[adjective][species]

Animal Farm is George Orwell’s 1945 classic novel.

Orwell is considered to be one of the great authors and Animal Farm, along with Nineteen Eighty-Four, is considered to be one of his masterpieces. It is about talking anthropomorphic animals that overthrow their human farmer master and run the farm on their own terms.

I recently re-read Animal Farm with the idea that I would review it for [adjective][species]. I was planning to conclude that it’s a great book, and a great furry book, and that all furries should read it.

I have re-read Animal Farm, but I’m not recommending it: don’t read Animal Farm. Read something else.

I don’t think that Animal Farm a furry book. Which got me thinking about what constitutes a furry book.

I’ll try to define what a furry book is later, but let’s look at Animal Farm first. It has many qualities that might make it attractive to a furry audience:

• Animal Farm is not complex or difficult to read. Its full title is “Animal Farm: A Fairy Story“, and it’s written in a very deliberate children’s storybook style. The writing is magical in its clarity, akin to Dr Seuss, J.K. Rowling or Philip K. Dick.
• Animal Farm is short: you can start and finish it in a single sitting. It took me a couple of hours.
• The animal characters are fully realized and easy to empathize with.
• Many furry readers will appreciate that the only romance in the book is homosexual, between Benjamin the donkey and Boxer the horse. In line with the writing style, the relationship is chaste and friendly, and would perhaps be better described as homosocial, a bit like Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street. Still, Benjamin and Boxer are devoted to one another and are inseparable to the point that they plan to retire together.

And yet I don’t think it’s a furry book.

Why? For starters, I think that furry is escapist by nature.

Furry books tend to embrace an alternate universe. Makyo touched on this is some detail in his Layers of Fantasy post earlier this year. He pointed out that furry art tends to exist in this context:

It is a sort of stacking of different layers of fantasy, with our focus on anthropomorphic animals being layered atop science fiction or fantasy elements.

Makyo goes on to point out that this isn’t a rule that applies to all furry art, and that the alternate-universe concept falls over when we furries socialize in the real world. But I think that furry does necessarily involve some disconnection from the real world, if only to accommodate our self-images as animal people. I understand that this point is arguable (and please do comment away).

I think that a real-life furry gathering is always different from a non-furry group. The alternate names; the blasé acceptance of ears and tails and fursuits; the non-traditional treatment of sexuality, and;- most importantly – the implicit acceptance that each of us are the being that we feel we are on the inside. I’m an anthropomorphic horse; RandomWolf is in a funny mood because there is a full moon; Bob is just a friendly human who likes Thundercats.

I think that furry books reflect the furry community, in that the community is disconnected from the real world. As furries, we want to escape – however marginally – from the real world. We create our own reality.

Animal Farm, despite its talking animals, exists firmly within the real world. It is allegorical, not fantastical. I wouldn’t recommend Bulgakov’s The Master & Margarita as a furry book either.

Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian Revolution. It retells the story of Russia and the USSR from around World War I through to the last years of World War II. The primary porcine protagonists – Major, Napoleon and Snowball – are respective literal analogs for Marx, Stalin and Trotsky. Animal Farm is no fairytale: there is no redemption, no success. The farm, following revolutionary overthrow of the despotic Farmer Jones, charts a course back to corrupt dictatorship as straight as an arrow.

The children’s storybook language is key to the book’s power and testament to Orwell’s genius. The language primes us to expect and hope that our farm animals will earn themselves a better life through hope and struggle: we’ve read storybooks before. We expect conflict and dark times, but we also expect redemption or at least an engaging Brothers-Grimm-style grotesque coda. But there is no hope for our animals. They are as doomed under the pigs as they were under Farmer Jones.

As well as escapism, a furry book will often employ a literary device where species is shorthand for behaviour. (Cheetahs are fast; foxes are vain; bulls are strong.) This does occur in Animal Farm to an extent – for example we have a strong horse, a lazy cat, and a grumpy donkey – however like the characterization of the pigs, this is meant allegorically. That is, Orwell explores the fates of the Russian people against their (respectively for my three examples) loyalty, work ethic, and cynicism.

To put it more directly: Animal Farm doesn’t explore speciation as a philosophical idea in the way that a furry book does.

I wrote about Gulliver’s Travels a few weeks ago using this as the key “furry” idea. Swift’s rational horses and animalistic humans and are intended to disconnect our rational nature from our atavistic selves. In doing so, he asks us to consider what it means to be human, a question close to the heart of many furries (and, of course, [adjective][species]). I’d recommend Gulliver’s Travels to any furry interested in exploring the idea of identity.

Another example: The First Book of Lapism by Phil Geusz deals with the philosophical aspects of identity and species. Geusz imagines a world where people voluntarily transform themselves into bunny-people in the hope of creating a pacifist and highly-socialized race. Guesz’s books explore the consequences of this new race in an accessible alternate-universe manner. Speculative fiction isn’t personally my cup of furry tea, but Guesz’s works are well written and beloved by many.

Animal Farm is a work of genius and was a very important book when it was published in 1945. History is important, but the Russian Revolution is less relevant in our post cold-war world. And if a version of Animal Farm were published today as an allegory for conflict between the Western and Islamic worlds, I still wouldn’t recommend it as a furry book.

• Animal Farm by George Orwell is widely available for around £7. It is not available for download in the US. Recommended for furry European history buffs.
• The First Book of Lapism by Phil Geusz is available for £11.30 paperback / £3.22 pdf ebook. Recommended for furries who enjoy speculative fiction and/or bunnies.
• Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is available to download for free from Project Gutenberg. Recommended for everyone.
• The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is widely available in every format for around £5 or less. Recommended for anyone who has read the complete works of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

 

How many of you remember Sibe and Furry XDCC?

What about the PayPal kerfuffle with FurAffinity?  That was more recent.

Ooh, or “Kristal can’t enjoy her sandwich”?  Remember that one?  That was a good one.  It was pretty closely related to Yiffyleaks (insert eye-roll here), banning cub porn, and not banning Sonic art.  They all sort of circle around FA.

Those were all pretty big deals!  Remember them?

Now, when was the last time you thought about them?

I mentioned something like this a while back on the [a][s] twitter account.  Much to my surprise, Sibe himself responded to the first tweet.  I certainly wasn’t expecting what had seemed like some sort of evil boogieman from my formative years in the fandom to actually respond to me, even having a short conversation with him via twitter.  A few of my friends were there with me, staying over for New Years, and we all had a good chuckle about it, reminiscing about our pasts, when we knew each other only on the Internet, and we had all these giant things to care about, like whether or not people could download furry paid and private content on an IRC channel.

It really got me thinking that, in the last ten to twelve years as I’ve become a real person (a designation I won’t grant on who I was before 2000), I’ve noticed the way that the collective attention span seems to move in waves.  It seems like something will come onto the scene, picking up steam quickly at first, then slowly plateauing before starting to fade from our attention span: 

A lot of words and phrases will come readily to mind, here, and the one that will most likely leap to the forefront is ‘viral’ or ‘going viral’, or perhaps ‘meme’.  An idea like this will start with an individual or small group within our subculture, pick up a few more individuals, then explode in popularity until it seems like every other journal going through our FA feeds has to do with that one particular thing.  After a while, you start seeing the “stop posting x” or “snarky comment about x” journals mingling in with the rest as the sheer amount of participants seems to plateau at some invisible high-water mark and slowly fade out after that.  There may be a journal or two, then simply a reference or two within a few journals here and there.  Finally…nothing.

I was first made aware of this trend of arching ideas back in high school.  The way that it was explained to me was in terms of the ‘revolutions’ in history, as in the agricultural or industrial revolutions.  In each case, a few advances would happen near the beginning, then widespread adoption would follow, leading to a wider acceptance until it was part of the commonplace in everyone’s lives.  The point to be made was that, as each arch became part of the everyday, something new would start to come up, leading to a dovetailing effect, or even conflict, such as the French and American revolutions as the industrial revolution got under way, and the World Wars at just as the industrial revolution began to dovetail with the technological revolution.

Similarly, within our fandom, just as an issue starts to become commonplace (such as the cub-porn ban on FA) or even fade out (such as the Kristal-can’t-enjoy-sandwich meme), only a short lull follows before the next surge rockets off from obscurity into brief popularity.  The concept of strife at the dovetail fits at least a little bit here, though it may be a bit of a stretch, as we’re not talking about world-wide wars.  Instead, an event such as rumors that PayPal will flag your account if you mention FurAffinity in the message section of your transaction will trigger the next arch, and once that diminishes, we’ll switch to perhaps a tracing scandal, or maybe a rumor about Sonic art being banned.

This isn’t simply a furry problem, of course, and seems instead to be indicative of those who readily take part in the near-instantaneous forms of communication and new media so prevalent in western culture today.  If we were to take a step back from the furry fandom, I’m sure I could ask similar questions.  Remember the PayPal kerfuffle with Regretsy?  Remember the debt ceiling?  Remember the concerns over the Taepodong missiles?  Heck, even I will admit to having not really thought about SOPA or PIPA much in the last week or two.  In the revolutions graphic above, it’s intentional that the arcs become narrower: the amount of time spent dwelling on each of these issues does seem to be growing shorter.

In our so thoroughly connected culture, we’ve picked up an incredible amount of communication.  It ties us together more thoroughly than any previous era, that’s for sure.  On the flip side, however, we have picked up this shorter attention span leading to these more frequent waves of stress and drama.

I don’t mean to come off as a get-off-my-lawn, curmudgeonly Luddite.  I did preface that statement with how neat our new-found interconnectedness is, and I am writing this on a website, which will be published to three separate social sites and is powered by free and open-source software – things I know that I hold dear.  There is, however, a problem in focusing on the extreme near-term with some of these Terribly Important Events.  SOPA started its life a few months ago, but it wasn’t until the end of December into the beginning of January that it went viral, leaving it plenty of time to incubate and gain strength.  Additionally, after the house dropped it further bills either cropped up or gained visibility in the mediacentric west such as the OPEN bill and ACTA.  There are, however, root causes to each of these bills, as there are for most such spurts of interest within the media.  Just as online privacy and piracy are the backbone of SOPA, PIPA, OPEN, and ACTA, so too are gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights seemingly the backbones of much of the United States 2012 presidential campaigns.  With that, as interest in the intellectual property bills waned, did interest in online privacy fade as well?  And when the 2012 campaign trail comes to an end, will issues pertaining to gender, sexuality, and reproduction fade from the collective attention span?

That the furry fandom is beginning, in its own way, to exhibit the signs and symptoms shown by the larger culture of western society is indicative of at least two realities.  First, this is a sign that the contiguous fandom is getting large enough to accommodate all of these issues.  The furry subculture has seen a lot of growth in the area of those who identify specifically as furries in the last twenty or thirty years, but most especially in the last ten: we’ve grown large quickly, and we’ve started to encompass a variety of issues in our primarily social group.

Secondly, as these issues become more prominent and more prone to “viral outbreak”, it gets harder to see (and, arguably, more important to remember) that there are individuals at the heart of these Terribly Important Events.  These are the people to whom the events are very important indeed, the ones who will hold onto and remember the moments that passed so quickly through the massed consciousness for a much longer period of time; the ones who care deeply.  However, on the flip side, it’s also important to remember that not everyone will react in the same way to what one might consider extremely important.

People, in general, can’t hold more than a few things close to their hearts.  It may be difficult to conceive of the fact that something that is of dreadful importance to us is only worth a passing mention to those around us, but rest assured that everyone has their own Terribly Important Events to care about, things that not everyone will have room in their hearts to care about as well.  I’ve written before about how we’re often just like everyone else, and it bears repeating now: we’re all just folk here.

That’s what so much of this so-called ‘drama’ centers around: caring deeply.  Or failing that, caring shallowly but loudly.  An individual may care strongly in either a positive or negative aspect about gender and sexuality issues, to take an example from myself.  But in a community of our size, any individual will not be alone in their focus, having enough many like-minded people around to form a minority sub-community.  In previous articles, as well as in comments here on the site, the concept of minority and majority membership has been brought up: such is the stuff that these arches of drama are made of.  Members caring about something enough to convince others to do the same, if only briefly.

This is the final planned installment of The Dramagogues. I hope that it’s been enjoyable so far, and thanks for you patience on this last article!

Last Monday I posted an article comparing born-again Christians to born-again furries, those of us who found their life’s ear-and-tail-filled path at a more mature age. The discovery of something so important and personal often leads to born-again furries (and Christians) to be evangelical about their revelatory experience.

I used this to introduce a rough truism – a closely-held extreme belief often belies a transformative personal experience.

We have all met furries who hold extreme opinions on various topics. These opinions are regularly infuriating – however there is often a personal story behind the opinion. And that story will help cast the extreme opinion in a new, more understanding, perspective.

This is a theme you’ve heard from me before and will likely hear in the future: that it’s important to be tolerant.

I want to continue the theme by talking about the so-called ex-gay movement. It is a great example that has an equivalent resonance within the furry community.

The ex-gay movement is largely Christian-driven, based on the idea that homosexuality is a learned behaviour that can be treated. There are a couple of big problems here:

• Modern psychology has proven beyond any doubt that sexual preference is innate and essentially immutable.
• The movement reinforces the destructive idea that there is something wrong with homosexuality. Worse, many teenagers are cajoled or forced into a programme. Predictably, this can reinforce internalized homophobia and lead to mental health problems. The ex-gay movement is very probably indirectly responsible for many suicides.

Moving on from the moral failings of the ex-gay movement, the experience of people who attend and claim conversion is worth examining. Just like born-again Christians and born-again furries, ex-gays can be evangelical: they believe that they’ve had a life-changing experience.

For some of the ex-gays, this will be true. These are the ones who were never fundamentally homosexual: they were heterosexuals who were experimenting, or possibly hetero-leaning bisexuals.

Many furries have had a similar experience. There is no stigma on gay sex in furry, and most furries are not exclusively heterosexual. In this environment, many fundamentally heterosexual furries will have had gay sex. (The opposite of the non-furry world, where many fundamentally homosexual people will have had straight sex.)

Some straight furries will realise their sexuality later in life, perhaps after falling in love with a member of the opposite sex. Like the ex-gays, this can be a revelatory experience. And some of those furries will become evangelical about their experience, resenting the furry community’s complicity in stymieing this revelation.

