[adjective][species]

It’s common for furries to look within the community for potential long-term partners. For many people who are serious about furry, like me and presumably many of the readers of this article, a potential partner is required to be furry.

It’s logical that furries will form relationships together, because furry is about identity. If your identity as a virtual animal-person is internally important, you’re going to want to share that with your partner and express that within your relationship. I can’t think of a better example than [adjective][species]‘s own Makyo, who was married last week and posted a thoroughly charming picture of him and his partner in suit.

Furry is a very social group and it’s easy to meet new people, so there are a lot of opportunities for relationships. That is, unless you are heterosexual and male.

If you’re a heterosexual male and you want to find a partner within the furry community, your odds aren’t good. The ratio of eligible men to eligible women is about 3:1. And that’s being optimistic.

Here’s how I arrived at this ratio. Anyone not interested in the maths may wish to look away now.

Firstly, some assumptions and simplifications:

• All my data comes from the 2011 furry survey.
• I’ve lumped the pansexuals in with the bisexuals for convenience.
• I’ve excluded asexuals.

And the base statistics:

• Men make up about 80% of the furry population; women 20% – this split is pretty consistent if you look at biological sex or self-reported gender.
• The proportion of straight:bi:gay men in the furry community is 37:34:25%.
• For women, it’s 46:41:8%

And the maths:

• I exclude gay men and gay women.
• I assume that bisexual men and women can end up with opposite-sex or same-sex partners based on availability. (So bisexual men end up with mostly other men, simply because there are more gay/bi men available than straight/bi women.)
• Based on this calculation, I exclude the proportion of bisexuals who end up with same-sex partners.
• This leaves us with just those men (straight or bisexual) who are competing for available women (straight or bisexual).

The results:

• 46% of furries are men available for a female partner.
• 16% of furries are women available for a male partner.

In all likelihood, this is optimistic for men seeking heterosexual relationships within furry. Women are a small minority, but they also tend to identify less strongly as furries (according to the furry survey, although this isn’t reported anywhere public). So I’m guessing that this means that furry women are less likely to look inside the community for a partner, which will further deplete the available women.

A further problem is that the furry community is not very welcoming to the small number of women that do socialize. I am aware of several occasions where women have had trouble with unwelcome attention from guys within furry. This annoyance has crossed the line into sexual harassment and sexual abuse all too regularly. Of the furry women I know, a very high proportion have suffered. I have no doubt that this is a contributing factor to the small number of furry women, and their lack of engagement with the community.

There is also a sizeable minority of gay male furries who exhibit a less aggressive antipathy towards women. Their attitude might be described as Calvinesque, as in Hobbes. While there is often a lighthearted element to an “ew girls gross” attitude, it is still unwelcoming.

This problem is not restricted to the furry community. Inherent sexism is a problem in many male-dominated geek fandoms, an issue that is starting to be addressed in some circles.

Last year, a Texan gamer group decided to ban women from attending a LAN event. The bigotry was punctuated by irony: organizers decided the event should be male-only because they were worried that women attending the event would be subject to sexist comments.

Happily, the group was widely attacked for their sexism. It’s about time that sexism within furry was addressed as well.

A quick caveat: acceptance that the furry community is inherently sexist does necessarily not imply that furries are sexist. It is a norm – there are patterns of behaviour within the group that make it unwelcoming for many furry women. As standards with the community change, furries will adjust and act accordingly.

The best, and easiest, step towards change is to start talking about how women are treated within the furry community. It’s important. More happy furry women will make the group better for everyone.

As mentioned before, I’ve been totally slammed by offline things over the last few weeks.  It’s been crazy, it’s been fun, and it’s certainly left almost no time for the writing process besides thinking in bed before sleep. There certainly is a place for that in writing, however, and so I hope you’ll all forgive me for a post consisting mostly of introspection.  Now that things have mostly cleared up, I hope that I’ll be able to get back into the swing of writing about the fandom in a less navel-gazey way.  Until then, here are three ideas that I’ve not been able to get out of my head, recently.

Process in Furry

When I was working my way through my music composition degree, I wound up fixating on one particular style of composition that has stuck with me to this day.  There are as many ways of writing music as there are composers (many more, really), but one can discern general trends in the process of creation.  I’ve mentioned this before, actually, in the introduction to the article on meaning within the fandom.  There is the watercolor method of writing, which I’m going through now: starting at the top and writing until you’re finished.  In contrast to that, there is the carefully sculpted architectural method of writing, where one creates a blueprint then writes an article to match.

It’s similar within music composition, and the style that I latched onto was process music, which is something of a synthesis of the strictness of form so important only a few hundred years ago and the freedom implicit in the postmodernist ideal.  Within process music or process composition, one doesn’t necessarily work with a form, but with a defined transformation.  One of the most common ways of enacting the process is to come up with a set musical idea, a motive, and applies the transformation to it over time in order to help construct the piece of music.  The use of the word ‘help’ is key there; the idea of a transformation in music is not a new one.

In the early-mid twentieth century, the idea of a transformation was extended to the twelve-tone row (where one sets the twelve tones of the western scale in a certain order and makes that a primary motive to be used in the piece).  One transformation is to simply shift the piece over some number n where n is less than twelve (as a twelve-tone row is a mode of limited transposition – more on this later), but one may also take every instance where one tone in the row goes up to the next tone and make it go down the same number of steps instead, and vice versa; or to play the row backwards.  Of course, these are just transformations working on the same set of material; a very strict process, as it were.

The process music that I found myself working with in my career follows a much looser standard, playing with the motive much more freely, while still applying a process to it over time.  This was explained to me in terms of music that I had already written, however, and as with most all retrospection, it was something which I found applicable in many aspects of my life, such as when one learns about archetypes and, on looking back over their life, finds such scattered throughout, almost exactly where one would expect them.

The way in which I found myself thinking about processes in furry was within the context of conventions.  When I interact with my furry friends online, when I interact with my furry friends in person, and when I interact with furries at a convention, I’m often struck by the how we continue the wayss in which we socialize within the constraints of the medium.  Put differently, I feel that I interact with furries in much the same way, no matter the medium, and all that happens is that I tend to put the interactions through a transformative process in order to fit them to the setting.  The ways that I talk and move within the fandom, and the shifting settings and participants aren’t mere pixels in some rasterized picture of my life, but more like vectors, something purer that traces tracks through time (and I freely admit that that is an enormously nerdy analogy).

I suppose a lot of this is fairly obvious stuff, but I find it all very interesting, because of the correlation to music, another very important aspect of my life.  Indeed, the parallel can be drawn through most aspects of my life, or even through trends in history.  Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of processes recently, though, due to the recent familial conflagration that took place at our house during the marriage, and all that lead up to it.  It was easy to see it as a single event, a goal.  Then I started remembering the similar gathering that took place at graduation, at various birthdays, and so on, and it became a little clearer that life is more of a process that we experience over time, rather than simple events taken out of time.

In the long run, I suppose we all deal with transformations of a motive throughout our lives. We’re bound, whether consciously or not, to certain themes present in the world, and it’s only the passage of time that helps us to change or be changed by them.  It’s a little bit of the old “there is nothing new under the sun,” to be sure, but it’s also heartening to think of the paths we make through each other’s lives as we live out the processes of our lives in proximity with each other.

Evolution Within a Subculture

If one were to take a step back from the individual paths that we make in life and look at humanity as a species, it becomes clearly that we’ve really got a good thing going on with tool use.  We’ve been at this whole “living on Earth” thing for quite a while now, and we seem to have grown accustomed to our surroundings, or, failing that, grown accustomed to making our surroundings fit our needs and wants.  Sure, we started small with simple knives of stone and bone, then moved up through hammers and thongs to hammers and tongs, through stone to wood and bronze, iron, steel, titanium.  We’ve surpassed many other species in a great many ways, arguably right up to species primacy.  This is the process taken to the utmost extreme.

Similar things happen within societies, when one takes a step back inwards: civilizations rise and fall, and change with the times.  The Romans, they did great!  Certainly a gold star for the republic, and then the empire gets special marks for effort, to be sure.  But they aren’t alone, of course.  The Greeks, the Tsardom of Russia, the various monarchies of Europe, and so on, have all striven forward and achieved primacy in their own times.  America did likewise, and even believed strongly in its own exceptionalism for quite a while, and we shall see where that leads.  Needless to say, the same sort of evolution and process holds true on a cultural level, as well as a species level.  Neal Stephenson discusses this in many of his books – whether it’s the Chinese ti in his book The Diamond Age or the struggle of societies in The Cryptonomicon.

All of these struggles also surround tool use, in a way.  The members of cultures are tools of the culture, as are the things they create.  Not only did the individuals of the Revolutionary War help cement American exceptionalism in the cultural mindset of the times, but the use of inventions such as the atomic bomb helped to solidify them during times of stress.  I’m being a little glib, of course, but the point stands: the use of what we’re given in order to build with what we’ve got better than the others describes much of human civilization, in the macro or micro sense.

There was, however, one invention that, at least to some extent, changed up the order a little bit, simply by virtue of ignoring the previous geopolitical boundaries already in place.  The Internet’s a great and grand thing – where would [a][s] be without it? – but it’s shifted the race to primacy, at least in terms of social stability, one step closer to the individual from species and culture.  The subculture is something that surely existed before the Internet, of course, as one had such things within occupations and hobbies, but without necessarily the same ease of communication.  With the advent of the communications age, the subculture gained a greater deal of prominence within the lives of those so enabled.  A hobby moved beyond something one might do with close local friends and by oneself in the basement, and into something one shared with like-minded individuals with a fervency that was magnified by a technology that mostly just aided in communication using written language for a good deal of its existence.

Taken that way, the contiguous furry fandom these days has a lot going for it.  We know our tools very, very well.

Furry fits in nicely on the web: by virtue of having much of the primary purpose of its existence based around socialization, role playing, and communication, a medium that lends itself particularly well to such things was quite the opportunity for the growing fandom.  It’s not simply that we’re all tech-savvy individuals, as that’s demonstrably not the case, there are weekly journals in my own watch-list on FA and daily statuses on Twitter made by furries requesting tech-help.  Simply being savvy with the underlying technology isn’t what makes all of this so useful to us, no, it’s tied into something deeper, something which will help to ensure the stability of our subculture in many ways.  Furries are savvy, instead, in the concept of social currency within the context of their fandom.

The whole idea of social currency suddenly became much more important with the invention of the ‘net.  One could have all the money in the world, or only enough to afford the means with which to communicate on the ‘net effectively, and one could become rich in social currency: the sharing of ideas and words with those seeking them out.  It’s a little bit cynical, perhaps, and not very flattering for us, but [adjective][species] acts in its own way within that structure, bolstering its own social currency by providing the ideas contained by the authors, both of articles and comments, to a wider audience – not simply forcing it on them by way of intrusive advertisements, but by making it a genuine resource available to those in search of it.  We do our best to earn our social revenue, but we are, when it comes down to it, actively seeking it out.

Furries seem to be all about this, too: there are paid sites with limited-distribution furry images and stories, comics available only in hard-bound format, and countless individuals seeking profit in the more standard sense.  However, for every image that’s available only in a paid format, there are tens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of images freely available to a wide audience through venues provided free of charge.  And just as some form of man grew and rose to some form of species primacy, just how some forms of government grow and rise to some form of primacy in their respective times, the fandom is growing and rising into a space that sometimes seems made for it (avatars in SecondLife, anyone?).  We’re evolving to fit the environs and growing in stability as we do so.

The Self-Aware Fandom

I know that I have written about the idea of the contiguous fandom before, as that which is made up of those who identify as members of the fandom such that a semi-coherent group is formed.  It’s worth mentioning that in many cases, the idea of ‘identity’ is used to describe something that is pathological, or differing from the norm.  For instance, I brought up the idea of basing a portion of my identity on my successes with my psychologist, and we wound up spending the next several weeks talking about what exactly could be causing such a problem.  It’s not so much that we have identities, of course, we all do, but that when we are conscious of our identities, it’s indicative of some pathology, something differing from the norm, or some dis-ease; we may always identify as male, but when the idea of gender identity rises to the surface and occupies one’s thoughts unbidden, then we start thinking of gender identity disorder.

Doubly interesting, then, that furry has become a matter of identity.  It’s been brought up on twitter, at least, that many within the fandom may feel some sort of species dysphoria, or dissatisfaction or depression associated with the feeling of being the wrong species.  While I went through a period wherein I would have agreed to that, I don’t think that’s the case for myself anymore, and I’m not sure that describes a majority of the fandom, either.  I think we have something subtler and more interesting going on with the fandom.  It seems a simple thing for us to say that we are furries, and yet [a][s] is only the most blatant instance of furries exploring or attempting to explain furries, even to other furries, never mind the world at large.  Perhaps it’s a symptom of the participation mystique I’ve brought up before, and perhaps not, but it’s worth exploring either way.

The idea of a furry identity is consistent with even a cursory observation of the contiguous fandom.  The two examples that seem to show themselves most clearly is the combination of apologetic and defensive attitudes in regards to adult content, and the self deprecation that takes place in so many of the social outlets as favored by members of the fandom.

The first of these, I believe, is due in part to a sense of just how loose-weaved the fandom is  perceived to be by its adherents.  What appears to be a split between those who are avid consumers and producers of adult content and those reject that it is a large part of the  experience of being furry may in fact be so visible because of the simple perception that there is great diversity in the membership of the subculture, and the whole gamut between porn-obsessed freaks and those who are either most innocent of or staunchly opposed to the adult content that exists within the fandom.  This site is not the only outlet of meta-furry content out there – I see fairly regular journals and mention of many of the topics we’ve covered and will cover here.  Furry is something we obviously spend a lot of time thinking about, it’s an identity that doesn’t necessarily always sit naturally within our concepts of self and how we interact with the rest of the (non-furry) world, and perhaps that’s due to the social nature of what much of furry has become.

