[adjective][species]

At what age do furries start to be furries?

We can be confident that furry must have its genesis in environment, not genetics, because furry is a modern phenomenon. It’s probably fair to guess that exposure to some aspect of culture during childhood is important, likely cartoon animals. Furry might well come about during adolescence, in transition from childhood to adulthood, as an artefact of certain childhood experiences.

This places furry as something which is first experienced, from a personal point of view, as a young teenager. This is the time we start high school, and learn about the social horrors that can lurk within if you don’t “fit in”. Furry would count, in most high school social hierarchies, as a Bad Thing, and therefore probably as something that requires management or concealment.

This makes furry a “concealable stigma”, a phrase sometimes applied to the condition of being LGBT. Someone with a concealable stigma has a different social experience: they learn to be careful about disclosure unless they are confident in the reaction they will receive. Someone with a concealable stigma may tend to be socially withdrawn, and simultaneously closely attuned to the reactions of others. These coping mechanisms can have a significant impact on decisions in adult life, including career choices.

There are positive and negative aspects to such learned behaviours. Being socially withdrawn helps people gain personal independence, but also means that social confidence can lag behind. Being attuned to the reactions of others may make people appear socially anxious, but also means that some interpersonal skills may be unusually advanced.

We can broadly see these personality traits in the furry population. We are a pretty geeky group, which may indicate a certain combination of personal independence and social anxiety. There are also a lot of artistic furs, who might be seen to have unusually intuitive connections to others, tempered by a predisposition to self-doubt. It’s possible that these personality traits are not innate: they could have developed during adolescence, as furries learned coping strategies for their concealable stigma.

Of course, when we look at furry and see the preponderance of geeks and artists, it’s easy to conclude that geeks and artists are simply more likely to identify as furs. It’s counterintuitive to suggest that people might become geeky or artistic as an outcome of furry. Yet there is evidence this may be the case, as outlined by a paper published earlier this year (Ref 1) looking at favoured occupations of groups with a concealable stigma, specifically gay and lesbian groups.

Just as furs are over-represented in IT and in the artistic professional worlds, there are some jobs in which gay men and lesbian women stereotypically congregate. Gay and lesbian professional occupations are often judged, like furries, to be a natural outcome of the “the sort of person” that gay/lesbian people are. So gay men are thought to be feminine and therefore likely to perform “women’s” jobs (like flight attendants or hairdressers), and lesbian women are thought to perform “men’s” jobs (like probation officers or mechanics). And while it is true in all the examples that I’ve given, gay men and lesbian women also congregate in other jobs that can’t be similarly, lazily dropped into a gender basket. For example, gay men are much more likely to be news reporters than straight men, and lesbian women are much more likely to be sociologists. Overall, the majority of gay men and lesbian women work in occupations where the majority of workers are the same sex, i.e. male-dominated and female-dominated jobs respectively (Ref 2).

The paper provides evidence that the professions of gay men and lesbian women has nothing to do with gender roles. In its way, it add to the growing body of evidence that gender roles (in general) are at worst imaginary and at best lazy stereotypes. It certainly demonstrates that to categorize all gay men as “feminine” and all lesbian women as “masculine” is wrong.

It’s equally lazy to stereotype furries as geeks (or artists). Furry certainly has plenty of geeks (and artists), but furry itself is neither a geek phenomenon nor an artistic one. We have our origins in geek fandom groups, and there is still plenty of crossover with modern-day fandoms. (And we are remarkably prolific from an artistic point of view, the act of creation being a key feature of furry culture.) But neither geekdom nor artistic output is required to identify as a furry or to participate in furry’s animal-person roleplay.

Being a furry in high school can be socially stigmatic. The stigma is concealable, in that it’s possible to hide furriness from others (just like it’s possible to hide non-heterosexuality). However this comes at a personal cost, because it means that you cannot fully express yourself. The challenge for someone with a concealable stigma, then, is to manage the sharing of information to allow personal expression without unduly risking social status.

This challenge goes beyond high school, and includes other social situations where being furry might be stigmatized (perhaps a family environment or the workplace). It’s common for furs to present edited versions of themselves, not being false but not being completely open either. It’s the same trade-off, between a desire for honest self-expression and the need to be seen as socially appropriate.

This challenge may well inform furry professional choices. There are two drivers, supply-side and demand-side:-

The supply-side driver is the wants of the prospective employee, in this case a furry. Because expressions of furriness are potentially stigmatic, furries may be driven to work in occupations where there is less interaction with peers. These are job with high “task independence”; a role where little interaction with others is required to perform a task (Ref 3). A simple example of a job with task independence is a bus driver: while the driver doesn’t have any control over his route, she can perform her job with very little peer interaction.

As it turns out, programming scores highly for task independence. While some peer interaction is required, and varies depending on the actual job, the bulk of the professional work is performed alone. It makes sense that furries would be attracted to programming roles, because there is less identity management required than many other jobs.

Conversely, the demand-side driver is the wants of the prospective employer. Someone with a concealable stigma may develop social coping skills during those formative high school years that place an emphasis on understanding and predicting the social reactions of others (Ref 6, Ref 7). This is a rare skill, and rare skills attract higher demand: more pay, or more attractive working conditions. It makes sense that a group with a concealable stigma, like furries, would excel in roles that require sensitivity towards the reactions of others: “social perceptiveness” (Ref 4).

As you may have guessed, most artistic occupations score highly for social perceptiveness. This requirement probably relates to the social challenges associated with translating the desires of others into art. People who have excellent skills in this area, perhaps furries who learned them as a coping strategy, are more likely to have the necessary aptitude to be successful artists.

There are jobs that have a combination of high task independence and require high social perceptiveness. These include front line IT support, flight attendants, and medicine. These jobs may be natural careers for furries, and indeed for other groups with a similarly concealable stigma.

There is another force at work that is known to have a significant effect on professional choices: dark networks (Ref 5). A dark network is an informal network of people who connect in a way invisible to the normal structures of the workplace. Furry is an unusually strong dark network, because we are a spread-out group that crosses many common social hurdles (age, affluence, race, gender, etc), and we have a particularly close connection with one another. This means that furs will tend to be attracted to jobs that are known to already have a significant furry population.

Dark networks can account for furry hotspots, where certain companies or certain roles are otherwise inexplicably furry-heavy. They can also reinforce the concept that some jobs are a natural furry choice, as is currently the case with IT and related disciplines.

Like everyone, furry and non-furry, our experiences help inform who we are. Furry experiences tend to diverge from the mainstream, either in the way we express ourselves in all-furry environments, or the way we manage our identity in the mundane worlds of school, family, and work. The internal and social skills required to negotiate these environments (as a furry) are often markedly different from those skills required by non-furries when negotiating the mainstream world.

The preponderance of furry in IT and artistic circles may have less to do with what makes us furry, and more to do with what furry makes us.

Refs

1. A Tilcsik, M Anteby, & CR Knight, Concealable Stigma and Occupational Segregation: Toward a Theory of Gay and Lesbian Occupations, Administrative Science Quarterly 2015
2. Data from the American Community Survey, where gay and lesbian workers were defined as employed individuals living with an unmarried same-sex partner.
3. O*Net Online “work values | independence” data (Occupations that satisfy this work value allow employees to work on their own and make decisions.)
4. O*Net Online “skills | social perceptiveness” data (Being aware of others’ reactions and understanding why they react as they do.)
5. C Marquis & A Tilcsik, Imprinting: Toward a multilevel theory, Academy of Management Annals 2013
6. M Radkowsky & LJ Siegel, The Gay Adolescent: Stressors, Adaptations, and Psychosocial Interventions, Clinical Psychology Review, 1997
7. JE Pachanki, The Psychological Implications of Concealing a Stigma: A Cognitive-affective-behavioral Model, Psychological Bulletin 2007

JM is at Confuzzled this coming weekend, presenting an [adjective][species] talk—Exploring the Fandom Through Data: Furry Demographics and Sexual Behaviour—followed by a Q&A. We have some brand new data to share, based on preliminary results from the 2015 Furry Survey (www.furrypoll.com), plus lots more. (Confuzzled is an 18+ convention, and this will be an 18+ panel.)

It’s on at 4:30pm on Sunday. Stop by if you can.

And feel free to say hello to JM if you see him around the convention, i.e. at the bar.

How I Went From Ridiculing Furries to Cheering them On in Five Panels or Less

Guest post by Isaac. Isaac is that guy who is still pretty much a human, but definitely not Mundane.  He likes red pandas, chocolate, and improv.  You may have seen his apology post on Reddit, found him putzing around the FurNet IRC, or attempting to become America’s Next Top Popufur on Twitter as @isaacapologist.  He will be at Midwest Furfest, probably. Say hi.  Be gentle.

In many ways, I like to think that I ended up at a furry convention in the way that many furries end up at a furry convention:  alcohol, combined with an unhealthy sense of curiosity.  But the reality, I think, is even a bit more interesting than that, so I’d be happy to expand on the perfect storm of circumstances that led to my attendance at FurCon 2015, and subsequent headlong fall into the rabbit hole that is the Furry Fandom.

It’s December.  I’ve just recently moved to the Bay Area, to help out a friend with a new job working in the Silicon Valley.  He’s much the introverted type, I’m much more of the outgoing type, and he invites me to live out in CA for a few months to help him get acclimated and make some new friends.  As I’ve since discovered, neither of us is really good at ‘going out’ to make friends, we rather prefer to just organically meet people.  In practice, this works out about as well as you might imagine.

So, we are spending one of our many weekends in our living room, drinking wine, he playing video games on his computer, me watching Netflix, and I stumble upon the documentary about Bronies. I, being mildly intoxicated and fascinated with countercultures, decide to indulge in the Brony documentary.  I then decide to indulge in a second Brony documentary.  By this point, I am both fabulously drunk, and fabulously fascinated.  I have an inception-style we’ve-got-to-go-deeper moment:  If there are two documentaries about Bronies, there’s got to be one about furries.

I’d like to say at this point, a lot of what follows is going to make me sound like a terrible person, and, if I’m being honest, yes, I was being a pretty terrible person.  I’d like to say here that my drunkenness doesn’t excuse any of my assumptions or motivations, but I present them here as honestly as possible in the interest of transparency.