Consider an ex-gay-furry – let’s call him StraightFox – who decries the community for pushing homosexuality on new members. StraightFox is convinced that vulnerable young people in the furry community are being placed at risk by established gay members. (I expect that most people reading this post have been exposed to someone like StraightFox at some stage.) StraightFox is probably going to get shouted down for trolling. This is wrong: StraightFox is misguided, but so is the furry – let’s call him GayWolf – calling for his head.

Here’s why StraightFox is wrong:

• Nobody in the furry community turned him gay. He was straight at the beginning; he is still straight now.
• He is assuming that everyone else has the same experience. StraightFox may have had a negative experience but he is neglecting those that have had positive experiences. Furry’s enthusiastic acceptance of sex is manna to the repressed, the closeted, and the shy.

Here’s why GayWolf is wrong:

• StraightFox has been damaged by the furry community. He deserves respect (for finding his true self and for being brave enough to voice a contrarian opinion) and pity (for his difficult experience).
• GayWolf, being gay (and a wolf), should think of his life in non-furry world, where he is a member of a minority. GayWolf should know that it hurts to have a personal and important belief shouted down.

Like StraightFox, those people who have “successfully” been treated through the ex-gay movement are worth talking to. They will have fascinating stories to tell. They might be in complete denial; they might be struggling to fit into a world that doesn’t accept their sexuality; they might have an interesting perspective on sexual experimentation. And just like everyone else, they are probably a good person struggling to manage their human failings.

Ted Haggard is a high profile, oft ridiculed ex-gay. Haggard was a high-profile evangelical pastor who was caught buying methamphetamines and sexual services from a male escort. In the ensuing scandal, Haggard resigned or was fired from his various religious posts.

And we all enjoyed the sweet, sweet taste of schadenfreude: someone who supported anti-gay legislation was publicly shown to be a hypocrite.

Following the scandal, Haggard underwent ex-gay counselling and was declared “completely heterosexual” just three weeks later. This claim was met by general disbelief, derision, and laughter.

It is easy to conclude that Haggard is a deluded and/or calculating individual: that he is trying to fool either himself, his family or the general public into believing that he is straight. It’s easy to disregard him as a caricature: a fake, greedy, self-promoting hypocrite masquerading as a community leader.

Yet it is wrong to cast Ted Haggard in such a simplistic way. In 2011, a journalist, Kevin Roose, went on a camping trip with Haggard and his two sons. Late night, over the campfire, Haggard put a different spin on his situation:

“I think that probably, if I were 21 in this society, I would identify myself as a bisexual.” After a weekend of Ted trying to convince me of his unambiguous devotion to his wife and kids, I’m at first too surprised to say anything.

“So why not now?” I ask finally.

“Because, Kevin, I’m 54, with children, with a belief system, and I can have enforced boundaries in my life. Just like you’re a heterosexual but you don’t have sex with every woman that you’re attracted to, so I can be who I am and exclusively have sex with my wife and be perfectly satisfied.”

This is not to say that Haggard should not be criticised. But it’s easier to see him as a flawed human being who deserves pity for his situation. Like the ex-gay furries, he’s in a situation he didn’t choose and he didn’t foresee.

The story of the ex-gays is different from last week’s born-again furries but the general conclusion is the same: people are interesting and vulnerable, but this is rarely evident on first impressions. This is why tolerance is a great virtue: it gives people a chance to show themselves in all their complexity.

So be friendly and respectful towards the people you disagree with. You might be surprised.

Some things are better enjoyed alone.

Driving, for example!  That we even use the phrase “back-seat driver” points to it being an endeavor best carried out by oneself.  Typing, as well, and writing.  And programming for sure; I know that I certainly have a difficult time with paired programming (because I’m right, of course).  Exploring one’s own emotional state, plumbing the depths of one’s psyche, and working through one’s own problems are certainly meant to be solo adventures.  Sometimes we just have to be solipsistic, separating ourselves from those around us to figure out what’s going on within us.

Furry, however, has become something that goes beyond solo.  It has become a subculture, past even a simple fandom.  It’s something to be shared, to be experienced with others, and I imagine it would be difficult to find an individual who would identify as a furry solely in a solipsistic sense.  

I know that I’m being a little glib in my use of ‘solipsism’, here.  Solipsism is the idea that nothing really, truly can be sure to exist beyond one’s own mind.  It can be useful, to be sure, in the ways that I mentioned.  Part of the reason I took last week off is that I’ve been struggling through a bit of a tough spot, and I needed evenings and a weekend alone to help sort through some of the mixed up emotions that have been plaguing me.  I had to withdraw from a lot of friends, both online and off, in order to get my thoughts in order, even at the expense of spending time with a bunch of animal people I really enjoy being around, usually.

From a layman’s perspective, this is an inkling to the big difference between psychology and sociology.  Not simply that I was thinking about myself instead of others, but that in order to do so, I had to pull back from the society around me: work by myself, think through my own problems, and eschew the distractions of chatting online or even in person in order to get through this.  Now that I’m on my way back up, as it were, I’m doing my best to reintegrate with my friends and cohort, to become a member of my team at work, get back into dealing with my fiance and parents at home, and slip back into the fandom.

When I was a little younger and a lot more foolish, I spent some time writing on what I was calling the Manifesto Project (which still exists in a crippled form to this day; I won’t dignify it with a link), which was my attempt to explain what I believed and why.  The project wound up stalling out before I got very far with it due to the sheer broadness of the goal “write about what you believe”.  Before I sputtered to a stop, however, I had started to pull together some of my thoughts on what sociology was, what it meant to be part of a group.  Prior to that point, I had written primarily from a solipsistic point of view, pulling together ideas that had to do with me and me only.  And, as I’m sure you all are well aware, I have a habit of boiling things down to a pithy phrase that I can go off on for a few thousand words.  In this case, I chose “triangulation of self”.

I never claimed to not be a nerd.

I had been (and have been recently) thinking that a lot of what we do in our interactions with others was done in order to help define ourselves.  We surround ourselves with friends and embed ourselves in a society in order to define our own boundaries.  And here, by interactions, I don’t simply mean talking and touching and what not, but judging others’ reactions to us, and our reactions to others.  This helps us see the shape of ourselves similar to how a visual artist can depict a chair using only negative space.  The negative space is sociology, filling in the details is psychology.

Of course, this is a long way around back to furries, and I’m sure there’s some far better term to be used besides “triangulation of self”.  It is important though, given how robust a subculture furry has become due to this interconnectedness of its members.  We, as a group, rely on our social interactions to perpetuate our interest in anthropomorphics in art, in communication, and in self expression.  All of this, combined with our loose and varied definition of what we actually are leads to our strength through our plasticity.  That is, our strength comes from our ability to reshape the community, or even our views of the community, allowing us to thrive and grow over time.

It’s this assignment of importance to social interaction in furry that provides some of its greatest draw, I believe, especially during certain periods in one’s life.  It may even account for some of the skew in age seen in those within the fandom toward those in their teens and twenties, that time in life when defining oneself becomes so very important.  Add on top of that the common reliance on a constructed avatar specifically used for interacting with others, and we have this “triangulation of self” in spades.  Communicating and interacting with other furries, both online and off, provides this definition of character so many crave (“character” meaning both the character and the mental and moral qualities of the player, here).  This definition of self through interaction is perhaps part of the reason that conventions, furmeets, social communities online and off, and so on are all so successful.

This is also so highly visible due to the ways that we communicate online, where a record is left of our interactions.  Art sites such as FurAffinity, SoFurry, and Nabyn, not to mention intentionally social sites such as The Furry Agenda, the FA Forums, and the fluctuating community of furries on Twitter and other not-specifically-furry social sites are good examples.  Heck, even sites like this one are nothing without both contributors and readers.  [adjective][species] is its own little community, in a way.

This may just be one of those things that is too obvious to require stating.  I mean, of course we communicate with each other.  Of course we interact, and we feel that we need to interact in order to express our characters and show our animal selves.  What is interesting, though, and perhaps this is an artifact more of the fact that we’re a loose-knit online community than furries, is that a lot of these services are free, fan run, and contain only fan-provided advertisements, if any at all*.

The reason I bring up the free status of these services is to point out something unique within communities such as this.  Whereas in the larger community of, say, the western world, capitalism suggests that a company’s success is decided by tconsumers spending their cash with them: Wal-Mart and Target are as large as they are because so many people spend their money at those stores, voting with their wallets in a sense.  With our free services, however, the currency isn’t financial, but social.  Sites like FA and so on are popular and remain that way because they have earned our social currency.

The benefit for us as members of this culture is that we now have these treasure troves of as the basis our social standing.  The relationships and social dynamics within the fandom are very complex, and proof of this lies evident in the ways that we interact through the ‘net.  Not simply discussions taking place in public, nor even the text sent back and forth between two people, but in the ways we react and interact with each other, defining ourselves through others.  One can buy art of one’s character – a little, a lot, or none at all – and one can comport themselves in certain ways in order to shape the way they’re viewed, and identify themselves through the process.

As a bit of a personal anecdote, I wound up finding my current career through another fur, who wound up being my boss, in a way.  Almost every time we talk about the fandom, I’m surprised at just how many people we both know, how much of their stories and the fandom’s history we can recount to each other.  It was recently estimated that, on Facebook, rather than there being the oft-quoted “six degrees of separation” between you and any other individual, the gap is narrowing, now nearly down to 4.74 degrees of separation.  And that number is from the unintentional community of facebook users.  It’s no wonder that, with furry being a more intentional subculture and with our draw to interpersonal communication, that that number seems to drift even lower, especially keeping in mind that the average person can keep track of about 150 people in their heads, and that most furs seem to surround themselves with like-minded friends**.

I know that this article was rambling, and I hope you’ll forgive me as I get back into the swing of things.  Even so, it’s interesting that we are so reliant on our interconnectedness to help define ourselves within the fandom.  Doubly interesting that we draw so much of this definition from the social aspects of so many different sources, online and off.  Interesting and comforting.

* As I was asked previously, [a][s] is run without ads and doesn’t bring in any money – it’s all paid for out of pocket and contributors post for free under a non-restrictive license.  We aim to stick to this as best as possible, too!

** Taken from an informal twitter poll and eleven years in the fandom – don’t hit me!

George W. Bush is probably the world’s most famous born again Christian. At age 40, he was a borderline-alcoholic, a failed businessman, and the son of a successful politician. He credits a conversation with the Reverend Billy Graham in the mid-1980s, a high-profile preacher and Bush family friend, with turning him around.

Whatever you think of Bush as a politician, and whether you believe his story about rediscovering religion (plenty of people feel it’s a convenient fiction), it’s a compelling narrative: “ne’er-do-well boozehound finds God; becomes president”.

Bush’s story is unique but the sentiment is common amongst born-again Christians. Born-again Christians like Bush credit their faith for showing them the path to becoming a fully realized person. It is a revelatory experience to discover, or rediscover, your direction in life. The strength of that experience is such that born-again Christians are notoriously evangelical about their faith.

Which brings me to the furry community.

Many furries don’t discover the furry community until they are already an adult. The experience of learning about your personal identity, combined with the fellowship of the community, is often intense and profound. It’s common for such furries to go through changes that might qualify as being born again: they reconsider their lives and find a new, more honest direction. A born-again furry immediately gains an important social group; commonly re-evaluates their sexual preference; and sometimes changes career, relationship status or living situation.

Finding furry later in life can be revelatory. Just like born-again Christians, the experience is so strong that born-again furries can be evangelical about the community. (Some of them go so far as to write articles for websites dedicated to meta-analysis of the community itself.)

To those people who discovered furry as they were maturing, for whom furry has always been a part of their adult lives, the evangelical attitude of born-again furries can be a bit ponderous or cloying. After all, the furry community is flawed: the drama, the toxic personalities, the popularity contests, and the cliques are all reminiscent of the worst aspects of tribal juvenile behaviour, otherwise known as high school. How could a self-destructive and childish community be so great and life-changing?

To which the born-again furry might answer: try being a latent furry who doesn’t connect with their natural social groups. Or perhaps: if you think furry is childish and self-destructive, you should see what the rest of the world is up to.

The evil funhouse mirror version of the born-again furry is the anti-furry. An anti-furry (for the purposes of this article) is someone who thinks the furry community is a bad thing. In my experience anti-furries usually fit into one of two categories:

1. The burned fur: a fur who has been hurt by or become disgusted with the furry community. They usually cite the endless whirlpools of drama, or the community’s tolerance of unsocial or oversexed behaviour. These furries often ragequit by airing their grievances in some public forum, quietly lurk online for a while, and eventually return – albeit harbouring ill will towards the community in general.
2. The troll: someone who rails about the horror of the furry community. Something Awful was a notorious hotspot for this sort of behaviour some years ago. I’m happy to say I have personally seen less trolls in recent times. The trolls who are obsessed with the furry community are often (surprise surprise) latent furries who haven’t managed to admit it to themselves.

The anti-furries are similar to the born-again furries because they have equivalent confidence in their opposing convictions. They are also similar in that those strong opinions are rooted in personal experience: the revelation of the furry community at a late age; the feeling of being let down by the community; the pain of being a closet case.

Regardless of your own opinion, born-again furries and anti-furries alike have interesting and valid personal stories to tell. They are all worth your time and your fellowship.

There is a rough truism here – a closely-held extreme belief often belies a transformative personal experience – that can apply in any case where a strong opinion is expressed. It holds for born-again Christians and, to refer back to my recent post, it holds for controversial topics like zoophilia.

My article from two weeks ago makes a defence for ethical zoophiles, practising or otherwise. It’s a topic that is rarely discussed in any sort of intelligent fashion. In my experience, most conversations devolve into flame wars between two people who hold extreme positions on either side. But there are strong reasons to defend and appreciate the people holding both the extreme pro-zoo and the extreme anti-zoo opinions.

A few weeks ago, there was a zoophilia thread over on Flayrah. The subject is a furry who has been prosecuted for bestiality. The subsequent comment thread is difficult to read without becoming enraged for the un-nuanced opinions asserted from all sides – see below for a relatively mild example.

