After all, a person who expects his personal bubble to be maintained would be offended regardless of whether or not the person doing the bubble-bursting happens to be a furry or not. Attempting to legitimize it as “a furry thing” does active harm to the outside perception of the fandom as oversexualized. It also does no real good for the furs inside who would prefer a more typical set of rules of engagement.

Submitted as Exhibit B: A friend who wasn’t there said to me after the fact: “Yeah, people do that to me all the time, because they assume that it’s okay if I’m in a furry space.”

2. Being a non-furry operating in a mostly-furry space can skew one’s perception of norms

It’s easy to see how this would be the case, but let’s explore this a bit further. First, the social component: non-furries and furries alike accept the “multiple name” social construct to varying degrees. Personally, I attempt to find out a person’s real name relatively early to avoid conversational awkwardness, as I would prefer to never have another conversation with my mother in which I have to explain why I don’t know the name of the person who’s crashed on our couch for three days. For a non-furry, this is even worse, as “We spent the day with my boyfriend and his friend, uh…Sheppenwolf…” is a risible statement in a great many contexts.

If we advance the clock a bit, it’s easy enough to see how one can become immersed in this culture and normalize it. I, and by extension much of my social circle, have two friends that have legally changed their birth name to their furry name. Both have furry names that aren’t readily identifiable as such, so it works, but in the event that they were named “Tikkamasalacat” or somesuch, a lot of people would shift readily. After all, we’re used to using fan names as a primary mark. Mainstream society, not so much.

This translates very easily into the sexual side of the fandom, which I will discuss…now.

3. Being a monogamous furry can lead to conflict with the fandom’s polynormativity.

This is something of a logical extension of the previous two, but it’s worth touching on separately. At least one close friend of mine is strictly monogamous, and has expressed some discomfort at some of the standard furry social norms outlined above. This is a slightly extreme example, of course, but many people assume that it’s okay to hug everyone they see at any sort of gathering, without actually asking. This probably shouldn’t be the case, but many furries say that this is one of the things that they like about the fandom. Even so, one person’s idea of openness is another person’s idea of a popped personal bubble.

This bubble-maintenance can actually lead to some very interesting emotional backlash. Perhaps a monogamous furry feels as though he’s cramping the style of the stereotypical furry by shying away from physical contact, or that maintaining monogamy is somehow counter to what the fandom wants or expects. I certainly went through a bit of this myself: early in my exploration of polyamory, I felt very weird for wanting to expand past my relationship, and that quickly evolved into “but most of the people I know have multiple partners, so maybe I’m just doing this wrong.” For what it’s worth, while most of the people I know do in fact have multiple partners, or have at least experimented with such, this is just selection bias, even within the fandom.

There’s an interesting thing to explore hiding in there, too: how 25% became widely perceived to be a majority. Clearly, it isn’t, but much like “every man in the fandom is gay”, the assumption is often made that if you aren’t naturally promiscuous, this fandom is not the place for you. There are a few possible explanations for this, at least some of which are erroneous assumptions in their own right: compare, for example, the perception that all of the art on FurAffinity is porn. It’s actually somewhere around 23% (ref), and that’s “mature” and “adult” art combined, but the fact that this is the art that gets the lion’s share of the views and favorites means that the perception remains that furries are a lascivious bunch. Even if “only” 25% of the furries are in open relationships, they’re sometimes more vocal and certainly more visible, and that makes one more likely to think in terms of absolutes.

To conclude: the fandom’s polynormative nature makes sense as an extension of its openness in other ways. We have a drastically higher percentage of people who see a hug, rather than a handshake, as the standard greeting. I would also argue that the significantly higher favorite count on adult art means that people are often not viewing it in shame. So it’s pretty easy to extrapolate that to the conclusion that people who are open in general, as well as open about what they like, will be more likely to go seek that out.

The last thing to remember is that, while we are statistically more open than others, that doesn’t mean that consent isn’t still of paramount importance. Play safe, and communicate, just like you would expect to do within your relationship, and everyone can get along just fine.

In his recent article Of Rabbits and Rayguns, Phil Geusz described his fight to get the mainstream publishing industry to accept furry fiction. Phil is an accomplished writer, and he and I share a number of views and goals. He has chosen a different path than I have to attain those goals, but I think both paths are valid. In response, or perhaps complement, to his article, I’d like to offer my own thoughts.

I have for the past decade been becoming more and more familiar with the furry publishing industry. I have good friends at Sofawolf and FurPlanet and we talk business on a number of occasions. As a fairly high-profile author, I am always trying to figure out ways I can make our joint business more successful. At the same time, over the past two or three years, I have been talking with and listening to more people in the larger SF publishing world; mostly authors, but also some editors.

It’s probably instructive to define a couple things before we get into the state of the industry and its attitude toward the fandom. First, I want to draw a distinction between furry fiction and fiction with furries. Furry fiction, by my definition, is fiction in which the furries are the prominent, if not exclusive, characters, and in which their existence is accepted as a given. Fiction with furries is fiction in which furries are an explained part of the world, possibly protagonists, but not necessarily.

To give examples: my Out of Position books are furry fiction. Kevin Frane’s books are furry fiction. Watts Martin’s Ranea stories are furry fiction (but closer to the line). The San Iadras stories of foozzzball are fiction with furries (but again, close to the line). Most of Phil’s stories that I’m aware of would be in that same category, as would Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia and other underpeople stories, C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur books, Larry Niven’s Kzin books, Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger books, H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzy books and John Scalzi’s recent reboot…Fred Patten could probably add another hundred names to that list. Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music is also fiction with furries, but much further from the dividing line: the kangaroo is a secondary character, and while his existence is never really explained, he’s also not that important to the story.

The reason to draw this distinction is that we in the furry fandom are used to furries. We are so used to them that now, stories that include the Origin Of Furries as a major part are very rare. We know all the origins: space aliens, created by humans (for war or sex, usually), or humans changed by magic or a virus (sometimes a magical virus). That is no longer as important to us as what the author does with the characters.

Non-furries, by contrast, often need the origin story, and so there is a gap between what is publishable in the furry fandom and what is publishable in the larger F/SF world (there is also a gap because of the general quality of furry fiction and the barriers to publication, and that gap is actually larger than the gap attributable to world-building, but that’s another post). And that leads me to the second thing I want to define.

The publishing industry is a business. It is a tricky business, because they are taking creative properties which people have a personal investment in and attempting to gauge how many other people will relate to those properties enough to spend money on them. Publishers tend to the conservative, because if they take too many gambles, and nobody buys the books they publish, they won’t be publishing for very long.

In general, publishers lump book submissions into four categories: (1) This is awesome and everyone will buy it; (2) This is pretty good and we know we can sell it; (3) This is good but we don’t think we can sell it; (4) No.

(It will not surprise you to learn that the vast, vast majority of submissions fall into category 4.)

Right now, there is no established market for furry fiction, not in the F/SF mainstream, not in the way that there is for space opera or Tolkienesque fantasies or wizard school stories. I’ll come back to this in a moment, but what that means is that a furry book, or even a “fiction with furries” that is close to the line, pretty much has to fall into that first category to get serious consideration from a mainstream publisher. And I don’t think that book has been written yet.

(By contrast, you will see from the above examples that there is plenty of “fiction with furries” in the mainstream market, and has been for decades. There’s no publisher I know of that would reject a book they otherwise would have bought just because some characters in it are furries.)

But the good news is that there’s another way to convince publishers that furry fiction is a winning proposition, and that’s by showing them. This is what Phil is doing with his books; this is what short story sales to F/SF venues (Renee Carter Hall and Mary Lowd have both had that success this year) do; this is what strong sales by furry publishers do.