I stumble upon the YouTube 3-part series entitled Furries – An Inside Look.  I think, wow, this is going to be a grand old time.  If you’re not familiar, the series in question basically is just an aggregation of interviews with furries, how the fandom intersects with their lives etc.  I’m rewatching this as I write, and even as I watch I know exactly what I had been thinking at the time.  I’ll spare you my exact thoughts here in an effort to not offend anyone, but the conclusion that I came to was: These people are such freaks. and my follow up thought: What better place to see the freaks than at a freakshow?

I should also note at this point that I moonlight as an actor, and an extremely common acting exercise or part of character study is to go out and study people.  This is also fairly common among most people, known as people-watching.  Now, my roommate has noticed my fascination at this point, and at some point I divulge that furry conventions have to be the greatest people-watching to ever exist on the planet.  We start a quick Google search, and, in perfect serendipitous coincidence, Further Confusion is a few weeks away, and only a few miles from our apartment.  We buy (We are nothing if not dedicated to the stunt) tickets, imagining the great time we will have, laughing at the ridiculousness of these strangers in animal costumes.

Skipping ahead a bit, since then I have:

• Been to at least half a dozen fur meets, probably more.
• Sort of dated a furry?
• Attended “Frolic” – a monthly furry night at a bar in San Francisco.
• Created a “Furry Twitter.”
• Spent a definitely-not-insignificant amount of time on FurNet IRC.

Along with what I will assume to be many more experiences at the very hands of the furry fandom.  Most of these were the result of invitations extended to me after my post on Reddit, apologizing for my malintention in the attendance of FurCon 2015.  But where did the change happen?  Both my roommate and I can tell you the exact moment where we changed from this is hilarious to this is fucking awesome. However, rather than just jump right to that, I would love to go into how hard we tried to dislike furries first.

So, we’re registered.  It’s not long until the con, so we are already looking at the schedule, planning which panels we are going to attend.  We are, of course, looking for the most outrageous panels to attend.  “Alien Sex” “The Adult Dragon Panel” “Totemism” and “Love, Sex, and Fur” (Sorry Makyo!) are some of the panels that catch our eyes.  Now, since we are not too heavily invested in this, we opt to not take the day off work, and only attend the con on Saturday and Sunday, eliminating a few of those panels as options for attendance.

We fill the rest of our schedule with a combination of what appears to be “main events” and ones that satisfy our perverse curiosity about what the fandom “really is.”  Fursuit parade, a jazz show, the dance competition, the talent show, a fursuit head carving, and, our first panel “Exploring the Fandom Through Data.” Before the panel, though, and our very introduction to the furry fandom, was the Fursuit Parade.

And so, we arrive at the San Jose Convention Center.  For a moment we get lost in the large building, stuck in the volleyball tournament that concurrently occupies the space, and we are sure that we look just as out of place there as we might at the furry convention.  After a few moments, we catch sight of a person with a tail, and follow them to the opposite side of the convention center where we discover registration.  We end up in line behind a group of four teenage girls, each with a fursuit head and tail, huskies in four different colors, chaperoned by what we assumed was the mother of one of the children.

This instantly had an effect on our perception of the con.  We whisper dumbfoundedly to each other that this may be a lot more normal than the internet would have led us to believe, our first moment where we doubt our intentions for our attendance. However, after a moment, the person to approach in line behind us is wearing a leather harness, and a trench coat over that, topped with a fedora, so for the moment, our prejudices remain intact.  We obtain our tags, foolishly adorned with our real, full names, our con books, and all the all the other swag you get at registration.  We dig through our little pocket con guides, and head upstairs to the Atrium for the first thing on our schedule.  The Fursuit Parade.

As we head upstairs we notice people are already lined up throughout the hall, we find a spot near a post.  We worry for a moment about all the pictures that we are about to be in the background of, placing ourselves at the convention.  As a new hire at an high profile tech company, and an actor with a public persona to uphold, this seems like bad news to us.  Of course, we learn later that the Chairman of the convention works for that same high profile tech company.  Our apprehensions are overcome for the moment as the fursuiters begin their parade.  We snap picture after picture, remarking at the master craftsmanship of some of these fursuits, and I think we realize for the first time that the furry fandom is more than a casual hobby to many members.

After about half an hour’s worth of fursuits march by, we move on to our first panel: Exploring the Fandom Through Data, which you may already be familiar with if you are reading this article.  I won’t go into too much detail on this panel, and just say that as ? theatre major, ? economics major, this panel was basically a wet dream of information about counterculture and I loved every moment of it.  I was taking notes on my tablet through the whole panel just because I found it so genuinely fascinating.  I imagine around here my thoughts about furries would be something along the lines of: yeah, furries are really fucking weird people, but I guess they are, in fact, still people…

The rest of the day passed without much fanfare.  I think we quickly got our fill of, but eventually became desensitized to, the number of harnesses, latex suits with crotch zippers, people (and animal-people) on leashes, etc.  We had explored the dealer’s den and seen all manner of tails, furry porn, and even an erotic furry trading card game, which I now know to be Furoticon.  It was later in the day now, and we were still feeling amazed that this was really a thing, but we found it easy to maintain the idea that we were somehow “above” all of it, even as we headed into our last event of the day.  The fursuit dance competition.

We took our seats near the back of the main stage, merely assuming that it’d be good for a quick chuckle, and then we’d be headed home, spending the evening talking about all the madness of the day we had experienced.  We assumed incorrectly, because from the moment the first person began their routine, we were hooked.  Oh man, I gained, and now hold, an insane amount of respect for fursuit dancers.  First of all, they can dance a hundred times better than I can as a human, not to mention in a suit that’s thirty degrees hotter than the rest of the room.  There was a distinct moment where we looked at each other during a routine and just had a moment of eye contact that said oh man, we are totally in this right now.

From that moment forward, we had an unironic good time, whether it was watching a bunch of people in fursuits acting like “real” animals hitting around a beach ball, or witnessing an onstage  proposal during the talent show, while a dragon played piano and a wolf played violin.  There was definitely no lack of holy shit, we are here, and having a blast, this is surreal moments, but we definitely enjoyed ourselves immensely in spite of all that.

And thus ended my existence as an anti-furry human being.  I’ve already introduced some of what has happened in my new, admitted “furrier” life since then, and I’d love to write more about my interaction with the furry fandom for [a][s] in the future, but for now, consider this the “extended edition” of my apology.  It’s been an incredibly interesting few months, and I’ll say one thing to finish here:  I may not share all of the interests of the furry fandom, but I share the end goal with all of you: having a good time, and enjoying a sense of community.

JM Horse wrote an article Monday titled “The Role of Criticism Within Furry, or: Buy This Article,” which described pretty well the state of reviewing within the furry community (defined both as reviewing of furry works and reviews by furries, which are more or less a perfect circle Venn diagram at this point in time). There were a couple things he missed, namely describing some of the reasons particular to the furry community that shape the state of reviews. He also only really touched on the role of reviews in the fandom, so I’d like to offer my perspective as a long-time author in the fandom.

As he wrote, furry is a tight-knit community, and most members are also creators of one sort or another (note the number of disclaimers in this post). This is why I don’t generally review furry fiction unless I think it is something worthwhile that most people will overlook (Rukis’s “Heretic” was an example). Many other authors take this tack, and we have very few people in the fandom who are, like Fred Patten, dedicated readers, not authors, and good enough writers to pen a review.

Several years ago, a friend of mine attempted to set up a review site with honest, critical reviews that highlighted the positive and negative of books (disclaimer: he published reviews of my books that were generally positive). The result was at least one angry letter from a creator and numerous refusals to provide review copies of books to him because he wasn’t “taking them in the spirit in which they were written.” He got discouraged and busy with other projects, and in the end the site wasn’t worth his energy.

This kind of response, as JM details in his article, is not unknown in the community (and outside it). It’s likely that the person reviewing your book is a friend of a friend, especially in the small furry writing community—because who outside the furry writing community is going to have the proper context to review a furry book? More importantly, where else would furry readers go to find book recommendations? I have had books reviewed on romance blogs and on SF Signal; I doubt strongly whether more furry readers than I can count on one hand saw those reviews. So if someone reviews your book, it’s much harder to just ignore them and go about your life secure in the knowledge that you’ll never run into them in person or online. On the flip side, reviewers often know or get to know the authors they’re reviewing, and when an author replies to a review with an angry or hurt letter, that can discourage the reviewer from doing more. I’m not surprised that few people have taken the time and energy to read books and write thoughtful reviews.

But to get back to JM’s article title, what is the role of reviews in the fandom? I am not sure what the readership of Dogpatch Press or Flayrah is, but anecdotally, the number of people who have picked up one of my books and told me it was because they read a review of it is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who say, “My friend said I have to read this.” In a tightly knit community like furry, where the number of books is not as overwhelming as it is in science fiction or literary fiction, do reviews really play a part in people’s decisions? I think for a few they do (and the writing community tends to be the ones who read reviews the most, again anecdotally), but for the majority, word of mouth is how people decide what to read.

(This is also not necessarily unique to furry. I have previously worked in market research, where studies have shown that the single most influential factor in persuading someone to make a purchasing decision is a personal recommendation.)

Yes, we as authors would like to have someone write reviews, to tell the world how much work we’ve put into our books. But I am not sure that most furries are out there clamoring for more reviews. And this is the second thing that is particular to the furry fandom: many furries enjoy books that reviewers might not.

To be honest, this isn’t unique to furry either. There are millions of readers worldwide who enjoy romance novels that many of us might charitably describe as “formulaic” or “unreadable.” But furries often fixate on the species of the lead character. If you’re a skunk and Amazon has a novel about a skunk on its Kindle store, you’re going to buy it, and chances are that even if it’s riddled with typos and a plot as flimsy as a skunk’s tail, you’re going to enjoy it. Because you relate to that character! She’s a skunk too!

Here, too, reviews are unnecessary. People will buy at conventions from publishers where they can see the book and get recommendations from the people working the table (both Sofawolf and FurPlanet—disclaimer, again: I have worked both tables—are good at the “if you liked this you’ll like this” game), or online where they can see the cover and read a summary of the book. Often they will get as far as “It’s the story of a fox” before clicking the BUY button.