As for the second example of self deprecation, I’ve been watching waves of the hashtag #furriesruineverything wash over twitter over the last year or so.  It began as simple snark, implying that furries really did take everything, turn it terrible, and set it loose on the Internet, but it’s since gained additional layers of meaning.  It’s been inverted to add some sarcasm to the mix – furries “ruin” everything, by making it better – and it’s been reverted back to the idea that furries can ruin even things that aren’t necessarily furry in the first place, such as Twitter, kids shows, and so on.  This is only the simplest and one of the most blatant examples of the self-deprecation that seems to move through the fandom, and it’s occasionally found itself tied to the first example through off-color remarks about how most furries are sexaholics, but we love them anyway.

What does it mean that we are all occasionally a little uncomfortable in our membership with this subculture?  It’s one of those questions that, yes, is another sort of process, the type of question we’re continually finding new and better answers to, the type of process that continues to define who we are, hopefully toward the more healthy end of the ‘identity’ spectrum.  It seems that, for a majority of those involved, the fandom has at least provided a positive influence on life, whether or not it makes us a little too conscious of the portion of our identities we’ve based on it.  I know I wouldn’t trade myself now for who I might be without the fandom, ever.

In the April 2012 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, there is an interesting piece of research that presents evidence that “homophobia can result, at least in part, from the suppression of same-sex desire“.

There are two ways that this conclusion might be perceived:

One: hypertolerant types might think this provides a bit of scientific ammunition against the bigoted. We can take the logical next step and apply this idea to haters within furry, which reframes them as closeted versions of the object of their hatred.

Two: skeptical types might think that psychological experiments are never statistically sound, and that academics are pre-disposed to presenting conclusions that match up with their pre-existing beliefs.

Both of these perspectives are valid if extreme. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I’m going to explore this, and how this is reflected within the furry community, but first I’m going to talk about cognitive psychology and chronobiology.

The research on homophobia used the phenomenon known as priming, a common tool in psychological experiments. The classic priming example is as follows:

Fill in the blank to create a word. Answer with the first word that comes to mind.

For example: W_SH becomes WASH
Create a word from: SO_P

 

Presented with this question, a very large majority of people will answer SOAP. If you remove the example from the question, the most likely response is SOUP. The responder is “primed” with the word WASH, so SOAP comes to mind first.

This well-understood phenomenon can be combined with a tool used in the study of chronobiology, which is the science of how we perceive time.

It has been shown that, if you flash a word or phrase on a screen quickly enough, it will not be consciously registered by the part of the brain that deals with language. However it will be read and understood on an unconscious level.

As long as the word is flashed up quickly enough – typically less than 50 ms – it will not be consciously registered. The threshold at which messages are not consciously registered is key to chronobiological experiments, which study how time is experienced under different circumstances. This word-flashing technique is used in experiments testing the phenomenon of “slow time”, commonly experienced in stressful situations. Scientists measure the change in message-recognition threshold for subjects under extreme stress.

(My favourite experiment: subjects lie face-up on a net at the top of an old silo. The net is dropped, and a word is flashed on a screen for the subject to read while in free-fall.)

Words flashed in such a fashion are known as subliminal messages. And subliminal messages can act as a “prime”. Someone can be primed with WASH subliminally, and will be very likely to choose SOAP.

This technique isn’t restricted to word-association games. Priming also affects reaction time to certain tasks. In psychological experiments, this is often a simple sorting task where a person will be asked to categorize an item.

In our homophobia experiment, subjects were asked to categorize images as being “gay” or “straight”. The subject would be presented with a homo- or hetero-normative image or word (e.g. pictures of same-sex or straight couples) and asked to press a button associated with the appropriate category. The computer measured reaction time.

The catch? Subjects were subliminally primed with a word – either “ME” or “OTHERS” – before each test. Previous experiments have shown that this technique will reliably distinguish between self-identified heterosexuals and self-identified homosexuals.

A gay person would, in general:

• React quickly when presented with a gay image after being primed with ME, or when presented with a straight image after being primed with OTHERS.
• React slowly when a gay image was primed with OTHERS, or when a straight imagine was primed with ME.

A straight person will usually react in the opposite way.

This particular experiment was designed to test the effect of upbringing. The participants were asked a series of questions about their childhood and family. Among these questions, each participant was asked about their own attitude to homosexuals (for example: would you feel comfortable if your roommate was gay?).

Based on these responses, participants with intolerant attitudes were lumped into a group loosely termed ‘homophobes’. (As you might expect, this group was mostly populated with people who grew up in a homophobic environment.) The experimenters compared the results for three groups:

1. Self-identified homosexuals
2. Homophobes
3. Everyone else

Surprise, surprise: the experimenters discovered that a significant proportion of the homophobic group reacted the same as the homosexual group.

The scientists concluded that there is “a discrepancy between self-reported sexual orientation and implicit sexual orientation” because “given the [parental] stigmatization of homosexuality, individuals may be especially motivated to conceal same-sex sexual attraction“.

To put it another way: they concluded that about 20% of homophobes are actually closeted homosexuals.

The leap of logic from “reacts the same way as a homosexual” to “is a homosexual” is questionable and difficult to prove. This technique is classically used to test covert inclinations such as racial prejudice. Our homophobia tests are going a step further: they’re not just measuring attitude. A potential counter-hypothesis might be that our homophobic subject becomes unconsciously enraged, thereby improving reaction time, after having “ME” linked with homosexual images. I’m not aware of work that has tested the validity of this idea.

However, it’s compelling to conclude that someone closeted with an unusual sexuality might exhibit hatred towards that sexuality. If someone is hostile towards a certain sexuality, it may help them feel as if they are internally ‘proving’ that the sexuality doesn’t personally apply. What manifests as negativity towards others is actually self-hatred.

In the furry community, we don’t have a significant problem with homophobia. But we do have a problem with hatred towards some of the more unusual sexual orientations and interests, such as transexuals, babyfurs, zoophiles, and more. In all cases, people are being attacked for things that are innate.

Here is a high-profile example of hatred, which was linked to me by a babyfur friend of mine. Back in the salad days of Livejournal, furry humourist 2 The Ranting Gryphon posted an offensive rant aimed at babyfurs. It’s particularly egregious for several reasons:

• 2′s high profile means that his article is easy to find – it appears if you google ‘babyfurs’.
• The events that 2 relates are almost certainly apocryphal. (In the comments, FWA security staff claim that they never heard about the events described.)
• Even if true, 2 takes one anti-social act and blames all babyfurs for it. He is being hostile towards an innocent group of people, whose only crime is having an unusual sexual interest.
• Plus, of course, the direct threat of violence.

2 posted a partial apology for his outburst a few days later.

I can’t say whether 2 is a closeted babyfur but his behaviour is certainly consistent with someone struggling with self-hatred. It’s safe to say that at least some of the haters are closeted versions of their target.

This means that our haters are not just angry: they are struggling with self-acceptance. It’s unfair to take a hater to task for his position. Our hater is just reacting in a natural fashion to his own sexual interests or orientation: the anti-zoophile is very often a zoophile himself.

This is a natural, and unconscious, coping strategy. If you hate the hater, you’re making the same mistake that he is: you’re castigating him for something he has no control over.

Nor is it helpful to try to show our hater that he is wrong. As I have mentioned in previous articles, self-deception is a powerful force. If we see evidence that is contrary to our version of the world, we disregard it in a way that reinforces our existing belief.

It is far better, I think, to treat everyone – even the haters – with respect and nonjudgemental curiously. Furry is a great environment for people to grow, and learn about themselves. There are many examples of ex-haters out there and none of them have changed their ways by being shouted down. Furry fellowship and understanding is a powerful force for good.

Personally, I recommend this is best done in person over a beer. But given that we’re furries, I assume it would also work while engaging in a statistically unlikely sexual act on FurryMUCK. It’s worth a try.

You can read more about the psychology article on homophobia here.

Sorry for the brief hiatus, there.  I promise there are more articles in the docket, but I’ve been a little busy.  Like…busy getting married :o)

Expect things to pick up now that that’s over with!

Best,

~Makyo

A quick plug: this year at Confuzzled, I’m running a Furry Hypnotism show.

In what I think is a first at a furry convention anywhere, I’ll be running a group hypnosis session followed by some furry-themed fun & games. The group hypnosis session will be a relaxed and vivid experience, helping you get in close touch with your furry self. And then onto hilarious party games.

I’m on the main stage at 3:30pm on Saturday afternoon for 90 minutes or so. It’s going to be thoughtful and fun: happiness guaranteed.

Confuzzled 2012 (www.confuzzled.org.uk) is held in Hinckley, Leicestershire, from 25 to 28 May. There are over 600 registered attendees.

I’ll be about for the rest of the convention with some [adjective][species] goodies. I’m friendly and shouldn’t be too hard to track down, so please say hello if you see me trotting about the halls.

I received some fairly strong reactions to the short article I wrote about geeks a couple of weeks ago. The article is probably the slightest and most trivial contribution I’ve made to [adjective][species] in my ten or so articles to date, so I was expecting some criticism about its glib tone and sweeping statements. But I didn’t expect that it would be read so differently by geeks, compared to non-geeks.

The geeks thought I was being unfair by connecting positive geeky behaviour to anti-social behaviour. Several people pointed out that geekiness is sexy and mainstream, whereas the anti-social behaviour I attributed to many geeks might be considered ‘nerdy’.

On the other hand, the non-geeks felt the opposite: they thought the article was an over-the-top love letter to geeks and geekiness everywhere.

As an aside, I’m happy to report that the geeks all responded to me on the internet; the non-geeks all commented as part of a ‘real life’ conversation. (Stereotypes: confirmed.)

In this article, I want to explore the geeks in a bit more detail.

Geekiness is a big part of the furry experience. It’s the most obvious, and accordingly laziest, way to characterize the community from the outside. For a new furry (or perhaps a journalist), it’s a bit overwhelming – and it’s easy to come away slightly shell-shocked after exposure to those geeks who can be low-empathy and unsocial.

For those people who exist in a geeky world – perhaps a programmer who plays tabletop RPGs with her friends – the geekiness of furry is not going to be so pronounced. I was recently shown a Livejournal post by Kuddlepup [link], talking about how furry is seen by people inside geeky fandoms.

Visiting a steampunk convention, Kuddlepup reported that furries are seen as being anti-social. But not because of poor personal hygiene or unsocial behaviour, but because furries at conventions only go to see their friends.

KP suggests that furries are being exclusive and vaguely cliquey, and I understand how it could be seen that way. However I’d argue that furry is fundamentally different from geek fandoms – it’s about personal identity. Furries are spending time with their friends because they can explore their identity beyond the superficial I’m just a wolf in a turtle-neck and glasses.

Comparing the reactions to KP’s post with those encountering the community from outside geekdom, I think there is a parallel with the contradictory reactions I received to my previous article. The different points of view are easy enough to explain, I think: there are many geeks in furry, but it’s not a geek phenomenon. Our geeks and non-geeks just have different reference points. Everything, as always, is relative. (KP goes on to make a few other interesting observations and I’d encourage you to read his post in full.)

Regardless of how furry is seen through the lens of geekdom, it doesn’t help us understand why we have so many geeks.

One thing we can say for sure: there is a preponderance of furries with non-traditional sexuality and gender identities. We’ve established that a very large number of furries re-evaluate their sexual preference after they discover the community; the full spectrum of gender identities are well-represented; furries exhibit a lot of unusual sexual behaviour (like the zoophiles, for example).

The breadth of humanity seen within furry is one of its great traits, because exposure to different people helps us all to become more understanding and tolerant. Furry is great for those people with unusual sexual and/or gender identity: furries can roleplay these parts of themselves, online or even in person.

Roleplaying as an animal person allows many furries to slowly accept and ultimately embrace their unusual gender and/or sexual identity. This ‘baby-steps’ approach is healthy and low risk from a physical and mental point of view. It’s one of the ways that furry provides a positive environment for personal change, and it allows us to enjoy the irony of furries using an imaginary animal person as a vehicle to acceptance of their true self.

This virtue of the furry community is why, I think, that furry attracts so many (male) geeks. Geeks are often perceived to be weak, and this doesn’t mesh well with a society that conflates ‘masculinity’ with ‘strength’. Geeks are often bullied because they don’t meet society’s assumed roles.

Disclaimer time: I’m aware that geek culture has become more mainstream in recent years. However ‘geek chic’ is still very marginal. Looking into the most important reflector of mainstream human society: geeky TV characters are still, for the most part, held up as figures of fun. There is not a significant difference between the characterization displayed in The Big Bang Theory and, say, Steve Urkel.

At the risk of making a serious philosophical point using Urkel, it’s telling that SU would sometimes transform into a masculine, suave, jamesbondian alter ego, named Stephan Urquelle. The contrast between our nerd and his masculine alter ego – like Superman & Clark Kent, Urkel & Urquelle, and many other similar examples – clearly delineates society’s position on what it means to be a man. The opposite of a man?: the geek.

There are parallels here with many furry geeks, who present as a furry self with a very different outward attitude, in mind and body. Furry avatars often bear little relation to the human behind them and this is particularly prevalent amongst the geeks. There are very few overtly geeky furry avatars.

Happily, we furries are accepted as the animal person that we purport to represent. This means that our geek can present as Lord HyperDragon and be accepted on those terms. Just like someone can experiment with gender online, our geek can mentally test-drive Lord HD’s body and attitude. Such roleplay often leads to change: it may be that our geek starts to become more like Lord HD over time – maybe in attitude, maybe in sexual behaviour, maybe by hitting the gym.

Now, before I get castigated (again) for lazily stereotyping geeks as unsocial and unwashed, I want to be clear that this isn’t my intent. Geeks may be the single most obvious feature of the furry community, but the definition of ‘geek’ is slippery. I can’t discuss the geeks without making some broad statements that will be fundamentally wrong in some way. But the geeks are different from the non-geeks – and there is some evidence that the two groups have different experiences within furry.

In my previous post, I tried to assess the number of geeks by looking at the response rate to three questions from the Furry Survey:

Would you describe yourself as:

• a fan of RPGs? (Yes 55%)
• a fan of science fiction (Yes 61%)
• a fan of anime (Yes 49%)

I’m going to use the response to ‘science fiction’ to explore survey data from those that answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, two groups that are respectively more or less likely to be geeks. I chose ‘science fiction’ because I think it’s the least ambiguous question of the three. However the trends are similar for the other two questions.