Here’s where some of the burden falls on the fandom. The furry fandom is still small by comparison to worldwide SF fandom. In the fandoms’ respective awards, the Ursa Majors, which are free to all, do not get as many votes as SF fandom’s Hugos, which require a minimum of $50 to vote. Furry fandom is, I think, more active, more vibrant, and more creative—but furries just do not read as much as science fiction fans, whose fandom is centered around books.

Fantasy and science fiction books regularly make the New York Times bestseller lists; the industry supports thousands of midlist authors who sell thousands of books. I have friends in the fandom who buy hundreds—plural—of books a year. In many ways, furry fandom is stronger than SF fandom; books, for the moment, are not one of those ways.

And this brings me back to the statement about there being no established market for furry fiction. There is, clearly, a market. Sofawolf and FurPlanet and Rabbit Valley manage to not only survive, but prosper, selling furry books, but they operate on a smaller scale than Tor, Daw, Baen, etc. The good news is that that market is growing. Phil has found success outside the fandom with his David Birkenhead series. I’ve found success outside the fandom with my Out of Position books. With every sale outside the fandom, we are showing people that they can enjoy stories with furry characters, and opening opportunities for more furry books.

It’s a slow process, but that’s the way these things happen. Are we ever going to convince everyone in the world that they should like furries? No. I occasionally see the same comments Phil talked about, from people who just have to tell the world how much they don’t get furries, and you know what? That’s fine. There are people who hate vampires, people who hate boy wizards, people who hate science fiction. In fact, I think the appearance of these protestors is actually a good sign. The fact that they feel the need to loudly state their objection means that they feel like they’re in the minority. They look around and see other people appreciating these stories, and they don’t get it, and because they don’t feel like part of the “in” crowd, they have to justify their stance.

But I think it’s a mistake to assume that mainstream F/SF publishers feel that way, simply because they say “we don’t publish talking animal stories.” I had a conversation with an editor from a mainstream F/SF publisher in which she said, “Why does there have to be a distinction between furry fiction and ‘mainstream’ fiction? Why can’t it just be about good stories?” Amen. Remember, publishers are a business. If they find a story with furries that they just can’t ignore, they will publish it.

Furry fandom is growing, and the market for furry books is growing. I’ve mentioned this before, but I think this past year was the first time all five Ursa Major Novel candidates were written by furries. I remember a time when you could walk through a furry con’s dealer’s room without seeing a single novel; now you can choose from probably about fifty of them.

Are they selling at a mainstream F/SF level? Not yet. But readership within the fandom is growing, and the fandom itself is growing. I’m pretty happy selling my books to the people who are passionate about them. The people who don’t want to read them don’t have to. I’m just glad that there is a big, growing community of people who do.

So there I was, pretending to be a fox person (as all good stories should start), when I noticed something rather strange happening. It’s probably telling that it wasn’t me pretending to be a fox person that was the strange part, but I think by this point in my life I’ve so thoroughly integrated that aspect of myself, that avatar, that not having that at least at the back of my thoughts seems outlandish.

The something strange was twofold: first, I started noticing that the way in which I interacted with others when I was doing the fox thing, down to my speech patterns, was totally different from the way in which I interacted with just about any other part of my life. Additionally, that change in style had rather profound impact on the ways in which others interacted with me, or at least with this constructed avatar. The more I thought about it, too, the more I realized that this construction of our front-stage personalities goes further than just how formally, submissively, or whateverly we act, but all the way down into the nuances of language, the subtleties of inflection, and the smallest of gestures.

As to what happened, I’ll need to go back a little bit, to about autumn of last year, in order to specify that I had left behind one of my old haunts – sort of taken a break from hanging out with some of the people that I’d spent so much time around previously.  I’m not really sure why other than life in general was changing: I’d graduated, wound up in a new job, and was spending most of my time working or perusing a few time consuming hobbies.  Jump forward to spring and summer this year, however, and I wound up back in the old online hangout that I’d spent so much of my life in the fandom.

Things had changed, though, as they often do.  Along with a few pretty big changes in my own life had come a few more subtle changes in the way I interacted with others within the context of furry, and especially in the language I used. Whereas before, I tended to interact in what I supposed was a grammatically correct if rather flowery manner, a lot of the changes in the intervening months had resulted in a shift in my language usage.  I noticed myself using more fragments, dropping the letter s from possessives and plurals, or adding it in in other places, dropping pronouns and repeating words. For example, if I we to greet, say, my friend Scruff, it’d come out as, “Makyo cheer, Scruffs! Hug and hug and hug.”   Another change was that I posed quite a bit more, and posed things that I probably could’ve said, instead (for those who aren’t into these things, on a MUCK, one may pose an action or say things “out loud”).

What had changed, in those months, to change the way in which I interacted with other people pretending to be animal-folk?  Several things, I think.  My friends group shifted, several things offline happened at once in March and after, and basically I just grew up a little, like you do.  It was one of those stretches of time where life seemed to actually advance by paces rather than holding still, and I think that had a bigger effect on things like how I interacted with others than one might have expected.

However, I don’t think the change was all that surprising, nor restricted to furry.  In the past, when I first started figuring out sexuality and how that played into my life, I bought into an expected stereotype – that is, I acted gayer because of my change in perceived sexual orientation, to the point where my husband said, at the time, that I was “too gay” for him.  I had bought into that subculture, and as I drifted away from it over time, my affected interactions calmed back down into something close to what they were before, though certainly with more freedom to express myself than I’d had, the type that comes with integrating a previously rough edge into one’s life.  Similar things happened when I started trying to figure out gender, as well, and have similarly calmed down of late.

Much of this comes down to the idea of front- and back-stage.  I brought this up way back when in order to describe the fact that we don’t present the whole of ourselves when interacting with fellow furries, but I feel that I glossed over it, then.  The idea of a front-stage persona artfully created to interact in a social setting is certainly important with furries, even if we tend to expose more of our back-stage workings to the people we’re emotionally connected to.  This is why I’m sticking to using the words ‘persona’ and ‘avatar’ moreso than ‘character’ (which slips in every now and then to keep things interesting): they more accurately describe the idea that we are constructing this version of ourselves to present to others, whereas, although ‘character’ fits in with the stagecraft metaphor, it’s been overloaded within the fandom to be a sort of second-hand reference to these avatars that so many of us create for ourselves.

Just as interesting as the changes are the ways in which others interpret these front-stage avatars.  In my case, and the thing that prompted me to think about this in the first place, this newer persona that I was presenting to others caused them to interact with me differently than they had before.  Notably, the character was treated as if it was much smaller than previously – say, 5’2″ instead of 6’2″, and perhaps eighty pounds lighter – something to be hauled or pushed around rather than merely hugged or waved to.  I should note that the location – a bar* on FurryMUCK – has what I think of as a standard mix of chat and inconsequential roleplaying that shows up fairly often on MUCKs and IRC, so such things weren’t necessarily out of place.

What happens when we interact with those that we know more than passingly is that we tailor our actions to our interpretation of their persona.  In such a case as furry, though, where that persona is often a carefully constructed avatar, that means that one is often actually guiding others’ interactions with oneself.  Of course, in any front-stage scenario, this is likely the case: viz. our contributors here on [a][s].  Each of us has a different way of getting an idea across (many of which are less wandering than this), and each attracts a different sort of interaction from readership, whether in post comments, interactions on twitter, or passing comments elsewhere.  It’s simply that in any situation involving any sort of role-playing (and here I don’t necessarily mean playing out a story or even e-hugging someone online, but assuming a role as a character and going along with it), this becomes a vastly more intentional affair.

I know I’ve written plenty before about the whole concept of character versus self; this is the flip-side of it, the side seen from the perspective of those around us.