And look, as an author who has spent years and years trying to improve my craft, I get the undercurrent of resentment that JM has in his article for books like “The Cat’s Eye Pub,” which in his words “fails to meet minimum standards for publication.” Why should this book be recommended to people when “the author [didn’t] reread and self-edit his own work”? It’s frustrating, just like artists in the fandom who spend days or weeks on a technically beautiful picture only to see it get a quarter of the faves of a sloppily drawn porn piece.

But here’s the thing: people like what they like, and all of those likes are valid. People through the ages have railed against the tastes of their community, from the people who decried Shakespeare as “common” to the people who hate “Twilight.” (I am not drawing an equivalence between Shakespeare’s plays and the Twilight saga, only the critics of their fans.) So I feel like JM thinks that the role of reviews in the furry community should be to gently or not-so-gently direct people’s tastes toward “better” books. But I’m not sure that the people he’d like to direct in that way would actually read reviews. They enjoy the books they enjoy, and furry is a small enough place that they can find the “better” books and decide if they want to read them. Heck, there are basically three sites on the Internet and three tables at conventions to browse. It doesn’t take long.

And for the record, I don’t think Fred Patten errs on the positive side in his reviews to avoid friction in a tight-knit community; I think he genuinely finds something to like in everything he reviews. I’ve seen a lot of his reviews end with “If X is to your taste, then you will like this book.” That’s a pretty good review. (Again looking to the romance community, there are several review blogs where the policy is “if we don’t like your book, we won’t review it.” In that field, little is accomplished by negative reviews other than to annoy the author; they would rather point people to books they like a lot than take out time and energy to criticize ones they don’t. I do think that there is room in furry for constructively negative reviews, especially in the writing community, because it’s such a young community relative to most other writing communities and most people in it are actively interested in learning.)

I’m not opposed to more reviewers by any means. But I think what we authors need to do is encourage our fans to talk about the books. Those are the reviews that most people listen to and the reviews that matter.

The majority of furries create and contribute to our community in one way or another. Few furries are just consumers.

Our art encompasses a wide range of media, with a focus on creations that help bring our imaginary furry world to life. We have a lot of visual artists and a lot of writers, and it’s no surprise that two of our biggest online gathering places—Fur Affinity and SoFurry—were originally settled by each of these two groups.

With so many contributors and contributions, it’s inevitable that the quality of art is often pretty poor. That’s a good thing, because we are an inclusive community, where the emphasis is on contributing and sharing, rather some race for a prize. Furries draw and furries write because they enjoy the process, and because they are contributing to the collective community. In many cases, people hope to improve and aspire to take their art further. It’s the sort of collaborative environment that creates artists, and we within furry can be proud to have bred and encouraged so many talented people.

Some artists—the focus of this piece is on furry writing, but it equally applies to visual art—look to sell their works, in either hard-copy format or as ebooks. Those works that are for sale, ideally, should represent the best of furry writing and be worth their cost to the buyer. Sadly that is not always the case.

Visual artists who sell their work can be judged easily enough by a prospective customer: a quick glance will give an idea of the quality of the art. This creates a meritocracy, where the more (commercially) successful artists are those who are better able to meet demand. This does not work so simply with writing, because it’s not always possible to quickly sample before buying, and because a significant time investment is required to consume a work.

The challenge for we furry readers, then, is to identify good writing and good writers based on other information. In the past, publishing companies were the only route to sales, and therefore they acted as gatekeepers, choosing to publish only works that were of a certain quality. Someone buying a book would be more likely to enjoy a published work than something unpublished on SoFurry. The cost of the book was more than just paying the author: it was also paying the gatekeeper.

This has changed. There is now almost zero barrier to self-publication, and just about anything can be made available for sale as an ebook. To make the point, I have made this article available for purchase—the sale version contains absolutely nothing extra and is a complete waste of money—you can download it from Amazon for an inflated price here.

Obviously you’d be better served spending your money elsewhere. But where? There is a lot of bad writing out there for sale, but instead of offering it for free on SoFurry (or on [adjective][species]), writers are taking advantage of the low bar to publication and hoping to make a few extra dollars, or maybe become the next Kyell Gold.

You have a few options to increase your chances of ending up with a good read. Your first is to buy only from specialist furry publishers, like Furplanet or Sofawolf, to take advantage of their gatekeeping.

You also might wish to read some reviews.

Way back in 2012, Phil Geusz wrote a piece here on [adjective][species] thanking one of furry’s gatekeepers, Fred Patten. Fred is furry’s most prolific reviewer by far, writing about just about any and every furry book he can get his hands on. Reviewing is a largely thankless job—the joy of books is in the reading—and Phil wanted to acknowledge Fred for his unheralded contribution to furry.

Fred had a long association with Flayrah, but has recently started publishing his reviews on Dogpatch Press after becoming frustrated with editorial delays at his old home. His reviews at Dogpatch don’t seem to be on any obvious schedule, but they turn up regularly, and I understand that there are several dozen more reviews already written (and undoubtedly many more planned). His reviews are a good place to start.

There are a few other places to read reviews of furry books. The rebooted Claw & Quill seems to be staking out ground as a place for in-depth reviews, and Flayrah will undoubtedly continue to publish reviews now their editorial backlog is cleared. However the biggest source of reviews anywhere are places like Goodreads and Amazon, full of largely informal opinions offered by readers. Here we have a significant issue.

Sites like Goodreads and Amazon offer the opportunity for readers to offer up a rating and/or a review. This is great in theory, and works well when there is a large, engaged readership. However because of the low bar to publication, a new furry reader is presented with a dizzying array of choices, very few of which have a large number of reviews. The result is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to tell what is worthwhile. The rating system doesn’t work.

As an example (or perhaps cautionary tale), a friend of mine decided to dip his toe into the waters of furry fiction back in 2012. He purchased a couple of furry ebooks based on their blurb and their Amazon rating. He came away with two books, both of which were clearly labours of love for the writers, neither of which had been edited to anything resembling a reasonable standard. I would describe the quality of these books—both currently available as ebooks for around $10 each—to be somewhere in the vicinity of “embarrassing”.

Part of the problem is that the rating system on Goodreads/Amazon is easily manipulated. One furry author over at the Furry Writers’ Guild noted: “There have been some absolutely terrible pieces that have been 5 star reviewed because they are the author’s friends, and others marked 1 star because of either a disagreement or ‘war’ between the authors.”

There are annual awards given for furry writing, which help sort the needles from the hay. The Ursa Major Awards have three relevant categories, and the Furry Writers’ Guild run the Cóyotl awards. The Ursa Majors are awarded based on popular vote, and the Cóyotls are semi-juried, with guild members voting on a winner from a shortlist. Both systems work pretty well, and tend to recognize higher-quality works. But awards can only be given to a small number of books each year.

Some furries question whether reviews have any value at all, because they can be seen as a form of elitism, with high-profile reviewers (like Fred Patten) able to single-handedly determine the quality of a work of art. This might be considered contrary to the values of the furry community—creative, nurturing, and collaborative—although arguably this no longer applies when the author is asking people to buy their works. Reviewing does have value – it is a judgement of quality, and quality is valuable to consumers.

As furry author Renee Carter Hall says: “when you get to the point of asking people to pay money for your work, with that work you’re now operating on a level that to my mind has gone beyond that sort of fun fan spirit, and thus you’re operating in the realm where criticism, in some form or another, is to be expected“.

The complaint, that a single review from one gatekeeper is too influential, has a simple solution: more reviewers. (Furry authors were universal on this need in a forum discussion.) However reviewers are subject to a lot of negativity from authors, negativity that all too often becomes somewhat abusive. It feels at times that authors treat their reviewers as the enemy.

Fred Patten reviewed Bonds of Silver, Bonds of Gold on Flayrah in 2012. Fred’s review is a long one, featuring an introduction to the plot and several quotes directly from the book. Any reader of his review would get a good idea of the Bonds of Silver, Bonds of Gold’s themes and style. The bulk of his criticism is a single, short paragraph:

“There is a good dramatic plot here, but it is buried under the constant nonstop graphic sex, the beatings, and the humiliation. The beatings and the humiliation are [one character’s] alone; everybody participates in the sex. Buy according to your taste for this sort of thing.”

 

The author, Kristina Tracer, took exception to this review, stating in a Furry Writers’ Guild Forum thread—two and half years later (!)—that Fred is not a “credible” reviewer because of a (perceived) bias against explicit sexual content:

“I’m angry with the situation with Fred because it feels like our most prolific reviewer is letting his biases show in a way that isn’t healthy for the community as a whole”.

 

Kristina’s frustration is understandable—reviews are difficult for any artist—but in this case it feels unfair to Fred. Fred is writing in good faith and—unlike Kristina—isn’t offering his words up for sale. He deserves acknowledgement and thanks for his time.

If there is a problem with Fred’s criticism (and furry criticism in general), I suspect it’s the other way round: reviews of furry books are too positive. I think that reviewers shy away from making criticisms that might be perceived as negative. I have a couple of examples to support this, one bad, one good:-

A bad book: Fred reviewed The Cat’s Eye Pub last year, a book that obviously fails to meet minimum standards for publication. Fred noted several major issues with the book, such as a failure to perform basic copyediting, which suggested to me that the author hadn’t bothered to reread and self-edit his own work. Errors mentioned by Fred included obvious punctuation mistakes, missing quotation marks, misused words, missing words, and “common misspellings such as “to” for “too” and “use” for “used”“.

Yet, Fred concluded his review with a recommendation for purchase: “Recommended? Yes; despite the book’s problems, The Cat’s Eye Pub is a feel-good story featuring charismatic non-humans whose difference is more than window-dressing. I enjoyed it; I think that you will, too.”

A good book: Fred reviewed Kyell Gold’s Green Fairy in 2012. Fred gave Green Fairy a rave, concluding his review by calling it “a piece of magnificent literature“.

As part of my research for this article, I cast about on Twitter for book recommendations, and Green Fairy was a popular choice for the best furry novel written to date (God of Clay by Ryan Campbell was the other collective recommendation). I read Green Fairy and wrote a long review, which was recently published at Hooded Utilitarian – you can read my thoughts on the book in detail there.

The short version: I enjoyed reading Green Fairy. But it is not a piece of magnificent literature.

It’s understandable that Fred, or indeed any reviewer, might err on the side of being positive. Furry is a tight-knit community and negativity has the potential to cause friction. And as we saw with Bonds of Silver, Bonds of Gold, even a neutral-to-positive review can create some long-simmering problems.