With Klisoura’s help, I compared new furries with furries who have been in the community for at least 5 years. I looked at the decline in heterosexuality, which is the clearest statistic for the phenomenon of furries re-evaluting their sexual preference.

• for science fiction fans, the decline in heterosexuality is 42% (over 5 years)
• for everyone else, the decline in heterosexuality is 54% (over 5 years)

Statistics alert: this data is of very low quality. There are many reasons why it is statistically and logically flawed beyond all reasonable use. I present it because I expected to see this pattern before Klisoura and I performed the data mining – it supports my hypothesis about the geeks.

To summarize, my totally unscientific hypothesis and data analysis suggests that furry disproportionally attracts people who don’t fit into mainstream society.

• many people are attracted to furry because of unusual sexual and/or gender identity
• many (male) geeks are attracted to furry because they are not traditionally masculine

The obvious question raised by this theory:

• Does furry exist simply as a mental stepping-stone for people to understand and accept their true selves?
• Or do people within furry learn to love themselves because the community is such a positive environment for introspection and real change?

It’s difficult to say which premise is the cart, and which is the horse. It’s a question that, I think, is fundamental to exploration of furriness itself. So as a horse, I’m going to continue to pull this philosophical cart, exploring the question within the pages of [adjective][species]. (I’m also going to continue to torture equine-themed metaphors.)

But the cart can wait for future articles.

For now, I’m happy to reflect on all the positive things that furry brings. We
all know people who, through furry, have improved their lives. This might be through re-evaluation of sexual preference or gender identity, or maybe they’ve lost weight, or improved their job situation, or maybe just gotten a little better at dealing with the difficult job of being human.

I think that the abstraction of one’s self into an anthropomorphic avatar is what makes furry so personal and rewardingly social. Hopefully we’re all better people for this weird and wonderful furry experience.

This week’s article is brought to you by otters, which are awesome. One otter, Zik to be specific, pulled together an incredible list of furry conventions outside of North America. Check it out!

The diversity of the furry community is simply incredible. Furry conventions are artistic, diverse, and creative. If you think I’m talking about AC, FC, MFM, FWA, or any of the other tons of furry conventions within North America, that’s not quite what I had in mind. While the “local” furry conventions plenty of merit of their own, I set out to learn about the conventions and meets across the world. I tracked down at least one meaningful picture for each convention that exhibited the local furry culture’s flavor and style. In the end, I found out that there are a huge, huge number of furry gatherings going on all over the world, and they are all fascinating.

I often hear people talk about the fandom as if we (as in, Americans) are the only ones taking part. There seems to be a common conception that the “furry” experience is an intrinsically American one. While it can certainly be argued that “furry” is more active in the U.S.A. than anywhere else in the world, it’s completely invalid to assume that furries are an American-only population. According to the “International Online Furry Survey: Winter 2011”, 78.13% of respondents were from North America. This is quite a large number. However, the survey covered 4,338 participants, meaning that about 948 respondents were from outside of this continent. In addition, it is mentioned that the target was largely aimed at a North American audience and was only written in English. It is extremely likely that there is a far larger population of furries from outside North America than presented.

There many different kinds of meetings going on. My research came across tons of different events, from local cuisine sampling, stargazing, hiking, dances, dodge ball, Highland games, and even scuba diving. Many of the events were reflective of their country’s culture. For example, a Swiss furry meeting takes advantage of the local scenery by hosting in the Swiss Alps, and another Swiss furmeet includes Swiss cheese fondue as a part of its cuisine. In a way, it’s almost like a way to rediscover your local cultural attractions from a new perspective. As a personal example, one of my favorite “furry” gatherings was a skiing outing to the back of the Sandia Mountains here in New Mexico. I had been to the peak of the Sandias but had never been to the ski resort. Thus, it was a fantastic opportunity to discover something new in my own backyard.

The meets and conventions summarized below range from all sizes and styles and, naturally, from all over the world. Their origins range from as far back as the mid 90’s to as recent as mere weeks ago. I hope you find them as interesting as I did!

Eurofurence 17

The theme for Eurofurence 17, held in Magdeburg, Germany in August 2011, was “Kung Fu Hustle” and saw over 1000 attendees. It has been held in Germany for several years in a row but was previously held in Sweden, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. In 2012, the theme will be “Animalia Romana”, a Roman Empire theme. It is also the longest-running convention and was first put together in 1995.

Confuzzled

The third Pawpets UK show, subtitled “Goatfellas”, debuted at Confuzzled in May. Confuzzled is a furry convention in the United Kingdom, hosted in Manchester in 2011 and to be held in Hinckley in 2012, where they will be celebrating their fifth anniversary. In 2011 Confuzzled had an attendance just short of 500, making it the second largest outside America behind Eurofurence.

Russfurence 12

Russia has been hosting its own furry convention since 2001. Like many conventions, this one began as a meeting of furs and grew larger to its size today. Their 2012 convention, in late January-early February, had 190 attendees. Their theme is very unique; as mentioned on their website, “This year north and south will face to face… nose to nose each other to find who is the best: Fennec or Arctic Fox.” Fun fact: At their unofficial gathering in 2000 in Ukiwa’s apartment, one of the 8 attendees brought an actual young lioness named Molly.

Abando 2012

Abando is Brazil’s first annual furry gathering, held in Ribeirão Grande, São Paulo starting in 2008. It is a more outdoorsy meeting, basically a camping event on a furry fan’s farm. This will change next year when it will be held on a nature reserve. The 2011 gathering was held in March. Activities included Frisbee, body painting, and water-balloon rugby!

FurcoNZ 2012

First hosted in a private home, FurcoNZ in New Zealand grew until 2007 when its hosting was moved to camps and lodges around the country. A report of their 2011 attendance hasn’t been published but their 2010 gathering had 66 attendees. The camping event is held in December, during the beginning of NZ’s summer months. Events included outdoor activities such as archery, kayaking, and abseiling, and indoor activities included board games and a dance.

MiDFur 2012

Like FurcoNZ, MiDFur is also held in December. It has been held in Melbourne, Australia since 1999. The two are scheduled around each other to encourage international visitors to make the short flight between the two and visit both during their stay. MiDFur’s last event was actually held in January 2012 had 372 attendees. Their latest venue space is a semi-underground convention and housing space that regularly hosts concerts.

Berlicon 9

Berlicon is a small convention that has been held in Berlin since 2004. It is yet another outdoors gathering held in a developed camping area. For its first three years it was held in April but it is now held in mid-June. There were 89 attendees in 2011. Their theme for Berlicon 9 is “Nach uns die Sintflut!”, roughly translated as “After the flood!”, another post-apocalyptic theme for 2012.

?eSFuR

?eSFuR is a small convention in the Czech Republic first held in 2005, initially held in late March-early April and more recently in July. The event is headquartered in a hotel and hosts many indoors and outdoors activities, from hiking to stargazing to game shows. 100-200 attendees are expected in 2012.

ZodiaCon

ZodiaCon, another Czech furry convention, is a recent convention started in May 2011. The second will take place in May 2012. Its theme is “The sky is falling”. Each year has a Zodiac mascot assigned to it, and every mascot can be seen in the banner above. The next convention will be held at the ŠARZ Vršov hotel near Pardubice, Czech Republic, with plenty of outdoor possibilities nearby.

Furry Weekend Holland

Furry Weekend Holland 2012 will take place in Westdorp near Borger, Drenthe, in The Netherlands from March 30th to April 1st. Its location will be “De Tweehek”, a housing facility with plenty of outdoor recreational opportunity nearby. 72 furs have pre-registered from eight countries as of this article. Plans include a large dance, a fursuit photoshoot, and a bar, using Pawcoins that cost one euro each for currency. Shown here is the official badge for the convention.

Furtastic

Last year’s Furtastic took place for the first time at a scout camp Aalborg, Denmark, from July 8-11. Next year’s gathering will be from July 12-15. Events include an art auction, a barbecue, and a bonfire, all on 11.5 acres of campground. A tent served as the bar in the 2011 gathering.

Futrzakon

This convention was first held in September 2008 after considerable planning and preparation from the Polish furry website polfurs.org. Interestingly, interest was so great that the convention was unable to accommodate the number of furries interested in attending. The 2012 convention will be held from 7 – 11 August at a sports and recreation resort in Sulejów.

Lakeside Furs

Initially held in July 2007, this Austrian gathering had its own t-shirt, fursuit presentation, art show, and hiking, all on its first year. That same year at the end of August an “underwater” edition was held with a one-day diving course. Recent events have included an ice cave hiking trip and a steam train ride. The next event will be in mid-August.

ScotiaCon

ScotiaCon is a Scottish convention first held in July 2011 in Inverness. Several trailers were released in the months before the convention, hyping it up. Events included a science talk, a culinary event, and, naturally, Highland Fur Games. The next convention will be in 27-30 July. The convention’s mascot, Wallace, is a Scottish terrier named after William Wallace.

Golden Leaves Con

Golden Leaves Con is an autumn-themed convention held first from 4-7 November in 2010 at the Baselbieter Chinderhus in Langenbruck, Switzerland. Their second gathering was in November 2011 at the same place. Plans included a cocktail night, swimming in their outdoor heated pool, and a plethora of food, including Swiss cheese fondue.

CH-on

Another Swiss convention, CH-on is held in the scenic Swiss alps. First hosted in June 2008, the convention has been held yearly in June ever since. The convention prides itself on its excellent food and has more laid-back programming compared with other conventions.

Israel Furmeet

Worth mentioning is the series of small furmeets hosted in Israel. First hosted from 20-21 October 2008, these have been small gatherings of only a handful of furs. They’ve been hosted at furs’ homes with the usual standard gathering fare: food, card games, in this case even clubbing. It’s a great example of how widespread furry as a fandom is!

Kemocon

Japan’s second convention, following the last TransFur in 2007, is Kemocon, which first took place on 30 November 2008. More than 390 attendees were at the 2010 event, and the 2011 event was held on 20 November in Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture. Exhibitions included an art show and, naturally, a ton of fursuiting. The name comes from “Kemono”, translating to “beast”, the basic equivalent of the anthropomorphic fandom that exists in North America as “furry”.

Fur-st

This convention, which was held for the first time on 20 March, is sort of mysterious: it has a very well-made website, but a lot of information about it is missing. It has a lot of sponsors and merchandising (shirts, art, and business card holders!). A heavy emphasis seems to be placed on the art and literature; doujinshi, referring to self-published printed works. Hopefully more information will be available soon!

Kemospo

Arguably the most unique convention is Kemospo, held in a gymnasium in Suzuka city, Mie prefecture, on 14 January, 2012. The convention was based around sports, with many prizes offered for the winners of the events, including jump roping and dodge ball. Of course, a lot of contestants even managed to compete in full fursuit!

References

• http://sites.google.com/site/anthropomorphicresearch/past-results/international-online-furry-survey-2011
• http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5060389/
• http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Eurofurence_17
• http://www.furaffinity.net/full/5572027
• http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/ConFuzzled
• http://rusfurrence.ru/2012/
• http://www.lionking.ru/ru10_1_11.shtml
• http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Abando
• http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/FurcoNZ
• http://www.furconz.org.nz/news.php
• http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/MiDFur
• http://www.midfur.com.au/index.php/about/venue/
• http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/%C4%8CeSFuR
• http://www.cesfur.org/en/informations/
• http://www.furryweekend.nl/home.html
• http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Furry_Weekend_Holland
• http://www.furaffinity.net/full/5509479/
• http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Furtastic
• http://www.furtastic.dk/Vanue.html
• http://www.icerealm.org/ilfurs/events
• http://fur-st.com/
• http://www.kemocon.com/infomation.html
• http://kemospo.jp/pics_kemo1.html

Miss the first part? Check that out here!

Tying it all together

At some point, the furry fandom started to coalesce. Some would put it in the 1980s – a reader and friend posits that the fandom really got started September 1st, 1980 at Noreascon with Steve Gallacci[5] – some would put it much, much earlier, and some perhaps later, into the ’90s when the Internet became truly accessible. For the sake of this artcle and much of this site in general, we’d probably go with some time in the mid to late ’80s for the source of the fandom. This was the time when the umwelten, the spheres of meaning for individuals, began to collide in enough numbers to form that critical mass that led to the formation of a subculture rather than a collection of enthusiasts. Furries doubtless existed before, as is certainly evident even within our own readership, but the furry fandom as a culture phenomenon, the basis of study for much of this site (rather than individual furries themselves), relied upon this interest being actively shared among ur-members.

It was a sort of participatory semiosis that helps to define the exploratory beginnings of any new social group. It wasn’t so much that individuals hadn’t come up with the idea of fox-people before, as that now they were in the process of finding meaning in the fact that there was a cultural identity to be had, and assigning it to the signs of “funny animal” and furry, to foxes and cats leading extraordinary or banal lives, to the very feeling of membership. In her book Straight, Hanne Blank makes a similar argument that the growth of heterosexuality (and its complement, homosexuality) was due in part to the process of self identificiation, the semiosis among individuals that reached a critical mass after a few influential authors such as Freud became widely read.

In short, I tend to focus on what I’m calling the “contiguous fandom”. That is, a fandom made of of members which share the borders of their umwelten, the meanings attached to the sign that is ‘furry’, in order to create a coherent whole of a fandom. This is the importance of membership; it is the act of being actors in a community that helps to define the community as an entity.

Another way to think of it is that this is our participation mystique. By basing part of one’s identity on one’s membership to an idea or community, one helps to define both oneself and the thing of which one is a member. To put it in the terms of linguistics above, we readily adopt our sociolect. Remember here that we’re taking into account all of the signs available to us. Not only are we taking in this social interaction using words in a furry context, but we’re always taking in the visual aspect of furry art and the participatory aspect of conventions, fursuiting, and so on.

Beyond just adopting the sociolect, however, we’re continuously adding to it. We aren’t just passive observers, but we are actively participating in the creation of new texts, whether it’s voicing our appreciation of art, taking part in role-playing, or even running a silly meta-furry blog where one talks about the semiotics of the furry subculture.

