[adjective][species]

When I write a blog post – either on here or my personal blog – I tend to “stub out” the entry before I even write it, sometimes days or weeks before I get to it.  It’s something like outlining, though not as structured as that implies.  More like jotting down ideas in the order in which they should occur in the article, though more structured than that implies.  For this article, the first line read: “witty comment about the standard furry – fake psych exercise to envision a default furry”.  As an introduction, I was going to come up with some sort of goofy little quip about how one would envision the standard fur.  I’m only referencing it instead, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s been done before.  Countless times.

With any society come a whole heap of internal stereotypes.  With programmers, there are the hierarchical nerds who strive for alpha status, the quiet smart people who do cool things, the loud smart people who also do cool things, the designers, architects, and engineers.  In music, things generally follow the lines of instrument or voice part, but there are some ideas that cross boundaries, such as the dramatic opera singer, the crazy instrumentalist, or the lazy genius.  One could, perhaps, measure the strength of a subculture by counting the amount of inside jokes contained within it.  Furry is far from immune to this, and there are several recurring threads.

One definite theme within the fandom is that, to quote an old page, “The Animal Kindgom is full of a plethora of amazing and interesting species, and so you’ll probably be a Fox or a Wolf”.  Canids seem to far outstrip other species as far as representation within the fandom.  An informal poll shows them making up nearly a third of all respondents. There are even stereotypes that go along with each species (though these have, admittedly, weakened over time), such as that “foxes beg for it, while huskies are just targets”.

Default fur so far: a wolf.

Age also plays an important factor in the fandom.  It could be that something about furry speaks to those just coming of age, or that the liberal nature of the subculture fits in well with the general liberal nature of youth; the oft miss-attributed quip “if you’re not a liberal by 20,  you have no heart…” seeming appropriate.  With its widely espoused (and practiced, though perhaps to a lesser extent) values of acceptance and tolerance, it’s not really much of a surprise that a good portion of furry falls into the 18-25 age group.  I was pretty firmly entrenched within the fandom, myself, by sixteen or so, and here I am, twenty-five, and writing a slightly satirical blog about furry – which I still love plenty, mind!

Default fur so far: a 22 year old wolf.

Geekdom, particularly computer geekdom, has almost always been dominated by males.  The reasons for this are many and complex, but it seems to be a nearly universal truth that the technologically literate castes for the last several hundred years have been made up primarily of men.  Furry, which is made up in good part by communications taking place on the Internet, can no more escape that than it can escape certain episodes of certain television shows or, if you’ve been around for a while, certain articles from certain magazines.  Gender in furry is a complicated enough issue to warrant several of its own posts, but for now, let’s call it decidedly male.

Default fur so far: a 22 year old male wolf.

Now is when things start to get hairy (har har).  The stereotypes still exist, but have less basis in reality.  Perhaps it would be better to say that the basis is less readily apparent, though.  Take sexual orientation: if one were to go by the way people act, the art that’s posted, and the relationships formed online, one could pretty easily leap to the conclusion that the standard fur is a gay male.  However, this doesn’t quite appear to be the case.  Rather than showing up as predominately homosexual, respondents seem to be fairly evenly divided among different quanta of sexual orientation.  With the decidedly affirming nature of our little subculture, it’s easy to see how this could lead, first of all, to the even distribution of orientations, and second of all, the more visible and vocal nature of the more homosexual portions of the population.  It could possibly be construed that society as a whole is likely divided up fairly evenly along Kinsey’s scale, but that, due to social, evolutionary, and personal prejudices, we’re left with a more uneven seeming distribution.  Even so…

Default fur so far: a 22 year old gay male wolf.

The waters get even muddier as we move on, and even the stereotype gets harder to pin down.  Furries have a reputation of being highly sexual people.  More so than their reputation from the outside, however, furries pretty strongly believe that their subculture is full of highly sexual people.  Things get weird here, especially, because most respondents don’t consider themselves to be very sexual people.  Stranger still, most respondents believe that the majority of the general public views them as highly sexual.  This is certainly a tough metric to judge, and it would be hard to rank the fandom amongst other subcultures when it comes to sexuality, but it appears that furries, by and large, assume that furries are pretty oversexed.

Default fur so far: a 22 year old gay male wolf looking to get laid.

And now we’re getting into some pretty speculative territory.  From within, it seems that most of the fandom is made up of socially awkward people who care very strongly about one thing, which is likely to be computers or games – that is, nerds.  Nerds that drink.  Geeks that party.  People who don’t communicate effectively with each other, but never stop trying.  I have no graph to go along with this; it’s partly based on introspection into my own outlook and partly from listening to others when they talk about the fandom.  I would have left this out due to it being so hard to pin down, but considering how large it figures in all of the satires of the fandom, I’m not sure I could justify that.