The issue here, for authors and reviewers is this: who are you writing for? If you are writing a story for yourself and for your own enjoyment, then by all means enjoy and post it on your SoFurry account. But if you’re planning to sell your work, you must write with the reader in mind. Copy-editing and editing are needed to demonstrate respect for the reader, even if they are a lot less fun than writing your first draft.

And for reviewers: you are writing for the prospective reader, not the author. Authors will of course take a very close interest in any review, and they will always be interested and perhaps vocal. Readers who avoid picking up The Cat’s Eye Pub and instead read Green Fairy will be grateful, but may not think to thank the reviewer once they have enjoyed their purchase.

So, from me and all those silent readers, to Fred Patten and every other reviewer out there: you have our thanks. Keep helping us spend our money wisely.

This article is available as an ebook from Amazon.

The International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP), a group of psychologists and sociologists who have been working with and around the furry community for many years, have just published their latest set of data online. The results are from data gathered at Furry Fiesta, which the IARP visit annually. Their Furry Fiesta research gets better and better each year.

The Furry Fiesta studies have become a testing ground for new ideas for the IARP, and always bring up some fascinating insights, as well as some crowd-pleasing frivolity. This year’s Furry Fiesta report is titled Minorities Within a Minority, Face Recognition, and Furry Pornography and it’s well worth reading the whole thing.

There is too much of interest to focus on a single element in my review, the same problem I have had for [adjective][species] in the past, such as when I wrote about their focus group on the experiences of women at furry conventions last year. So I’m going to pick out some nuggets, focussing on those that relate back to topics of discussion here at [a][s] in the past. There is a lot more in the IARP report itself (including a section where they exposed non-furries to furry pornography).

Furries with Disabilities

A few years ago, I interviewed a few furries with physical disabilities for a piece here on [a][s]. The premise of my piece was that the furry environment, where a person will often socialize through the guise of a fursona rather than an arbitrary human meatbag, would be a particularly welcoming one for people with physical disabilities. It is well understood that people with obvious disabilities suffer social prejudice in all sorts of ways, and I was wondering if furries—an environment where human physical appearance is less important, especially online—were better at, as they say, seeing the person not the disability.

The answer, as you might expect, was more complex than a yes-or-no. Furs with physical disabilities appreciated that they could socialise in some ways without the stigma of the disability, but they also were wary about pretending their disability didn’t exist. As one person put it: “Having my fursona do things I can’t do is fun, but sometimes I don’t like it because it feels less me.” On the whole, it was difficult to draw any real conclusions beyond the well-known phenomenon that the internet, socially and practically, has been a massive boon for physically disabled people.

The IARP asked furries about their own disabilities, and found that a remarkable 54% of furries self-identified as having one or more disabilities. The disabilities were overwhelmingly non-physical; they were categorized as mental health or cognitive disabilities in a large majority of cases. (It may be that furs with physical disabilities are less likely to attend a convention like Furry Fiesta for practical reasons, although anecdotally I found it difficult to find many physically disabled furs, and the ones I did were mostly very social people. But there is wild selection bias going on here, so I don’t think we can read much into that.)

The IARP asked furs with self-identified disabilities about the differences between their human selves and fursonas. Like my interviews with the physically disabled furs, the IARP were interested in whether furries would incorporate or excise their disability from their fursona. It’s an especially interesting question because previous IARP research has shown that we tend to create fursonas that are an idealized version of ourselves. Would our disabled furries use their fursona to wish their disability away?

The answer, again, is neither yes nor no. Disabled furs most commonly responded that their fursona served to help them forget their disability, or to hide it from others. In both cases, this means that the disability can be rendered irrelevant: furs with disabilities are treated as a person (or animal-person) in furry spaces first and foremost, without the disability informing social interactions.

Data courtesy of the IARP

As with my small and informal survey of furries with physical disabilities, it’s hard to read much into the IARP results at this stage. It’s not clear whether the advantages of socializing through the guise of a fursona is different from other online socializing, or indeed if the IARP respondents experience a difference in the value of their fursona online and offline. Even so, the results are especially interesting given that the data was collected at a convention (and so the furries in question must be relatively adept and comfortable in offline social environments), and that fur with disabilities were more likely to say that their fursona represents “who they wish they were”.

Not surprisingly, the IARP have flagged these results as worthy of further research. It’s common for furries to appreciate the freedom that a fursona affords, especially in social environments, where our assignations of everything from socio-economic status to body shape to gender become less important. It makes sense that furs with disabilities might get particular value from this.

In counterpoint to the use of fursona as a mechanism for escaping ourselves, previous research from the IARP (reviewed by [adjective][species] here) has demonstrated that (broadly), the closer our fursonas represent ourselves, the better our mental health. More specifically, IARP research has shown that furries with diverging fursonas are more at risk of some negative psychological states.

This phenomenon was reinforced by results from this year’s Furry Fiesta. IARP researchers asked about differences between real age and fursona age, and correlated that with several variables, including self-esteem:

Data courtesy of the IARP

This reinforces the idea that fursona is an idealized version of one’s self. It suggests that someone with a fursona closely-related to their real self feels like they are already close to ideal. Such people can be expected, quite reasonably, to have high self-esteem.

That’s not to say that there is a problem with having a divergent fursona, or that high self-esteem is necessarily a positive trait. There is evidence that fursonas act as a testing ground for future behaviour, and so help furries self-improve. Someone with a non-divergent fursona may have higher self-esteem, but they also may be more stagnant; those furs with a divergent fursona (or fursonas) may be more likely to improve and grow.

Fursonas are unique to the furry community. Everyone, to some degree, presents a version of themselves to the outside world that diverges from their “real” self, online and offline. Fursonas, which might be thought of as an extreme version of a universal feature of human nature, are an obvious focus of study for the sociologists and psychologists of the IARP. It’s been a theme of their work for some time, and undoubtedly will continue in the future.

Furry Women

Another ongoing theme of IARP study, and one we have talked about a lot here on [a][s] over the past few years, is the treatment of women within the fandom. Furry is male-dominated, and appears to have a culture that isn’t welcoming to all, or even most, furry women. You can read a review of [a][s]’s coverage here.

The IARP ran a focus group at Furry Fiesta 2014, which added to evidence that sexism is a problem within furry. 68% of women in the IARP focus group agreed that furry is an “intimidating place for women”. This year they cast a wider net, looking for evidence whether furry women experience furry differently from furry men. They discovered:

• That furry women experience internal elements of furry as strongly as men (self-identification, importance of fursona), but experience external elements differently (women feel less like part of a community and engage with furry culture less deeply).
• That furry men and women experience the same rates of unwanted attention from others, and feel alienated from others within furry to the same extent.
• That furry women were less comfortable than men about presentation of gender in furry pornography, and that gender was “brought up” more often in interactions with other furries.

What’s interesting about these results is that they reflect not just what women have said to the IARP in the past, but that they reflect comments by men made in response to articles on the topic here at [a][s]. The results clearly demonstrate that while women are in a disadvantaged position compared to men, this inequality is possibly a simple result of furry’s gender imbalance—roughly 80/20 male/female—rather than any outright sexism.

The fact that women experience furry in the same way, and experience equivalent unwelcome attention, is evidence that there is nothing implicitly sexist about furries in general. Yet the fact that women are (significantly) more likely to feel intimidated and (significantly) less likely to feel like part of the community clearly demonstrates that furry has a problem.

The IARP researchers hold fire on drawing any conclusions from these results, but it’s not difficult to see how a male-dominated community can be inherently, or accidentally, sexist. The same phenomenon is seen in many community that have a dominant majority, where members of the overarching culture create an unwelcoming environment for a minority without doing anything “wrong”. This phenomenon can be seen today seen by looking at the treatment on homosexuals in majority Christian communities. In such communities, homosexuals tend to feel unwelcome by default, and special steps are required to remedy this problem. This might include policing of aggressive or offensive language, creation of gay-only community groups, and visible acts of advocacy.

It’s common in such cases for members of the dominant majority to resent having to make special consideration for the minority groups, and this can be seen in some Christian groups. Some Christians resent the appropriation of words like “gay”, some feel that gay-only groups discriminate against non-gay people, and others might wonder where there is no “straight pride” parade.

We see similar complaints from members of the male majority within furry. (Examples include complaints about “politically correct” language, or about events at conventions from which men are excluded.) The complaints are understandable, and nobody deserves to be vilified as bigoted or sexist for expressing them. But the fact remains that when there is a dominant majority in a community, like men within furry, positive steps must be taken to help the minority group feel welcome. “Doing nothing wrong” isn’t enough – that just reinforces the status quo. Men within furry must take concrete steps to make furry a more welcoming place for women.

Furry Artists

Finally, the IARP looks at the relationship between artists and consumers within furry. This relates back neatly to the recent Commissioning Etiquette Guide we recently published here at [a][s].

Our etiquette guide was written by a guest writer and published anonymously, in part because we were concerned it might provoke one of those artist-vs-consumer slanging matches we have all seen before. We thought that an anonymous writer would prevent any complaints from becoming personally-directed. In the end, it received nothing but praise on Twitter and other social networks.

The IARP results suggest that our experience reflects the reality: that the relationship between furry artists and furry commissioners is, on balance, a very good one. There does not appear to be a large problem or conflict between the two groups.

The IARP data shows that there is very good agreement between artists and consumers on how each groups is expected to behave. Each group is realistic and positive about the other. This suggests that problems are caused by a few “bad eggs”. As the IARP concluded, the problems and drama we see online are caused by “rare encounters with […] very few individuals”.

The poor behaviours cited by artists are commissioners who are “entitled” – those that are unreasonable in their expectations or think they deserve special treatment. On the other hand, complaints by consumers are largely driven by artists who manage their time poorly. (Interestingly, complaints about price did not feature: artists take note.) As concluded by the IARP, problems can be reduced “through clear communication, both of the commissioner’s expectations, but also of the artist’s terms of service and their ability to accommodate the commissioner’s request in the expected time frame”.

The IARP report includes a lot of easily-understandable data and covers more ground than I’ve mentioned here. You can find the whole thing at the IARP website.