Given the contiguous fandom, I can’t continue without providing some thoughs on what’s “outside” that mostly coherent group of individuals that make up furry. There is also importance in not being a member, in not having that participation mystique. When it comes to signs in semiotics, there is a loose division into dyadic and triadic signs. With dyadic signs, you simply have one entity assigning the meaning of what a tree is to the sign “tree”, but in triadic signs, one has the additional context of just who it is that is doing the assigning alongside what is is that is being assigned. This is the interpretant sign the one to whom “I” and “you” hold meaning as opposed to one and the other, and, although it’s abstract, it becomes very important when it comes to membership.

When someone says “I am a furry”, they are using a dyadic sign to signify that a portion of themselves is defined as a member of the furry community. However, when someone says “that person is a furry”, then the sign shifts to being triadic: the interpretant is taking an active role in specifying that a sign (“furry”) signifies an object (“that person”). Someone can always construct their own sign relations at any time, but when it involves a third party, it has the tendency of muddying the waters of the semiotic niche (after all, if it were straight-forward, there wouldn’t be much discussion to have).

What this means is that someone can certainly contribute to the sociolect without necessarily becoming a member of the society which owns it. There are more than enough examples of this to go around: Watership Down and “Robin Hood”, or perhaps Coyote or Raven or Jackal. The creators of these signs and contexts did not necessarily take up membership in the furry social group, but they certainly did add to the niche of language and meaning that has been carved out over the last thirty years or so. This is complicated even further by the fact that the niche is made up of a community of actors rather than just one: something like Coyote as trickster may seem plenty furry to one member of the community, but only tangentially so, if at all, to another.

There are a few problems surrounding this concept of furry as a semiotic niche, and they have to do with the depth at which one analyzes the fandom, or the distance from it one stands. If, for example, one were to step back from furry a little ways, one can look at it a different way and see it in the context of a related field: genre theory.

Furry as a genre is, on the surface, not a surprising concept. One can think of furry literature just as easily as one considers fantasy literature, or perhaps historical fiction. There is an underlying topic that lays beneath the corpi of all three genres. However, as Chandler puts it, “The classification and hierarchical taxonomy of genres is not a neutral and ‘objective’ procedure.”[6] The important point here is that the difference between objective and subjective interpretation is, in the terms of semiotics, the act of subjective interpretation is a sign in and of itself. That so many furries today would consider Disney’s “Robin Hood” to be a furry movie holds meaning both in regards to the object of the film and the fuzzy interpretants themselves. It is difficult even for me to interpret the movie outside of a furry context – I saw it first in Elementary school, and even then spent time drawing foxes afterwards. Needless to say, genre’s a difficult thing to determine from within.

This leads us to the second issue of determining a definition from within or without. If we bring back the concept of Moderate Whorfianism, this becomes more evident. In that context, language influences thinking, but if the thinking is the process of defining either one’s membership within the community, or, more dangerously, defining the community as a whole as we are here, then a feedback loop is started. If our contributions to the sociolect modify the sociolect that we’re in the process of studying, even individually, then it becomes even more difficult to pin down. This is quite the problem when studying the fandom from within.

Studying the fandom from outside introduces other related risks, however. It’s difficult to study something like this from the outside, as well, without having some concept of the use of the texts involved within their context. That is, it seems like studying a participatory corpus such as that of the output of our subculture without participating as well has the risk of coming up with an incomplete mental map of what all is going on. A good example of this (and I do mean good – the studies are well worth reading) would be the work of Kathleen Gerbasi, such as her study Furries A to Z (Anthropomoprhism to Zoomorphism)[7]. While the study is well conducted and provides a good, in-depth look at the fandom, entries to her livejournal page indicate an involvement with the fandom not quite at the level of membership, but perhaps above simple scientific observation.

There is, it seems, a bit of indeterminacy when it comes to studying something such as a social phenomenon. By investigating or defining, we change, or at least risk changing that which is investigated or defined. It’s part of the aforementioned feedback loop, as certainly the goal of the investigator is to be changed in some way by the thing being investigated. That’s what gaining knowledge is all about.

Finally, the furry corpus in particular is extremely difficult to analyze. This is mostly due to the proliferation of texts, media, and modalities. We produce a lot. It is to the point where it’s even difficult to break the corpus down beyond lines other than simply different media. Even those lines are blurred by the profuse cross-sharing of information across media, such as the reposting on twitter of FA journals that link to one or several images, potentially hosted on other sites.

There is, of course, plenty of writing to go by within the fandom. It’s not simply writing for the sake of adding to the furry genre, such as it is, though, but writing in the form of image descriptions, journals, and rants on twitter. The idea is carried further to social interaction with written language, through twitter conversations, comments on images, role-playing, and instant messaging. Beyond the word, however, there is our focus on visual art; whether or not visual art is the primary draw to the fandom is certainly up for debate, but there is a reason that one of the primary social hubs online is an art website and one of the big draws at conventions is the art-show and dealers den.

There are more complex forms of communication than static text and images, though, and here is where things become quite difficult to analyze in any meaningful way. Fursuits, for instance, provide communication in a visual medium similar to that as art – they are pleasing to look at and express the meaning of the character they are intended to embody – but they are also an interactive medium. A medium that can move and talk, can hug and bounce and stalk and take on a life of its own.

And beyond even the concept of extending one’s character into a costume one can don, there is our social interaction that happens on a more mundane basis, yet still within the boundaries of “furry interaction”. There is an acceptable behavior, however ill-defined, that goes along with being a furry. It’s difficult to speak of beyond tendancies and social cues, as many such social customs that come with membership in a subculture or fandom. It has been noted before, though, that one can tell the furries at a furry convention and a furmeet apart from the non-furs. There’s a way that we act, which likely has much more to do with the idea of shared membership and social status than an interest in animals. JM, for instance, writes about the prevalence of geekiness and the behavioral norms that go along with it as they pertain to our fandom[8].

There are subtle cues and portions of our sociolect all over the place, though, and it doesn’t always have to do with direct communication between actors in the community. The subtler things such as structures in websites (Flickr and DeviantArt, for instance, don’t have a category option specifically for species) and conventions (the previously mentioned focus on dissemination of texts through the artshow and dealers areas), or even in media already geared toward social interaction such as MUCKs (again with a species flag) and SecondLife (where one can purchase a skin not only of the species of one’s character, but of the exact color required).

Furry is a heady mix of a full slice of human society that somehow seems to remain topical. We have the glue of our mutual interest in anthropomorphics, but beyond that, we have spread our corpus across several different texts in our own personal ways of generating meaning within the context of our subculture. By the interaction of our own spheres of meaning we have generated our own semiotic niche, however fuzzy around the edges, and come up with this idea of “furry”. There’s no real easy way to pull it apart, even given as broad a topic as semiotics, but by investigating and participating, we always seem to expand it all the further.

Conclusion

This thing we call “furry” is clearly more difficult to pin down than one simple article or even a whole website will cover. It’s something that I’d tried before in a few different ways. In fact, it seems to be something that everyone tries as part of their membership dues. Every now and then, once a month or so, I’ll come across a journal post of someone else’s take on the whole fandom, and the beautiful (and yes, a little frustrating) part of it is that they’re all totally different.

We can make at least one statement, having taken all of this into account, though. Furry is a complex interaction of actors within a social community surrounding an already complex sign-meaning relationship. Beyond that, though, the issue grows complex by our reliance on two main modalities: natural language, which is always prone to misinterpretation; and visual art, which is only barely analyzable, and limited further, anyhow, by the medium of primarily hand-drawn images. Both of these are inherently ambiguous, and often based on aesthetics and identification on a per-member basis. That is, what is furry to one is not necessarily furry to another, or even the creator. The final level of obfuscation comes through the means with which so many interact with the fandom, via a willfully constructed avatar, something which does not match the individual themselves out of necessity.

This article and any like it will have it’s necessary downsides. We didn’t really get anywhere, all told – we defined some terms in order to help us understand the ways in which we interact with our subculture, both throught the linguistic concept of a sociolect, a language used among our co-fans, and the semiotic concept of a niche, a set of meanings and sign relations shared by the members of the niche. It’s hard to get anywhere with either, though, especially in such a loose-weaved community. Semiotics and lingustics are all about statements of subtle facts made out in the open. There are concrete tests and analyses to be done (if one could port the commutation test to our visual art in order to find the “graphemes” of muzzles and tails, that could lead to interesting results), but they’re difficult to really do well, and even if they were, it’s not guaranteed that they would lead to any results, nor if any of the results would even be welcome.

There are positives to be had as well, though. I hope that the article has provided more insight into the the linguistics and semiotics of the fandom. The ideas of sociolects and genres are a good way to think about this broad base of which we are a part, because they provide a foundation of words on which we can base our own explanations of what it means to be a furry. And, beyond the definitions, it’s nice to maintain a certain sort of disputability. It allows for a greater membership through greater self identification – more people can become furry because the definition of what furry is can accomodate them. And hey, that sense of mystery about the fandom is always nice, as well. It’s a hook for bringing in new members, and for keeping the old ones interested, too.

I know this has been a little out of the norm, but I wanted to actually take my time to research an article and provide a more coherent look at the reasons for studying the fandom, and for this site in general. These things are important to us, too. The meanings we create determine our interactions within the fandom and how they take place. Beyond that, though, by participating in our community as members, we contribute to it. This is how we grow, explore, and find meaning,

Where to go from here? Well, I hope that the cognizance of the signs around us is helpful in a way. Every word, every piece of art, and every interaction between members is a sign from which we can glean a message and to which we can attach our own individual meanings, however mundane. The meanings inherent in these relations surround us and help define our membership, and we’re certainly always creating more. If nothing else, there’s always more work to go when it comes to exploring the furry subculture.

Citations

[1] Chandler, Daniel. “The Act of Writing”. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/act/act.html accessed April 3, 2012.

[2] Zik. “furry lexicon”. http://pastebin.com/GR7MqsnJ accessed, April 2, 2012.

[3] Munroe, Randall. “Umwelt”. http://xkcd.com/1037/ accessed April 1, 2012.

[4] Lotman, Yuri M. On the semiosphere. (Translated by Wilma Clark) Sign Systems Studies, 33.1 (2005). http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/sss/Lotman331.pdf accessed April 5, 2012.

[5] Geddes, M.” The History of the Furry Fandom, Pt 1″ (2012).

[6] Chandler, Daniel. “An Introduction to Genre Theory”. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre1.html accessed April 7, 2012.

[7] Gerbasi, Kathleen. “Furries A to Z (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism) in “Society and Animals”, 16, 197-222. http://www2.asanet.org/sectionanimals/articles/GerbasilFurries.pdf accessed March 15, 2012.

[8] JM. “Geeks”. http://adjectivespecies.com/2012/04/09/geeks/ accessed April 9, 2012.

Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 1
Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 2
Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 3

Read the whole article at once.

Miss the first part? Check that out here!

On Semiotics

When I first heard about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, I rejected it immediately. It states, in brief, that the way we conceive of the world around us, the way we assign meaning to things, is shaped entirely by the language that we use to describe that meaning. I think that part of the reason that I had such a negative reaction to the idea right off the bat was that I learned about the hypothesis via the constructed language lojban. The idea behind lojban (always written with a lower-case ‘l’) is that, if the way we think is shaped by the language we use, than a language that is totally and completely “logical” ought to help one to think totally and completely logically.

That idea really grated on me for a few reasons. First of all, I was in a Madrigal choir at the time, and while the Madrigal came from the Renaissance period, much of the words to the songs spend time evoking romantic imagery. That, and much of the songs we performed weren’t exactly Madrigals in their own right, but composed later in the Romantic or Neo-romantic eras. Put simply, I was a teenager inundated in romanticism – the concept of being able to explain everything only with logical terms and without the metaphor inherent in romanticism didn’t jive with me. Additionally, having been brought up by two atheist parents, I was going through my own spiritual renaissance at the time, and so I was always finding these neat, non-spatiotemporal, sometimes ineffible ideas around myself, whether it be religion or something more new-agey.

I was a non-Whorfian, basically. I believed, at the time, that we fit words entirely to the meanings that exist independently of those words. There is certainly an argument to be made for that, as well. We all, in one way or another, are able to perceive what a “tree” is. There’s a way for us to scientifically define it, and there isn’t necessarily a way for us to claim that a tree is only a tree because we have all conceived of the language for defining what a tree is.

I’m no longer fifteen, though, and things have changed. I have had my own experience with the way that meaning comes to us through language or signs of some sort, not least of all with my attempts at such things with these articles. I think that I might now call myself a believer in Moderate Whorfianism. In his book The Act of Writing, Daniel Chandler explains that many linguists would find extreme Whorfianism hard to swallow, but may accept a weak version of it as defined in the following way:

• the emphasis is on the poitential for thinking to be ‘influenced’ rather than unavoidably ‘determined’ by language;
• it is a two-way process, so that ‘the kind of language we use’ is also influenced by ‘the way we see the world’
• any influence is ascribed not to ‘Language’ as such or to one language as compared with another, but to the use within a language of one variety rather than another (typically a sociolect – the language used primarily by members of a particular social group)
• emphasis is given to the social context of language use rather than to purely linguistic considerations, such as the social pressure in particular contexts to use language in one way rather than another.[1]

This leads us to the next topic of discussion: semiotics. There is argument as to whether or not linguistics is a subset of semiotics, or vice versa. Whereas linguistics aims to tackle the use and meaning of language, semiotics aims to tackle the use and language of meaning. They are certainly closely related – given that language, written language specifically, but also speech, provides a measureable, non-objective metric to study, much of semiotics deals with the use of words within a certain context to either ascribe or convey meaning, as well as the additional meaning conveyed via word choice.

Beyond that, however, semiotics also takes into account such things as the medium and modality of communication, regardless of whether it has to do with words. Semiotics is just as comfortable looking at body language and posture, meaning conveyed through the layout of a webpage, or even additional meanings conveyed through art, which most definitely has something to with our own subculture. That is, rather than focusing on language itself, semiotics focuses on the meanings conveyed between actors within a community. It is not that linguistics has nothing to do with meaning, nor that it doesn’t take the social context into account, simply that that focusing specifically on those areas is the realm of semiotics, instead.