But let’s consider a closely-held extreme belief often belies a transformative personal experience. This puts a different perspective on our flamers. I have already made my defence of the zoos, so let’s look at the anti-zoos. Here are a couple of plausible scenarios:

• The topic of zoophilia is important to our anti-zoo because she is a zoophile and is rejecting it in her own head. Participating in zoo-related discussions helps reinforce her belief that zoophilia is wrong. It also helps her believe that she will be able to escape her own sexuality. And perhaps, subconsciously, it’s also a little titillating.
• The topic of zoophilia is important to our anti-zoo because he experimented at a young age with the family pet. What if our anti-zoo was discovered by a family member mid-act? (We all vividly recall our own shameful experiences and we know how powerful they can be.)

In either case, our angry furries are a lot more complex and interesting than their comments suggest.

Some of the most interesting furries I’ve met were angry. The topics that triggers their anger are all different, but they all share the same destructive consequences: anger is exhausting and, in the long run, unhealthy.

The furry community is a positive one for people exploring their own mind and their own personality. This holds true for the angry furries as well. Most of the angry furries I’ve met have changed or moderated their position over time – the community has helped them accept their sexuality, or their past, or their familial relationships, or whatever it may have been. Everyone has a unique story.

It’s easy to get fired up when someone disagrees with you. I’d suggest that we should be tolerant towards all parties – even the trolls, even the born-again Christians. They might surprise you with their intelligence and ideas. (Your milage may vary if you befriend George W. Bush.)

Hi folks, Makyo here.  As mentioned, I’m taking a week off to get caught up on some stuff.  This week’s article comes courtesy of Calamari. Enjoy!

As a reader of this article, you may or may not have seen a recent mini-documentary on the furry fandom, filmed by National Geographic. Although I’m not a subscriber to this fine organisation, I’ve read many of their articles. Time and time again they produce splendid pieces on interesting aspects of history, the environment, and culture. So my first thought upon hearing that they’d chosen furries to be the subject of one of their small documentaries, was confusion. Why had they let their standards slip this time?

Don’t get me wrong. I love being a part of this fandom. Despite the various oddballs and undesirables, there are a number of absolutely fantastic people within this little group. The artwork can be fantastic, and the process of thinking up a character is more fun than you’d like to admit. But the reason that the public has never properly welcomed us with open arms, attacked us with pitchforks or even acknowledged us is because we aren’t all that interesting. Apart from the fact that we all like anthropomorphic animals in some way (and that we maybe have a tendency to be a bit nerdy) we aren’t one collective body that thinks and does the same thing.

If you watch another documentary or read another article from National Geographic, you’ll know what I mean. A well written piece about gang culture in Peru has more going for it than a bunch of nerds that dress up like anthropomorphic animals. Because that’s really what we are.

When I first saw this mini-documentary, it was posted on a forum for furs from the United Kingdom. I was at a friend’s house at the time, who also happens to be a fur. I pointed at the screen with a grin, and she sighed. While the documentary was unintentionally entertaining, it was also extremely predictable and more than slightly embarrassing.

The main problem with these films is that they all seem to have a similar layout. First we are introduced to an individual, who is supposedly usually ‘shy and reserved’ but is ‘happy and playful’ when it comes to wearing a fursuit or roleplaying as their character. I always find this part rather annoying. If these people want to portray us as likeable, interesting individuals, they aren’t doing well by describing themselves as semi-autistic.

As someone who is fairly heavily involved in fandom, I don’t need to take on an alternative persona to socialize with people. Most of us are very capable of doing it ourselves. I mean no malice towards people who have difficulty interacting with others, but it does seem that we are too often portrayed as shoe-gazers that need to pretend to be an animal in order to cope with reality.

And so we come to, wait for it, deep breath everybody, the Sexual Side of the fandom. In a number of furry related documentaries, everyone always quips without hesitation, “There is a porn aspect, but it isn’t really that strong!”

This was interesting coming from people like ‘The Ranting Gryphon’, who has a whole skit dedicated to roleplaying online sex with furry characters. When we talk about the sexual side of the fandom, it is nothing less than stupid to deny that porn is not a big part of furry culture.

I have no idea if FurAffinity is the most used furry site. I do know, however, that it is very much up there in terms of the number of furries that use it. Refreshing the front page with the filter off, it is very rare to not see a single piece of ‘adult’ artwork on the front page. Doing a Google search of furry with mature content doesn’t give a particularly clean result, either. I’m not going to deny that there are people in the fandom not interested in the sexual element. I do feel sorry for them. But even they acknowledge the fandom’s ‘darker side’.

All in all, I’d prefer it if there were no more documentaries, films, or TV programmes based on the furry fandom. With that said, if someone ever shoves a camera in my face, asking if I’d like to give my opinion on the fandom, I’ll put down my drink, I’ll sigh, and I’ll look straight into the lens.

“We’re all a bunch of porn obsessed freaks”.

Calamari is a 3rd year Journalism student from Scotland that enjoys drinking excessively and writing when he gets around to it. He pretends he is an anthropomorphic dog and lives in a flat with two fridges. One of them doesn’t work.

• FA page
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This is a post I did not intend to write.  I certainly did not intend to continue the Participation Mystique post into another.

Actually, truth be told, I had planned on taking a week off from writing; coming up with some fluff post pulled together from a combination of responses with some neat witticisms thrown in for good measure, or even just tossing up a guest post.  Work’s been decidedly hellish, and when I haven’t been working, I’ve been feeling some emotional strain resulting from a large case of over-commitment on other projects.  Come Monday, however, I’d caught up on sleep, and started rifling through comments and tweets in response to a few statements I’d made over the past few weeks.  I eventually decided that I shouldn’t be a lazy fox-man and pull together a formal response here in the form of an article.

So.  What is furry?

It feels like every website, blog, and even every individual has to take a crack at defining furry.  I personally wanted to stay away from it as much as possible because I didn’t want my own attempt at a definition to color the views of the readers of the site.  There have been a few comments on my last two posts and a few of my tweets, however, that have shown that that’s already the case, and that my circumlocution around the issue may have caused more problems than it avoided.  That is, for certain definitions of “problem”: I love this sort of discussion, truth be told.  Almost as much as I love circumlocution.  Or the word “circumlocution”.  Sorry I’m so wordy.

“Furry” is an overloaded term.  One of the most descriptive definitions of “overloading,” as I understand it, comes from the realm of computer science.  When one overloads an operator, that means that one is changing the way that operator works within a certain class of items.  That is, the ‘+’ operator, given two numbers, will add them together, but when given two strings, will turn them into one string by concatenating them.  Additionally, when one is dealing with structrured data, one can overload a reference to a piece of that data.  ’ID’ can refer to a student ID, a class ID, or Idaho.

I like this metaphor when it comes to overloading words in language.  In particular, I feel that the concept of an overloaded term intended to mean multiple discrete things is  particularly applicable, given the response I’ve gotten to certain posts and tweets.  Namely, Altivo’s comments to the article on sexism in the fandom and Sparf’s responses to my twitter query about one’s favorite “unintentionally furry work of fiction”.  In both cases, the difference between one person’s definition of furry and the other’s is notable.  The big discrepancy seems to be whether or not the holder of the definition considers things that are not intentionally furry as furry or not.  Put another way, is anything that represents an anthropomorphic animal furry?

The whole concept of anthropomorphism, as I’m sure my (likely 100% furry) audience already knows, is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human objects, usually to non-human animals, real or fictional.  Since I seem to be on a tear of explaining myself, this is what I would call the parent category of what is furry.  The fact that Coyote could talk, that Mickey Mouse could stand on two legs, that Garfield hated Mondays, these all fall into the camp of anthropomorphism, without a doubt.  However, in each case, the author or authors designed the animal in question without a thought (at least, at first) that they might be subsumed by a fandom that was not specifically related to that exact thing (insofar as there is a Coyote, Mickey, or Garfield fandom).

Both of the commenters I mentioned before appear to disagree with me on this, however, and I know that they are not alone in their definitions of furry.  In fact, the number one response to the question “Describe furry in your own words” on the [a][s] Census and Survey far and away seems to be “an affinity for anthropomorphic animals”.  However, I’m not convinced that I’m alone in feeling that this isn’t exactly the case for many who call themselves “furs”.

My biggest complaint with simply claiming “any anthropomorphized animal” as our own is that the definition is simply too big for a fandom to be able to be structured around it.  Specifically, I feel that there is more to the fandom than simply anthropomorphic animals: avatars.  It’s not so much that we share thoughts or even fantasies about anthro-animals with each other, but that we all create our own avatars consisting of a mix of ourselves and an animal of our choice.  I’m not sure that a furry convention would be able to gain multiple thousands of attendees if it simply consisted of many people agreeing loudly with each other that they like talking foxes.

On the other hand, I know that there are many levels of auto-anthropomorphism within the community.  Some people find it a fun thing to draw, some think it’s pretty awesome to dress up as an animal, and many find it perfectly pleasing to interact with each other on the Internet as if they were anthropomorphized canines and felines.  The main thing that ties all of these diverse individuals together is the fact that they enjoy the connection between man and animal embodied in the concept of anthropomorphism.  It is the root of our community, and the base of our interaction with each other.  There are two questions that deal with this on the [a][s] survey: “what is your level of anthropomorphism?” and “what is your means of interaction with the fandom?”.  That such questions are even part of what could be considered a general census of the furry fandom is a clue that there is something more than the specific concept of having a partially-animal avatar.

This is why I prefer the definition for furry as “a collection of people who identify as furries”. I think that it encompasses the right amount of people without overstepping bounds.  It allows me to say things like “unintentionally furry” in order to differentiate between those who do something related to anthropomorphic animals and those who consider themselves members of a group who is willing to focus on anthropomorphics to the extent that many will even create for themselves an avatar for interpersonal interaction that is an anthropomorphic animal.  In short, it allows me to step on the fewest toes.  Or tails.

I feel that this differentiation is important, not only for us being able to define ourselves to ourselves, but also to the world around us.  I’ve mentioned before the reaction of the writer Steven Boyett’s reaction to discovering that his novel The Architect of Sleep had been latched onto by members of the furry fandom (for those who missed it, it was decidedly negative).  When we define ourselves to others, we have to take into consideration our own definitions of the fandom, as well as others’.  This is something that was elaborated on by Samuel Conway (that is, Uncle Kage) in his Anthrocon panel on interacting with the media (something which I very much recommend watching).  Conway neatly breaks this down into a few key points:

• Don’t define ourselves in terms of what we’re not – If you say “it’s not about sex!”, then the first thought that will leap into the minds of your listeners is “wait…why did they mention sex?”
• Don’t define ourselves in terms that aren’t easily understood - This ties into some of my qualms about defining furry as “people who are interested in anthropomorphic animals”: doing so provides such a broad definition that it becomes easier for the listener to oversimplify than to understand, and that only if they already know what we mean when we say “anthropomorphic animals”.
• Do be aware of first impressions - Conway suggests that you lead with your answer to the question “what is all this?” by saying that we are fans of “cartoon animals”.  While this grates on my nerves, I have a hard time disagreeing.  If someone’s first opinion of you is as a fan of Tom and Jerry and Rocky and Bullwinkle, then there is little harm done before you go on to explain the fact that many of us come up with our own personal characters with which we associate.
• Do be aware of the listener’s preconceptions - While this isn’t explicitly described in detail in the talk, it is implied with Conway’s interactions with the ex-military audience member: if the listener already thinks that we are a bunch of sex-crazed maniacs who fetishize getting it on in animal costumes, take that into account in your own interactions with them.

These are just a few of the items mentioned in a lengthy talk on interacting with the media, but I feel that they’re important to consider when coming to terms with defining furry.  There are many who hold their own vague concept of what we are already in their heads due to either their own personal interaction (or membership) with the fandom or with a media outlet’s portrayal of us.

Besides even that, though, our interaction with others within the fandom depends in part on what we consider to be a furry.  Some have a more liberal definition of furry, in that it includes constructs that are not intended to be included in a fandom of those who create their own constructs for themselves.  Others, however, hesitate to even call themselves furry, so much as furry artists, or eschewing even that, anthro or even animal artists.  Put that way, my own definition seems to be something of a cop out: I say that those, whether or not they have constructed their own characters, are furries so long as they identify as such.

In more concrete terms, I think that this is the definition that my readers should take into account when reading my articles and the twitter feed.  When I say that there is a focus on sexuality and a certain sort of sexism in furry, I mean within those who identify as furry; similarly, when I ask what is a favorite “unintentially furry” work, what I really should’ve asked is what would be a favorite work focusing on anthropomorphic animals that didn’t originate from our own subculture. This is partly in my defense as a response to those who have called me on my use of the term, but also me tossing my own two cents in when it comes to defining furry: it is what you make of it!

One in six furries self-identify as zoophiles. The real number is probably higher.

This piece of information comes courtesy of Klisoura’s survey and I don’t think it would surprise many furs. A quick mental poll of the furries I know — the ones that I’m close enough to have an insight into their sexual preferences — suggest that it’s about right.

Like many things in the furry world, exactly what comprises a zoophile is a little blurry. It’s arguable that furry porn, as appreciated by a large majority of the readers of this blog, might be considered zoophilic. Taking the non-furry world as our reference point, furry erotica is certainly a half-step in the zoophilic direction.

In the psychology world, there is a growing consensus that zoophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation. Research taking place this century is roughly equivalent to the human sexuality research famously performed by Kinsey in the middle of the twentieth century.

A sexual orientation is usually judged to be valid based on three criteria:

1. Affectional orientation (who we emotionally bond with)
2. Sexual fantasy orientation (who we fantasize about)
3. Erotic orientation (who we prefer to have sex with)

Using these three criteria, it’s easy to qualify homosexuality as a legitimate orientation. (You would struggle to make an argument for plushophilia.) There is growing scientific evidence that zoophilia qualifies on all three counts.

There has been very little research into zoophilia. Up until very recently, scientific research focussed exclusively on mentally disadvantaged or low-IQ subjects. However research in the past few years has started to focus on so-called ‘high functioning subjects’, which is a slightly weaselly euphemism for ‘normal people’.

Jesse Bering, a research psychologist and regular contributor to Scientific American, is probably the world’s leading mainstream voice on zoophilia. Bering has explored the topic on several occasions in his Scientific American column and elsewhere. Among his data and discussion is the rather startling statistic that around 1% of people probably qualify as zoophiles.

1% is a lot. Consider that around 5% of people are homosexual.