A disclaimer from our anonymous contributor

This is not an authoritative guide. These aren’t hard rules, they don’t apply to all situations. Etiquette is a common code of polite behaviour designed to avoid unnecessary conflict. Etiquette doesn’t always go far enough and it often goes too far. I think the best case is that this guide informs your better judgement.

Preparation

• Some artists use Trello to organise their work. It’s actually great for commissioners too! You can keep a commissioner’s Trello to keep track of hoped-for, upcoming, awaited, and completed commissions.
• Keep a list of commission ideas. It can be really helpful for diving into quick sales, but thinking ahead also lets you develop an idea and gather useful references.
• Always read the artist’s terms of service. If you’re commissioning a private and tender moment between you and a loved one, you might not want to see prints of it being sold at conventions. You might also be expecting a high-res version for personal use. Never assume. An artist’s terms are there to protect them and you.
• Know what you’re getting into. Don’t assume that you’ll get your art within a couple of weeks of paying; read the artist’s journals to get a feel for how they work and what situation they’re in. Some artists take months to turn a commission around, some of them are working through personal issues. Life happens, and people in a bad situation don’t get many opportunities for good luck to happen. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t commission them, it means you shouldn’t add to their problems by getting upset when they fail to meet your unrealistic expectations.

Commissioning

• If you have a very particular composition in mind, ask for (or provide!) a “stick-figure”, “outline” or “thumbnail” WIP. Unsurprisingly most artists are imaginative and visual thinkers, so text descriptions rarely get interpreted the way you might expect. Send references if you can; Google image search is an obvious choice, but there’s also a huge treasure-trove of anatomical, pose and character references at http://pinterest.com/characterdesigh/ if you’re stuck for ideas.
• If you expect a certain turnaround, make sure the artist agrees with it. Some artists prefer being given deadlines, but most don’t.
• Don’t pester even if you’re in the right. If you’ve not had any word from an artist for a while, it’s reasonable to nudge once or twice, but “a while” means something different for each artist. If you do nudge, be polite and understanding.
• Communication between an artist and commissioner is often welcomed by artists, but never presume a commission relationship is equal to an offer of friendship with all the demands on their time which that would confer. Keep contact light, friendly and constructive, and if you end up making friends then that’s great for both of you.
• Text descriptions are are a lot more ambiguous than you probably realise, so get a ref-sheet, especially if your character has specific details that are meaningful to you. Make sure you’re explicit about small details that matter to you, e.g. piercings, shaped markings, etc.
• If you have complex markings, wings, tentacles, or specific details, then expect to pay sparkletax. It might not seem fair to you, but they’re usually a lot of extra work. And on the other hand, if you’re happy for an artist to experiment with your character’s design or clothing, say so!
• It’s great to provide references for poses or backgrounds and even colours or moods, but don’t ask artists to make something exactly the same as the images you provide – photographic or artwork. Aside from the obvious storm of drama and accusations of tracing that this invites, it also denies artists the chance to be creative and devalues their skills. It’s also kind of weird and rude to ask a furry artist to draw in another furry artist’s style.

Reviewing

• Ask for changes before inking and colouring. Don’t expect changes afterwards. Try to send all your changes in one batch. And wait at least half an hour before hitting the send button. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve either spotted something else, or discovered that a change I wanted didn’t need changing at all.
• When an artist sends you a WIP, give yourself enough time to spot changes. If you’re experienced and have a good eye for anatomy, that could be as little as a few minutes, but more likely you should look at it critically, then come back to it a few hours later. Flipping the image horizontally is a simple way to give yourself a fresh look at an image without having to wait too long. And remember, if an artist can keep working on other slots while you’re reviewing, you’re also giving them time to look at your work with fresh eyes when they come back to it. Time is a precious resource for artists; give them enough to stretch themselves.
• Keep changes to a minimum. Proposing a small anatomical fix or pointing out missing piercings is one thing; asking for a different angle or pose is another thing entirely. This is why references and thumbnail sketches are so important if you have a specific image in mind.
• Show what you mean when you want a change. Artists are usually visual thinkers, so highlight areas you’re not sure about and send a dropbox link or put it on imgur or something. And be helpful but not demanding – offering a redlined fix is great if you’ve got the eye for it. Trust their judgement if they disagree, and accept that some changes are too big to do anything about this time around.
• Furry art is not an industrial process. No one churns out consistently good art (despite what you might see in a gallery), so don’t expect perfection. Accept that some jobs are more challenging than others and sometimes the planets just aren’t aligned for your particular piece. There’s always the next time.
• Artists are their own worst critics. I’m not saying they’re precious snowflakes whose feelings need preserving at a cost of your own happiness (that usually ends up with both of you being unhappy), but don’t compete with their inner demons. Always be constructive with your criticism, and put at least as much effort into telling them what you’re happy with as what you have concerns about. If you say nothing, then many artists assume the worst. Being gracious, patient and generous pays back in this commission and every one that follows.

Money

• We’ve all been there; that artist who’s never open for commissions suddenly has slots available, but you aren’t paid until next week. Or it’s $30 more than you have right now. Stop. There’ll always be other slots opening and other awesome artists to commission. Put money aside for commissions and don’t spend more than you can spare. Remember that it’s a lot easier to put a few dollars aside on payday than at the end of the month.
• It’s rude to complain about an artist’s prices in public (especially on their gallery or journals). If you can’t afford it, that sucks, but that doesn’t mean it’s overpriced. It’s common for furry art to cost between $30-50 and take 3-5 hours to complete; could you live on $10/hour? Can you get health insurance and feed yourself on that?
  Some artists get in trouble and offer “doodles for donations”. Be generous, but remember these are not commissions; if you expect anything more than gratitude in return, chances are you’ll be disappointed.
• You might think you’re being helpful by sending a payment as “friend/family” instead of as “goods/services”, but Paypal can be total dicks about accounts which have dozens of friend/family payments coming in from various places (freezing or closing accounts, etc), and you lose any kind of payment protection if things go wrong. If you really want to be nice, throw a couple of dollars on top of the asking price to cover fees instead, but don’t say in the payment notes that you’ve done this because it’s against Paypal’s terms for artists to charge more to cover fees. Mentioning Fur Affinity in the payment notes can also cause problems, so don’t do that.
• Tipping’s part of the culture in the US, so it’s surprising it’s not more widespread in the furry art world. If you can afford to, tip, especially if you got more than you expected, if the work was done really quick, or the artist was super nice.
• If the price was low, tip high. The market on FA is pretty tough for beginner artists to get into; when artists are starting out they’re competing at the bottom end of the price range with people who can kick out 2-3 times more work than them in the same time. If you end up paying $15 for a commission you love (and you can afford to), tip another $15. You’ll make the artist’s day and you’re still getting a bargain.

In a recent article for [adjective][species], I wrote about a 2009 paper that presented an origin theory, of sorts, for furry. The author, Dr Anne Lawrence, proposes that furries (she uses the term “furverts”) are all plushophiles, that fursuiting (“fursuitism”) is a fetish activity, and that furry identity is an attempt to turn ourselves into the object of our supposed desire. We are, she concludes, autoplushophiles.

To put it simply, the paper is balls. I won’t rehash any of the reasons here, except to note that it is possibly the first peer-reviewed scientific paper in history to cite an episode of Entourage.

Yet Dr Lawrence’s paper uses an interesting approach. We here at [adjective][species] are interested in exploring furry, and while Dr Lawrence is factually wrong, the general idea—erotic target identity inversion, or ETII—is one that can provide useful guidance to the big question: why are we furries?

Dr Lawrence’s article has inspired at least one researcher—who has been in contact with [adjective][species] (and others)—to look at furry from a sexology perspective. The idea is based on the hypothesis that furries may be categorized as having ETII.

Of course, there is never going to be a successful one-size-fits all furry origin theory. Furries find our community through different routes, and participate in our community for different reasons.

In general, ETII may be applicable to those furries who personally identify with a furry character, avatar, or fursona. This is today’s furry mainstream: if you roleplay as an anthropomorphic character, or think of yourself as an animal-person in some contexts, you probably fit in this group. Consumption of furry pornography is not a requirement. You might not fit into this group if you don’t have a furry identity, or if you only use a furry identity as a convenient way to participate in mainstream furry culture.

ETII is a subset of “erotic target location error”, which is the topic of Dr Lawrence’s paper. It’s a theory that may explain the origin of sexual fetishes.

There is value in research that explores the source of fetishistic behaviour. Firstly, research can provide psychological insight into human beings and human society. Secondly, it can provide a basis for therapy for people looking to understand and control sexual impulses. Of course, that’s not to say that someone with a fetish requires therapy—we’d need a lot of doctors!—just that there may be value for some people.

Dr Lawrence’s “erotic target location error” theory claims that the target of a fetish originates from its association with a real erotic target. The archetypal example is a straight man who gets sexual enjoyment from wearing women’s underwear. The theory suggests that this man—I’m going to call him Panty Dad—is attracted to women, but his sexual focus is subject to a “location error”: something associated with women has become his erotic target.

In the case of Panty Dad, he has inverted the sexual interest, applying it to himself. This is ETII (erotic target identity inversion) – he is sexually interested in the idea of himself in panties, an interest fundamentally founded in his desire for sexy mums and his daughter’s friends from college.

That is a very simplistic example, but I’m sure you get the idea. In general, ETII is not really about sex. Panty Dad may feel sexy when he wears those panties to the office, but he is not attracted to men in panties. He is interested in women but some part of that interest is inverted, so it applies to his own behaviour and—importantly—his personal identity.

This explanation for fetishistic behaviour isn’t widely accepted by sexologists, although ETII does have some high-profile advocates. Like all ideas in a scientific but fundamentally uncertain field (like psychology and sexology), mainstream acceptance tends to wax and wane. Scientific dialogue often takes the form of idea advocacy—Dr Lawrence is nothing if not a culture warrior—with support provided by clinical anecdotes.

Dr Lawrence provides one excellent, elegant example to demonstrate the value of ETII. It’s taken from a 1977 article (ref), describing an 18-year-old man who had his first homosexual experience with a uniformed soldier. Following this, he displayed a clear fetish for military uniforms. His behaviour included an incident where he broke into a dormitory of Italian bersaglieri (sharpshooters), and masturbated in uniforms laid out for the next morning.