There’s a phrase that Jon Ronson uses in his recent book The Psychopath Test that I think we can co-opt, with some modifications for helping to describe this: being “reduced to one’s maddest edges.”  This is most certainly applicable to the way I changed the way I interacted when I came out.

Before it was removed completely from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the entry on homosexuality was changed to ‘ego dystonic homosexuality’, which was, in essence, when homosexuality caused one distress.  It’s now accepted that some forms of distress surrounding coming of age or the formation of identity are a healthy part of growth, but even so, during those periods of distress, one tends to focus and think quite a bit on what it means that they don’t necessarily fit in society the same way they used to; one defines oneself by one’s maddest edges, and when those edges aren’t the roughest around, one finds that one has integrated what had been a problem into a part of one’s identity.

Within our subculture, within the group of folks out there that create these additional avatars, reduction to a subset of one’s total edges, perhaps the fuzziest ones if not the maddest ones, is simply a part of the whole game.  In the process of creating a character for ourselves, we often enhance some aspects and cover up others. We willingly reduce ourselves to some of our best, furriest edges, and we all accept that as part of the story of social interaction within the fandom.  We willingly guide others’ interpretation of our selves and we’re all okay with that.

I know ask this a lot with articles, but is this a furry thing?  Probably not.  I think there are a lot of instances, perhaps especially sexual orientation and gender identity as mentioned above, where membership in a community helps inform the edges used to construct that front-stage persona.  However, I do think that a lot of this ties in with furry on some level or another.  For one, there is the obvious connection to character creation, especially in a situation with such an obvious difference from oneself as species.

Beyond that, though, the fandom does seem to attract a lot of self-aware or other inwardly oriented folks, which I think helps build a community where avatars are so important.  43% of respondents, for example, agreed or strongly agreed that they both had a tendency to over-think things and were focused on a few specific interests, which is 10% higher than an even distribution of the same (ref).  Maybe I’m just over-thinking things, here, but I think it’s not too surprising that a social group full of focused people would be so good at constructing personas for themselves simply in order to interact with each other.  Not just constructing, but also being prepared to interact with someone who has done much the same, accepting their foxdom or wolfitude as part of their fuzziest edges.

* Of course.  Makyo’s first axiom: get enough furries together on the internet, and they will spontaneously generate a bar, club, tavern, or cafe in which to hang out.

Fly Away Home (1996) is the third of director Carroll Ballard’s four great animal films. I’ve discussed The Black Stallion (1979) in a previous article; Never Cry Wolf (1983) and Duma (2005) will come later.

Fly Away Home is the story of a tween girl who becomes the de facto mother to a gaggle of young geese. Like Ballard’s other three films, it’s entertaining, great fun, and—in partnership with cinematographer Caleb Deschanel—a spectacular exploration of the beauty of his animal stars. It’s a grown-up movie that can be enjoyed by children.

But is it a furry film? And what makes a film ‘furry’ anyway?

A quick peek at the Ursa Majors and the regular ‘Furry Movie Award Watch’ features on Flayrah indicates a strong preference for animated children’s films in the vein of Kung Fu Panda. That’s fair enough: anthropomorphic characters have always featured in children’s entertainment, including many of the reference points for the early furry fandom (Robin Hood, The Lion King). Anthro characters are rare in films intended for adults.

The [adjective][species] chronicler of the international spread of the furry community, Zik, asked for furry movie recommendations recently on Fur Affinity (link). He guessed, correctly, that people would recommend Robin Hood and Fantastic Mr Fox, and little else. So where are the rest of the furry films? Many furries, of course, enjoy those movies that are designed for children, but—as a community—we don’t seem to have a go-to oeuvre of grown-up furry movies in the way we do books or TV.

I’d argue that any film with non-human protagonists might be considered furry. Aside from the Carroll Ballard films I’m writing about here, you could include Avatar or even the Alien films in that group. Certainly, both those films will appeal to some furries on a deeper level. Fly Away Home does too: even though our geese are not anthropomorphic in any way, they are presented in a way that invokes the close personal bond that some people have with their pets.

The movie starts, as Ballard’s films often do, with death. The 13-year-old main character, Amy, is riding in a car with her mother. The only sound is music, a new version of the old folk standard, 10,000 Miles. As it turns out, 10,000 miles is the approximate distance between Amy’s parents. She is with her mother just outside of Auckland, her father (and the rest of the film) is in rural Ontario.

Fly Away Home starts in New Zealand because Amy is played by Anna Paquin. Paquin is best known nowadays as Rogue from the X-Men films: in 1995 she was 13 and had just won an Academy Award for her debut film role in The Piano.

Good child actors must be hard to find. Casting Paquin meant that the film needed to be rewritten to explain (excuse?) her New Zealand accent. The choice of 10,000 Miles to accompany the prologue presumably also came after Paquin was cast.

Amy’s mother dies in the crash, and Amy flies to join her father in the Canadian countryside. She then discovers some goose eggs abandoned due to land clearing near her new home, and we have ourselves a coming-of-age story, as Amy plays Mother Goose to a gaggle of ludicrously cute goslings.

This all happens in the first few minutes. As a viewer, it’s already obvious that this is a film with no filler. Ballard doesn’t like to advance his plot through conversation: in interviews he has dismissively referred to spoken exposition as ‘yak scenes’.

The film also stands out for having a female lead character. It shouldn’t be rare to see a coming-of-age story starring a girl, but sadly it is. This was noted by one of our commenters on my Fantastic Mr Fox article, who noted “It is harder to appreciate some of the truly spectacular stories that explore masculinity because at this point it’s largely the only option.” (Thanks Ju.)

Amy’s father is a thoroughly irresponsible parent. On Amy’s arrival, his first act is to take a dangerous ride on a hang-glider of his own invention, leading to the first of the movie’s many crash-landings. He is the one who allows—and facilitates—the idea that Amy should fly from Ontario to North Carolina to lead her geese in their first winter migration. It’s obvious that this is a terrible idea, but he encourages Amy to risk her physical safety and frames the journey in a way that risks her emotional safety as well.

Fortunately her journey, and various antics leading up to it, are hilarious and beautiful. Like all of Ballard’s films, his animal stars and the countryside are spectacular. He is also smart enough to avoid the worst of the potentially treacly story, keeping Amy’s adventures engaging and light.

Fly Away Home is an apolitical film, but it presents a fascinating moral take on the world. Consider these two lists:
Good guys in Fly Away Home: academics, the American military, hippies, TV stations.
Bad guys in Fly Away Home: capitalists, park rangers, hunters, the Queen.

In the film’s morality, these two groups are delineated in a simple way: you’re good if you go about your business without negatively affecting others; you’re bad if you assert your own desires as more important than someone else’s. It’s a kind of libertarian philosophy, but one where monolithic government-provided service providers—local TV news; scientists; the military—are considered to be essential to the social fabric. Those who blindly apply rules (aka ‘laws’) are not looked upon kindly.

It’s refreshing to see a film where the United States is morally superior to Canada, to say nothing of the moral superiority of the US military over the Queen (!).

Having said that, the film is too black-or-white at times. Storytelling efficiency is clearly a higher priority than believable minor characters, some of whom are drawn in broad shorthand: the moustache-twirling evil property developer at the end leaps to mind.

The physical comedy in the film is often too broad as well. There are a couple of slapstick scenes backed by slightly Bennyhillian music, that feel as if they have been accidentally edited in from a bad children’s film. It’s a pity, because Ballard creates some hilarious moments: not wacky misunderstandings in various states of undress, rather a baby goose falling into a toilet.

If you can forgive these small mis-steps, you have a brilliant film. Ballard’s scenes showing tiny goslings running around in Amy’s footsteps are some of the best he’s ever shot. And the scenes of the adult geese flying alongside Amy’s ultralight aircraft are stunning.