Default fur: a tipsy, awkward, 22 year old gay male wolf looking to get laid.  Cute, huh?

So, given our wolf guy here, what’s right and what’s wrong?  Sure, he’ll fit in pretty well, he’s certainly welcome within the fandom, but what, in his construction, is just due to demographics and what’s due to stereotypes?  Judging by the few datasets we have, our RandomWolf here is probably a young adult male wolf due simply to the make up of furry itself.  Given any one member of the group, and that member is likely to be a male canid somewhere in his early twenties.  As for the awkward, gay, and oversexed parts, though, these aspects of our fictional character are more likely stereotypes than anything (however attractive or not you may find them).

Just like any group, our nutty little fandom has its fair share of preconceptions, misconceptions, and stereotypes.  We’ve got our in jokes and our quips (I’ve heard “by and large, furries are bi and large” enough to turn the study of it into this article, after all), and we’ve got our reactions to those.  As a group, we’re introspective enough to recognize trends and turn them into stereotypes.  The visualization on sexuality in the fandom is most telling: there’s the way we perceive ourselves, the way we perceive our fellows, and the way we imagine the world perceives us – they may not always align, but that’s just the warp and woof of subcultures, and I think just adds to the fun.  Me, I’m gonna go hit on this awkward wolf guy, buy him a drink, and see if I can get him to come up to my room with me.

Have you ever needed to get out of a scene you didn’t actually want to be in?  Started playing around with someone and you didn’t really want to?  Collected here for your reference are a few options that have been used before – sometimes legitimately, promise! – to get out of scenes.

• “God dammit, I have to go get my roommate, he got a flat tire…” – Legitimate: my roommate had a shit car that had tires go out one by one in a circle around the car as he would replace one at a time.
• “Oh, shit, neighbors lit their house on fire with Christmas lights!” – Semi-legitimate: my neighbors are pretty terrible people, and they did melt a strand of lights one year.
• “Ah, I have to go watch 24 now.” - Legitimate: I had this one used on me.  Fair enough, I suppose…
• “Damn, brother interrupted me, sorry!” – Not legitimate: I’m an only child.
• “Sorry, feeling kinda sick…” - Both: really depends on the situation.  I’ve gotten into a scene I really shouldn’t have while sick before more than once.
• “I’m super tired/have to get up early/have work/have school and need to get going, sorry.” Legitimate: it’s a valid reason.
• “I came too soon…” – Legitimate: understandable.  However, I’ve never seen this one in the wild.

Let us know if you happen across anymore!

I can almost pinpoint the time I realized that furry was just a slice of humanity as a whole, and not some special fandom elevated above the dregs of the world.  I think it came sometime in around 2007, and it probably happened in a text-only, electronic gay bar on the Internet (and I’m pretty sure it was while pretending to man-sized fox wearing a nice suit on the internet, but that’s a given).

The subject was girls.  In the Purple Nurple (t tpn on FurryMUCK), this comes up occasionally.  Being a gay bar of sorts, the e-bar tends to attract some very gay people.  Which is to say, it attracts everyone, but since it’s a gay bar, most people tend to gay it up pretty hard while there, and so when girls come up, reactions are pretty much as you’d exepct:

• The nice folk – a few who are probably a Kinsey 6, but most who are somewhere less than that – tend to just ignore the topic.
• A few who are feeling pretty snarky or eager to fit into the very-gay scene will pull the “ew girls!” card out and wave it around.
• The token straight guy will start “throwing people out the window”.
• Any girls present seem to fall into two categories:
  • Those with female players will likely roll their eyes. Whether they act that out on the MUCK or not is up in the air.
  • Those with male players will pout, get defensive, or say nothing, depending on why they’re pretending to be a female animal-person on the internet.

This sort of scenario seems to come up every once in a while in the Nurple, where females are mentioned in a sexual context among a group made up of primarily homosexual males; and that’s not a grammar gaffe: several homosexual males I’ve met online seem to base a large portion of their personality and social interaction on the fact that they’re homosexual.

While I don’t remember for sure, what I think happened is that I was dwelling on this as it was happening some time around early 2007.  It was a pretty introspective time of my life, with bits of college working out very well while others collapsed around me in ruins.  I was spending a lot of time reminiscing about high school and the way I had changed as I grew up.  When I was depressed, it would border on “where did I go wrong?”, and when I wasn’t, it tended towards “how did I get here and how can I get where I want?”. It was the romantic, introspective springtime of youth that all young foxes must go through at some point or another.