It’s easy to see a common thread in the behaviour of Soldier Boy and Panty Dad, and Dr Lawrence cites a few other illustrative examples. Drawing on research (by others) on fetishes and sexual interests, she identifies a few apparent patterns:

• Fetishistic behaviour, and possible erotic target inversion, is more commonly observed in men than women.
• People with fetishes display a disproportionate tendency towards other, coincidental fetishes.
• It’s common for people to dress up as part of their expression of the fetish.
• Fetishes can manifest as self-focussed experience (such as a masturbatory aid) or as a feeling of identity.

The final point is an important one. People with ETII tend to see their fetish as part of their personal identity, rather than a sexual interest. (For example, Soldier Boy claimed his behaviour was due to his desire to become a soldier himself.) People will commonly feel that the identity-related aspects of their interest are the most important aspect.

This is a problem for researchers, because they cannot hold much stead in self-reporting of identity inversion. People tend to deny the erotic component completely, or claim that the erotic component is secondary to personal identity.

It’s reasonable to say that the demographics of Dr Lawrence’s ETII groups match with the general furry population. I have also, anecdotally, been told by researchers that fetishes seem to be more common in people who work in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), which also fits in neatly.

Furries also tend to claim that identity aspects are more important than erotic aspects. Yet this is only on a personal level: furries think that sex is much more important to the community as a whole.

Data from the 2012 Furry Survey

Data from the Furry Survey shows that people rate the importance of sex within furry to be lowest for them personally, and higher for other furries (and higher again for public perception). Logically, the importance of sex to each furry, collected together, must be the same as the importance of sex for furry as a whole. The estimates are therefore wrong: furries either underestimate the importance of sex to themselves, or they overestimate the importance of sex to others.

This is an interesting result, and we have tended to explain it here at [a][s] by looking at the friendship paradox, and the differences between internal and external judgements. The friendship paradox shows that our friends, mathematically, are more likely to have more friends, be richer, be happier, and have more sex (ref). This is in addition to the tendency for people on social media to discuss positive things, which makes our friends seem less bogged down in the minutiae of life and therefore more happy/rich/sexual, all of which combines to make furry for others appear relatively more sexual than it really is.

The ETII theory gives us another reading of this result. We may naturally consider identity to be the major component of our own furry experience, yet we can see the importance of the sexual aspects of furry when we remove ourselves from the judgement. We can see the pornography, the flirtatiousness, the openness, the sex positivism—all things we may personally appreciate and enjoy to some degree—and conclude that it is particularly important to the furry community. But when we look at ourselves, we think of our furry identity first and foremost, with sexuality (and everything else) a secondary component.

Dr Lawrence directly mentions furries in her paper, however her analysis focusses on plushophilia, which is a marginal interest within furry (around 8% identity as plushophiles). And as I wrote in my previous article on Dr Lawrence’s paper, her analysis of furry is problematic. However her approach towards a different group may be relevant to furry: zoophiles.

Her analysis is particularly interesting because she notes that a significant number of zoophiles report that they personally identify with the target of their sexual attraction. Dr Lawrence then goes on to describe behaviour that is recognizably furry: she mentions fursuiting as an expression of animal-identity, and also touches on body modifications such as those of the late Stalking Cat. This section is short, but with its mention of animal-person identity it provides clues as to how the ETII might apply to furries.

Perhaps surprisingly, a fair bit of research on zoophilia and zoosexuality has taken place over the last 15 years or so. The seminal work is a book written by a sexologist, Dr Hani Miletski, in 2002. Dr Lawrence quotes statistics from Dr Miletski’s research, noting that 20% of the zoophiles who participated in Dr Miletski’s study reported it was ‘completely or mostly true’ that they identified as a non-human species: in this case, the animal they are attracted to.

The identification with animals sounds like a furry trait, and in fact Dr Miletski’s work shows that the furry community is fairly well known among zoophiles. I have written about the cross-over between zoophile and furry groups before on [adjective][species]: around 20% of zoophiles feel their identity can be expressed as an animal-person, and around 15% of furries self-report as zoophiles. You can read more on the topic here.

The existence of a larger zoophile group is key for the application of ETII to furry. ETII requires that the inversion takes place for a minority of the group, hence there must be a non-inverted majority. So if we hypothesize that furries can be described as zoophiles with ETII, there must be a lot of non-furry zoophiles (i.e without ETII). Evidence indicates that this is indeed the case, with the zoophile population roughly estimated to be in the 0.1-1% range, and furries perhaps (and very roughly) 0.01-0.1%.

A second criterion for ETII is that it usually comes with a fetishistic behaviour focussed on items that represent the original erotic target, for example Panty Dad and his lady underwear. Dr Lawrence drew a blank on this one, saying “I have not found descriptions of fetishism for items associated with animals or animals’ body parts“, and supposing this might be because animals tend not to wear clothes.

Had Dr Lawrence been a more diligent researcher, she would indeed have found evidence of fetishistic behaviour focussed on animals’ body parts, in the furry community. She could simply point towards the fine selection of products offered by Bad Dragon.

Furries meet several of the criteria required for us to be considered, at least in part, as zoophiles with ETII. However the idea would undoubtedly meet a lot of resistance from many furries. Most of us, myself included, would deny that furry is fundamentally zoophilic. Furry, we might say, is about identity as an animal-person.

This is a catch-22, because that’s exactly what we’re expected to say. ETII tends to manifest as identity rather than sexuality, and so we are not really in a position to make a judgement. As Dr Lawrence says:

“ETII can superficially appear to be ‘disorders* of identity’ primarily, and erotic phenomena only secondarily, if at all. Many persons with putative ETII tend to emphasize the identity-related aspects of their feelings and deemphasize the erotic aspects”

 

* Note that Dr Lawrence use of the word “disorder” here is misleading. It signifies a psychological divergence, not a psychological problem.

There is also the well-understood fact that people will tend to misrepresent themselves if they have a non-mainstream sexual interest. People tend to deny fetishes, sexual fantasies, and non-heterosexual sexual orientation. For example, in its comprehensive household survey, the UK Office for National Statistics found that 1.5% of Britons admit they are gay, whereas less direct methods (where sexual orientation is inferred rather than directly asked) from government agencies place the actual number at 6%.

In short: we can’t be trusted. Our opinion on whether furry has any connection with zoophilia isn’t reliable. And regardless of how it feels from the inside of furry, from the outside there are good reasons to connect the two.

For starters, animal-person identities (and art and porn and everything else) have one thing in common: the animal aspect. Furry can be seen as essentially defined by the animalization of human beings, and much of the scope for expression of identity within furry is based on how far along that spectrum we each like to go. We might have feral characters, or taurs, or be digitigrade, or have different types of genitalia, all the way from “mostly animal” at one end through to “mostly human” at the other. We could equally be called zoomorphic humans as anthropomorphic animals.

The link with furry has not been lost on researchers into zoophilia. A draft classification for zoophiles was published in 2009, and furries are specifically mentioned. The author proposes that “human-animal roleplayers”—a shorthand description for furries if I ever heard one—be considered “Class I zoosexuals”. Of course, publication in a peer-reviewed paper doesn’t make it true, but it does demonstrate that it’s a reasonable way to look at the furry phenomenon.

All this is evidence to support the idea that furry may have its origins in zoophilia, and that the mechanism of ETII has led each of us to personally identify as an animal-person. In sexologist-speak, the furry identity may be autozoophilia.

Of course, furry is a broad church, and there is no simple definition that can cover the entire community. However, ETII may explain why so many of us find value in our expression of furry as an identity, and may well be the engine that drives furry’s growth as a worldwide phenomenon.

There are some aspects of ETII that don’t appear to be supported by furry behaviour. The most obvious is gender. If ETII dictates that we identify as the target of our attraction, then we would expect, in general, furry expressions to match the target’s gender. This is true for some furries but not others:-

Those attracted to animals (or anthros) of the same gender—homozoophiles if you like—can be expected to dress up and fursuit as a furry of their own gender. This is indeed usually the case. Heterozoophiles, on the other hand, would be expected to dress up and fursuit as the opposite gender, a bit like a Furry Panty Dad. Yet for all the heterosexual furries out there—usually men attracted to female anthros—we don’t really see fursuit cross-dressing or furry genderfuckery from otherwise cisgender furs. This doesn’t seem to be consistent with ETII, especially considering that, for all of the range of sexual orientations in furry, heterosexuality is still more popular than homosexuality (although it’s pretty close).

This is an issue to be addressed with data, and as far as I am aware there is insufficient research to draw any sort of conclusion. Certainly, I am not aware of any formal research on the gender preferences of zoosexuals, which seems like an obvious starting point.

It’s also worth noting that not all seemingly obvious examples of ETII turn out to be correct, following investigative research. This may well be the case with furries, and the furry-as-autozoophilia hypothesis may be demonstrated to be wrong. In any event, the psychological origins of furry, whatever they are, don’t inform the day-to-day furry experience. For all the psychology jargon and the 3000 words or so it’s taken me to reach this point, the value of the idea doesn’t amount to much.

The real value is to help us think about and understand our own drivers. If we can gain understanding of what makes us furry, it can help us find personal meaning in being a furry. As ever, in our extraordinary community, thinking and being furry can help us achieve greater self-acceptance and happiness.

This article is about the blurring of lines between human and non-human animals. It looks at how the furry identity muddies the idea of what it means to be a person by challenging the human/animal duality, and draws parallels with similar false dualities such as male/female, straight/gay, and animal/machine. This is all tied into science fiction, futurism, and feminism.

I realise this is an odd opening to my article. However I think this opening is necessary for those of you who saw the word “cyborg”, and guessed that I’d be writing about Randomwolf as a robot who learns that the most powerful force on earth is love. If you were hoping to read about the activation of Randomwolf’s emotion chip, you may stop reading now. This article is about how furry links with cyborg philosophy. Robot Randomwolf never learns anything about these things we humans call “feelings”.

The Cyborg Manifesto, an essay written by Donna Haraway first published in 1985 (full text here*), is a thoroughly readable and prescient exercise in futurism and feminist theory. Haraway posits that technology will strongly influence the way we perceive identity, and that this will have a knock-on effect to the world in general. And while Haraway doesn’t predict the rise of the furry community, furries fit neatly into her predictions.

* Note that my link to the full text is pretty obviously a scan. There are a few OCR errors.