Fly Away Home is easy to enjoy and packs an awful lot into 103 minutes. It’s cheap too: I bought my DVD from Amazon, delivery included, for less than £1.50. You’d be crazy not to.

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

- The Black Stallion (horse)
- Never Cry Wolf (wolf): coming as soon as I find my DVD following a recent move
- Fly Away Home (goose)
- Duma (cheetah): coming eventually

(This is a lightly edited reprint of a column from Anthro Magazine #20)

I’ve always admired Winston Churchill, perhaps more than anyone else who ever lived. Somehow he managed to cram not one but a whole succession of lives into the span of one. He rode in the last cavalry charge of the British Army; wrote more books than most full-time authors (winning the Nobel Prize in literature along the way); became arguably the most successful columnist and reporter of his day; was a noted watercolorist; coined terms like ‘seaplane’ and ‘iron curtain’; arguably invented the tank; not only prepared the Royal Navy for World War I but also led it during the early and most crucial parts of that conflict; and sponsored key social legislation that few associate him with today. He was present on Wall Street just after the Crash of 1929, in Cuba during the insurrection against Spain, and personally fought in desperate, bloody actions in India. He remains the only person ever voted an honorary citizen of the United States, by special Act of Congress. Oh, and by the way, he also led Britain during the proudest and toughest period of her history, when she stood alone for freedom against Adolph Hitler and all of occupied Europe. Mustn’t forget that part!

He was also without question a furry, long before there was a name for such a thing.

Shocked? So was I, when I first came upon the truth while reading The Last Lion, a biography of the man by William Manchester. Unlike all the other biographies I’d read, this one was up close and personal—more about the man himself than his accomplishments. In it I learned of the troubled, attention-starved youth with a wild and vivid imagination, who couldn’t ever quite fit in and all but failed out of school because he couldn’t deal with the regimentation of rote learning. I cried with the adolescent who refused to abandon his nurse despite the fact that he was mocked for it by his peers—his parents had cast her off to live on nothing, and young Winston helped her with money from his own allowance and kept in close touch until the day she died. Later, I grew to know the brilliant young man whose keen intellect eventually became apparent to everyone, but whose poor social skills kept him an outcast. And, I have to admit, everything seemed to be fitting a familiar sort of pattern.

But I couldn’t quite put a name on it until I ran into his fursuit.

Yes, it’s true: Winston Churchill owned a fursuit. More than that, he owned a whole closet full of costumes, though apparently this was his favorite. He wore it quite frequently, it seems, playing and roughhousing with his grandchildren. As difficult as it might be to picture, according to Mr. Manchester Winston Churchill loved to dress up as a gorilla.
I blinked when I read that part, as little bells and whistles began to ring in my mind. Churchill also kept odd hours, sleeping twice a day instead of once, and did his best work late at night. In a nation noted for its eccentrics, he was an oddball. Winston loved animals deeply—his home was supposed to be a working farm, but he could never bring himself to slaughter any of the livestock and even worried for days once over a sick goldfish. More and more alarms went off…

…until finally I hit the hard, definitive paydirt, the letters between he and his wife.
Here’s a quote from Manchester…

Like other lovers, they invented pet names for each other. Clementine was “Cat”, or “Kat”, Winston was “Pug”, then “Amber Pug”, then “Pig”. Drawings of these animals decorated the margins of their letters to each other, and at dinner parties Winston would reach across the table, squeeze her hand, and murmur “Dear Cat”.

Or, at a later date…

“We are going to bathe in the lake this evening,” he told her in a typical note. “No cats allowed! Your Pug in clover, W.” And she would assure him that while he was gone “your lazy Kat sits purring and lapping cream and stroking her kittens.”

These were not one-offs, taken out of context. Due to Churchill’s odd schedule and frequent travels, he and his beloved Kat didn’t see much of each other, and even while living in the same house they wrote each other frequent letters. Practically all of them are full of love—and they’re equally full of what we today would recognize in a heartbeat as typical anthropomorphic on-line role-play.

Here’s another example, among many. In closing a long letter in which Churchill’s political enemies are clawed to pieces, Clementine wrote her husband:

“Good-Bye, my Darling. I love you very much. Your Radical Bristling—” here she drew an indignant cat.

It goes on and on and on in this vein. A modern-day fur, looking at this body of correspondence, cannot help but feel right at home. Indeed, he might even envy the easy and natural way that these two very-much-in-love individuals unselfconsciously communicated using the anthropomorphic symbols and language that clearly meant so much to them. Matters continued in this vein to the very end, as did their love. If any part of Churchill’s life can be described as filled with joy, this was probably it.

A lot of people seem to enjoy bashing furs. These same sorts of people seemed to enjoy bashing Churchill as well until he grew into such a historical giant that no one dared any longer. He started out life as an awkward, troubled, sickly and accident-prone youth that no one understood and who seemingly couldn’t get ahead. But he grew tall and strong, perhaps taller and stronger than any other man of his time. There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind that, were he alive today, we’d find him attending furcons and hanging around in furry chatrooms.

I’d submit that Winston Churchill’s furriness, along with the intelligence, creativity and sensitivity that so often accompany it, was an essential component of his colossal strength. Certainly, it was a major part of who he was, and how he saw the world.
Which apparently wasn’t, if you’re reading this, so very different from the way that you and I see it.

Normally, I keep myself a list of articles that I’d like to write for [a][s], and I try to space them out throughout the year so I don’t write, say, too many articles about art or conventions in the same time period. Another thing that I’ve instinctually stayed away from are seasonal posts.  It’s a little too easy, I think, to get caught up in the [season] spirit and doing so can cheapen the content of the post.  The last thing a lot of people really want to read, I think, is some ode to giving spilled out on a blog during the winter holidays.

So, I’m sorry.

The problem I’ve run into here is that this is one of those cases where inspiration for a specific topic coincided with the holiday season due to a few external events, and now I’m stuck really wanting to write an article for the first time in a long time despite habits saying otherwise.  It was a three-pronged attack, really, and so now here I am, writing for the first time in quite a while, looking into furries and giving.

The first event that nudged me toward this topic is a little personal (not that that’s gotten in my way in the past).  JM was kind enough to help take over most of the writing and much of the administrivia that goes into [a][s] over the last several weeks, and before I get too far into the topic of giving, I’d like to publicly thank him, at the risk of sounding maudlin, for being rather awesome about the whole thing while I get my head on straight*. Having someone willing to give the time and energy to help keep things rolling forward in the mean time has been quite helpful, and watching the response to the writings from JM and others has been immensely heartening.

On a less personal note, however, there’s been a few things going around on twitter that have been the more recent nudges to get me writing about this.  Firr started it, for me, when he posted that, for every retweet he received of this tweet, he would be donating fifty cents to the ASPCA (as some have mentioned, although that sounds like relatively little, Firr has over six thousand followers on twitter, and there’s the potential for the numbers to grow quite large). This struck me as a pretty good idea, and so a friend and I both agreed to match his donation after the “retweet-drive” had come to an end on December 25th**. We weren’t the only ones inspired, either; KalypsoPuppy set up something similar, but with a dollar given to the ASPCA for every retweet of his statement.  (Minor edit: another has popped up; BinaryFox donating to Red Cross.)  I’d not personally seen a retweet drive such as either of these before, but it does seem like it has the potential to be successful, especially given the way information propagates through twitter, along branching networks of relationships between individuals.

Another example of smaller-scale charitable works perpetuated through social networks are various benefit auctions, several of them ladder style, that have cropped on FA, The Dealer’s Den, and other such sites.  A good example of the like is the charity auction to raise money for the Rocky Mountain Feline Rescue, a ladder auction and donation drive that wound up pulling together over $4500 to help fund the shelter for several months.  Much of this took place over FurAffinity through journals as well as through several retweet-this style messages sent out by a bunch of individuals on twitter.  Similar auctions have been held in the past in order to help out causes both furry and non-furry.