Bering, however, is a pragmatic scientist. He will argue that the facts support zoophilia being a legitimate sexual orientation, and that there are a lot of zoophiles out there. (And many more amongst us furries.) But Bering doesn’t touch the other side of the argument: the moral argument. And it’s a big one.

Is it okay to be a practising zoophile?

Peter Singer, the ethicist I mentioned in my article on vegetarianism a couple of weeks ago, bases many of his arguments on the simple premise that humans are animals and therefore not a special case. This is not to say that the life of a human being should be considered as valuable as, say, an ant: quite the opposite. Singer argues that the suffering of a human being should be given equal consideration as the suffering of any other species. So a species with little capacity for suffering, like an ant, gets proportionally little consideration.

Singer, in his tragically-titled 2001 article Heavy Petting, makes the point that interspecies attraction is completely natural. He mentions a few obvious examples including incidents of zoophilia in humans, but also sexual attraction towards humans by other species. He discusses a typical amorous housepet and also a case of a male orang-utan making overt sexual advances towards a female human.

The best documented case of a non-human anthropophilia is Lucy the chimpanzee. Lucy was observed to have no sexual attraction towards members of her own species, but would masturbate to pictures of naked (human) men displayed in Playgirl.

Dan Savage, the sex columnist and ethicist, responded to a zoophile correspondent in 2008 (link). The question posed was a simple one, and one probably on the mind of many zoophiles: I’m emotionally, mentally and sexually attracted to dogs. I’m not attracted to humans. What do I do?

Savage acknowledged the difficulty of the situation. Importantly, this included the tacit concession that his correspondent was a zoophile by orientation, and not by choice. The zoophile would not be ‘cured’ by therapy (no more than a homosexual might be) and the zoophile would be well served to learn to accept, rather than fight, his orientation.

Savage suggested that his correspondent find a canine partner and keep his personal life to himself. This qualified endorsement was made on the condition that the zoophile keep himself safe (from prosecution or persecution) and his dog unharmed (from the sexual acts committed in the relationship).

This is the crux of the issue, I think: harm.

Both Singer and Savage make the obvious comparison between eating animals and having sexual contact with animals. They both conclude that bestiality is less harmful than eating meat.

I’ve touched on this topic before in other forums and I know it’s a controversial statement. It’s not easy to conclude that a societal norm like meat eating could possibly be worse than bestiality, a taboo sex act widely reviled for its perceived cruelty. However, if you can put aside those preconceptions, it’s easy to see that the harm caused by a practising zoophile pales against that caused by someone eating (say) one factory-farmed chicken a week.

Even if you are vegan, I don’t think you can hold a strong aversion to bestiality on ethical grounds. The harm caused by the myriad of meat-eaters is overwhelming compared to the relatively few practising zoophiles. This comparison holds even if you assume that the zoophile is harming the animal in question.

This is not to say that zoophiles don’t have a responsibility towards the welfare of animals: of course they do. Most zoophiles are attracted to horses or dogs. The duty of care of a zoophile is exactly the same as that of an owner of one of these domestic creatures. From a harm point of view, the sexual component is not relevant.

The large majority of zoophiles will be ethical and responsible carers. Because of the emotional connection — something required for the zoophilia sexual orientation to apply — it’s likely that zoophiles make excellent pet owners. There will always be a selfish, sex-driven cruel minority, however it’s unfair to tar all zoophiles with that brush.

This allows me to wheel out one of my favourite phrases: the most visible members of a minority are rarely its best ambassadors. To put it another way: the majority of zoophiles are not doing harm and they are largely invisible. Recall that upwards of 1 in 6 furries are zoos.

Through most of last century, and still today in many parts of the world, homosexuality was considered to be abhorrent. This belief, of course, didn’t prevent or reduce the number of homosexuals: it simply made for a lot of unhappy people. Freud believed that elevated suicide rates of young homosexuals was evidence that homosexuality is a mental illness. Fortunately this belief no longer prevails and homosexuality is accepted as a legitimate sexual orientation.

Zoophiles are in a similar bind in today’s society. Tolerance and acceptance amongst the furry group, where zoos are so numerous, will do a lot of good.

Many furries argue that the community is too tolerant. This is a point of view with some merit; self-policing helps reinforce positive behaviour. However I think the sentiment is often misguided — it’s important to differentiate between what is innate, and what is a choice.

I’m not arguing for unconditional tolerance.

Instead, I’m arguing that zoophiles should be accepted for who they are. They should not be castigated or shunned for something that’s innate. Zoophilia is a sexual orientation. We should encourage discussion about how one might become a happy, ethical zoophile.

One of the interesting things about running a blog is that you get to write about what’s important to you.  And one of the interesting things about running a blog with more than one contributor (hi guys!) is that rather than focusing on the whole field, you’re more able to spread the labor around and focus on specific things within the field that are very important to you.  Given that I’ve already written a more broad-picture article on gender and am now about to delve into another 2000 word essay on the same, it’s safe to say that I think the whole thing’s terribly interesting, and that furry itself is probably one of the more interesting subcultures in which to examine gender, sex, and sexuality.

As I did in the previous article, I feel the need to provide the following information and disclaimers about myself.  Firstly, I am a biological male, I do not identify as male-gendered, and in terms of sexuality, while I’d call myself pansexual, I am engaged to another man.  Since that’s what I’ve got to work with, that’s the viewpoint I’ll be writing from, even though I’ll try to draw as much as I can from others. In addition, the title is in reference to results provided by Klisoura’s Furry Survey, which will be mentioned within the article itself.  Some of the thoughts in this article come from the responses to the [adjective][species] survey on gender identity and sexual orientation in the fandom. Finally, I know that my articles are wordy, perhaps more so than they need to be, but given that this topic is especially important to me, I do hope that you’ll forgive a slightly longer read.

Now that we’ve satisfied that nagging part of me that needs to make disclaimers…

Part of what got me interested in this whole topic to begin with is the way I spent most of my time in the fandom for the first five or six years of my time here.  Without going into more detail than has already been covered, I spent a lot of time hanging out with mostly gay guys online, primarily on MUCKs and IRC.  It was what I’d call a comfortable existence.  My daily routine online consisted of connecting and immediately heading to the gay-bar-analog, whether it was an IRC channel or a room on FurryMUCK, to spend some time chatting it up, or maybe even looking for some hot, hot text-only action.

And it was pretty fulfilling, too!  I met some wonderful people I still love to spend time around (hi guys!), had my fair share of relationships that occupied heart and mind almost completely while they lasted, and just generally lived out my little hedonist life as a red, then an arctic fox.  I explored some things that I would never do in person, and some things that aren’t even possible offline, but in all, it was a young gay man’s paradise; sex without consequences, a large dating pool, and a surrounding subculture that was almost fanatically accepting.

There were a few little things, however, that I hardly noticed at first, but started to bug me more and more as time went on.

I’ve noticed a trope in western gay culture, such as it is, that discovering you’re gay goes through five main stages.  Put glibly:

1. Age 5-12: “ew, girls are icky!”
2. Age 13-14: “I’m supposed to like girls now…”
3. Age 15-25: “ew, girls are icky!”
4. Age 26-32: Maturity
5. Age 32+: A mystery.  Some say The Gay ends, some say that this is about 102 in gay years, and some say that a few mythical couples live on…

Alright, so that was put very glibly.  Even so, I bring this up in continuation from last week’s article, Participation Mystique, wherein I mention some of the participation mystique that gay men have with western, or at least American gay culture.

There is a certain rebelliousness that we (and I say “we” freely; I identified as gay for quite a while) buy into.  It starts with the rebelliousness that many teenagers go through without further prompting, continues on through liberation to college or working life where we know everything, and peters out around the time we land a job or career we aim to keep for a while. It’s a rebelliousness against the heterocentrism that is inevitable in a world that, to requote and oft-quoted statistic, is 90% heterosexual.  The bias is justified, sure, but we’re up-and-coming young adults and there’s no reason we shouldn’t assert not only our existence, but our membership to the gay culture, our participation mystique.

It’s been successful to some extent, as well.  The whole “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” scene has done much to push the culture and its members into the conscious mind of America, and change is indeed happening at both a state and national level. It’s the return to the “ew, girls are icky!” stage that I find intriguing, though.  A focus on marriage rights, matronly pop-stars, and men having sex with men is not the only thing that the gay culture brings with it.  Of note to us is a sort of misogyny that is based within this rebelliousness, a rejection of the female body as being unappealing which seems to go hand-in-hand with the trope of straight men liking lesbian porn due to the lack of male bodies in the picture.  While it’s a subtle sort of misogyny that is based around the bearer of the bias’ own state more so than the bearer of the brunt of the bias (that is, this particular bias is based in the fact that gay men do not like women, rather than the fact that women are perceived as fundamentally inferior in some way), it is still just that.

It is what it is, though.  My high school history teacher said several times that, in order for a segment of society to gain what they perceive to be equal status, they have to push a little too hard, go a little too far, in order to let things swing back toward the middle.

It is what it is, I should say, except in the case where you have a population that is effectively 80% male and 20% female, rather than the standard fifty-fifty split. Here in furry, we have a predominately young male culture, anonymity provided by the Internet, a sexually liberated atmosphere, and a group that is decidedly accepting of most anything.  In short, we have a perfect storm for something that smells good to gay men.  While there are countless roots into the fandom, I don’t doubt that several are through the exploration of homosexuality online.  I don’t doubt it, because that’s how I got here: a combination of some people posting in a forum for gay teens and some…uh…stories on a certain nifty website.  Needless to say, given all that, it’s no surprise that there is the concentration that there is of young gay and bisexual men within the fandom.

I know that this was a long, round-about way to get here, but I feel that it really is very important to understanding some of the misogyny within the fandom.  The misogyny that I’m speaking of, in particular, is the reaction to sex within an adult image or story.  We really are a tolerant crowd, and there’s room for everyone within this fandom.  That the subject matter drop-down when submitting a piece of art to FurAffinity includes such things as “paw (tame)”, “pregnancy (adult)”, and “abstract” (while somehow managing to leave off “crafts”) is telling of just how open a community we really are.

We’re all welcome here, and yet still there is this strange misogyny that expresses itself almost as heterophobia in the reaction to art.  What would an image depicting a straight couple having sex be on FA without the “this would be better if they were both male”, “ew, grody vagina :(“, and “you’re cute, so I guess I’ll just cover up the other side of the screen” comments?  It’s become pervasive on FA, respondents to the survey have mentioned it, and I’ve started noticing it within day-to-day interactions with those around me, as well.

This is, of course, only one example of the sex and gender bias within the fandom, of course.  Along with our unique brand of heterophobia, there do seem to be some unique gender roles that we’ve appropriated for each other here in furry. As with most gender roles, they focus on dichotomies and binary states. Men are x, women are y, and never the twain shall meet. I tried to pull together three good examples, but there are, of course, plenty more than that.

• Female as creator, male as consumer
  This, as with all of the examples I have here, is based in part off a gender role that is common in fields such as crafts or amateur art. That is, the female is seen as the one who takes the time to create, the one who would do such a thing as a profession, while the male is seen as the consumer, the one who would buy the created object. Though there are certainly a good number of male creators and female consumers within the furry fandom, it does seem that there is something of an expectation for the female furries to be the artists and fursuit makers, those who are creating, while the males are the ones browsing along the aisles of the dealers den, looking to purchase.

  With this, as with most gender roles, there is little danger in bucking the trend, but the pressure to go along with it remains. One will not be castigated because one is a female consumer or male creator, but there is still an expectation that things will work a certain way, and perhaps a bit of disappointment when they don’t. It is interesting to see the differences in sex between those who are roaming the aisles and those who are working the tables at a convention dealers den, however, especially given the reported demographics of the fandom as a whole.

• Female as nonsexual, male as hypersexual
  A friend on twitter recently mentioned that one of his favorite things about a certain adult website was that it provided some insight into the feminine state of mind when it came to sex. “Society makes that hard to see,” he said. “Since for girls, sex is some big secret for the most part, when guys are concerned.” This is a codified gender role that goes way, way back; centuries, even. That a female would ever enjoy sex was something that was simply beyond the ken of many, and to this day, that remains a concern within society.

  Conversely, that a man might not be all about sex violates the code of machismo that, if nothing else, is codified in western media, if not society as a whole. There is a growing population of those – male and female alike – within the fandom, as noted by a respondent to the sexuality and gender survey, who identify as either asexual or non-gendered. What my friend was bemoaning was the double standard and that surrounds sexuality between the genders. This is perpetuated, to some extent, within the fandom by the western culture that surrounds so much of it. While a female bucking this trend is not likely to be called a nymphomaniac, nor is a male likely to be called a eunuch, that it’s strange and new for us to see the opposite sides is telling of how gender works within the fandom and our society as a whole.

• Female as offline, male as online
  One of the interesting experiences surrounding gender that I had in college had to do with the gender differences between the majors offered by the university. I went to a school that very much bought into a lot of old-school ideas, from the way it treated the arts to the ways it expected students to act. Students and parents bought into this, as well – there was another, more liberal school in the state, and our goal seemed to be “don’t be them.” So, not only were female engineers and scientists more rare, but they more readily bought into certain roles such as “nerd” that males didn’t necessarily need to buy into. You could be a “jock” male computer science major, it seemed, but you couldn’t be anything but a “nerd” female computer science major.

  This is a wide-spread issue that is being focused on by many better minds than my own, but it’s effects are also seen within the fandom. Along with the creator role mentioned above, it seems like the females of the fandom are not expected to be as willing to partake in MUCKs, IRC, or even forums to some extent as much as males are. Combined with the previous point about sexuality, and it is unsurprising just how much of the population of Tapestries, a sexual and BDSM MUCK, is male.

I know that I’ve likely gone on for far too long, and probably lost readers along the way, but I feel that this is an important topic for the fandom to consider. We are an open-minded bunch, all told, but there are a few sticking points where we have our troubles, and one of the biggest problem spots has to do with gender. Even if it’s not necessarily the cause for huge amounts of drama, it always seems to be riding beneath the surface of our interactions, making itself known here and there in all our myriad means of communication.