The process of ascribing meaning to a sign – be it a word, a gesture, music, or some aspect of a piece of visual art – is known as semiosis. Semiosis isn’t something that happens on it’s own, we don’t ascribe meaning to the word “tree” without having some framework in which to ascribe that meaning. Signs are parts in the whole of sign systems or “codes”. A code could be a language, but using that word in particular is a poor choice, because language always takes place within some context and carries additional signifiers along with it. “Tree” said calmly, for instance, carries different connotations than “TREE!” shouted fearfully. Even in a text-only environment such as this, the punctuation and capitalization are signs in and of themselves. All of this is taking place within a cultural context, as well. With language in particular, the sign (a word) is a portion of a code that is shared among actors in a community, whether it’s the community of English-speakers (a language) or the community of people interested in anthropomorphics interacting online (the sociolect of furries on the Internet).

This all goes to show that semiotics goes beyond the individual. The webcomic xkcd recently performed quite a feat[3] by displaying a different comic to different viewers. The comic that was chosen depended not only on the viewer’s choice of browser, but also on their location and even the size of their browser window. The title of the comic was “Umwelt”, which is the collection of sign-relations (briefly, the pair of sign-meaning, or the triad of sign-interpretant-meaning) that make up one’s perception of the world. We cannot help to do anything outside our umwelt, other than to assimilate new meanings into it through semiosis.

We aren’t nearly so solipsistic, though, and so every time our umwelt collides with another through interpersonal relationships, we influence each other. When umwelten group together naturally through an attractor such as a mutual interest, we wind up with a semiotic niche. That is, when a social group forms, a sociolect can form with them due to the way the group steers semiosis, the way it finds meaning.

These semiotic niches work much the same way as umwelten, in that they can converge and share boundaries – they all, after all, take part in the world of meaning around them, known as the semiosphere. That is, something like furry will share its meaning not only with Internet culture, but also western culture, anime culture to some extent, and, as a whole, belongs to this whole perceived world around us. Beyond the semiosphere, “language not only does not function, it does not exist.”[4] Without some framework for meaning, be it words, visual art, music, or anything, there is only formless thought.

If we were to modify our language hierarchy to be about semiotics (helpfully done in advance), it would look something like this, then. Similar to the idea that languages are made up of sociolects and dialects, which are in turn made up of idiolects, so too is the semiosphere made up of semiotic niches, which are in turn made up of the umwelten of individual members, the combined basis for creating meaning in the world around us. This is, of course, a necessary gloss over the field of semiotics, which is quite large. The goal of this article isn’t to go into commutation tests and syntactic analysis of furry works, though, just to provide a groundwork of the concepts of language and semiotics in the fandom.

It is within this construct of signs and meaning that we not only form our ideas of what means “tree”, what an image of a tree is and what it represents, but what abstract concepts such as our subculture are and what they’re made up of. As individuals and members, or even as outsiders looking in, we build the sign-relations, we come up with the meaning of what is and is not furry, each to our own. It is where those interpretations meet and generate a coherent idea of furry within more than just the individual’s point of view that we wind up with the furry fandom itself.

Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 1
Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 2
Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 3

Read the whole article at once.

I’m trying something new by splitting this post up, even though it’s one coherent article. The next parts will be coming over the next two days. Comments will be disabled until the entire post is published. Thanks for your patience!

This is an idea that has been tumbling around in my head ever since I started this site. In fact, I suppose you could call a lot of my earlier posts a sort of fumbling around as I tried to articulate this idea. The idea that I’m talking about is the concept of what furry is. That is, not only what a makes a furry a furry, but how is furry a thing, and where did we all come from. A lot of the articles on this site have come at this idea from different angles, but usually focusing on a single aspect or in a stream-of-consciousness manner.

When I write posts for [a][s], I do so in what’s called the “watercolor strategy”, as named by Daniel Chandler in The Act of Writing. That is, for the most part, I start at the beginning, and when I get to the end, I stop. It’s a strategy that, to my mind, would work almost solely for the introspective writer, one who internalizes a subject, then blasts it out on to paper (or screen). The idea is that one works as one does with watercolor, where there is no real way to correct a mistake or change what one has done – one must simply start at the beginning and continue until one feels that the work is done, then stop. There is no editing along the way, as there would be in the “oil painting strategy”; with oils, one has the ability to paint over the paint already in place without worrying about muddying the painting or ruining the paper. As Chandler quotes in the section on the watercolor strategy, “rewrite in process…interferes with flow and rhythm, which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material” (Plimpton, 1989, quoted in Chandler)[1].

In a lot of posts, this has worked well. I think that I often work in short enough sections that I can hold most of the article in my head with only the barest of sketches taken down mostly as reminders to what I had already planned rather than a true outline (which would be the “architectural” or “bricklaying” strategies).

My process has occasionally come back to haunt me in that I’ve incompletely captured an idea. It happened very early on when I wrote about the default furry, which eventually turned into the post about doxa: what I was trying to name in the “default furry” post wasn’t so much trends in character creation as the fact that there is a factual basis for much of what we take for granted within the fandom.

One of the big things that keeps me coming back to these subjects is the standard artist’s complaint that I’m never really satisfied with the product. I can barely even call myself an artist, here – so much of what I’ve done with [a][s] is rehashing ideas I’ve heard of or learned about in a non-furry context within the context of furry, and this piece here is no exception. Rather, I’m one with artistic habits.

I was unhappy with both of my posts on “participation mystique”. It’s such a wonderful concept and fits so perfectly with the contiguous fandom that I couldn’t get it out of my head. All the same, I couldn’t seem to get down exactly what I wanted to with it. The first post turned into an idea of how members identify with the fandom, which is close to, but not exactly participation mystique. The second post veered off course and into (still related) waters of the definition of our subculture.

That those posts feel as though they inadequately captured what I wanted to grates on me, so I feel that, as the person best in a position to correct my mistakes, I probably ought to. In order to do that, however, I’m going to have to start with a little bit of background that I’ve picked up over the last few weeks of study and years of background on the subject even if it isn’t immediately applicable to this furry site, and I’m going to have to abandon the watercolor strategy and at least work toward the architectural strategy. It may be a bit of a long travel, and I’m sorry if I wind up coming off as boring, but I believe that a lot of these ideas are pertinent to figuring out what is going on with the fandom, and why the concept of membership is important. If nothing else, I find the concepts very interesting, and I think that many others will as well.

A Linguistic Introduction

I’d like to begin here with a basic introduction on some of the linguistics that are involved in exploring meaning in the fandom. There’s a very important reason for this which I’ll go into more depth on later, but for now, it will suffice to say that language is important to us because our fandom is wrapped up in it. We describe our characters, we write stories about furries, and, above all, we communicate; we are a social fandom. Language is always important to subcultures such as ours which subsist on social interaction.

There is an argument to be made that language, rather than being a defined entity, is simply a collection of idiolects. Dialect is a commonly known word, of course, but language can be broken down further to the speech patterns used by an individual. Each person’s pattern of language use is unique to them, just as their handwriting and fingerprints are unique. This is their idiolect. The argument here is that, despite pervailing attitudes within the United States and elsehwere, a language is made up of its mutually comprehensible dialects, which are spoken by individuals with all of their unique idiolects.

I bring this up not only because it’s fascinating (to me, at least), but because there is another step in there that’s missing between idiolect and dialect, and that is the sociolect. A sociolect is the subset of a language that is shared among a social group. While this may have started with the difference between the language spoken by different social classes, with the growth of the middle class, particularly of skilled workers, the numnber of recognized sociolects has grown. My partner, a machinist by trade, is able to share this language within the social group of other machinists. When they go on “thou”, “scrap”, “tombstones”, “jobshops,” and “print-to-part,” they can understand each other within the context of their social group.

Similarly, the fandom has started to pull together its own sociolect formed of the collected idiolects of its members. That we have our own “jargon” with words like “fursona”, “hybrid”, and “taur”[2] that goes along with our membership to this nebulous group helps to define the fact that we have become a more well-defined subculture, or, to put it better, a community. A community, in this sense, is a coherent group composed of multiple actors, and that is just what we are within the fandom: we act within and upon it, both taking from and adding to it by way of our membership. It works to say it either way: our sociolect is a combination of our idiolects because we are a community composed of members, and we are a community composed of members because we have our sociolect as a combination of our idiolects – our ways of communicating made up of those who communicate with each other.

Put this way, we can come up with a sort of hierarchy of language. A language is comprised of dialects and sociolects, subsets of the overall language based around social, economic, or geopolitical groups. The dialects and sociolects, in turn, are made up of the individial idiolects of their members. There, of course, some mixing due to new speakers of the language and borrowed terms, but also due to the fact that individuals often belong to more than one social group, and thus may take part in more than one sociolect or dialect – my partner is a machinist, but he is also a furry, for instance. A good example might be the apparent dichotomy between “realistic” and “toony” furry art, perhaps due to the overlap between the furry subculture and the art world (whereas “realism” isn’t something I hear much at my own job as a programmer).

Much of this focus on our means of communication ties into the Internet and the prominence of its role within the fandom. There’s really no doubting that a good portion of the fandom “grew up” on the net. The ways in which it facilitates communication between individuals or groups regardless of geographic location fits in so well with a fandom that bases so much of its existence around social interaction. There are a few terms that become important due to this fact, namely “text”, “corpus”, “medium”, and “modality”. A “text” is a unit of communication, whether it’s a journal post, an image and all of its associated discussion, such as comments, or a webpage like this. A “corpus” is a collection of related texts – this post would be a text, but [adjective][species] would be a corpus – though it can be taken in broader terms, such as the collection of all different texts on FurAffinity – images, journals, comments, user pages – or simply the collection of all texts within our subculture: the furry corpus, if you will.

“Medium” and “modality” are similarly intertwined. The “medium” is, obviously enough, the way in which a text reaches us, and the “modality” is what the text is constructed of. For instance, words and language would be the modality, whereas that can be divided into written words read off a screen on a webpage, or spoken words shared among a group of friends at a convention. The reason I’m bringing up these terms is that, taken together, they form our social interaction within the fandom, and the reason that it’s /important/ is because, in particular, our choices of media and corpi are language in and of themselves: that is, that we rely on the Internet for so much of our communication, whether out of necessity or desire, and allow the idiolects that we’ve formed on the ‘net to creep into our verbal communications with each other is something of a statement in and of itself.

Put another way, our medium is important because it involves the concepts of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer (or, more specifically, Internet) mediated communication (IMC). The first, HCI, is important because computers are not free-form entities through which we may communicate however we want. Instead, we communicate through the specific media of SecondLife, through comments on submissions on FA, through MUCKs, MUDs, IRC, and IMs. The actual means of intereaction within each is different from each other, and certainly different than other media. For instance, posing actions, and thus role-playing, are quite simple on MU*s and IRC, and thus more common, whereas the same is not true of instant messages and the less-immediate form of comment threads and forums. The latter concept of IMC becomes particularly evident in SecondLife, where the action taken by your character on the screen is distanced from reality by necessity. Shooting a gun, turning a cartwheel, or doing a dance are all usually thought of physical activities offline, but on SecondLife, they are all the result of commands typed in by the user or accessed via the mouse on a head up display.

It’s an easy thing to say that communication is the basis of our subculture, but more difficult to express it in terms of the source and result of a sociolect comprised of the colliding idiolects of its members. While that is far from the only thing that furry has going for it, it’s a definite signifier of our being a society in our own right, and one of the easiest to perceive, once one takes a step back. We have settled our concentration certain media for a variety of reasons – the ease of constructing an avatar on the Internet, the mediated sharing of texts through different websites and services, and the ‘net’s way of connecting individuals across distance. Our choice of media is a form of communication in a way, though not simply due to the benefits to be gained from it. There is more, though, to be sure.

Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 1
Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 2
Meaning Within a Subculture – Part 3

Read the whole article at once.

I’m trying something new by splitting this post up, even though it’s one coherent article. The next parts will be coming over the next two days. Comments will be disabled until the entire post is published. Thanks for your patience!

The regular Londonfurs (londonfurs.org.uk) meets are a great environment for getting to know furry friends, old and new. The meets are held in a City bar on Saturday afternoons and are attended by upwards of 100 furries. They have an easygoing vibe, fuelled by the sort of bonhomie that’s engendered by drinking with friends in the afternoon.

I was chatting at the bar with a couple of furry friends at a recent meet when we were approached by a geeky furry acquaintance of mine. Most furries will be able to guess what happened next. Our geek delivered a deadpan anecdote, describing a workmate who had become confused about two different types of barcode. His story – which was incomprehensible to anyone not intimately familiar with the ins and outs of barcodes – had nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Everyone in the conversation immediately understood that we had been ‘geeked’. We tried to steer our geek away from his topic and predictably failed: our geek paid no heed to the usual social cues of conversation. Everyone else managed to escape and I was left with my geek, doomed to listen on in feigned interest and rising annoyance.

Every socially active furry will be able to identify with my experience. Why, I asked another furry following my eventual escape, am I socializing with these infuriating geeks?

Another question struck me later in the day: why are there so many geeks in the furry community?

There are definitely a lot of geeks. I asked Klisoura, [adjective][species] contributor & curator of the Furry Survey. We found three questions that, if hardly authoritative, help us guess at the proportion of geeks in the furry community:

Would you describe yourself as:

• a fan of RPGs? (Yes 55%)
• a fan of science fiction (Yes 61%)
• a fan of anime (Yes 49%)

This data suggests that around half of the furry community might be considered geeky, although that’s really just informed speculation. Suffice to say that there are plenty of geeks out there. (Further data mining suggests that geeks and non-geeks have different experiences within the furry community, but that’s fodder for a future post. It’s interesting stuff though.)

The furry community has always had strong connections with geek culture. Geek culture informs a large number of furries from a political, social and personal point of view. And, most pertinently, the fledgling furry community of the 1980s and 1990s was essentially a geek phenomenon. Most furries, especially pre-internet, discovered furry through a variety of geek fandoms.

The furry community of 2012 is not an exclusively geek phenomenon. Conversations about (say) programming languages may be common amongst furries, but these are not furry conversations per se. Such conversations occur because a lot of furries care about programming languages. I might chat about music with furry friends, but that – like that lively exchange of ideas on programming languages – is just two people discussing a common interest.