Haraway’s essay is a manifesto. It is not a review of the current state of affairs, it’s a look into the future with hope. Her cyborg future is all a bit Star Trek, with technology removing old prejudices that define gender roles, sexuality, and the differences between humans, animals and machines.

Her thoughts on human relationships with non-human animals and machines have materialized, in part, with the expression of furry identity. Haraway doesn’t worry too much about the difference between reality and fiction, persuasively arguing that fictional extensions of real-world phenomena affect the way we think. She argues that science fiction informs science fact, something we can all see in much of today’s gadgetry, reflecting as it does the hypotheticals of 20th century science fiction.

As an example, Haraway compares an organism to a “biotic component”. If you accept that these two things are strongly related, the fact that one is natural and the other synthetic becomes moot. There is no fundamental difference, in terms of function, between a human ear and one augmented with a hearing aid.

This ties in with furry, because an animal-person identity subverts the existence of a hard boundary between human animals and non-human animals. Most of us have an animal-person identity of some sort, which may fit anywhere on the spectrum as a lightly modified fictional version of our human selves, through to the therians: those who feel they are, on some level, not completely or not solely human.

The muddying of these waters affects the way we relate to non-human animals. For starters, many furs feel a close affinity for their animal counterparts, treating them with a degree of anthropomorphization. That might be as simple as enjoying some cute pictures (e.g. cheelaxing), thinking of them as a special case (for example when it comes to food; many horse furs have very strong opinions about the consumption of horse meat), or by giving a pet the status of family member.

You can see my own furry sensibilities come to the fore by the language I use. I am careful to call humans “human animals” and non-humans “non-human animals”. My language shows that I don’t give human beings any special or divine status, that I believe in the science of evolution rather than the fabulism of creation, and that I think that non-human animals must be considered to have some rights.

Consider this thought experiment: imagine that you become your furry character, and that the rest of the world stays as-is. Would you expect to be given the same rights as you enjoy now? Of course. Now imagine a genetically-engineered human/non-human hybrid of considerable intelligence – let’s say a dolphin anthro with below-average human intelligence, but with intelligence at the lower end of “normal”. Should our dolphin-man enjoy the same rights as humans? The answer here, again, has to be yes.

You can see where I am going. Do we give human rights to intelligent primates? If we don’t apply any divine uniqueness to human animals, we can’t reasonably deny rights to comparable non-human animals, and indeed the Great Apes are given special protections in some parts of the world, notably New Zealand.

And so on, we can step down a rough hierarchy of animals, asking what rights should be given to each. Should pigs be granted the right not to be raised for slaughter? Should mice be granted the right not to be poisoned?

From this perspective, where we accept that humans are just another animal, one with greater cognitive and physical capacity, it’s easy to conclude that the two extreme points of view are absurd. On one hand, we should not be granting full human rights to minor animals like mice. On the other, we must grant some rights to non-human animals depending on circumstance and cognitive ability (among other considerations).

My use of language—”human animal” and “non-human animal”—has this political position as an inherent message. I don’t think that humans have special non-animal status, and so I’m undermining the creationist duality of human/animal.

This is Haraway’s cyborg manifesto in action. By finding examples, real or fantastical, where humans are also partly non-human animal, or machine, we’re forced to consider how non-human animals or machines might be treated as humans. As Haraway says, this leads to “kinship with animals and machines”, which will affect society in general.

It’s ironic that our status as the highest animals—and therefore able to make these complex connections in thought and in language—may challenge the way we treat lesser animals. As Haraway says:

“Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man.”

 

The above sentence takes on a wider meaning if you read it from a furry perspective.

Technology, of course, is not necessarily a force for good. Haraway’s manifesto is a call for action. Her action, in this case, is to ensure that technology is used as a tool for diversity, rather than a tool to consolidate the monolithic status quo. Recent arguments about net neutrality are an example of this, with neutrality necessary to minimize the control of technology by corporations and governments.

In general, Haraway argues that technology is a fundamentally progressive force, and therefore there is good reason to hope for positive change. However those hopes don’t always become reality, as—sadly—illustrated by one of Haraway’s examples (when she wrote the manifesto in 1985).

Haraway looked at the lack of women working in world-building commercial or industrial roles, and considered this an example of male/female duality, where (by default) men go to work and women stay at home. She saw hope in the “ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley”:

“Can these personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women of colour, are coming to be fairly numerous?”

 

Haraway’s hope in 1985 seems like folly today.

Haraway also looked to contemporary science fiction to break down the male/female duality. She names a long list of authors, and interestingly names Samuel R. Delany as a “feminist” writer (at least from a cyborg point of view). This surprised me, as Delaney’s work is very male-centric and homosexual, remarkably so for the era in which it was written. Delaney’s dearth of female characters had always struck me as a weakness of his work. Haraway sees it differently, where Delaney’s male households and relationships subvert the very idea of gender roles:

“Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth.”

 

More irony. Haraway sees Delaney’s lack of women—as sexual partners—as an idealized version of the world where women are not required to fulfil traditional roles, in this case (and broadly), male/female as sexual conquerer/conquered respectively. By removing the need for women, Delaney has created a vision of the world where both men and women are free to be themselves outside of the constraints of traditional gender identity.

You can see how the world has changed in this direction since 1985 by looking at the questions on our own 2015 Furry Survey. When you are asked about your gender, there is the usual set of checkboxes. Those people who aren’t able to easily categorize their gender are asked to place it on the Gender Cyborg Identity Diamond*:

* a phrase I just made up but I hope catches on

Sex is important too. Haraway sees these nuances of gender—and nuances of non-human animality (like furries)—as undermining the ubiquity of heterosexuality. Again, technology is the key:

“Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility.”

 

Haraway happily transgresses the boundary that limits sexual contact to between humans. In this context furries are cyborgs (of human and non-human animals), and the sexual aspects of furry undermine the human/animal duality:

“The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.”

 

Her “myth” in this quote includes not just imagined sexual contact between animal-people in furry pornography, but also cross-species relationships in science fiction (hello Captain Kirk), historical myths involving sexual animal-people such as satyrs, and many more.

The cyborg manifesto, then, challenges those parts of society that are “given”. It’s obvious to a gay person that homosexuals are discriminated against in some circumstances, and similarly obvious to a member of a racial minority or a woman. This hegemony is cultural wallpaper, always there but rarely noticed.

If you’re a member of the privileged majority—roughly white, male, and straight – you might be a bit flummoxed by all these racial equality, feminist, and LGBT rights movements. Yet people were once sure that slavery was justifiable, women shouldn’t vote, and gay men should be jailed. It turned out all those changes made the world a better place. And so it will be when a mostly black city has a mostly black police force, when somewhere around half of silicon valley professionals are women, and when homosexual couples have the universal right to marry.

All unfair prejudice is based on cultural norms, handed down, shadows of our unequal history. Things like:

• Human beings are special.
• Sex is for procreation only.
• Identity expression cannot involve nuances of gender or species (or technology).

The rise of cyborgs—people who mix gender, or species, or animal with technology—make these cultural assumptions ludicrous. It forces us to change our language to include people who exist outside of the old binary duality, and this helps our culture shift towards a world where assumptions aren’t made about gender, race, or sexual behaviour.

The irony of Haraway’s cyborg manifesto is that denying that humans are special makes us more humane. As she asks:

“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”

It’s here, it’s finally here! It’s been a month in the works, but the inaugural [adjective][species] Poetry Collection is here. It’s been a lot of fun reading and putting together this set of amazing poems, getting to see the breadth of talent in the fandom. I know, as a poet myself, it’s sometimes difficult to sell your talent as as meaningful. I’ve had so many people, in-fandom and not, just raise eyebrows at the mere idea of poetry, so I’m glad so many people still write it.

I’m not here to set this post up too much. The poems are organized by flow, not by any ranking system. There is no winner—just a curated experience. Thank you to all the poets who submitted poems, and hopefully we can do this again soon.

~ Lunostophiles

 

Why a Weasel by George Squares

Because I’ve power when a lump of sadness sits in my chest,
and the feeling is utterly mine.
Quite the covetous catch with this feeling I snatch
from myself like the robin’s high treasure in nest.

I command hurting hunches to bunches
of bristles, and pine thistles, and mountain peak priories,
where dead clerics dance and damned fairies prance
in the carvings of soft-whittled wood.

The colors blind, barely, when fairly I flip
to the conclusion on the tip of my tongue—
though there in my throat it has clung
when you told me my voice was deeper than you thought.

But there’s many ways to squeak, and to hide, and to peek,
peek at you, yes at you, with my stare always blatant.
When night bleeds bland ink and in the earth, on your brink,
“things must get better,” you moan, and I wink. And I think.

How sad you can’t see me at home past the stack,
in the black. Keeping track.
When I write out my anguish it breaks. Snicker-snack.

 

At the Aquarium by Renee Carter Hall

The otters, all brothers,
curve and glide through the pool,
pushing off against the thick glass
and diving long and deep.
One plays a game with a sinking stone,

nosing it, batting it to keep it off the bottom,
as one might blow on a falling leaf.
The trainer finishes her talk and
calls for questions.
Little girl in the audience:

Why do they play with rocks?

Two answers come to mind—the scientific first,
describing how such a game would keep their skills honed,
thus helping them catch more fish, live longer, reproduce,
pass on their genes, ensure the species’ survival.
But the second answer feels more like truth:

that there is joy, however simple, in the feeling
of every muscle working in turn, rudder of tail,
dexterous webbed paws, all responding perfectly
in the sweet resistance of water.
No purpose served but in the act itself—
the satisfaction of the well-played game,
the image in sand, the completed poem.

Why do they play with rocks?
The trainer fumbles for an answer,
then admits she doesn’t know.

 

Shape-changed Heart by Amy Fontaine

You need not feel sorry for me
because I have dreams.
My mind harbors a multiplicity of faces,
of voices:
a flock, a pack, a pride.

It’s not a curse.
I’m not diseased.
I think it’s more like a superpower:

the ultimate Empath,
animal shaman,
able to shift into
all creatures under the sun.

I’ve found friends who understand
what it means to walk in two worlds.
To don one skin by day,
by night another,
to sing the praises
of the full-bellied moon.
Perhaps we are the lucky ones:

better to be a furred vagabond,
a roving Rover,
the owner of a shaggy,
shape-changed heart

than a listless tool
without a story to tell.