Rather than end this overly long article on a simple concluding statement, thought, I want to take the more proactive approach by putting out a call for submissions. I’ve written this “Eighty-Twenty” article from the standpoint of a mostly-male furry in a mostly-male fandom. What I think we really need, though is the “Twenty-Eighty” article written from a female standpoint about how the fandom works from that point of view. I know that a few of you (hi guys!) have already approached me about the possibility of writing such an article; well, let this be your call to action – I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to hear more sides of the issue!

If you’re interested in writing the companion piece to this, you may get in touch with us via email, or send us a note on twitter to @adjspecies; we’d certainly welcome a guest post to help fulfill this need in the community.

When I was pulling together the contributions page, I did my best to think through all the types of submissions that would fit in here on [adjective][species].  I wound up tossing “fiction” in there just in case someone could think of a way to write meta-furry fiction.  I could think of one example by WhyteYote that would’ve fit, except for the fact that it was erotica.

However, lo and behold, our first piece of fiction arrived just a few days ago. Katzenjammer, after hearing stories about overzealous convention security, pulled together a short piece about a rent-a-cop taking his job protecting the animal people a little too seriously…

“Why did you do this, Lewis?”

“The rules state only one handler per. The lady or gentleman involved was attempting to bring two. That is double the allotted number.”

“But did you have to tackle one of them?”

“They were not responding to my verbal direction.”

“People here are calling us Nazis. I don’t need to tell you that is not the image we are trying to project.”

“With all due respect ma’am but I’m certain that at the Nazi ‘furry’ convention we would not be having this conversation as no one would consider bringing two handlers into the headless lounge because they had a respect for order that is sadly lacking here.”

“Oh. …are you some kind of World War II history buff, then?”

“Huh? …no.”

“Oh. Well I’m just concerned because you’ve been doing such a great job so far. I mean, we all appreciate you taking this seriously. I know that this can be a job that is difficult to take seriously. But there are limits. How did you come across this job anyways?”

“Well I really don’t know much about your organization here, but I saw the posting at the temp agency for additional help and it seemed… it seemed important to me.”

“Important?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a very strange choice of words.”

“I apologize.”

Sigh.  ”So, how am I going to explain this to the staff?”

- § -

It was 1983 when we landed in the swamp.

They told me that the mouse lived here. That’s all I needed to know. Why did he live here, I wondered, in this oppressively sweltering land? Perhaps to keep his enemies at bay. Perhaps as a challenge to the righteous. I was righteous. Did he think that a lay over at the stagnant, labyrinthine Atlanta airport would stop me? Did he think that making the best option for lunch the airport Applebees would slow me down? There was a lot of suffering in that Applebees.

‘Muggy.’ That’s how people from the midwest describe a hellhole. People with values. Good people. That’s how my parents described it. They didn’t deserve this.

We arrived.

The sign had printed on it ‘The happiest place on earth’ but I understand that what it was saying was ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’ The snow cones around every corner seemed like a sick joke. What chance did they have?

It wasn’t difficult to find him. The mouse. We stood in line, I would have my meeting, it was imminent. But wait.

They came out of nowhere but the incessant, shrill cackling was unmistakable. Teenagers! They descended on the mouse. I couldn’t tell what was happening and they disappeared as quickly as they had arrived.

When I finally got a view of what was going on I saw it happen. He just collapsed. The mouse. How could he be so weak. His image adorned every surface that could take it for fifty miles around. This was the reason I had come so far? Yes. This was nothing, a surprise attack by cowards, no real damage was done. A prank. My concerns were unwarranted. I thought.

But he stayed down. His vassals arrived.

Then his head came off.

What?

His HEAD came OFF.

WHAT.

They lifted it off, like it was the lid on a jar of pickles that a friend had already failed to open but regardless claimed credit for ‘totally loosening it’ when you succeeded.

I don’t. I don’t understand.

Yes. You do.

Oh god.

It’s not over yet.

Why.

It’s just not.

What is that inside of him? Is that a person? What was going on here? This was madness! Was I wrong? Was I not prepared? My mind was too fragile. Why didn’t they warn me?

But it wasn’t over, he was right. In this heat, this… interloper started… vomiting.

Alright that’s just gross.

I know. I’m sorry. But it happened. It seems so obvious. He was vomiting out the magic. It kept coming out of him until it stopped. Then, mercifully, they took him away.

But it stayed. It just lay there, baking in the sun. The magic. To say that it was ruined was offensive. It was destroyed. Annihilated. Extinguished.

Never again.

- § -

“Hey? Hey are you listening to me? You kind of zoned out there for a while. Just don’t it again, alright. Try to relax huh, try to have some fun. This isn’t exactly Fort Knox. You’re too tense.”

We’re always willing to take a look at possible submissions; information is on our contributions page!

Many of you will be vaguely familiar with Gulliver’s Travels, the satirical novel written by Jonathan Swift and published in 1725. However you may not know that the book is overtly furry.

Gulliver is a traveller who, through misadventure, voyages to four unknown lands: Lilliput (a land of little people); Brobdingnag (big people); Laputa (a scientific ruling class repressing an uneducated populous); and finally Houyhnhnmland – land of the rational horses.

Pronunciation note: ‘houyhnhnm’ is the name the horses have given themselves and so should sound much like a horse’s whinny – ‘hwinnum’.

I won’t go into the plot in detail (although I will discuss Houyhnhnmland a little later on) but suffice to say that it’s a very easy and entertaining read. The language isn’t as antiquated as you might think; no more so than the contrivances used by some fantasy authors.

And then there’s the furry content.

For starters there are the rational horses, the houyhnhnms themselves. They talk, they use their forelegs to handle tools and to eat, and they live in a society. In short, they are anthropomorphs.

Swift uses his anthropomorphic horses much in the same way many furry books, and sometimes furries themselves, use anthropomorphs: to reflect on human society. The houyhnhnms are entirely rational and live in a peaceful collective where the concept of lying is unknown. To draw a parallel with a more modern invention, they share similarities with Star Trek’s Vulcans and in many ways, Borg.

Swift goes a step further by including zoomorphic humans: the yahoos. The yahoos are humans stripped of their rational nature. The resulting animal is reduced to a violent, selfish, scatological and sex-driven being. Gulliver is so disgusted by the yahoos that he begins to hate himself as he sees his instincts reflected in their behaviour. He yearns to be less human; more horse.

The entire book, not just the Houyhnhnmland voyage, looks at human society from an outsider’s point of view. This, in my opinion, is how many furries see the ‘human’ world: as a collection of laws and unsaid rules that are often illogical and arbitrary. In each of the four islands visited by Gulliver, he experiences an askew version of England and English society.

Most famously, on the first island, Gulliver is a giant amongst two nations of tiny people who are at war. They are, literally, at war because they disagree over which end of a boiled egg should be sliced off before eating: the big-endians and the little-endians. On his second voyage, Gulliver finds himself the diminutive amongst giants. He attempts to justify the slaughter of his fellow tiny men in the war between England and France by the insignificant perceived differences between the two nations. His explanation is met with the same disbelief and horror that Gulliver expressed over the endian war.

England is no longer at war with France however the metaphor is just as strong today. I think many furries consider themselves to be outsiders from human society, and see many of society’s actions as equally illogical and harmful as the endian war. I don’t think you, reader, will struggle to find a relevant modern-day analogue.

Back in Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver’s Travels explores the conflict between our instinctual, atavistic side and our rationality. By creating beings that are purely rational (the houyhnhnms) and purely animalistic (the yahoos), Swift asks the reader to consider himself. We like to think that we’re rational beings, but how true is that? Surely most of our decision-making is driven by instincts like fear, or sexual desire, or love?

Furries explore the same questions pretty directly. By presenting as non-human (or part-human) animals, we’re disassociating ourselves from the rules of ‘normal’ human behaviour. Starting from a position a half-step away from humanity, and a half-step towards our furry avatar of choice, we think about our animal instincts and consider that perhaps some of the artifices of human behaviour are untenable. The traits that we’ve appropriated from our avatars are usually instinctual ones; instincts that bring us closer to the animal world, and closer to one other. We’ve learned that a hug is often preferable to a handshake.

Through this lens, furries, like Gulliver, can see how humans everywhere are guided by instinct. (Many, if not most, people would deny this.) Once you think of everyone as an animal, it’s easy to see selfish or territorial or lustful behaviour. And it’s easy to see that denying that these behaviours are instinctual, and so applying a sheen of redemptive ‘reasoning’, often leads to harmful outcomes.

The houyhnhnms have no such instincts and accordingly their lives are guided by purely rational principles. They know neither love nor empathy. Decisions are made collectively and never second-guessed. Mating pairs are selected based on genetic synergies. They enslave and freely execute yahoos, rationalising that such wretched creatures cannot have worthwhile quality of life. They eventually exile Gulliver after observing his human flaws.

The furries might say that embracing instincts for what they are – natural – leads to a new understanding of ones self, and leads to the possibility of a richer life. If you are naturally flawed, it’s easier to accept that everyone else is too. The furry community, for all its problems and drama (brilliantly encapsulated in these virtual pages by Makyo), is a welcoming and tolerant one. Swift’s houyhnhnms and yahoos, representing the two extremes of our human animal nature, live in two very different but equal hells.

Gulliver’s Travels is out of copyright, and so is available to download for free from Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org). You can get it in any format imaginable: plain text, Kindle, HTML, even as an audiobook.

No copyright means that there are no royalties payable, and so the story of Gulliver’s Travels has been adapted countless times. The ‘fantastical voyage’ aspect of the story makes it ripe for adaptation into children’s stories, much in the manner of One Thousand and One Nights. The book has also been exploited with varying degrees of adherence to the source material in middlebrow cinema, notably the 1990′s TV miniseries featuring Ted Danson and the recent film starring Jack Black.

Adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels usually focus on the first two of Gulliver’s voyages, where he is respectively huge and tiny amongst the native population. The adaptations usually water down the occasionally explicit sexual content of the novel, which is a key theme. Human sexuality is a major societal motivation and Swift does not withdraw from the topic: Gulliver’s comparatively massive genitals are key to his activities in Lilliput; he becomes a sexual plaything for teenage girls in Brobdingnag; crude sexual advances from pubescent yahoo girls lead to his eventual abandonment by the houyhnhnms.

Gulliver’s Travels and Swift’s houyhnhnms helped me understand my own identity as a furry. It’s given me an insight into myself and also provided the language and framework to allow these ideas to become fully formed. Swift’s focus on the true motivations of the human animal – instincts such as sex and fear – helped me understand that my own motivations are just the same as everyone else.

I sign off my emails as ‘your friendly local houyhnhnm’, but this is not to say that I see myself as a rational being. It’s quite the opposite. The houyhnhnms, for me, are a reminder that I am just an animal. I have instincts that I can’t deny or rationalize away.

Gulliver, on the other hand, is seduced by the logic and the reason of the houyhnhnms. Despite being cast out by the houyhnhnms and being returned to England by sympathetic humans, Gulliver rejects human society outright, seeing only a group of yahoos. He ends the novel as an embittered misanthrope. Sadly this is also the fate of many furries. Like Gulliver, they are blinded to the greatness of society by contemptible human actions, false rationalisations and the other ways in which we humans fail.

Swift encourages the reader to empathize with Gulliver and this is part of the book’s genius and power. We watch and understand his downfall but we ultimately reject Gulliver and his beloved houyhnhnms. We can choose a happier path.

My furry self, the horse, stands for two things: my animal nature that I need to learn to embrace and accept, and the fact that I can use reason and rationality to improve myself and my life. The houyhnhnms and the yahoos are metaphors for our dual nature as human animals. They’re something I’m running towards and away from at the same time.

There is irony here. By stepping away from my human form into my furry one, I’ve learned how to be human. The most human version of myself is the horse.

As you all know, the 2012 [a][s] Census and Survey is currently under way.  We’ve got quite a few responses already, and there’s a lot of really neat stuff being said about the fandom.  However, responses are currently only visible to the survey admins and, if you maintained a copy of your code pair, your own survey is visible to yourself.  We did promises that the fandom would benefit from the results, and they will indeed show up in the form of visualizations, articles, and so on here in the near future, but in the mean time, I’d like to share some of the direct results in a few short posts just to give a flavor of how diverse we all are!

For this first post, here are some responses to the question “Describe your process of character creation.”

The species came to my head without even thinking about it. Also, I think that German Shepard are a very beautiful race, full of personality…
Attributes, however are still a work in progress as I can’t figure out what special features my character has.

– XThe_GManX

 

I have never really chosen a species, I just “feel” it. It’s like looking inside, and seeing another side of oneself. I see a wolf, most of the time. It’s just there, I don’t choose.

– anonymous

 

I identify with my species through spirituality. Animal totemology.

– Toast

 

The species I wanted to be one from my home country (the US). I chose a raccoon because I think chubby raccoons are cute, and I wanted him to be a self-representational fursona and am chubby myself. They’re also easy to accessorize because of their coloration, and since I wanted him to be a Pokemon trainer I didn’t want it to be difficult to design his trainer outfit…there are some bizarre clothes in the Pokemon world.

– anonymous

 

I don’t actually recall anymore where the character of ‘Shakal’ originally came from. I have always had a strong affinity with felines. During college he became a complex mixture of both self-identity and self-idealization. In essence while being one of my strongest symbols for what I consider to be ‘me’, he also is an idea of what I want to be, a goal to push myself toward.

– Shakal Draconis

 

There was not really a choice. I felt drawn to wolves ever since I was a joung teenager. They were mentioned in a book I’ve read and immedeatly I recognised myself in those animals. I startet to devour every book about them I could get my hands on. So it was clear I would be a wolf. The other attributes… well I tried to depict my charakter as myself, only more… wolfisch. So he has a lot in common with me. And some things I discovered during my shamanic practises, like the fur pattern.

– Lutan

 

Don’t have a fursona.

 

Apperently it is very important to the furry fandom to have fursona.

– anonymous

 

Well, I started off as a generic wolf in Furcadia, but as I grew to identify more with the sub culture, I became a dragon, merely becuase I had a thing for reptiles. In time the dragon felt a little generic for me, and a little too majestic or strong. I was a person with weaknesses and flaws that needed to be reflected upon. One day while digging through IMVU i found a jackal skin and it just struck a chord in me. I tend to be loud, and annoying at times, possessing sharp tongue and mind. Jackals are seen as scavangers, which I tend to mooch sometimes, but trully keen hunters and can defend themselves from larger predators using witts. Highly undrestimated and ovrlooked.