If the spreading tweets on twitter and journals on FA got me thinking about furries and giving, the final straw was researching convention charities that got me thinking about writing.  Conventions, of course, often pick a charity or charities to sponsor that year with proceeds from auctions, patron or sponsor memberships, and direct donations, either from individuals or an organization, such as that which runs the convention.  Notable this year, however, was Midwest FurFest’s total donation of more than $40,500 for their selected charity, Felines & Canines, Inc. (who certainly appreciated the donation).  Not only is that number high – very high – but according to the same post (which, I apologize, I can’t link to directly; this link will eventually age out), this donation puts the total amount donated to charities by furry conventions since 1997 over a million dollars.  That is definitely a lot of money.  The number likely originates from this entry on Wikifur, which shows the dramatic increase in funding over the last fifteen years.

I did a bit of exploring of the data for three conventions in this draft of a visualization, on the hunch that the average donation per attendee had gone up as attendance at cons had increased.  It’s clearly not quite the case: there are good years and there are bad years.  However, it is exciting to see that, in general, the amount donated per convention increased each year in pace with or greater than the pace of the increase in attendance.  There are a lot of factors that go into charity donations at conventions, it turns out.  There is, of course, the charity auction, but also portions of patron or sponsor memberships go toward the charity, as well as direct donations either through collection jars or other means.  This, I think, helps explain the variance from year to year visible in some of those charts.

So, is giving a furry thing?  Probably not.  It’s not that we’re not charitable, as we obviously are.  However, I’m not sure that being a furry necessarily makes one more giving (even if, as I’ll explain later, certain things about our subculture encourage it).

Is giving a social thing, however?  Almost certainly so.  A lot of giving takes place in a social context.  Some notable examples, of course, are tithing and zakat.  Both take place within the social context of a religious (or political, in the cases where religion and politics coincide) organization, and both are intended for charitable use.  Another example is corporate matching, where a corporation will match an employee’s donation, sometimes to a list of approved charities.  This encourages the employees to donate within the social context of their workplace.  Even the very existence of charities is a social phenomenon, where individuals with a shared will to help change the world for the better in a certain aspect group together in order to form a charitable organization.

There is a lot that goes into the idea of giving and charity beyond even the social ties involved in donating to, or even participating in some sort of act of giving, whether it’s cutting a check or retweeting something when it scrolls by on your feed.  For one, there have been several studies which have suggested that giving has a positive effect on a person’s life and sense of well-being.  Additionally, one’s identity plays a role in giving; one can identify as a donor, a volunteer, or a giver, helping to add to their sense of self (ref).  Of course, beyond donations, one can volunteer directly for a cause, as several members of our subculture do, the suiters most visibly.  These two facets, donation and volunteering, can even be played off each other in order to help benefit the cause further – asking individuals how much time they would be willing to give to a cause rather than how much money can encourage them to donate more money in the end, due to the emotional implications of volunteering being added to the financial implications of simply donating (ref).

All of this fits in well within the social context of our subculture.  The impetus of giving provided by the context itself, the effect of giving on happiness and well-being, and the emotional and financial obligations involved in giving can all be seen, in some form or another, in the way we as furries give.  Whether or not one agrees with the cause itself, the donations to Fernando Decarvalho in order to help keep his business, Fernando’s Cafe, open are a prime example of this.  The social momentum came from individuals like Kagemushi and 2, while many individuals felt good giving to a businessman to help with his debts from a failing business, and furries managed to raise $21,000 for Fernando’s Cafe.

Be it in small doses such as in the retweet campaigns, a bit more in the case of charity auctions, $40,500 from an entire convention, or even helping to run a website for a while, we give do quite a lot, in this fandom.  In other words, whether or not giving is necessarily a furry thing, we seem to do quite well at it.

* Literally; much of the reason for my absence was a motor tic in my neck that makes it hard to look straight ahead. Ha ha.

** In the process of writing this article, another person has agreed to match Firr, and two of the matchers mentioned that they are being matched by their employers, meaning that each retweet, instead of being worth $0.50, is worth $3.00, so far.  As of the last edit of this post, with 599 retweets, the total donation is nearly $1,800, with KalypsoPuppy and their matcher adding $216 to that.

There are a lot of furries who have Asperger’s disorder, or at least a lot who think they have Asperger’s disorder. As of May 2013, none of them will have it: it’s being deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s in DSM-IV; it will not be in DSM-5. (Roman numerals are out too, apparently.)

Along with three other conditions—autistic disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder, and ‘pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified’—Asperger’s is being lumped into Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD. ASD reflects our understanding of autism as a universal aspect of personality rather than a specific condition. People with Asperger’s will be recategorized as having mild ASD, or as having no disorder at all.

This is very good news for people with Asperger’s, especially those with mild symptoms. (Anyone self-diagnosed with Asperger’s is highly unlikely to have ASD, for reasons I’ll explain later in this article.)

Autistic people fail to read social cues, and this leads to communication issues and inappropriate behaviour. In general, someone is classified as having ASD (as per DSM-5) if this condition is bad enough to be disabling.

Everyone, to some extent, has symptoms of autism: it’s a natural outcome of how the brain works. Our species has evolved to have certain mental traits that support our social nature: we excel at facial recognition (to the extent that we might see faces in a grilled cheese sandwich, or in sand dunes on Mars); we are more empathetic towards fellow humans than towards other animals; we unconsciously negotiate sexual interest. Autistic people have poor social skills because these parts of brains are innately limited—a genetic throwback to a pre-evolved brain.

Autism is not an on/off condition, like having a broken leg. Some people have brains that are strongly socially-wired, perhaps actors or salesmen, others are less socially-wired and tend to be more logically minded, perhaps programmers or engineers. But everyone feels socially awkward, or out of place, or humiliated, from time to time.

Compared to society at large, furries are collectively further along the autistic spectrum. Symptoms of this might include our flair for technical work, such as IT and the sciences, and perhaps in our enjoyment of fursuits, which create a ‘deindividualized’ social environment.

I see two causes that place furries further along the autistic spectrum:

1. Our demographics: we are young and overwhelmingly male. Put simply, men typically take longer than women to socially mature.
2. People with autistic traits might be attracted to furry:

Anyone who struggles to read social cues will feel disconnected from society, especially if they are going through puberty. People who are non-heteronormative or genderqueer—and this somewhere around 70% of furries (ref, ref)—are more likely to feel alienated.

For young people who feel disconnected, it may be easier to identify with an anthropomorphic animal (as seen on TV or other media) than with other human beings. Growing up, furries may internalize this identification to the point that they start to see themselves as more like the animal-person and less human. This will be important to sexual development and may become a touchstone through puberty: the animal-person becomes an alter-ego that can safely experiment with new personality traits through introspection and roleplay—for example, alternative sexual or gender identities.

(I’ve explored the value of furry roleplay as an avenue to maturation previously, Growing Up.)

It’s plausible that a sense of alienation when growing up is a strong contributor to our identity as furries. It helps that the concept of furry identity is open to interpretation, which means that we are free to explore personally useful aspects while discarding others. It also helps that the furry community is social and welcoming, filled with people with a similar internal world. Serendipitously, for many people, the social nature of the furry community provides a solution to the alienation that drew them to furry in the first place.

If the furry identity stems from this feeling of alienation, this offers an explanation for our unusual demographics:

• Furry is largely male: men, on average, are less socially developed when they reach puberty.
• Furry is geeky: geeks, largely people with sharp logical minds, are often slower to develop socially.
• Furry is largely non-heterosexual: if you are sexually queer (or genderqueer), your social development can be more difficult.