A full disclosure: I am not a geek, at least by furry standards. I have a science-based qualification but I don’t work in IT. I don’t frequent geek culture websites (like xkcd). I don’t read speculative fiction and I don’t watch animated TV programmes that are designed for children. I do, on the other hand, enjoy many non-geeky activities such as playing and watching sport.

I’m not anti-geek. I think geeks are great. My partner of some six years is a geek. Geeks can be frustrating, but they are also rather amazing.

My experience with the barcode geek is a common one, and a hazard for anyone socializing with furries. But geeks aren’t all about derailed low-empathy conversation topics, there are big upsides.

I think the thing that most amazes me is the ability of geeks to intensely focus on some logical or mechanical problem. That single-minded intensity, which geeks often glibly refer to as “the zone” (without realizing the rare genius that seems to result from it), astounds those of us who don’t work that way. Geeks are also direct and honest, have a knack for seeing unexpected solutions to complicated problems, and are rather charming to boot.

As it turns out, a combination of personal introspection, fierce intellectual pride, and charm is downright sexy.

Geeks are not always the most self-aware people. The unfortunate downside is, like my barcode-loving friend, they don’t always meet the nebulous and ever-shifting rules and expectations of society. Examples, all of which will be in bold display at every furry gathering all over the world:

• Geeks often have poor personal hygiene.
• Geeks often fail to read social cues that suggest they’re acting inappropriately.
• Geeks often have poor interpersonal skills.
• Geeks often dress very poorly.

The good news is that geeks are open-minded. Geeks can, and do, get better at their shortcomings because they are open to change. If the stereotypical teenage geek is a smelly escapee from their parents’ basement, then the stereotypical middle-aged geek is beardy, wise and all smiles.

The furry community is good for geeks who don’t feel comfortable in a social environment, because it is welcoming and tolerant. Furry accepts all comers, regardless of social skill, but also provides a template for improved behaviour. Any new furry will meet a wide range of people and learn more about society’s confounding rules through observation and experience. And everyone is improved by chatting with the wise beardy man.

The Londonfurs meets are good example of this. The geeks are welcomed and able to socialize amongst their peers, but they are also required to abide by society’s rules in a large public space.

Regardless of furry’s geeky genesis, it’s logical that the community would attract a preponderance of geeks. Geeks are less likely to find an appealing mainstream societal norm, so they are more likely to be looking for somewhere to belong. Geeks also tend to be introspective and imaginative, ideally suited to our ultra-personal version of unreality.

It’s difficult to be respected and considered sexy if you’re a geek. Furry is a community that accepts geekiness, as well as providing a framework for geeks to have a positive self-image. Furry’s acceptance of alternate anthropomorphic identities allows geeks to be accepted in that wonderfully counterintuitive furry way, where the most real version of someone is their imaginary avatar. Geeks can be sexy, confident, respected, and human.

Hey, all you wolves, dogs, foxes, and other assorted wonderful canids!  We’d like to see how the family canidae breaks down in terms of representation within the fandom!  Head on over to take the survey, and we’ll bring up a visualization of responses once we get enough.  The survey is only a single question, so it should be fairly quick.

Thanks, folks :o)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article talking about the preponderance of furries who re-evaluate their sexual preference after discovering the community. The experience is common enough to be a furry stereotype.

Many of you shared your stories in the comments, in the forums and to my email ([email protected]).

Today I want to post some of those stories. I’ve edited them all for length but I’ve done my best to retain the true voice of the writer. I encourage you to read the longer versions elsewhere on the site, and seek out more stories by asking around your furry friends.

I realized I was gay after getting into furry, and also right after starting college. I grew up in a fairly Christian household, so erotica was a no-no. I never seemed to go after the female stuff and of course anything else was unthinkable.

 

In college I got a ton more unmonitored internet-using time. RL friends would suggest porn-viewing nights, and online friends would send me links that I actually felt okay about opening. Needless to say, all this was straight. It took a great gay rolemodel and another furry friend online realizing he was non-straight, to realize there were other options. I spent a couple months identifying as bi, but by the end of the first semester, I was identifying as gay online and in RL, had a Tapestries account, a male mate online, the whole thing.
- Indi

 

I grew up with my mother, who was very open regarding sex and sexuality. There was nothing wrong with being gay and so I was already prepared to consider/accept it when puberty hit.

 

My sex life began when I was thirteen. I slept with a friend’s male cousin. I didn’t like it. But I knew I could find a bond with females. When I was fourteen I came out to my mother as gay. It’s one of my favourite stories about my mother that when I came out she shouted, “WOOHOO, gay girls don’t get pregnant!” and then we had cookies.

 

I then spent several years in the local gay community as a drag king and little-boy dyke. At nineteen I decided I was no longer interested in the gay community or its drama. It’s pretty ironic I then turned to the furry community.

 

I had reservations about joining the group after one male member propositioned me online, but another guy had seemed nice. We decided to have casual sex and started dating. I was now unsettled and wondering about my sexuality. I rationalised that he was bi and therefore some sort of stepping stone between female and male. For about two years I was still trying to find excuses as to how I could still be lesbian.

 

I have since fallen in love with another male in the local community. I’m still sure I’m bisexual, but I was sure I was lesbian before. I have never found myself attracted to a female member of the community, though they are in very limited supply. I’m still not sure if I changed more or just my circumstances.
- Muchi

 

Both my parents were non-practising Jehovah’s Witnesses. I grew up not knowing what “gay” was. I had my first crush when I was eight. Because I didn’t understand what was going on, I just thought it was a case of hero-worship towards a role-model who was a few years older. When his friends noticed and taunted me, asking whether I was “gay”, I asked my mother what it was. As an answer, I got a description of some bizarre caricature of aging pedophiles who forcibly rape little boys. All that set me back about ten years.

 

The furry community is the best environment for people to self-actualize that I’ve ever encountered. Inasmuch as it does this, I genuinely consider it to be, literally, the most important thing on the planet.
- Satori

 

I was introduced to the furry fandom through through erotic art when I was 15. At the time I was very attracted to women and not at all to men. One day, I read a short story involving two males and something clicked.

 

Did furry turn me bi? It’s hard for me to believe that I had some latent homosexual desire through all the years I spent lusting after women. As much as the victimist in me wants to say I was born this way, I’m honestly not sure that’s true.
- SS

 

When I joined furry, I was just as gay as could be. I was one of those “ew girls gross” guys. It took probably a year or two before I started to open up. I wound up first in a relationship online in which there was much toying with gender, then in a relationship in person with a girl.

 

It was a similar journey for me in terms of gender. Gender’s big and complicated, as big and complicated as sexuality, and I certainly can’t say I’m finished with either journey, but the furry fandom has certainly been instrumental in helping me to grow and change as I feel I ought. I seem to have landed somewhere in the middle of the Kinsey scale, and while I don’t consider myself transgendered, I don’t really consider myself cisgendered either. If there’s another thing that my growth in the fandom has taught me, though, it’s that I’m not going to claim those labels forever.
- Makyo

 

I grew up in a fairly conservative family in a conservative part of the country, so queer folks always seemed distant – something that you’d find in big cities. When I first discovered furry, I thought of myself primarily as asexual. The thought that I was attracted to men never occurred to me.

 

Furry changed all that. Talking to gay and bi men helped me realize that I did have sexual thoughts and urges. My first serious relationship with a furry girl was with someone who was very interested in online gender play.

 

Long after I had dated several men, admitting I was gay felt dirty and like I had betrayed my family and my church. The fandom was a refuge from those feelings. People in the fandom were willing to say the two most important things that a young gay man can hear: you are not alone and what you feel really is OK.
- peri

 

When I was a teen I dated a few girls, mainly out of expectations rather than any sort of mutual attraction. What I was really interested in was dogs, and to a lesser extent other guys. I didn’t really think that homosexuality really existed beyond a concept at that age, let alone zoosexuality.

 

While the furry fandom offered plenty in relation to zoosexual material and people to contact, it also provided plenty of opportunity to rally against those very same things, with no shortage of people who were very anti-zoo. I turned on my zoo friends. My homosexual encounters also became more self destructive, becoming meaningless, anonymous and objectifying. Eventually it got to the point where I convinced myself in my mind that I hated sex. And thus my life was miserable for a long time.

 

I eventually identified what was wrong, and had to go through the agonising process of learning to accept and love myself as a homosexual. I then had to go through the even harder process of accepting myself as a zoosexual. It remains the hardest thing that I have ever done.

 

I don’t think I could have made those steps without my friends within the fandom who were accepting of who I actually was. I feel sad when I reflect on the kind of person that I used to be, and that I had pointed accusingly at people who were just like me and said with conviction ‘You are wrong and vile’. I’m surprised that I could have ever hated myself that badly.
- Anonymous

 

Thanks to everyone who told their story.

It’s been a long time since we’ve done any open posts here at [adjective][species].  A lot of this is due to the sheer amount of personal stuff that’s been going on, but also, it’s been hard to think up any good topics!  It would be nice to try something new with this one.  I’ve talked before about how I got into the fandom – finding yerf, getting out of hand with it in high school, then calming down later on.  We’re interested in the variety of stories from other people, though!  What got you into anthropomorphized animals?  What got you into the furry subculture?  Heck, how did you find this website?  Tell us about all of your beginnings!

N.B. Rather than modifying the post with all the responses, since that would mean mostly copy/pasting what commentors provide, I’ll leave the comments mostly in place, unless I receive comments form Google+, Twitter, or FA!

If we accept the fact that the furry subculture, the fandom as a cohesive group of somewhat like-minded individuals, has only existed for about thirty years, then we have available to us a growing and expanding membership at the beginning of what I hope to be a long thread of human society. We’re still in that bright, almost expansionist era of our creation where we are doing out level best to create more than we can consume. We bring in new members not only through the shared interest in anthropomorphics, but also through both the vibrancy of our existence and the social currency of our creative output. Furry, such as it is, is on the rise.

We are still young though, there’s no getting around that.

Thirty years, in the grand scheme of things isn’t really all that long of a time. The United States has lasted eight times that long, Christianity approaching 70 times, and, according to some, the universe almost 200 times that long, and that number is considered very, very small by many others. Our vibrancy and social currency is strong, but we are not the only group on the rise out there. In western culture, the anime fan base is taking a similar track, as have countless other subcultures and fandoms before it. Our output is copious and so, in turn, is our social currency, but they are not out of proportion.

Our fandom is young, and given the median age of about twenty years old, we are a fandom made up of many, many young people. Really, then, it’s no surprise that a single death among our ranks affects so many of us so greatly.

As I mentioned last week this article was one that has been in the works for a bit, and was intended to go live last week. I, like JM, like to get the article done a day or so ahead of time in order to make sure everything is set to go off without a hitch. Unfortunately, while I had this article halfway done, I heard the distressing news of the loss of two furries via several posts on FA. I waffled for a few days about whether to continue on with the publication of this post in tribute or to hold off out of respect, and, at the last minute, wound up coming to this compromise of a weeks delay for a respectful entry.

Death and the larger concept of mortality have been our fixation for almost all of recorded history. It’s arguable, really, that death and mortality have been the fixation of life for its entire existence here on earth. It’s something of a milestone in life when we start to realize that we’re mortal, that we will end and that at that point, something fundamental about our existence will change, whether it’s entering into heaven or simply the same unknown we return to that we were a part of before birth. For me, it was about the time I turned eight or nine and, leaning against my mother’s front while watching TV, I heard her heartbeat and it hit me, in a very logical fashion, that at some point that heartbeat would stop and my mom would be no more. I suppose it happens to everyone now and then, but from an individual’s perspective, the idea that life will eventually come to a stop is something that focuses the mind and all but forces introspection.

Death is always a tricky subject, but especially so in a societal context.  Death has become an industry in Western culture; not just dealing with the remains of our loved ones respectfully, but also the industry of delaying death and the industry dedicated to bereavement.  Whether or not the concept of the end of one’s life is cause for introspection, it’s something that society has grown up to deal with.  There are arguments to be made for the fact that death – or at least protection from early death – is at the center of society and governance.  The sharp contrast between life and death is often at the center of much of religion and art as well, both social concepts.  It makes sense, then, that a subset of society (and of religion and art, if you look at furry that way) would also have its collective mind so focused by loss.

We have at least two benefits within furry, however.  First of all, we’re still relatively small.  The Tucholsky quip that “The death of one man: that is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: that is a statistic!” would be difficult to hold true in our subculture of one or two hundreds of thousands (an arguable point, I’m sure).  For us, one death is a tragedy, but given our small size, any number of deaths would likely be as much a tragedy.  Much of the basis for this quote has to do with Dunbar’s number, the suggested limit of stable relationships one individual can maintain; with a community of our size and a rough estimate of perhaps 150 for Dunbar’s number, that means that, no matter what, in the event of a catastrophe, the chances of one being directly affected, either through personal involvement or a personal relationship, are much, much higher.

The second, and perhaps more important benefit is that furry is based around a willful membership.  We identify as furries, whether or not the interest in anthropomorphics is innate, whether or not we feel a connection with animals.  It is a choice, much more than skin color or biological sex could ever be.  Our membership in the subculture comes primarily with the benefits of social currency and standing within the smaller group, and in a limited setting with such a friendly group, it’s hardly surprising to see loosely connected people paying their respects to the dead and the bereaved.  On the FA profile page of any deceased or grieving member of the fandom, one is likely to see that nearly every shout or comment on a journal is another fur offering their sympathies.

The interesting side of this is that many, if not most of those leaving their shouts and comments do not actually know either the bereaved or the deceased.   They have found out about it through their own social networks.  In our socially oriented fandom with a relatively small mean degree of separation between individuals, news about anything travels fast.  If one sees a friend grieving over a loss, and makes one mention of it, chances are good that someone not even involved will feel moved and may even leave their own note.