– Iridon

 

I always liked wolves

– CS Silver

Some additional notes:

• Sample size is 368 at the time of writing
• The following terms were mentioned (partial match):
  • Totem – 2 times
  • Spirit – 6 times
  • Connect – 9 times
  • Represent – 21 times
  • Identify – 26 times
  • Personality – 43 times
• Some initial reactions:
  • Many referred to their character matching themselves physically or mentally
  • Many refer to their character in the third person (“He is…”, “My character does…”)
  • Character creation seems to be a pretty casual process, but a fluid and ongoing one
  • Furries are pretty casual writers, but pretty good ones overall
  • While character creation may be a casual process (‘pick’, ‘choose/chose’, and so on are used frequently), it’s still a fairly personal one, and there’s usually a reason behind the choice of species

Additional Notes

JM recently wrote about the concept of “priming” in surveys and how difficult it is to avoid.  One reader brought up a point about the concept of spirituality and how that might affect affinity with species.  I agree with him that there is often a spiritual sort of connection, however ill-defined, with the animal one associates with a character.  However, that question was not asked, and so it seems that we have a bit of a priming issue here on our hands. Due to the way the question was worded and the questions surrounding it (which are visible both in the electronic and paper versions of the survey), replies along that vein may have been minimized.  The upside is that the survey portion of the census and survey will change every year, while the census remains fairly consistent, and so this is a question we can elaborate on more in the 2013 [a][s] Census and Survey!

As a reminder, you can always get in touch with us by leaving comments, contacting us on Twitter/FA/Google+, or shooting us an email: [email protected]!

Despite my frequent use of the word, I am more of the opinion that furry is a subculture, rather than a fandom. That’s part of the problem of being a writer and having mostly just one topic to write about: thinking up enough ways to refer to the same concept again and again without sounding repetitive can prove difficult. I think that part of the reason that I keep referring to furry as “the [furry] fandom” is that it is a phrase engrained within our subculture, due to its historical use.  Perhaps at some point in time, furry consisted mostly of a collection of fans, but as furry grows, so do the means with which it’s members connect with it.  That’s why I enjoy subculture as a word to describe us: it is much more all-encompassing and, in the end, perhaps a little more accurate in describing our hodge-podge group.

When I was reading William Gibson’s book Pattern Recognition, I was introduced to the term participation mystique, which comes from early Jungian psychology, adapted from Lévy-Bruhl in order to describe the means by which we, as people, can define a portion of ourselves through membership in a community or association with an object.  This, I think, is the core of the furry subculture.

I don’t think that I could entirely get away with not using “fandom” to refer to furry. While anthropomorphism has figured large in most cultures, I think that what we call furry today stems in large part from a combination of other fandoms, such as those surrounding comic books, cartoons, and science fiction, eventually coalescing into a more coherent group, though still (and as yet) without a enteral nexus. It would be unfair of me to discount not only the formative years of the fandom, but also a still significant portion of furry that relies on their association with some extant product that contains that kernel of anthropomorphism.

So much of not only my own childhood, but my early years within furry had to do with the little fandoms that revolved around individual films.  Disney’s Robin Hood, the Redwall books, and even less direct examples, such as animal companions – talking and not – in Saturday morning cartoons or books such as Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series (embarrassing admission: when I first got into furry, I tried to do a comic of Sabriel with the characters being foxes – lets just say it’s good I stuck with music).

These sources are important to us because they give us an extant product to latch onto, a body of work to study, expand upon, and dream up new microcosms in the macrocosm of their world.  For the rare few who are gifted enough to create the world in itself, it can be a little (or very) distressing, but the human mind is always adept at treating a fictional world as a fractal, looking closer and finding – or at least adding – more detail.  It’s doubly important, then that furry itself ‘grew up’ around these sources, at least in part.  It allowed us to start with several very specific ideas, look deeper into them, and come out with something general enough that a group of individuals from different interests could come together and say “this is us”.

Of course, this led to a new way of thinking of furry, especially once its presence on the Internet began to grow.  A new member could find their way inside through some way other than some existing fandom.  Despite being a big fan of all the classic furry books and films, none of them really struck a nerve with me – it was finding that others had built something new from those roots that caught my attention.  I’ve mentioned before my roots in finding the fandom through Yerf! and a few other sites (Side7 and Elfwood, anyone?).  With the disclosure that it’s what I’d call my own point of entry into the fandom, I feel that a good portion of those who call themselves furry today follow much the same route: a general interest in the concept of anthropomorphics not necessarily tied to one single source other than what the fandom has already produced.

I freely admit that this isn’t a very intense association with furry.  For a little bit near when I was first getting into the fandom, I did think about myself as a fox (as I was at the time), and would often spend nights awake in bed imagining myself comfortable with my partner, both of us our cute little fox-sona selves.  I know that for some, this sort of self-zoomorphism can become almost a whole-body species-dysphoria, extending from feeling as though one exhibits characteristics of their animal character to feeling decidedly uncomfortable being a human.  I feel as though I should be careful writing about this, partly because I know relatively little about it beyond my own simple experiences, but mostly due to the fact that it tends to shift at this point into our…lets say “sister subcultures” of therianthropy and the were culture, which are not necessarily the focus of [adjective][species].  That said, this focus on the species as it pertains to the self is still important within furry culture, particularly when it comes to character creation (“I don’t feel like much of seagull, so why would I make my character one?”).

We certainly cannot leave out the spiritual aspects of furry, either.  While this, like most things, seems to go through waves of popularity, it’s never waned so much as to become insignificant as an aspect of the fandom. This is a topic that certainly deserves its own article, so I’m only going to touch on it a little here, but it is interesting to note. As there have been anthropomorphic aspects of many cultures back through time, it’s easy to see these creating “fandoms” of their own. This is its own gradient as well: some may latch onto the legends and play into the roles set down for them, while others, seemingly unattached, will admit that they enjoy the trickster aspect of their coyote-sona or the cleverness inherent in being a fox-based-creature.  There’s so much more that can be said about the spiritual aspects of being a furry, that I really do think it will have to wait until its own article.  I still have to tie this all back together with participation mystique after all!

With something as loose-weaved as furry, it’s difficult to imagine there being anything more than the faintest borders around the subculture.  There are, though, and where there are borders, there’s bound to be someone aiming to push them.  Beyond simply the species available here on earth, many are more content to explore the bounds created in science-fiction and fantasy universes.  At least one of the followers of our twitter account is a Wookiee, and for a while, there were several Kzinti and Skiltaires floating around.

Beyond even the constructed species of these fictional worlds likes the only vaguely-defined realm of post-furry, a sub-sub-culture of sorts with the goal of pushing the limits of anthropomorphics beyond the “pure” combination of animal and human characteristics.  While this may lead to some rather borderline or intentionally humorous character creations, the postmodernist viewpoint that seems to influence the postfurry attitude serves well with its looser sense of reality.  This is another topic probably more deserving of its own post in the future, considering the intriguing variety possible within it, yet the dearth of information available on it.

All of these describe different aspects of our participation mystique as furries.  The way we associate portions of our own selves with this abstract noun that is “furry”.  We identify with the fandom in all our myriad ways, and by virtue of our identities, form the fandom in itself.  The question has come up several times in the last few days about what exactly makes a furry.  That’s one of those questions that’s decidedly difficult to answer in a way that’s satisfactory to all.  I think that the best definition that I could come up with is that a furry is someone who claims to be a furry.  There are probably some who fall outside this definition that others would consider as members of the fandom, but it’s part of our mystical participation that it be consensual – one cannot be forced to identify with something.  I guess in that sense, ‘furry’ winds up being more of an adjective than a noun, though the word as an adjective already carries too strong a meaning to be overloaded like that.

That there is a phrase for identifying with a group such as this is evidence that this is not a unique phenomenon. In the context of the aforementioned Gibson book, it was used in much the same way: describing the fascination and partial identity with a fan base for a specific creation (in the book’s case, bits of film slowly appearing on the internet, and in ours, anthropomorphics), but the same idea lends itself to other memberships that form portions of identities in individuals. A good example that comes to mind is one’s political or religious affiliation, which, for some people shapes a good portion of their identities. To state another example, since we’ve covered the belief and fan ends of the spectrum, many members of the LGBT community also base their identities on their membership, adopting styles, modes of speech, and mannerisms from what they believe is the norm for such an identity, thus perpetuating it’s existence.

Given these examples, I’m tempted to ask what modes and mannerisms within the fandom are perpetuated by identity with the fandom? There is certainly a good amount of lingo that comes along with our membership, such as the word ‘fandom’ itself. Beyond that, though, there are certain things that do go along with our culture, at least in the case of conventions: certain styles, stances, and actions can identify the furry from the non-furry.  Again this is something worthy of its own post, but it’s still worth noting that our participation in this larger culture called furry comes with its…perhaps price is the wrong term, but certainly its expectations.  One is no longer necessarily obligated to be familiar with Watership Down or Rescue Rangers (though one should apparently be familiar with dubstep), for instance.  The criteria for participation remain loose enough for us to be a fairly accepting fandom, and it could probably be argued that they have loosened over time, but there are still some lines, however faint and pushed by the post-fur crowd (to name only one example) they are, which identifies us as furries.

Participation mystique, mystical participation, is perhaps one of the best phrases I’ve found to be used to define the fandom.  It’s not something we can (or should) whip out when trying to explain our subculture to those non-members around us.  The concept of basing a part of our existence off something non-spatiotemporal makes it all sound a bit like a strange religion, especially when put in terms like that.  However, with all the different levels of identifying with our animal characters represented, plus the consensual aspect of self-identifying as a furry, I feel we’ve got just about all the bases covered: a connection with our characters, no matter the source, and our participation forming a portion of our identity as the crazy animal-people we are.

In the last post about drama, I wondered whether or not we, as a community, really were more dramatic than those around us, and if so, why, or if not, why we seem to think we are.  Much of the content of that post came from responses to a few questions on twitter. Perhaps the best thing about our fandom is our willingness and ability to communicate, and that really is the basis of much of these articles,  I had asked previously whether or not we were more dramatic and why, and gotten several very succinct answers as to why that might be the case, Beyond that, however, I also asked if our drama is in some way different than that in the world around us, and got several additional responses to this question, which is the basis for this, the second episode of The Dramagogues.

Yes. Furry drama sheds and gets all over everybody.

–rustitobuck

While this response may have been provided tongue-in-cheek, I think it does illustrate something that we do fairly well: appropriate. Furries are very, very good at deciding what is furry and what is not, and will do so every chance they get. There was a book published several years ago, The Architect of Sleep by Steven R. Boyett, which featured anthropomorphic raccoons as its characters. The author did not intend for them to be furry, and had originally planned on the book being the first in a series, but the response from the fandom was so outsized and, from the author’s standpoint, creepy, that he refused to continue the series with the fandom’s response being the reason why (he was not so polite in his wording).

We are so eager to appropriate things around us in the name of our fandom that it could be that, whether or not our drama is indeed all that different, we have made it ours. It may be just drama, but, being involved in the fandom, it becomes Furry Drama. There are, of course, some issues that may be unique to our subculture such as the intellectual property one has in a character, but it feels sometimes as though we could stick cat ears and a tail on any old problem and turn it into a furry problem. If you get short changed at the farmers market, you can complain about it,and if the artist you paid $5 for an icon takes a few days too long, you can do much the same, but it’s now possible to make it into a furry problem.

not particularly. the irony of the furry fandom is that it’s more human than humans are.

–_am3thyst

Another way to look the same issue is to consider that our drama is simply an artifact of us being a slice of humanity as a whole. Humans have their own little dramas that are being played out all the time. However, humans aren’t a small, rather tightly knit group of people with many things in common. While all our problems may be relatively human,it could be that we just read more deeply into them because of our commonalities. On the other side, because we read so deeply into them, we do tend to be more focused on the day-to-day human dramas of our fellows. I think that may indeed be why we are so closely knitting the first place, at least in part.

This is one of those good-for-you scenarios. Even though the drama around us is…well, drama, it’s still an instance of us interacting, which is a good thing, and the fact that we are so emotionally tied to the issues at hand is evidence of our emotional investment within the fandom.  I used to wonder what the fandom would be like without all of the drama at seems to come with the package, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I just wouldn’t like it that much. It’s not that it.s comforting by itself, so much as that it’s evidence of how much we care about our hobby. If furry were something where being involved didn’t mean enough for one to get emotionally invested, really don’t think that it would be something that I would’ve stuck with this long, nor something that would’ve grown as fast as it has, even if it means focusing on our all-to-human problems.

Drama is drama, regardless of who says it or the content.

–Adonai_Rifki

I mentioned a quote in the last post, “Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics. In-feuds carry the implicit baggage of membership”.  Perhaps our drama really is just drama and has no special furry significance, and although the Internet likely has its effects on the issues involved, it could just be that our membership in the community makes us feel obligated to interpret things in a furry context. This quote does well to tie together the previous two in that it brings together the “content” being appropriated and the “who” of us just being people.

Our membership in this group carries the implicit membership in the drama therein. By taking it onto ourselves and turning it into the fandom’s drama, we may wind up blowing it out of proportion (or way, way out of proportion), even though it’s still just a little spat between individuals, as would happen between any groups of people. Still, it’s comforting to know that we can do so much together, even fighting among ourselves.

I’d say any look at Facebook would say no.

–mousit

On the other hand, perhaps it’s not our membership to the fandom that makes us so keyed into each other’s drama, and our drama seems different and out of proportion because we happen to be tech-savvy people.  The benefit of anonymity provided by the Internet, or at least a lack of direct consequences for our words and actions could be part of why it’s so easy to turn any little thing into drama.  Perhaps our reliance on such a medium in order to properly express ourselves has its downsides: both an enhanced sensitivity to the language used around us (due to its relative permanence as compared to speech) and the ability to maintain a structured, even institutionalized facade presented to those around us.