In these three examples, furries may come to identify as an animal person as a way of unconsciously abnegating personal responsibility for social failure. It also explains why some furries might self-diagnose a social disorder: Asperger’s.

It’s common for people with Asperger’s disorder to characterize themselves as feeling like a non-human, like an alien tourist in a strange society. It’s easy to see why a young furry, who feels disconnected from the world and identifies as an animal-person, would find this compelling. Asperger’s disorder is also fairly high-profile because it’s relatable—mild autism is comparable to the less permanent condition of being a teenager—and also because of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel with an apparently autistic narrator. The narrator, Christopher, is an easy character for any young adult to relate to in the Holden Caulfield sense: he’s an outsider, confounded by his constant failure to act according to society’s fluid and unsaid rules. It’s an engaging read (although it flags badly in the second half as Haddon gamely tries to narrate action through Christopher’s limited perception of the world).

Anyone identifying with Christopher from The Curious Incident is almost definitely not autistic. To identify is to demonstrate empathy, the very trait that Christopher—and anyone with Asperger’s/ASD—lacks. The same logic can be applied more broadly: if you think you have autism, you almost certainly don’t.

Autistic people are often unable to see themselves as part of society. Ironically, anyone who thinks that they don’t fit in is demonstrating that they fit in well enough to be aware of society’s norms. A feeling of alienation doesn’t imply alienation. It’s usually the opposite: a feeling of alienation implies that you are maturing and learning to assimilate.

This is the difference between being autistic and being a teenager: autistic people do not mature to the point that they can fully function within society. It’s also worth considering that maturation continues until we are about 30 years old, and that the skills that help us feel part of society—empathetic skills—are the slowest to develop (ref).

So self-diagnosis of autistic disorders is usually wrong. It’s also potentially damaging.

Labels are important things. If you believe you have Asperger’s disorder, this means that you believe you will always struggle in many social situations. You believe that you cannot mature and improve beyond a certain point, because you believe you are innately limited. If you are younger than 30 (or so), this means that you are undermining your own ability to mature and develop these skills. In sociological and psychological circles this is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy, defined as ‘a false definition of a situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come true’ (ref).

The deletion of Asperger’s from DSM-5 means that doctors can no longer diagnose autistic disorders without evidence of symptoms in early childhood (ref). It’s easy to misdiagnose autism in an older child who is slow to socially mature. Psychologists have been long aware of the danger of such labels: a false diagnosis of Asperger’s can harm someone who would otherwise mature a little later (possibly as a well-adjusted furry).

It’s not just Asperger’s. Among psychologists, there is growing awareness of the danger of labels. For example, a 1997 meta-study on child sex abuse concluded that many people have had positive sexual experiences when a child: consider the trope of the 14 year old boy who has sex with the babysitter. The study recommended that not all children be labelled (and treated) as victims of abuse, because doing so could retrospectively harm someone who would otherwise be fine. (The study, unfortunately, was ignored after it was formally condemned in the United “Think of the Children” States Congress, ref.)

Self-diagnosis of Asperger’s is common because it’s natural for a child, who is slow to develop socially, to define himself as different. All children feel that they are the centre of the universe. When an intelligent, analytical child looks around, it’s clear that the outside world doesn’t treat him as anything special. The inconsistency between his internal world and the external world creates conflict and a feeling of disconnection. This child may read about autism and falsely self-diagnose as having Asperger’s. He would be much better off if he self-diagnosed as a furry, a label that encourages personal growth, as opposed to the self-limiting label of Asperger’s.

How do you tell if you’re autistic? Here’s what the DSM-5 says:

People with ASD tend to have communication deficits, such as responding inappropriately in conversations, misreading nonverbal interactions, or having difficulty building friendships appropriate to their age. In addition, people with ASD may be overly dependent on routines, highly sensitive to changes in their environment, or intensely focused on inappropriate items.

 

It’s impossible to self-diagnose. If you lack communication skills, you also lack the ability to assess the quality of your communication skills. People with ASD tend to be anosognosic, in that they are unable to perceive their disability (ref).

Your parents, or older siblings, are better placed to judge. They saw you grow up and will have noticed any symptoms in early childhood, which always occur in autistic people (by definition, ref). Otherwise, ask a doctor: they will use a simple written or verbal test to judge whether you have ASD. Everyone has autistic tendencies: it’s a question of the level of impairment.

If you have self-diagnosed as having Asperger’s, or if you were diagnosed when young, it may be time to reconsider. You may wish to think of yourself as logical and analytical, positive identity traits that allow room for you to learn and grow. Your analytical nature will help you learn new skills including improved empathy, if you apply your mind and approach the problem logically. You might begin by broaching the topic with similarly-minded furries.

I’ve been a semi-professional writer for many years now. I published my first short
story in about 1999, and since then have written and published about twenty-
two or twenty-three vaguely book-length thingies (I tend to write a much higher
percentage of novellas than most authors, frequently sold to the public as shorter
than standard books) plus I’ve lost count of how many shorts. While I mostly write
furry and furry SF, I also do horror, non-furry SF, essays, fantasy and even good old
conventional literary fiction. So I know the publishing industry a little, or at least I
think I do.

Over the past year, I’ve achieved my first real landmark success in the David
Birkenhead books, in which a young slavebunny is manumitted and finds success
in a future navy despite all the social roadblocks that lie in his way. Each book in
the series is titled after the rank that David achieves during the course of the story,
from Ship’s Boy to Admiral. Currently my publisher and I are ecstatically selling
well over a thousand copies a week. So far so good and yay for me, right? Maybe.

As I said, I’ve been dealing with the publishing industry—and through it, in theory
at least, the wants and needs of book-buyers—for some time. Over and over again
the “big guys” have rejected my stuff even though in my own opinion many of
my previous works have been better than the Birkenheads. More often than not
I got a rejection letter saying something like “Good work—you’re writing at the
professional level. But we don’t publish talking animal stories.” Then they’d add
nitpicky comments about my personal style that usually were in direct contradiction
to the nitpicks I received the time before. It was obvious that the “talking animals”
were the real problem, especially for my serious furry SF stuff, even though the
science involved wasn’t just clearly justified in the work in question but was
often the root of the theme and the driver of the plot. Without the talking animals,
which in my case were usually rabbits, the book was nothing. And because my
own best ideas most often are equally rooted in furry imagery, well… It was clear
that something would have to give. I could either compromise my art to meet the
unspoken “no furries allowed” rule at the big publishing houses—which their other
comments made clear was what they really wanted—or I could be true to my muse
and accept that I’d never do business with the mainstream book industry.

So I set out to beat the big publishers at their own game and sell furry fiction despite
everything the closed-minded bastards could do to stop me. At this point I had
written three multi-book series that I truly believed were of professional quality
and could sell well if given the chance. (One of these three was the Birkenheads.)
I sent one each to three small publishers (two of them furry-fandom based) and
commenced hostilities against the mainstream. As of today, I can almost claim
victory. The Birkenheads, as mentioned above, are currently selling at a rate well in
excess of a thousand a week and, as I type this, all seven volumes are in the Amazon
Kindle Science Fiction Top 100. Sure enough the other two series are now selling well too, though not at the same blistering rate. I can claim complete vindication and declare victory.

Almost.

There’s still one major thing wrong, which I didn’t anticipate and perhaps should’ve.
While most of the reviews of the Birkenhead books are embarrassingly positive, a
very significant minority of readers apparently are driven to the point of rending
their clothing and gnashing their teeth when, about five pages or so into Ship’s
Boy, they discover (having failed to read the book’s “blurb”, which would’ve
warned them) that they’ve been reading a story told from the viewpoint of an
uplifted rabbit (capital-R Rabbit, in the nomenclature of the series). Something
about this is apparently hideously repulsive to them at the core identity level, to
the point that in their reviews they do things like claim my parents must’ve been
alcoholics. (No, I didn’t make that one up.) Others state that this is proof that I know
nothing of science—apparently ray guns and FTL travel are far more “scientific”
than genetic engineering and species uplift. Some go so far as to call the work
well-written, but say it’s “impossible” for them to get into the character. One even
suggested it’d be a good book if the protagonist had been an alien instead.