During high school, I had been part of a support group of sorts, OASOS: Open and Affirming Sexual Orientation (and gender identity) Support.  It was a group organized by the Boulder County Health Department, and was made up almost entirely of young men and women trying to find the easiest way to fit into their imagined roles of gay and lesbian, or, more accurately, GAY and LESBIAN.  One of the defining moments of my life came from this group when I met a female-to-male transgender guy by the name of Michael.  The reason this was a defining moment in my life (and part of the reason Michael and I started dating) was because it helped me to understand the difference between sex and gender, and more importantly, how that changed my outlook on how these young GAYs and LESBIANs were acting within their stereotyped roles.

Something clicked inside, that day in 2007 as I was sitting in a fake gay bar on the internet populated with fake animal people. Being somewhere less than a Kinsey 6 myself, I was one of the ones who kept quiet, and as I watched, I realized that this was OASOS all over again.  These were almost all GAY young adults saying “ew, girls” while the STRAIGHT young adult e-threw them out the i-windows.  Those in the Nurple who I had perceived as basing a large portion of their personality on the fact that they were homosexual were really no different than those at OASOS struggling to do exactly the same thing (though, being older, those in the Nurple were probably a little less fraught with hormones and acne – but maybe not, who knows).

I feel it’s important that I say that I love all the wonderful people I’ve met online and in the Nurple especially, and I really don’t mean to cast aspersions on those who hold true to the Kinsey 6s and 0s out there.  My point here is that society contains several sets of roles that, in the western world, tend toward heteronormative. My discovery those years ago was that these roles existed through all of western society and permeated even into my messy little fandom – furries really were just a slice of society as a whole, trying to carve themselves a new, more exclusive role.  Perhaps this change in my perception began even sooner, though, and the shift in thought was more the final step after a long build-up.

I had been to a few conventions by this point – I believe AnthroCon ’06 and FurtherConfusion ’07 – as well as a few considerably large parties down in Denver and the normal weekly furmeets.  When I had stopped hanging out with furries solely online and moved my interaction to real life as well, perhaps that’s when my slow realization began.  It was undeniably fun to head out with a group of people who wore tails and ears, who made their stupid noises and were overly affectionate in public (if not to me, than certainly to the non-furs around us).  It felt good to belong to this exclusive group with shared interests and ready conversations.

After I’d suffered my sea change, however, the boundaries between our little (or big) groups and the world around us started to blur, for me.  I saw the same societal currents moving within the fandom that were moving in the world around me, and I began to see furries more as a group of mostly middle class, mostly western, mostly young adults.

The changes in perspective were subtle at first.  ”Perhaps furry is just more welcoming of the misfits and the minorities than other groups,” I thought.  ”Maybe the preponderance of homosexuality within the fandom is due to the more liberal attitudes therein.”  Over time, however, these views have changed, though only slightly.  I feel it would be more accurate in both cases to put the sentiments in the subjunctive mood: “Furry wants to be seen as more welcoming of the misfits and minorities than other groups”; “The preponderance of homosexuality in the fandom is due to the liberal attitudes the fandom wants to be perceived by the outside world.”

This, of course, makes it all seem a little sinister, though it’s nothing of the sort.  This is just the politicking that happens with any subset of humanity in order to increase its chances of survival.  If the western world as a whole is shifting towards more liberal attitudes towards homosexuality and minority groups, then a group can “get ahead” by being perceived as having liberal attitudes those things.  The fandom is really just like the rest.

I see this same thing played out time and again within subsets of the community around different issues.  Recently, our local furs went through something of a upheaval due to the very same gender issue as above.  There have been  issues surrounding the use of one site over another, issues over those who like fursuits and those who don’t, and even within that, issues between those who like fursuits with certain holes and those who don’t.  It’s even been claimed that the fandom is more drama-filled than any other group or the society as a whole; a claim that’s easily debunked by listening to an episode of This American Life (really, just pick any one, it doesn’t matter!) or by watching any news around election season.

Our only real claim to uniqueness is that we do tend to be more interconnected than most other groups of people.  Currently, I would hazard a guess that furry is much more interconnected than most other social groups, thanks to the internet.  However, if you had asked me that five years ago, I would’ve suggested that it be twice as interconnected.  This is an arms race we’re going to lose, and that’s okay.  We really don’t need to be different or better or more distinct than other social groups; we’ve cemented our place in western society already and our little supposed enclave is secure for the foreseeable future.  Just that we’re all just like the rest, is all.