Nothing is ever quite so simple, of course, and there are a few downsides and negative aspects to our relationship with death.  Primarily, just because we know or know of someone does not necessarily mean that we like them.  Many simply keep their peace in such situations, but some have noticed that individuals will occasional create puppet-accounts on social sites in order to post a negative comment or two, or even use their own account to rail against the deceased or their loved ones.  I feel that much of this is likely due to the anonymity provided by interactions on the Internet, but I could be wrong.  Perhaps there is an additional aspect to our social nature or our tightly-knit web of relationships that makes it easier for one to express their views, both positive and negative, but that said, I hear far, far less about this happening in person than online.

An additional factor to take into account is that the fandom is growing, and at quite a clip.  There seems to be hundreds of new furries each day.  Dragoneer, the owner of FurAffinity, recently mentioned that, in 2011, there were anywhere between 300-500 new accounts created per day for a total of 145,787 new accounts in that year alone, most of which were estimated to be unique, non-group accounts.  Along with the growth of the fandom comes a greater chance of losing one’s individuality in life and not being noticed quite as much in death.  However, even if the number of random strangers comforting us in our grief declines or the number of shouts from those who didn’t know the dead starts to decrease, our membership still gets us a caring family and many ready friends.

In the end, however, death within the fandom is still something that strikes us strongly. Perhaps it’s due to our small size, or our tightly-woven net of interpersonal relationships, or even due to the online nature of much of our interaction, but no matter what, it’s comforting to know that there are those out there who, whether or not they knew us, would feel our loss. So let this article stand in memoriam of FirePyro and Athus, Waarhorse and Randomonlooker, Ponybird and Loki, and all the others who have entered into our lives through furry and then gone. I’m opening up a topic in the forums for additional names to be added to the list; if the fandom has lost someone in particular that you know of, feel free to add them to the list of those to be remembered.

I had originally intended to write a different article this week, but due to recent events, I’m going to put that on hold.  Since I had already started writing it and had limited time to come up with an alternative post, I decided to do something a little more personal.  I hope you all don’t mind a bit of a fluff post this week.  Apologies for the wandering train of thought, I had to hurry to get it up in time!

The about page mentions as much but I’ll restate it more in-depth here.  I wound up at Colorado State University for college, starting in biochemistry but quickly moving to music.  I wound up spending longer than usual in the program for a few reasons.  First of all, I started off in music education.  That lasted for a few years, until I got far enough in the degree to start taking education classes, which didn’t sit well for me.  They were all about obeying the law and not getting sued by parents, rather than teaching children effectively.  After that, I switched to music composition.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t really a music composition program at my school, since there wasn’t really a music composition professor.  There was an adjunct professor that taught orchestration, improvisation, and jazz theory classes, though, and he wound up being my main professor for about a year.  However, I wasn’t the only one switching into the program at the time, so the university began the search for a composition chair.  I was lucky enough to be in on the selection process and helped to pick CSU’s current composition professor, and we wound up with a wonderful guy to head the department.  One of the first things he nudged me towards after listening to some of my composition assignments was Leonard Bernstein’s symphonies, and the one I fell in love with immediately was the third, Kaddish.

Kaddish, specifically the Mourner’s Kaddish, is a Jewish prayer singing the praises of God.  In his symphony, Bernstein mingles the text of the Kaddish, sung in the choir, with a narration that I feel describes an important transition that many people go through, both individually and as societies and cultures.

The piece opens with an introduction from the narrator describing God as “lonely, disappointed father” and “angry, wrinkled old majesty”.  The tone is immediately set, and not simply by the words.  The first sounds the listener hears are actually the entire choir humming an indeterminate pitch sotto voce. The effect is close to a science fiction movie’s depiction of space, but gives the impression of a vast and frightening expanse.  As the piece progresses and the choir starts to sing the words of the Kaddish, chaos breaks out with loud percussion and bright brass.  This isn’t a happy song singing the virtues of the Lord.

On the return of the narrator, one hears why: “you [...] who cause the dawn to know its place, surely you can cause and command a touch of order here below on this one dazed speck.”  The narrator isn’t pleased about his relationship with his God (who never replies in the piece, except perhaps through music).  As the piece continues, the confrontation between the narrator and God escalating to a climax as the narrator accuses God of breaking his covenant to man after the flooding of the earth.  ”Tin God,” he screams, “Your bargain is tin!  It crumples in my hand!  And where is faith now, Yours or mine?!”

As the symphony winds on, the narrator compares and contrasts the idyllic world of God’s creation of the Kingdom of Heaven with the reality that man has created, all in the guise of a dream.  The Kingdom of Heaven is “just as You planned it, every immortal cliché intact” where as the world of man is filled with “Real-life marvels! Genuine wonders! Dazzling miracles!”  As the narrator and God awaken, the narrator proposes a new covenant, “not quite the covenant we bargained for so long ago,” and pledges that the two shall always “Suffer and recreate each other.”  On this new agreement, the piece comes to a crashing end.

I know I need to tie this back to my own experiences with furry, but it requires a bit of explanation first.  First, I have to admit that if I’m unschooled in the ways of sociology and anthropology, I’m even more ignorant in theology and apologetics.  From the little I’ve read, though I’ve come to understand that the relationship between the both Christians and Jews and God is not a static thing, beyond the base definition of Creator and Created.  The relationship changed when Abraham obeyed God’s command to sacrifice Isaac; it changed after the biblical flood with the aforementioned covenant; it changed with Moses, with David, and with Jesus.  It’s still changing.

"Jesus" vs. "Christ" (click for full Ngram)

The chart to the side displays uses of the terms “Jesus” and “Christ” between the years 1900 and 2000.  During the late ’80s and into the ’90s, you can see how the trend shifts away from “Christ” and toward “Jesus”.  I believe, and this is only a gut-reaction, that this is largely due to the more personal relationship with one’s God being preached in the last few decades with the growth of large evangelical and liberal Christian churches.  Clearly, the change is still coming within something as established as western religion.

So what does this have to do with furry?.  There’s been a lot of my own path through the fandom that matches up closely with the narrator’s growth in his relationship with God.  Most importantly, the similarities are evident when, at the end of Bernstein’s Kaddish, the narrator and God come to a new covenant wherein they suffer and recreate each other.

This is something I spend a lot of time thinking about.  I’ve been chugging along in the fandom for about twelve years now.  I was initially pretty happy to just go along with whatever everyone else was doing, and even after I stopped doing that, I was still pretty happy to just say I was a part of it.  I was a furry and pretty cool with it.  I couldn’t draw, didn’t have much money to buy commissions, didn’t have a fursuit, and talked almost exclusively with my own little group of friends.  Then I got bitter.

Around my second or third year of college, after I’d been going to the local meets for a while, I found that, more often than not, I wasn’t really happy with the fandom.  It’s not that I didn’t like where it was going, so much that I didn’t like that I was in it.  I was occasionally ashamed by the fact that I was a fur, and that made me feel sort of sarcastic about the whole thing.  Of course, that worked pretty well as a feedback loop, and I started to sort of wind down my life within the fandom.  I talked to fewer and fewer people, I went to less and less meets.  I still went to cons, but I stopped going to panels.  I started making money, but never really used it to buy commissions.  I wound up changing my name to distance myself from the past – whereas before I was Ranna, the red fox who stole a cool sounding name from a book, now I was Makyo, the arctic fox whose name meant a demon that distracts from the path to enlightenment (I thought it was witty for a future teacher).

It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to get out of the fandom.  With the few friends I still interacted closely with, including one wonderful partner, I was still a fox guy.  I still kept up on enough of the goings on to have intelligent conversations with the people I did talk to.  Even so, I felt like I was going to what I thought was the standard thing: stick around furry for five to ten years, then leave it once real life took over.  It stung, at first, but I figured I was growing up.

Eventually, the snarky attitude calmed down and I settled into a routine with those around me.  It took me accidentally embedding myself in a portion of the Colorado furs, a chance invitation to a party, a few more people showing up at the local meets, and moving to an apartment building that hosted other furs.  It was the deeper sense of meaningful communication that I got from my furry friends that seemed to be missing from my music friends that got me thinking that I needed to renegotiate my membership within the fandom.  I wasn’t content to just be a listless member anymore, I wanted to be an active participant.

This was, of course, still a few years ago.  At the time, I began by trying to post more to my FA account.  I posted my music, which garnered little to no attention.  I commissioned some more art, which got a little more.  That attention felt good.  It was good to be known, to some (very) small extent by the art that I commissioned.  I can understand individuals who get a lot of art of their characters done, now: it just feels good.  It’s the visible affirmation of our character, and the affirmation of our social worth when the work is appreciated.

Even so, I wanted more.  I wanted to be on more even ground with the subculture of which I was a part.  I don’t think I’m the only one to experience this, either.  Sites such as The Furry Agenda, SoFurry, and so many others all aim to give back the fandom, yet are the products of their creators.  The same could be said vis-à-vis conventions and their chairs and board-members.  For me, the next part happened by accident.

My rather furry boss (hey boss, promise I’m writing this at home!) and I were joking around one day just after Halloween.  On the holiday, there was a party – small convention, even – and a friend of mine mentioned that there sure were a lot of people who were named ColorSpecies or some variant.  I don’t know who it was that my friend had talked to, but I brought it up to my boss and we wound up coming up with an idea to make some goofy automatic textual description generator that would fill in a template a-la the roadtrip game Ad-Libs.

I registered adjectivespecies.com that afternoon.

I’m not really sure how I got from the idea of ad-libbing descriptions to this loose amalgam of meta-furriness that we have now.  It happened quickly, of course.  I registered the domain that afternoon, and wrote the first article that night.  It probably had much to do with the drive home (my commute is about an hour long).  During the drive, I think I realized that what I was originally planning was much closer to my more sarcastic days than what I was aiming for.  I didn’t want to just wind up as some snarky, burned fur blogger making a snarky, burned fur website.

What was I aiming for?  I’m still not sure.  The recognition, a little bit; I did want to make a bit of a name for myself within the fandom, but it wasn’t just that (there certainly are easier ways about it, too).  To create a resource of introspection, too; I think that introspection is an important tool for anyone, especially when it comes to intangibles, and many of my previous projects reflected that.  More than anything, though, I wanted to, like the narrator and God within Kaddish, work with the fandom, dream with it, understand it.  Nothing so grandiose as changing furry to fit my whims, of course, it’s not my place to do so; simply to explore and grow along with it.  This was my new covenant with myself as an individual and myself as a member of the subculture: that we should continuously suffer and recreate each other.

Hey folks!  We’ve gotten a few requests so far for comment reply notifications via e-mail.  I had originally thought that this was part of WordPress, but I suppose not.  I did, however, find a plugin that should help out with this.  When commenting, you will now see a check box, which, if checked, will tell the blog to send you an email whenever someone replies to your comment.  This is currently checked by default, so you will have to un-check it if you do not wish to receive emails of replies.  This is configurable, and depending on feedback, I can change it in the future.  I hope this helps with discussion on the site!

Thanks :o)

There is a widely-held belief that new furries often re-evaluate their sexual preference after discovering the community.

Stereotypically, a young heterosexual male will begin socializing with furries – either online or in person – and will shortly re-evaluate himself as gay (or bi). Our young stereotype may think that furry helped him realize this about himself, and the experience will probably be a very positive one.

Confession time: my name is JM Horse and I am a stereotype.

I first heard about this phenomenon while reading about the community online. The then-popular Furvey, a long furry survey that people would fill in and post to alt.lifestyle.furry on Usenet, had this question (which I have lightly edited for clarity):

It is common for many furries to live as a heterosexual, and then through furry to discover their attraction to the same sex – is this the case with you?

 

This question has been asked since the mid-1990s. But is it true?

I asked Klisoura, who runs the Furry Survey. The chart below shows Klisoura’s data (visualized by Makyo), and it’s remarkable.

Years in the fandom vs. sexual orientation - (full visualization)

The trend is almost certainly starker than the chart shows. Our first datapoint is based on furries who have been in the community for up to one year. Some of these furries will have already re-evaluated their sexual preference.

It’s safe to conclude that more than half of the heterosexual furries coming into the community will change their sexual preference.

The big question: why is this happening? I have some ideas.

Does furry make you gay?

No. Furry is no more making people gay than Christian gay-rehabilitation camps are making people straight.

There will, of course, be some heterosexual furries who experiment with gay sex. This happens in every environment: homosexuals often experiment with straight sex when they’re younger; young men brought up in a rural environment often experiment with bestiality. You can’t change, or choose, your sexuality.

Are most people bisexual, and perhaps furry behaviour just a representation of that?

The idea that most people are bisexual comes from the research of Kinsey and the philosophies of Freud. Both Kinsey and Freud, while very important, have been discredited on this point: Kinsey wildly overestimated the numbers of non-heterosexuals, and Freud believed that homosexuality was a curable mental illness.

Around 2% of people identify as bisexual, declining with age. Most bisexuals eventually reclassify themselves as straight or gay. However it’s impossible to read much into this as bisexuality is a slippery concept: the ex-bisexuals may be in committed relationships and simply reclassify themselves for clarity.

It’s an interesting and controversial idea, and one that I cannot do justice to here. Suffice to say that there is no evidence for a silent bisexual majority.

The idea, at least in the furry world, can be dismissed by looking at the data. The straight furries who change their sexual preference are much more likely to move from straight to gay, rather than bisexual (or pansexual).

Are furries, to some degree, all zoophiles?

I suggested in a previous post that furry is a half-step towards zoophilia. However I meant this only from an external perspective – people unfamiliar with furry may look at all these animal people and jump to a conclusion.

More pertinently, only about 1 in 6 furries identify as zoophiles. That’s a lot but it’s still a small minority.

Is furry a gateway to understanding your true sexuality?

Possibly.

For most people, it’s not easy growing up gay. It’s assumed that you are straight – this reference point colours your life as you grow up. Any behaviour that might be homosexual stands out as being different, and nobody wants to be different when they’re an adolescent. You might not meet any openly gay people and if you do, their status as “gay” often defines them.

This reference point – that straight is normal, therefore not-straight is abnormal – is easy to internalize. A child quickly learns that some thoughts and feelings are acceptable to express out loud, and that some should be hidden. If it feels like you shouldn’t talk about being attracted to the same sex, it can be easy to focus on only those thoughts that reinforce normality. It’s easy to be gay and not know it. It’s easy to be in denial. It’s easy to be gay and homophobic.