It’s easier to relate to a complete alien than a Rabbit?

Don’t get me wrong here. At this point I can gaze serenely upon such reviews and
laugh all the way to the bank. I’m being well compensated for acting as a public
target, and by far the majority of the comments are supportive and positive. I’m not
after sympathy here. Rather, I’m seeking to understand something.

Why exactly is it that some readers react so strongly, even violently, to the idea of a
serious story being told from the viewpoint of a Rabbit?

Usually in these columns I try to offer some sort of insight—possible answers to the
questions I raise. This time, however, I find myself pretty much at a loss. All long-
time furs recall an era when our fandom was seen as something sick and repulsive,
and indeed this period may well not yet be over. For when I read the public Amazon
reviews on Ship’s Boy and to a lesser extent the later volumes of the series, I see
the public’s reaction to furry in microcosm. Mostly these reviews reflect open-
minded support and people who like to have fun, yes. And bless them for it! But I
also see a large minority who for reasons I literally cannot imagine instantly become
totally unhinged at the idea of seeing the world through anthropomorphic eyes. If
you read their comments, it’s like they felt the need to ritually purify themselves
by expressing immoderate outrage and indignation after exposure to such an
unclean influence. Theirs is an attitude that cannot be reasoned with—it goes far
deeper than that. The subject fascinates me; I think there’s real knowledge to be
gained about basic human nature if a way can be found to research the matter
systematically.

And I hope this research someday is indeed actually done. Because only now, after
declaring war on the mainstream publishers and then beating them in terms of sales
do I realize that the real battle is only beginning. The one the publishers knew about
all along, and were rejecting me over. And why shouldn’t they? After all, it’s not their
fight. Why risk having their products plastered with negative reviews that resonate
with John Q. Public despite their inherent irrationality?

The real fight, I’ve learned from all this, is the one that will someday allow everyone
everywhere to understand that it’s okay to experience the universe through
whatever set of eyes they choose. Everything else is merely a subset of this larger
battle, and it’ll be more a matter of freeing people from themselves than anything
else. Combat is only just beginning in earnest, and I’m not a young man anymore.
I probably won’t live to see the end of it. But by golly I mean to get my licks in
regardless!

Being furry can help your employment prospects. The connectedness of furries means that we are exposed to new people and new opportunities. This is true for any social network but it’s especially true for the furry world.

The business world is not a level playing field. Ideally, people would be employed and promoted based on competence, but this is not always the case. Some people have unfair advantages: the boss’s son; the alum from an elite university; the captain of the football team. Other people may unfairly suffer, such as those from disadvantaged backgrounds or anyone perceived to ‘not fit in’.

Unfair advantages are often examples of the adage “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. In the management consulting world, these are known as informal networks.

Famously effective informal networks include Skull & Bones, Yale University’s secret undergraduate society, with members including George H.W. and George W. Bush, and 2004 Democratic challenger John Kerry among many others. While the members of Skull & Bones are an intelligent group, undoubtedly many of their number have been helped by having friends in high places.

The value of informal networks can also be seen in those people who know – through friends or family – a professional or tradesman. Legal queries are easy if you can call a lawyer; medical opinions are easy to find if you live with a doctor; computer problems are easy to solve if you’re related to a furry.

Companies will usually develop a structure that is intended to define the passage of communication: guidance flows from the CEO down to the workers, and results are reported up the chain. Many companies have a formal organization chart to depict this, along with role descriptions for each of the employees to clearly show appropriate lines of communication. However these structures are only part of the story – in reality, workers tend to communicate with their friends, or peers, or whoever happens to be sitting near them.

Management consultants try to model these informal networks of communication to see how they affect the business (see here for an introduction). Some communication can be beneficial to the company; some can be harmful. Thanks to this research, it’s also possible to understand how informal networks can help (or hinder) an employee.

In management-consultancy jargon, it’s good to be a “mobile” employee. A mobile employee is one who is more likely to be promoted within the company, or more likely to leave for a better job. These opportunities means that mobile employees are less likely to be stuck, and likely to earn more money.

From a manager’s perspective, mobile employees are difficult. They tend to command higher salaries but are often critical to the function of the company. If a manager loses a mobile employee, it can take two or more people to adequately fill the role.

Furries are often mobile employees, for three reasons:

1. The furry world provides a broad range of connections. A typical furry group is more heterogeneous then a typical peer group. Accordingly, a furry is more likely to know people in different roles within his industry: perhaps technical, low-level support, management, the self-employed, service providers. Such connections can give access to information that might otherwise be difficult (or impossible) to attain.

For example: an engineer furry might learn from a friend that a desirable job will soon become available.

2. The furry world has a lot of people working in similar industries, particularly white-collar technical roles. The sheer number of potential connections increase the likelihood that a fur will learn useful new information that is not available to her colleagues.

For example: a programmer furry might be able to cast for opinions of an alternative development environment without having to spend time and effort performing research.

3. There is implied trust between furries. (This is a feature of our community I touched upon in my article titled The Furry Accommodation Network.) This means that furries are more likely to communicate freely and with respect, so the connections tend to be high quality as well as numerous.

For example: a furry in a management position looking for a new employee may broadcast the opportunity in furry networks, because the implied trust makes hiring a furry a less risky (and more fun) proposition.

These three reason are those that management consultants use to identity mobile employees. I think that there is another, overlooked, reason that can increase someone’s exposure to new opportunities: the ability to move interstate or overseas for a new role.

A long-distance move is risky. The risk, at least from an employer’s point of view, is that the newly moved employee (and family) may not ‘settle’ in the new environment. Potential employers will usually offer a bonus to someone moving into a new area, often dressed up as “relocation expenses”. This bonus is designed to retain a new employee who might be otherwise unhappy in their new location, hoping that the money will translate to loyalty.

Relocated employees often struggle because they have lost their social life. This is especially common when the new employee comes with a Significant Other, who doesn’t gain the social benefits of the new workplace. For furries, this is an easily surmountable problem: there are furry groups to be found everywhere. (And a lot of our social world is online anyway.)

Research also shows that there is no correlation between the position of someone within a network and their personality (ref). Furries who are introspective and shy are just as likely to be mobile and/or high-value to a company. The loudest people often receive the most attention in an office environment, however these people tend to foster low-quality connections. The quieter introverts tend to forge more valuable friendships.

Finally, online social networks provide a special challenge for employers. There is little research on the effect of such networks owing to their relative newness (the world of research moves slowly), however early results suggest that networks like Facebook provide advantages to employees at the cost of the company. For this reason, many companies decide to block or limit social networking sites even though this is an unpopular decision. This is especially true in industries with few ‘mobile’ employees: companies are concerned about the cost of unwittingly exposing their employees to better opportunities.

These opinions should be taken with a grain of salt. Most of the conclusions on the effect of online social networks are drawn from a landmark 2009 study on Microsoft’s employees (link). The social networks investigated, from most common to least common, were LinkedIn, Facebook, Live Spaces, MySpace, Orkut, and Friendster. Twitter was mentioned in a footnote (no word on Fur Affinity). Clearly results drawn from this study are out of date, a conclusion reinforced by tone of the discussion (“MySpace remains the choice of geeks”).