Before I got into furry, I got into the Internet and some of its culture.  I’ve mentioned before that I started out on some bulletin boards in about 1999, and we were no strangers to drama there, either.  With communication on the Internet, it’s easy and even encouraged to “write for your audience”, to steal a term. Speech is very extemporaneous and it’s easy to have a slip of the tongue or to say something potentially offensive without meaning to (foot-in-mouth syndrome), but it’s much easier to write with a purpose, rather than extemporaneously. That is, even when you’re discussing the relative merits of two different restaurants, you are writing with a very specific goal, reading and reread in what you’ve written, and making sure, even if only subconsciously, that you present yourself at your best. At the same time, however, you know that others are doing just the same and thus tend to pay a good amount of attention to language that’s being used around you.

In furry, this structured presentation of self has become institutionalized in the concept of one’s character, no matter how tightly associated the individual is with it.  Even on visual media such as SecondLife, our interactions take place as structured language intentionally built to deceive, in a way. We intend to show ourselves as our characters and we write carefully in order to do so.  Perhaps this is a symptom of furry, but it seems as though it’s built into the Internet as a whole. The ability to maintain near-real-time communication using text allows one to build up whatever facade they wish while still coming off as a real person. The drama here comes up when a bit of that facade slips or is let down in order to share an honest opinion with someone, or let loose with some previously hidden emotions. This happened nearly as often in the boards I had been a member of as it does within furry, but seeing as how we were all a bunch of hormone-saturated teenagers, I had chalked it up to that, instead. Having been around the ‘net as an adult now, I can say that we’re just as childish (if not moreso, sometimes) as we were when we were teenagers when presented with the opportunity for anonymity, however partial.

If I were asked to give an opinion on the spot as to whether furry drama is different than regular drama, I would say no.  Within the fandom, we have some very ordinary problems, and I don’t think that our membership to this subculture changes the problems we have in any way.  However, I would not be able to say that without a caveat: our membership does change the way in which we interpret drama. Our problems may be very similar to those among any predominately text-based culture, but our focus on our characters adds a strange twist to everything we do here, including fighting.

Tune in next time as we look at the way drama changes and fluctuates over time within the fandom, as well as how that is similar and different from the world at large.  The Dramagogues, only on [adjective][species]! Wednesdays, 12pm mountain! (Okay, so I wouldn’t do well in TV…)

It would be silly for a meta-furry blog to post a con report, and that’s not quite what we’re going to do here, but we would like to note that [adjective][species] was at Further Confusion 2012 (still is, technically) as Fan Media, and we had a blast! While there, we handed out surveys, cards, and “I ♥ RandomWolf” stickers, lined up some future interviews, and spent a good deal of time talking to and observing our fellow furries.

In the future, we would also like to conduct some interviews while at the con (we brought a camcorder this year, but forgot to really do anything with it), and have more people helping to conduct the survey. However, we are also open to suggestions – what would you like to see from us at conventions? What other conventions would you like to see us visit? Is there any convention specific content that you would like to see us produce? Let us know what you think in the comments and we’ll definitely take it into consideration!

Keep being awesome, folks!

I’ve been tiptoeing around this subject for a while now. It’s one of those topics that is both a pretty big deal and should be talked about, as well as one that is pretty divisive and some people could be tetchy about. My big worry in bringing it up I not that I’ll open a discussion on the topic, because that’s what I want to do. Rather, I worry that any discussion that does happen would be more inflammatory than anything. It’s one of those topics that a lot of people seem to agree on, but not agree on why, and it’s difficult to describe in words in any event. So I’m going to do the band-aid thing here and just say it all at once: either furries are more dramatic people than other groups, or they think they are, and either concept is fraught with implications and certainly worth exploring, given how much time and energy the fandom seems to put into its drama.

There is no metric of drama. It’s a hard thing to gauge and an even harder thing to gauge objectively. To say that furry is more dramatic than other groups, or more dramatic than life in general or simply the non-furry portion is a hard statement to back up. Is the drama more intense or less? Does it happen more frequently or less frequently? Is it more or less legitimate? Or important? Rooted in reality? That there are even so many questions in the second paragraph of a write-up on the subject bodes ill for saying, definitively, whether or not furry is more dramatic. Instead of trying to determine one way or another on the issue, I think it would be best to explore why this either may be the case or at least why many of us believe it is. I asked this as a quick poll on twitter a while back, so I’m going to structure the first two parts of this article around the responses I received to the two parts of the question that I posted, starting with one of my own views, while the third portion will be more about the duration of dramatic events in the fandom, with potential future exploration down the line.

Let me begin with some of the thoughts that have been going through my own mind as I work through these articles. I think that one of the biggest issues I’ve seen behind the drama, at least that which I’ve been party to or part of, is that furry is larger and more diverse than we expect it to be. We, as a community, share a strong common bond in our shared interests. We have our unique ways of interacting with each other, our unique modes of expression, and our unique concept of character. We have gotten so good at dealing with what we have and how that works within our subculture, that I think we believe our group is more self-similar than it really is. With our strong connection, it’s easy for us to expect that those around us will share more than just our interests and some of our mannerisms, that they will also share our opinions and our eccentricities.

Part of why I started to see this was due to the fact tht many conciliatory efforts that I saw being made publicly were posited as diplomatic ways of informing one on how to interact with others. However, many of these efforts come off more as ways to successfully interact with whichever party posited them. That is, the one who attempted to solve the problem did so by assuming the embroiled parties (even if they were one themselves) saw things the same way that they did. While it may seem like we’re a collection of mostly canids and there is a lot of self-similarity in character creation and our shared interests, we’re just not that much alike.

In other instances, however, it appears that furry is smaller than we want to think. We want the fandom to be large enough to accommodate every aspect of ourselves, and we want that to include a group of friends who share the same experiences. Furry just isn’t big enough for that, though. There are going to be clashes here and there in everything from names to interests. I ran into the name problem, myself, years go. When I started into the fandom, I went by Ranna, which was a name I had stolen from a book (and that’s why I rarely go by that name anymore). Of course, the minute I tried to sign up for SPR using that name, I was rejected due to there already being one there.  Same for Tapestries – a different Ranna, in fact.

In the long run, I really shouldn’t have been surprised that I ran into other “Ranna”s out there. We all wanted to be sure in our own little parts of the fandom, though, and so actually running into someone with the same name was a bit of a shock. The fandom just wasn’t big enough to hold that, though, and so we run into all these instances of people knowing friends we thought they would never know, and we find out that those friends maybe know much mores about us and our relationships than we had previously thought – this was something that happened to be twice within the past few weeks, actually: a friend I had known for a while under a different name didn’t know that I wrote for [adjective][species].

The drama, here, comes perhaps from the fact that it’s easier to speak about other groups of friends within our groups of friends. It’s easy for me to talk about drama at work when I get home and, with a filter in place of course, vice versa. Similarly, it’s easy for me to ramble on about some of the goings on in my offline life to my online friends, but things get difficult when it turns out that someone I talk to online knows more about the relationships than I had thought. This is another downside of our heavy interaction on the Internet: it’s so easy to say something to one group of friends and a different, perhaps contradictory thing to another group that could spark some strife when the information is shared between the groups.  Enough from me, though, on to what others have to say.

Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics. In-feuds carry the implicit baggage of membership.

- krtbuni

Although is is a tough statement to unpack, I feel that it captures a lot of what may actually be going on within the fandom. By belonging to a discrete segment of society, we are all members of a “minority group”. Members is too gentle of a word, even; this is something that we feel is part of ourselves. For many of us, furry is part of our identity. The downside of that, is that every interaction within or about that social context of which we are a part is also about part of ourselves. That’s the force multiplier: that there is some drama that may not even be connected to us makes little different when our membership carries this implicit baggage with it.

Every interaction that happens within some circle that’s important to us becomes a part of us in a way. If you are Jewish (disclaimer: I am not), antisemitism can have a very real effect on your life, whether or not you experience directly; if you are an African-American (disclaimer: I’m 1/16th black, but that means very little), the racism that our country still struggles to overcome may impact you in a very real way, even if it may not seem like it from it outside. Accordingly, if a tv show misrepresents the fandom of which you are a member, it is very easy to feel personally misrepresented, or if there is a fight between two furs in which you agree with one side, it’s easy to feel as if it is your fight as well. This would explain the way in which what seems like a relatively small bit of drama snowballs out of proportion once others know about it.

Any community whose central theme revolves around crafted image has inflated drama. see: art, acting, politics, high school etc.

- _am3thyst

This is similar to the above quote in that it has to do with the fact that we are members of a community, and that fact is what makes us a little more dramatic. However, this touches on some of what I’ve mentioned before here on the blog. Specifically, our whole subculture is based on the fact that we interact not with our selves, but with constructed personas that are intentionally misrepresentative – granted, in the relatively innocuous way of being a different species, or perhaps a different gender. The downside of this, of course, is that we are not our characters.

We have the same amount as other fandoms. Ours are just in the forefront unfortunately.

- Adonai_Rifki

You know, it may just be due to the online nature of many of our interactions that the perceived level of drama is so high within the fandom. Having spent a good portion of my childhood years with a step-brother and two step-sisters taught me that there is, indeed, plenty of drama in the real world. I used to keep a toy on the frame of my step-brother’s and my bunk bed that I would move from one end of the bed to the other as he annoyed me to sleep – my own version of “I’m going to count to three…” – which of course just caused him to act out all the more and led to fights. I was a real brat, growing up…

So really, being around drama wasn’t something that’s unique or new when I joined the fandom, I had been around it all the while growing up. The thing that changed instead, was the visibility of the drama, as everything was now written down and immortalized somewhere. Even if you’re hanging out in a MUCK or IRC server, the text will still linger there on the screen until its pushed off the top, and even then, it resides in scrollbacks and countless logs. I found a log from years and years ago chock full of drama the other day and sent it to an acquaintance who had been involved, and everything was still fresh to the both of us. The text had endured and, along with it, the drama behind it. That is the same drama we complain about on twitter and FA: every time something happens and hundreds of people make journals about it, the drama explodes and becomes all the more visible, and often winds up outlasting even the original problem itself by quite a wide margin – “Krystal can’t enjoy her sandwich”, anyone?

In the next episode of The Dramagogues, we’ll be looking into potential reasons why the fandom might either be more dramatic or think it’s more dramatic than the world around it.

It was suggested by a few folks that it would be good to do a semi-regular feature on some of the wonderful art that may not follow the norm of what’s posted out there.  For this post, we’ll be taking a look at Ookami Kemono and his storied images, both from the Dear L. series and other narrative pieces of art.

As a bit of a disclaimer, I’ve been following Ookami Kemono for a while, and have even had a commission of my own done by him.  Even so, I think it’s very interesting to see someone come up with a touching and emotional story for many of the pieces of art they post, and he certainly does post rather often! In this instance, we’ll be posting each of the “stories” that comes along with the pieces themselves in order to help complete the image (thus making this one of the longest posts of ours – the words really do help complete the images, though); be sure to check out the full versions on FurAffinity.

Dear L. - His Own World

Dear L,

My boyfriend is a big Dungeon and Dragons nerd as well as a WoW patron. In his D&D lifestyle, he loves creating worlds, making stories for them as well as characters and other concepts, and playing them out. In his WoW lifestyle, he loves raiding with people he knows or complete strangers for hours on end. It got to a point where you don’t even have to guess what room he would be in whenever he comes home from work or school. At first I didn’t really complain that much. Being his girlfriend, I tried my hand in his fantasy world and WoW campaigns. For a while, I played with him, learning the ropes and the books until I was no longer a “newb” to him. On special occasions, we even “larp”ed in the bed room, i.e roleplaying our sexual fantasies.

I was wrong when I thought his obsession for the fantasy world couldn’t get any worse. This new game came out last month for his console system and ever since, he was glued to the TV set. He hardly goes to work or school anymore as he juggles his D&D games, WoW raids and now this. It came to a point where I started to pick up extra shifts at my work just to make up for what he lost. I didn’t mind it as much until I, his girlfriend, started to fade from his attention. He hardly notices me anymore, even when I want to make love to him. He would brush me off, saying that he was too busy or too hooked into the game he was playing. When I do managed to get his attention, our love making would be quick, emotional-less and rather dull. I find myself just sitting next to him on the couch, watching him play. This is the only time where I feel like we are spending “quality” time with each other.

Continue reading on FA ?

 

Each of Ookami’s works comes with its own little story, often touching and always emotional.

Coming Out

” I remember that time very clearly. I sat quietly on the sofa – my fingers entwined together, my back straight and my and my breath calm. The only thing that was offset and erratic was my quick beating heart in my chest. I sat there, dressed in my lime green over shirt, my long sleeve purple silk shirt, my lucky red skirt and black stockings. My favorite Pride bracelet was resting on my wrist and my blue earring upon my right ear. I wore my favorite perfume for the special occasion: Vanilla Mist. Smelling it calms my nerves and makes me smile. Behind me was a wall filled with photographs from my past. My family loved to keep a photographic history of my past mounted on the living room wall. It ranged from when I was a pup, to my first day at school, to my participation at the marathon, my high school prom, to my graduation from college. Hopefully, my legacy wall will continue to have pictures of my continuing future. But that, I don’t know if that would happen.

Infront of me were my parents, both sitting in separate chairs, looking at my direction as their minds tried to process the information I just told them. Their faces, even their body language, were a mixture of puzzlement, confusion, anger and sadness. The images behind me were me when I was young and male. Now, I sit here before my parents, reveling my true self to them for the first time: I am a female inside a male’s body and I’m now coming out. My breasts and figure were thanks to my hormone medication. My antlers were still on my head, almost like a big lettered sign saying I’m a male, but I didn’t want to go far into surgery without telling my parents about myself and who I am.

Continue reading on FA ?

 

One of the greatest things about this work is the intense effort put into shading via traditional techniques of cross-hatching and stippling. Even in his colored images, the effort put into this shading is evident.

A Mother to Be

“What she wanted, I knew she couldn’t have. Sonya, my lesbian girlfriend, is a very nurturing woman. She has this motherly nature to her that I rarely see in woman now a days. Whenever we pass by a child in the park or on the train, wherever we wondered, she would always take a moment to make the child smile with silly words or goofy faces. Her face would bright up like the sun whenever she smiled. After she talked about how cute the child was, she would sometimes feel down, wishing to have a child that she could take care of someday. She takes care of me like I’m her ‘child’, but she wanted something small she could teach and dress up. With our income, we wouldn’t be able to afford to take care of a child of our own. Having to pay for the sperm injection, the labor and everything after that, it was a dream that she wishes that would come true.