Anyone coming out as a gay person has to deal with these two problems – internalized homophobia and homophobia in society. The first must be overcome to admit to yourself that you are gay.

Perhaps furry is a ‘gateway’ to accepting your true sexuality. For a gay person in denial, it might be easier to enjoy non-human homoerotica without threatening that internalized homophobia.

Furry erotica is stylized. If sex seems a bit smelly or hairy or icky, then furry porn is glossy, neat, and elegant. For a gay furry in denial, it’s a lot easier to fantasize about your furry avatar in a sexual situation compared to imagining yourself in an entanglement with a member of the same sex.

For many furries, consumption of furry erotica is a stepping stone towards becoming a sexually active adult. Furry porn can lead to typesex with an online friend (or stranger), which can lead to flirting and friendly physical contact with furries in real life, which can lead to sex with a likeminded furry. In the best case, this can all occur in an enjoyable, satisfying, low-stress, low-expectation environment.

You don’t have to be a gay furry in denial for this progression to work. There is a preponderance of furries who don’t naturally have a way of expressing their sexuality in the context of normal society. Perhaps the furry community is just a gateway: a way for us to take babysteps to realization of our true sexual identity, whatever that might be.

If this is the case, then furry may simply be a convenient construct. It might be no more than a vehicle that we subconsciously commandeer, taking our conscious mind on a journey to the point where it can accept our sexual needs. To stretch the metaphor, perhaps we can abandon this vehicle once we’ve reached our destination.

(Aside to furries who are currently on the journey: you will get there. You will accept and embrace who you are. You will feel comfortable with yourself and amongst your peers. You will, one day, say out loud “I am ___” and it’ll feel great.)

Perhaps the only reason we stay with the furry group – once the porn and the community have helped us reach actualization of our true sexuality – is for our friends, and the fellowship, and the flirtatiousness or sex within the group. Perhaps this explains why 60% of furries are single; perhaps this explains why furry is so young – most people move on once they find a long-term relationship.

This is an idea worth exploring in more detail. As a committed furry “lifestyler” – someone who strongly identifies with his furry self and likes to write philosophical articles about the community here on [a][s] – it’s easy for me to disregard this hypothesis (and, don’t worry, I will in a moment). I’m not an impartial voice: you don’t ask a priest for evidence that god doesn’t exist; you don’t ask a trekkie for an impartial review of William Shatner’s oeuvre.

I think it’s worth entertaining the idea for a moment. If furry were simply a convenient vehicle for each of us to accept and express our true sexuality, we wouldn’t know. The human mind can, and does, keep secrets from itself: a gay person in denial is not aware of something utterly fundamental. We could similarly be non-furries in denial.

Self-deception is a well known phenomenon in cognitive psychology circles, supported by a lot of research and scientific evidence. The basic theory boils down to this: we create a version of the world that is consistent which what we already think. If we see evidence that is contrary to our version of the world, we disregard it in such a way that reinforces our existing belief. This is counterintuitive but true.

So what follows is either my false internal justification for the reality of myself as a furry and the importance of the furry community, or my objective reasoning for such. With that caveat, you may make up your own mind.

My conclusions

If furry pornography is just a stepping-stone to acceptance of one’s real sexuality, then we would eventually lose interest in furry pornography. We would move on to regular pornography.

It’s not uncommon for pornography to be a gateway. Let’s consider someone with a relatively extreme fetish: a bit of /ah roulette on Fchan has given me castration.

Someone with a fetish for castration is unlikely to leap straight into /ah – their developing adolescent mind will know that this is not ‘normal’, and so will reject the idea. So our castration-fetishist will find stepping-stones that aren’t too challenging when taken one-at-a-time. Maybe they will start with porn featuring a power imbalance, then maybe knives will come into it, them maybe violence and disfigurement, then maybe slavery and eunuchs, then eventually good-old consensual castration.

Once our castration-lover has accepted their fetish, they will discard the stepping stones and head straight to /ah every time.

Every furry with whom I’ve ever broached the topic is an enthusiastic consumer of furry erotica. For those of us who have accepted our true sexuality, we’re usually consuming regular porn as well. But we’re not discarding the furry stuff.

I’d also argue that all pornography is stylized, not just furry pornography. Regular pornography features people with impossibly little body hair, perfect tans and bleached anuses. For those of you who like body hair: have lots. Like large people? Have really large people. Pornography is always stylized to push our buttons, and it’s evolved this way because that’s what people are demanding. It’s social Darwinism.

More to the point, furry isn’t defined by sex or sexual orientation. Furry is about identity, and that’s what separates it from other fandoms and hobbyist groups. People who identify as a furry usually consider themselves, internally, as a sort of animal-person. And external expression of that internal reality within the furry community can be very rewarding.

I mentioned at the beginning of this article that I am one of those people who re-evaluated their sexual preference after discovering furry. I’d like to share the short version of my story with you.

When I discovered the furry community, I was in a long-term heterosexual relationship with a fantastic person. She and I were great friends and had an active sex life. After a year or so into furry, something new happened: I fell in love with a nominally bisexual furry guy. I broke up with my girlfriend and attempted a new relationship. It didn’t work: the experience made it clear to me that I am gay, and clear to him that he is straight. It was hard on all of us but our friendship trumped the heartbreak. The three of us are still very close friends. A few years ago, I was best man at his wedding.

My story is unique but typical. I would love to hear your own stories, either in the comments below or elsewhere ([email protected]).

The furry community is, I think, a great environment for people to get to know themselves. It’s introspective but social; it encourages tolerance and personal growth; it’s trivial and important. I can’t explain why so many furries have unusual sexual and gender identities – perhaps the heterosexual furries find enough acceptance in the non-furry world, happy enough as Lion King fans, or playing as Khajiit on Skyrim.

I think that there are many people who live as a heterosexual with the subconscious knowledge that they are not being true to themselves. These are people who are not lucky enough to grow up in an environment where sexuality is a preference rather than a potential abnormality, and people who don’t have something like the furry community to help them accept who they really are.

An acquaintance of mine is a palliative care nurse, who provides comfort and dignity to people who are dying. She once told me the biggest regret people have: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

I feel very lucky to be a stereotype.

Hey!  We know furries are awesome.  Super awesome.  That’s a big part of why we’re furries, too.  We love writing about the fandom of which we are a part.  In order to help further much of this discussion, we’ve added a new toy to [a][s]: forums.  Now we can open the discussion of furry up all the further.

Also, and here’s the part I’m particularly excited about, one of these forums will be used for letting everyone contribute to the site by writing collaborative articles.  I know I’m an enormous dork, writing furry essays every week, so for those of you less dorky than I, feel free to chip in on a collaboration and get some of your ideas published here on the site.  I know this is all a bit of an experiment, but I have high hopes: I know I see at least one journal entry on FA per week that would make a good topic for a post, so I know you guys would be good at this!

Have fun, play nice, keep being awesome :o)

I’m sure I’ve gone on before about the benefits of working within a community, but I’ll say it again: you guys are ace.

While running the [a][s] Twitter account, I do my best to follow back everyone who follows the account.  This isn’t simply a nice-guy type thing to do; some of the best inspiration comes from all you fuzzies out there.  After all, the articles here would get pretty boring if they were solely about what it was like to be a furry without being a member of the furry subculture.  This week’s article comes from a recommendation and brief conversation with Drenthe, a raccoon of quality, about a book he had seen a review of which I subsequently purchased.  The book was Hanne Blank’s Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality.  I think it’s fairly obvious by now how much gender and sexuality interest me.

One of the early chapters of the book brings up an interesting concept that I only recently thought to apply to the fandom, and that’s the concept of doxa.

Doxa, from the Greek meaning “popular belief”, has come to mean something very specific in sociology today.  Doxa is everything that goes without saying in a society.  In Blank’s book, she uses it to describe the fact that, for the majority of our western society, it goes without saying that heterosexuality is the norm, that homosexuality has to do with two people in a binary gender system engaging in sexual activity or feeling romantically attracted to each other, when, on close inspection, neither sexuality nor gender are quite so simple.  This is part of our doxa, part of what we just assume is the case via popular belief.  It is rarely taught explicitly, and in fact rarely ever mentioned out loud because it is so common a belief.

This concept shows itself primarily in language and communication, though it’s also visible in many of the social structures of the society.  One of the most common linguistic elements surrounding doxa, Blank asserts, is markedness, or marked categories.  That is, two categories related by a rule and an exception, or a general category and a specific category.  For a pertinent example, one might consider the unmarked term “marriage” and the marked term “gay marriage”. Or perhaps in the language of media, this could be “advertisements” and “girls’ advertisements”, which in Chandler’s “Semiotics for Beginners”  is marked by “significantly longer shots, significantly more dissolves (fade out/fade in of shot over shot), less long shots and more close-ups, less low shots, more level shots and less overhead shots”.

All of this, of course, got me wondering about what sort of doxa and marked categories we have within the fandom.  Culture as whole has the givens and the goes-without-sayings, and individual subcultures, as parts of that whole, are just as susceptible to their own specific doxa.  I’ve written before about some of the stages of growth of an individual within western gay popular culture, and those, in their own way, are a sort of doxa, if it goes without saying that younger members of that culture go through their phases of discovery.

One of the big problems with discerning doxa amid that noisy channel of communication that is language and media is difficult, and it is most often found when it is challenged, such as when one notices a marked category.  After all, doxa is not a static thing: it changes and grows or fades as the society around it advances or declines.  Here are just a few of the things I’ve noticed within the fandom that could be called doxa, though as they’re all either currently being challenged or have already been challenged, they may sound a little dated.  To be sure, finding any sort of doxa that is currently well-entrenched is nearly impossible – it’s difficult to ask oneself what one takes for granted, after all.

• Everyone has a personal character - When I first started getting into the fandom and learning more about furry, it seemed as though the first thing you did was choose a species and attributes that fit your personality and did your level best to let that character become you.  Everyone I knew had a character that fit them well and only a few I knew had alts, which were mainly used to either sneak around or separate adult aspects of their interactions from more general aspects.  However, over time, I noticed that many of my friends (and me, for that matter) started to create different characters or at least different morphs to correspond to different aspects of their personality.  It wasn’t so much that one was just a foxman anymore; one was a foxman when chatting with friends, a foxgirl when questioning one’s gender identity, a wolverineman to roleplay stronger emotions, and so on.

  While this was likely the case even when I was still in my “fursona” stage, I think that things have become more clearly separated now as we get into such things as character auctions and “adoptables”, where one creating a character no longer has much to do with the personal aspect of having a character.  Now that the doxa of having a personal character is being challenged, you see more and more people on FA having journals listing their many characters, only a few of which they may have a personal connection with beyond simply “this is mine”.

• Furry is dramatic - As I mentioned in my previous post, it seems as though a meme will move in a certain arc shape that has become familiar.  That post was about the larger meme of drama within the fandom, but even that one can be seen to be moving in certain ways.  Whereas before it was considered implicit that furries were going to be dramatic people, now it is something that we hang lampshades on nearly constantly – heck, some of us even write introspective meta-furry articles about the subject – and it seems that a lot of that default-to-drama attitude is starting to fade away.  Just like all of the smaller bits of strife within the larger world of drama, the drama itself is starting to move in that same arc.  It is a doxa that is being challenged by the very fact that we’re so willing to point it out and name it.

• Furry is unpopular or uncool- Kathleen Gerbasi, referencing the infamous Vanity Fair article, mentions, “The furry stereotype promoted by [the article's author] indicated that furries were predominantly male, liked cartoons as children, enjoyed science fiction, were homosexual, wore glasses and had beards (male furries only), were employed as scientists or in computer-related fields, and their most common totem animals were wolves and foxes”, which does seem to fit in nicely with our own exploration of what might be the default furry in the fandom.  Needless to say, it doesn’t paint the picture of what one might call a cool or popular guy.

  However, as the fandom has grown and changed, it has entered into a marketing feedback loop: the more furs there are out there with purchasing power, the more money is to be made on them by creating products to suit their tastes, which in turn, helps to broaden the audience of furries out there.  At some point, it became cool and hip to adopt some items that could be seen as related to our fandom, if not necessarily to be furry oneself.  Spirit hoods, tails, and kigurumi pajamas are some examples of how this doxa has been challenged even from outside the fandom itself.

It’s important to note, here that there is a blurry line between doxa and opinion.  One can hold an opinion as a belief and even believe in it quite strongly, but doxa are things that we implicitly believe are true about the society in which we’re embedded, things that we take as fact.  The reason that the line is blurry is that, not only is it sometimes difficult to disentangle opinion from perceived fact, but that as doxa shifts and changes over time, it can veer closer or farther way from opinion.

Watching the shift and change of what we take as given within the fandom is a good way to watch the way our subculture grows and changes, itself.  As we watch these ideas shift from doxa to a division between orthodoxy and heterodoxy – that which is accepted as normal, and that which is seen as going against the norm – to an accepted variety, we can see the way that new members influence the fandom and how external factors can change our social interaction.  The perceived sexualization of furry and the consequent backlash from both older and newer members can be seen as part of this, for example, and there are even visible artifacts such as the numerous ‘not yiffy’ and ‘no RP’ groups on FA being tagged on artists’ and watchers’ profiles alike.  That is just one example, however, of a shorter change that has shown how the fandom is shifting along with its members’ participation.

So is doxa good or bad?  That’s a tough question to answer.  Doxa may be one of those things that “just is”.  It’s an artifact of the way we work as individuals as well as the way our societies are built.  Certainly, some doxa cause harm to individuals and minorities, and even within those minorities, sub-doxa of a sort can cause additional problems in the form of backlash, but commonly held beliefs and ideas are part of the glue that holds us together in cultures.  Even within our own fandom, there are several currents and ideas that form the shifting background of whatever furry is.  Equally difficult to ask, then, is what is the next doxa?  What new ideas will we find out we are taking for granted when they’re challenged?  What commonly held beliefs will lead to contention in the future of our small group of animal-people?  While it is difficult to look within ourselves and figure these things out now beyond searching for marked categories, it certainly bears exploration once they come to light.