One final interesting, if largely irrelevant, point: furry networks also resemble dark networks, as understood in the context of terrorism and terrorist cells. In dark networks, the source of power is obfuscated. It’s comparable to furries on Twitter, in that many accounts are private so it can be difficult to follow the progression of an idea. Social networking analysis was used to guess the location of Saddam Hussein’s hideout: furries trying to track down someone on Twitter might (informally) use a similar technique, starting with known acquaintances and looking for a key furry who might provide a direct connection (ref).

The value of these informal networks will be felt differently by different furries. They are most likely to be strong in furry-rich industries, such as tech. They are less likely to be useful in industries with few furries, or in so-called “dead end” blue-collar jobs where mobility may be difficult or impossible.

In extreme cases, some lucky furries will find new jobs and prosper largely through the strength of the informal furry network; others will see no benefit at all. However it’s nice to know that it’s not just Skull & Bones getting an unfair advantage.

Furry is an evolving phenomenon. This article is an attempt to capture where our community is now, and how we got here.

Furry’s First Wave, its origin and consolidation as a unique phenomenon, lasted up until the turn of the century. Furry is currently in its Second Wave, a fast-growing adolescence.

The First Wave of furry is neatly captured in Retrospective: An Illustrated Chronology of Furry Fandom, hosted on Flayrah (http://www.flayrah.com/4117/retrospective-illustrated-chronology-furry-fandom-1966-1996).

The First Wave defined the furry community. Furry began as an offshoot of sci-fi fandom and almost immediately become notable for production of original anthropomorphic content. Furry had less of a focus toward pre-existing art than sci-fi fandom, and in this way furry started to transcend the usual boundaries of a fandom. Over time, furries started to explore the idea of “being” a furry, and a struggle developed between those who considered furry a part of their personal identity, and those who saw furry as a fandom. Furries roughly spilt into these two groups: so-called ‘lifestylers’ and ‘fans’.

Culture wars between the lifestylers and the fans defined the First Wave. The lifestylers openly incorporated sexuality into their identity. The fans were dismayed by the permissiveness shown towards extremes of behaviour, particularly where sex was involved. The furry fans put a premium on quality and family-friendliness, creating Yerf; the furry lifestylers put a premium on acceptance and open sexuality, creating VCL.

The fundamental conflict was simple. For the fans, furry was something you enjoy. For the lifestylers, furry was something you are.

The lifestylers won the culture wars and, in the Second Wave, have become the furry mainstream. There are still furry ‘fans’ however they have typically been around since the First Wave. Furry is a broad church and fans are not excluded: it’s simply that new furries tend to take up an animal-person identity with a species and a new name by default.

Furry is still maturing. Second Wave furries are continuing to explore the idea of furry identity, and also starting to consider the community’s culture and values.

(A note on terminology: I like ‘community’ as a description of our collective although ‘fandom’ is probably more common, and is used by other writers on this site. I’d argue that ‘fandom’ is deprecated because, while there are many fans within furry – anime, MLP, Redwall, etc – we are collectively not fans of anything in particular. This is where furry deviates from fandom: we created and propagate a furry universe, a virtual reality of animal-people that exists parallel to the real world.)

Early expressions of Second Wave furry included some conventions (notably ConFurence, which received a lot of criticism for being overtly sexual) and FurryMUCK. In these spaces, furries presented as if they were their animal-person avatar, a furry cultural norm that is now widely accepted. Most furry spaces are Second Wave although this is not always the case: arguably of the two Australian furry conventions, MiDFur (with occasional non-furry guests) is First Wave, whereas the newer Furry Down Under (with a focus on socializing and fursuiting) is Second Wave.

The maturation of furry is reflected in media coverage. During the First Wave, those willing to publicly discuss furry were often on the fringes of the group, and were largely selected to reinforce the freakshow element. Serious attempts to understand furry, such as a 2001 Vanity Fair article, were largely hijacked by furries who were unwilling or unable to act in a socially appropriate fashion. As I have said before here on [a][s], the most visible members of a minority are rarely the best ambassadors. The result was cringeworthy, and furries ran a mile from the image portrayed in the media.

This is no longer the case. Second Wave furries are collectively comfortable with the idea of furry as an identity. Media outlets, regardless of whether they have honourable intentions, are presented with a community that knows how to present itself. Coverage often tends to focus on the more unusual aspects of furry, or even the range of sexualities on display, but the overall vibe is usually one of disinterested acceptance. The visibility and city-wide acceptance of Anthrocon during its annual residency in Pittsburgh is a good example.

I saw Anthrocon’s Sam Conway speak a few years ago, and he went out of his way to talk about furries who held respectable positions in the real world. He mentioned furry aeronautical engineers, medical doctors, and the like. It was a speech from someone who was trying to convince himself – and his audience – that the First Wave furry stereotypes no longer apply. He was, like Ophelia*, protesting too much, as if he could will such a situation into being. They were the words of someone who had experienced the worst of the First Wave furry culture first-hand, where furry’s reputation was repeatedly tarnished in the media by extreme elements of the group.

Conway’s concerns are reasonable but out-of-date. Nowadays, the idea that furries might be innately unemployable is all but nonsensical.

However the perceptions of the furry group in the First Wave suffered from the actions of a visible minority. Furries distanced themselves from such behaviour, insisting that real furries are people who simply, “have an appreciation for anthropomorphic characters”.

Pre-emptively defensive sentiments like Conway’s persist on Wikipedia. There are hardworking wiki-guardians who maintain furry’s entry, the highest-profile source of information for someone unfamiliar with the community. It opens with:

“The furry fandom is a subculture interested in fictional anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities and characteristics.”

The article provides an alternative definition of furry for “furry lifestylers”, quoting a line from Usenet that is about 20 years old:

“…a person with an important emotional/spiritual connection with an animal or animals, real, fictional or symbolic.”

Wikipedia’s portrayal of furry, like Conway’s speech, is firmly First Wave. We no longer need to act so defensively: our collective image is no longer shaped by a few outliers.

Fandom, as opposed to furry, is still largely perceived as a collection of social rejects. In many cases it’s reasonably applicable: if you are obsessed with Hamtaro (say), it’s likely that you are either very young or you have a very limited relationship with the wider world. The stereotype of the narrow-minded geek, that of Comic Book Guy or the stock action-figure-collecting sitcom character, is one of fandom. Furries are still pretty geeky and fandom-oriented – 61% of us describe ourselves as ‘a fan of science fiction’ (Ref Furry Survey) – but it’s no longer the driving force of our community.

(I don’t want to suggest that fandom geeks are any better or worse than furries. I’m merely trying to describe the progression from furry’s First Wave and its fandom origins, to today’s Second Wave. I appreciate that my embrace of fandom stereotypes is reductive and possibly a little insulting. I mean to say that fans will be over-represented by Comic Book Guy, not that all fans are like that.)

Furry media is largely Second Wave. Our social sites – Fur Affinity, Inkbunny, Sofurry – are Second Wave almost by definition, as furries socialize nearly exclusively as animal-people. Meta furry sites, like Flayrah and [adjective][species], who look at furry with a critical eye, are also Second Wave. There are still echoes of the First Wave culture wars however these are largely marginalized to ‘below the line’ forums, comment threads, and the juvenalia of 4Chan and Encyclopaedia Dramatica.

One of furry’s greatest features is that it is decentralized. We do not have a universally-respected figurehead or a formal code of conduct. Our culture and our community are fluid. Our most useful tools are those which allow furries to come together as a loose collective: conventions, social media, art depositories.

As we grow – and we are growing worldwide, fast – our culture is consolidating. New furries learn to abide by the unwritten rules of the pre-existing furry culture. This maturation is the furry Second Wave. Keep your whiskers erect and your ears perked for signs of the next step forward.

* corrected typo on 20-Dec-12 spotted by the furcast.fm crew. Thanks guys.