Christmas was approaching and she was hoping to get a big promotion at work. Sadly, she didn’t get it. She told me that if she did get promoted, she would be able to afford to have a child of her own. This event caused her to feel down and to sulk. Even though she smiled at me and said nothing was wrong, I knew that she was depressed on the inside. To have your dreams crushed and shattered like glass by just one negative word from your selfish boss’ mouth is terrible. It broke my heart to feel that, to see her try to hide her true feelings and to see her dream shatter so quickly. I was saving up to buy us two tickets to Europe, but I didn’t want her to feel down during our getaway. I rushed to a special store ( about 10 miles away ) that I hoped would have something to cheer her up. With the money I saved up, I used it all on something I knew she would love.

Continue reading on FA ?

 

The emotions tied with these images have a lot to do with gender, sexuality, or body image.

Concealing the Truth

“… It’s time to go to my parents house – my family who thinks they know all about me, their son. They don’t. I don’t tell them everything. I wish I could, but doing so would cause drama and so many issues that I can’t possibly handle in my life right now. They don’t know of my transformation: Male to Female transsexual. I have been taking pills for a long time and I now have grown well developed breasts. I can’t put bras on when I see them. They would notice the strap lines as well as the roundness of my chest. I would wear a thick sweater, but its no where near winter yet and they would still show. I don’t regret my new growth or the years I spent taking the pills to transform into what I want to be, so the only option I have is to bind my chest as tightly as I can with medical bandages, sometimes with a combination of duct tape I have to buy a bulk of rolls because they are one use only. It’s like wearing a corset that makes your chest as flat as possible. On top of wearing this stupid bandage, I have to wear boy clothes, down to the underwear. This makes me even more uncomfortable.

Its hard to breathe with this bandage on and I can’t flex my torso as much as I want to. In the end, I get burns and bruises from the tightness of the bandage. Sometimes my damage my ribs. I sometimes lock myself in the bathroom when seeing my parents and remove the construction from my chest. I only manage to get a good few breathes of air before I have to put it on again and walk out – continuing to act like a male instead of the female I want to be.

Continue reading on FA ?

 

That someone can come up with a story behind each image and present it almost in a slice of life journal entry or letter is, in my mind, quite impressive, and worthy of the attention.

Dear L. - Creation Crush

” Dear L,

I hope you don’t mind if I write this under Anonymous, because what I have to say sounds pretty weird and I don’t want to be the center of attention for hate mail and bullies. I have read the letters you have published from other people and I gained enough courage to finally write down what I have on my mind. I don’t know if its sick or not, but I’m hoping that you would give me some good feedback. I’ll just start out by saying that I have a huge crush on a girl. Her name is Ling-Doe. The thing is, this girl was drawn by an artist; a fictional character.

I’m single and lonely. Ill start off by saying that. I believe it’s normal for single people to fantasies about their dream mate. I first saw a Ling-Doe drawing created by an artist on a popular furry website. This artist,draws very beautiful woman. The detail to their bodies is amazing: the line work, the shading, the colors, everything. It almost pops out to life whenever you look at his creations. Ling-Loe has been drawn by other artists in various styles, but his style is what really brought me to my knees for her. It’s her eyes. There is so much life in her eyes. When I look into her eyes, those computer painted neon glowing eyes, I lose myself in a world of fantasy where here and I are talking, walking together, cuddling, and even making love. Everything like that. She talks to me in my dreams. Her voice so soft like a spring breeze, her eyes give off the warmth of a sun in a clear blue sky. Her body is molded like a Goddess among Goddesses. Her smile melts my heart and makes me want to pluck the moon for her. She is so unique. I’ve never seen any woman like her drawn as beautiful as her by anyone except for that artist who created her. Yes…I know… Its a bit overboard for an imaginary character drawn by an artist I have no idea what is is like or even his real name. All I know is that he draws her in a way that she becomes flawless, realistic, and unique in every way. I “worship” the artist because he is the one who created her – beautiful Ling-Doe.

Continue reading on FA ?

It’s hard to get a fursuit and not show it off.

Very hard.

When I first got my suit, I didn’t even wait until I had the whole thing all set up.  I picked my suit up from the maker at FC2011, stuffed the body suit and my shoes in the duffel I had brought along with, put on the rest, and headed back to the lobby.  I figured there was no reason for me to even bother dropping stuff back in the room; I had someone watch the duffel and wandered around as a partial otterman, making a fool of myself.  So it’s no surprise that furries and video get along like chocolate and coffee.

Several people have wondered aloud how to dance to dubstep.  It’s slow, it’s full of extraneous noise, and it’s difficult to find the beat some times.  Well, now you can thank the user NekoFluff on YouTube for an instructional video!  With special guest star: his dad!

Furries are all about dancing.   It’s one of the prime things we do at conventions, where the dance is one of the more popular activities to partake in.  So it’s no surprise that two of the videos I found to feature involve dancing.  Of course, this one has the added bonus of being put together from a series of still images to make the suiters float.  Pretty neat, I’d say.

Of course, not everyone is quite as interested in simply dancing in suit. Why, there’s all sorts of things you could do, like, say, review old electronics! Well, to be honest, I’d never thought of doing such a thing, but at least two people have: EmmersonCollie and SpatsBear2 on YouTube both have a few reviews of old appliances and electronics conducted in suit.

What’s life without poopjokes?  Well… I’m sure it’s just fine, actually, but anyway, here’s a fursuit poopjoke.  I…don’t have much else to add to this video.  That’s about it.

This is just four videos out of the countless ones available on YouTube, Vimeo, and any number of other video sharing sites out there. I picked these simply to get a good variety, and I know I only just scratched the surface. If you have any other suggestions, leave them in the comments!

After a recent article about suiting, it has been brought to my attention by several folks that I spent most of my time talking about suiting at cons and interacting only with other furries.  Of course, that’s not the only context in which fursuiters don their garb!  In the spirit of providing a more inclusive look into the costuming side of the fandom, I’m going to be pulling together a few of these vignettes on different aspects of fursuiting.  If you have any suggestions* to make regarding some unique use of suiting outside of the con scene, please feel free to either leave comments on this post, or email them to [email protected].  You can also send them to our Twitter, Google+, or FA accounts!

I found out recently that there’s a name for the concept behind the movie Inception: mise en abîme.  It’s a French phrase which means “placed into abyss”, and refers not only to the sort of dream-within-a-dream concept so heavily pounded upon in Inception, but also the concept of any thing within itself, such as a representation of the painting within a painting, or the feeling of standing between two mirrors and seeing the infinite representation of self receding into the distance.  It also has to do with different layers of representation and meaning in art, and, even though I’ve mentioned before that it’s surprising how mundane much of our interaction is, that’s what strikes me about the prevalence of fantasy and science fiction within the furry fandom’s artistic output.  It is a sort of stacking of different layers of fantasy, with our focus on anthropomorphic animals being layered atop science fiction or fantasy elements.

I suspect that a lot of why this weird dichotomy of mundane and fantastic trends within the fandom is so striking to me is due to the different avenues into the fandom that we’ve taken.  Speaking for myself, I found the fandom along a decidedly mundane path – Yerf.com.  Even though I’d read all the Redwall books at the time, had watched Disney’s Robin Hood over and over, and spent much of my time in elementary school role-playing scenes from The Phantom of the Opera with a friend wherein everyone was a cat, none of those actually struck the furry chord, as it were.  It was finding PacRat’s art on Yerf.com, images of furries in more mundane settings, that got me into things.  I liked the fact that species became more an aspect of self rather than some fantastical attribute about some fictional character.

That is, of course, not the only route into the community: several people I know have talked about their entry into the fandom being based around some of those things that I already mentioned, such as Redwall.  In fact, a good majority of my friends found their way into furry through the more fantasy-oriented routes, and that struck me as interesting, as here we were, already pretending to be animal people.  It was intriguing to think of layering fantasy atop fantasy like that.  It’s difficult, of course, to draw a hard and fast line between these two routes, as there are several people who are content living in a mostly mundane world set perhaps a few years forward or backward in time, or even a mundane life in the far future or distant past, yet I do feel that there is a difference in mindset between the more and less fantasy oriented furs.

I suppose that the difference between these two views of the fandom isn’t so much that we’re applying our culture to a fantasy setting versus a mundane setting, so much as how we view our focus on our characters.  If one views one’s character as some sort of fantastic being, some concept of self with additional elements which extend beyond the norm, it’s easier to place oneself in a fantastic setting.  From the other point of view, if one views one’s character as one’s self, simply expressed differently, or as something one possesses rather than one is, then it might feel more comfortable to exist in a setting closer to the one inhabited by the player – that is, a more mundane set of circumstances.  The difference there being that there is a bit of a divide, no matter how vague, between two sides of looking at one’s character – as fantasy, or as mere re-representation of self.

This sort of thinking struck me as interesting back when I was first getting into the fandom, on one of my first sojourns onto a MUCK.  When you describe your player using Triggur’s seemingly omnipresent editplayer command, you are given the opportunity to set a bit, or attribute, on your character to say whether or not you can fly.  I had personally thought this rather strange: I was just a teenage fox guy, living in a teenage fox guy world, where I had surrounded myself with several other teenage fox, cat, or what-have-you friends living in the same world.  What use did I have for flying?  I set the bit in order to more thoroughly explore the MUCK that I had wound up on (Zorin’s FluffMUCK), as it was needed to do things such as go up, instead of just north, south, east, or west.  Every now and then, I would play around with it, flying up above the park, the main location on the server, where I could joke around with friends or get away from the inane chatter below, but I never really thought of it as flying, per se.

It wasn’t until I started to explore further on other MUCKs such as SPR and FurryMUCK where role-play was taken more seriously than it was on my original hang-out of choice, that I found out that it really did matter to people less mundane than I whether or not the flying bit was set.  Although in the long run, I wound up simply finding another, older crowd of more mundane fox, cat, and wolf people to hang out with, it always stuck with me that here I was, a fox guy that could fly for, in my case, no real reason.  I never flew (I rarely do much more than hang out in one room, to be honest), and even to this day, never really consider it flying.  However, having seen and, once or twice, taken part in more serious role-play in a more fantastic setting than what amounts to a glorified chat room most days, I can say that this is likely due to me just not being a very fantasy-oriented person, and perhaps there’s a personality trait that helps determine whether or not one feels more comfortable interacting in a fantastic or mundane setting.

The downside to all of this, of course, is that it becomes difficult to maintain without potentially losing some aspect of the fantasy.  A furry story set in a fantasy setting runs the risk of being a fantasy story wherein all the characters are animal people for no discernible reason, or perhaps a furry story in which fantastical things keep happening with little explanation.  Perhaps that’s the sign of a really good furry role-player or writer, though, being able to maintain a level of coherence within all the separate layers of fantasy.  The requirements for a furry fantasy to be pulled off well require miscibility: the risk is great of having a fantasy that happens to be furry or vice versa, and so it seems to be important that furry be either a strong part of the fantasy or at least part of the plot in order for everything to work out well.

Another downside to these different routes into the fandom is the segregation that is built into that fact.  That western society views role-playing of most types as a geeky pursuit and geeks as a frowned-upon minority, it’s no surprise that the same outlook can carry over into furry pretty easily, given how much of the fandom is based in western society.  Perhaps that’s a big claim for me to make, but having seen the way that the issue of “RP” can polarize furries, I’m not sure of what other explanation there might be.  There are those who totally buy into their character, and especially into the fantastic aspects of them, and there are those who are in the fandom for some other reason, perhaps more of an affinity than an identity.  The two groups occasionally have their clashes, with arguments being based around the one group “powergaming” the other, or the other group being too serious or roleplaying in comments.  As yet, at least, the clashes seem to mostly involve the two groups poking fun at each other.

Furry is a fantasy, there’s no way around it – at the very least, it is a hobby that revolves around what could basically be explained as fantastic creatures with human attributes (or vice versa, of course), and on the other end of the spectrum, it can be seen as a set of people with identities that more closely match that of some other species besides their own, those who are perfectly willing to buy into the fantasy.  Adding additional fantasy on top doesn’t always work out quite as expected, but seems to be the natural course of events in that it’s so easy to extend furry beyond its roots and into such realms.  Some just like their animal people to be pretty normal, though, and that’s okay, too.  It’s long since gotten to the point where the fandom is big enough to hold all of us.

Alright, folks!  With the start of a new year, we’re featuring a new addition to the site: a census and survey of the furry community!  We’ve pulled together a few demographic questions similar to the Furry Survey for consistency’s sake, plus some additional information about characters.  In addition to the census, we’ve also collected a few long-answer survey questions driven in part by the content of the site.  The information collected by the survey will, in turn, help steer the direction of the content.  This is your chance to help explain some of how you feel about your membership in this crazy fandom!

Check it out here: http://survey.adjectivespecies.com/2012/

If you receive a “Site Temporarily Unavailable” error, try this link instead: http://b.survey.adjectivespecies.com/2012/

Anonymity

The survey is structured so that you make take it completely anonymously if you desire. While the information may drive the content of the site, your answers will never be referenced directly if you choose to remain anonymous.  However, if you are okay having your answers referenced or quoted in the site content, then you will have the option to provide a name or pseudonym, which will be used to attribute your answers back to you.  The information is collected in such a way that, if you desire to remain anonymous, there really is no way we can tie your survey responses back to you!

Survey code and pass code

At the beginning of the survey, you will have the option to either enter a survey/pass code combo, or proceed without.  If you have received a paper copy of the survey (we’re aiming to be able to give this survey out at conventions – we’re still waiting on a response from the Further Confusion board), there will be a code pair at the top of the survey: this is how we will key in your results, or, if you kept your survey, how you may key in your own results.  If you do not have a code pair, however, you may still take the survey by choosing to begin without codes.  This will generate a code pair for you and provide it on the next page of the survey.  Note: in order to have your survey responses properly attributed to you if you wish to allow us to quote them, you must enter in your survey code in the provided field here.  During the survey, you may choose which name you would like to be referred to by if at all!  Again, entering the code on this page is the only way in which we will be able to tie your identifying information to your survey responses – you may take the survey anonymously by simply not entering your code here!

If you have any questions or comments on the survey, please feel free to contact us at [email protected] or through comments on this post – we will update this with any additional information that’s requested.