 

Wolf Break by Huskyteer

Eleven o’clock; coffee time.
I opened a pack of wolves.
Fur white as icing, they surged
through the office, staring and sniffing
with almond eyes and chocolate noses.
Flicking the crisp points of their ears,
they crunched across keyboards
dunked their paws in tea mugs
snapped gingerly at power cords.
Then, at the call of distant snows,
they took the lift and left, behind them just
a sugar dust of hair on carpet tile.
Next time I’ll get custard creams.

 

Procyon Prowling by Altivo Overo

In silence she slinks   through the silver-dewed garden,
Wandering walkways,   wishing for sustenance.
Her three ring-tailed children   thirst in the home den
For this matron of many,   a milk-bearing clan queen.

Soon will she show them,   in single file leading,
Walking through woodland   to where there is food
And water for washing   as will be required
To live on their own   in lonely repose.

But now has she need   of nourishing foodstuff
Herself, before comes here   the herald of dawn.
Black eyes like buttons,   buried in face mask,
Search not so well   for her sight is too poor.

All growing around her   too green are the berries,
The sweet roots not ripened   or succulent yet.
Thus takes she her tread   to the tall-hanging feeder
For birds it’s intended   but better than none.

Alas! Though long-reaching   and laboring efforts
She makes, it gains nothing.  A mumble, a hiss,
And she turns to the trash cans,   a top that is loose.
She knows it so well   as she nears it again.

Brief clatter. She’s in.   A complaint from a dog
Afar wills it otherwise   but wonder, none comes
To break up her feasting   in bones and waste matter
Abandoned and left   to best care for her now.

The brood that is waiting   will be cared for also:
No dearth of dark faces   to delve in the night.

 

Imprisoned Avian Dreams by Corvus

My love, I chirp this song a slave
Confined to sleep within this cage
Yet you’re the one that I so crave

I’m gone, but please don’t fill with rage
I’m here alone this restless night
Confined to sleep within this cage

My feathers dream to soar in flight
Yet lights go out as hope does too
I’m here alone this restless night

I’d rest my beak right next to you
We’d rise into the sky next day
Yet lights go out as hope does too

When I return, we’ll always play
For when we meet then you will see
We’d rise into the sky next day

I’m trapped for now and cannot flee
My love, I chirp this song a slave
For when we meet then you will see
That you’re the one that I so crave

 

Siderosophia by Steven Mando

Go down the oldest Woodland path,
And if you walk for long,
You’ll hear the Crow, the Owl, the Frog,
And the Fox, who sings his song.

He sings to her, who falls behind
His red and whizzing tail
He sings because he’s so in love
That he could sing for days.

“Come here, come here!” he tells her then
“Come look at the night sky!
The Moon is full, the clouds are gone
And Stars shine bright on high!

“And if I were to see the Stars
On lonely summer nights
I’d count them all, to wait for when
You’d come stay by my side

“And if we were to roam the Moon
And you would float away
I’d raise my paw, and grab your tail
And hold you there for days

“And if I were to walk the Sun
And burn off all my fur
I know, I know, deep in my heart,
You’d lend me yours for sure

“And if, on cold and endless nights
I’d fall off into space
You’d wait for me, my dearest love
You’d wait for days and days.”

She sighed, and watched with empty eyes
The one who thought he was loved
She shook her head, and turned her tail
And swiftly, she was gone.

“No sweat, no sweat,” the Fox would say.
“Tomorrow’s a new day
We’ll meet again, I know, my love
And for that I will pray!”

No words on Earth will ever fill
The large heart of a Fool.
But if he’s happy
  let him be.
    Real
  life
    can be
      quite
        cruel.

 

Tricky Fox by Mut

Tricky fox is quickly running.
Sleepy dog is idly sunning.
Fox in henhouse, feathers fly.
Bird in mouth and gleam in eye.
Dog left staring, jaws agape,
As hungry fox makes his escape.

 

never invite stray dogs into your home by Buck Riley

where were we, Love, ‘ere
we were were-
wolves, weavingwoven throughinto the night
sky, drinking the moon
light heavy like wine
(but why why why?)

You knew the (biblical) scents of a she(e)p
he(a)rd the swooning swaying crooning
of ani-mals of moon of dark of shadow
and (what?) of us.

and what (of us)?

a husband? no husband
ry is not your style
you prefer(RED) the wild and me
? I was – would be – wont to stay staid
but you stayed (,) a stray (,) and lead (past present
always present) me a-stray.

you taught me how(l)
and I learned (became) HOWL

and howl and how
to be reckless. no plastic
on the paisley couch, coach
ed in moonspeak and ani-mal-
content. you showed me

the way (my) ripe apples fall in
Autumn the smell of (cheap) leather in the
Summer the taste of dead (graveyard) dirt in the
Spring when the moon sighs

and sighs and sighs and sighs
O!

but what of us?

Love, we were are RECKless,
and I, Love, I am a wRECK
(un)less I reek
of wreaths of wildflowers, Love.
of stigma of stamen of sweat, Love, but
no Love! for steeple and stature and staid
Love, you cannot stay (how) you are
a stray, Love, you cannot stay a-stray.

 

True to You, Oh My Darling, in my Fashion by J/K Perique

I saw you rush away from Disney that day
You said it was just a Magicked Kingdom
Ceci n’est pas pour les autres quand nous

But by our byes they let us sit there
And wear our special hats
Though we both were Down and Out
Les enfants, magnifique, symphonique, mais ne sont pas terribles.

We should’ve seen you in a millicent
But your ship called
And you beamed up
To another port of call

We weren’t lost then either
Your guild is large, after all
But the new navigator had different eyes
Still blue, but full of fish and spice
Et on y va, mais c’était pas la même chose

We still called him Terry
In your honor, of course
But he preferred Bison and Banks
So we knew they could not stay
Our Culture must change
For even otters slip away

It was smooth sailing with the Bison
But we still missed you
So we named the next crewman Hatchette
Since she was so cute
Your type of gal, ?????
But espacés a froid dans l’avion

So when we huddled for warmth
We learned it was a better name than we thought
The symmetry may never be broken
For our WELL is a circle, and a pool

But I still remember the fires we started
Dans le monde du les autres
Et je n’ai pas froid
From the memories and the letters

?????
???????
????

 

Tutu the Tortie by Judith Vance

Black, brown, white tortie.
Adopted from Feline Friends.
Two empty nesters
laugh, play, pet, feed and water
the furry queen of the house.

 

FC 2010 by Shining River

In the winter of Twenty-Ten,
It was time for Further Confusion again.
In Sillycon Valley,
I went to a big furry rally.

Yes, those wild Furry fans
put together great plans.
They found a nice new hotel
For they knew very well
That thousands would attend
And have fun till the end.

On the Twenty-First of Jan-u-ary,
They traveled by cars, planes, trains, and maybe even a ferry.
To the Fairmont Hotel San Jose,
They all found their way.
When the hotel doors opened and hundreds rushed in,
We called out, “We’re here! Let the Gold Rush begin!”

I met online friends, whom I’d not seen before,
I looked all around and found even more.
A friendly Rat from Brisbane,
And a Red Deer from England.
I met a rabbit for coffee,
At a quarter to three.

The Fursuit Parade was a fire-hose of Fur!
Hundreds came marching down the corridur.
I saw BeastCub and Donkey
OzRoo and Yippee Coyote.
A tall white snow-beast from Star Wars, oh my heck,
and a quadruped Targ from Star Trek.
Such a huge variety,
And amazing awesome creativity.

Workshops and panels for teaching,
About writing, art and fursuiting.
Art shows and auctions to show, buy and sell,
Dealer’s Den sales were quite good, I could tell.
Masquerade, CritterOlympics and Furry Night Live,
I cheered, I applauded, I laughed ’til I cried.

Too soon Monday came and away home I flew,
FC Twenty-Ten,  I hope I never forget you.

 

Sex Thing or What by Leif the Otter

“Is it a sex thing, or what?”

The words linger in a void
divided by the clicks of Mom’s turn signal.
I can’t place finger nor paw on a wholly true answer

“What do you mean?”

I want to know who’s asking.

Is it the woman I would check behind my shoulders for?

Or the woman who signed notes “Mama Wolf,”
when she learned her teenage son was a bit weird?

“I mean… it’s… kinky…”

I’m sure she wants to know who’s answering.

Her little boy?

Her wolf pup?
A pervert?

The silver Jeep hums around the corner
as I struggle to find the right words.

“You even had a collar­­­ is it BDSM? …Well?”

She breaks her eyes from the road,
and I’m glad it’s dark out.

It hides the shame on my face.
Hides it better than I could ever hide
my fuzzy little secret.

“Kinda… the fandom’s reputation
isn’t entirely unfounded…”

Silence. Every muscle tenses,
as if I could jump out of all this,

this conversation,
this Jeep,
this world

I watch the road, in case she can’t.
My eyes, blue like hers, begin to itch.
Sensitive.

“But… I’ve made a lot of friends.”

My breath cuts the engine’s drone,
and a smile tugs at my muzzle.
My ears perk up,

“And it’s fun.”

I risk a glance her way,
and meet skepticism in her raised brow.

Skepticism… and a smile.

“Just be safe. Safe and happy.”

Our destination brakes any further response,
and parked, we sit for a few seconds,
letting our few words wash over us.

“I am.”

Human
Pervert
Wolf
Son

I am all of these.
“Sex thing” or not.

Safe
Happy

Guest article by Laurence “GreenReaper” Parry. Greenreaper is the founder of WikiFur, lead administrator of Inkbunny, and editor-in-chief of Flayrah. This article first appeared on his personal Livejournal.

Many furries think raising money to support needy animals is a good thing. From a purely promotional point of view, it’s also nice to be able to say you “raised $$$$ for fuzzy critters”. As a result, many furry conventions do it.

Charity might seem like a win-win, but there are opportunity costs. Fundraising involves volunteer time, and sometimes money, which could otherwise be spent on awards, food, fans, guests, etc… – things which often relate more directly to the enjoyment of attendees, and the celebration and development of furry-related arts and crafts.

While charity events can be entertaining, particularly when live animals are involved, there are often trade-offs – for example, giving a table in a crowded dealer’s room leaves one fewer table for others, and perhaps a loss in funding; running an event takes volunteers and room slots. Likewise, while it’s not a zero-sum game, many attendees have limited funds, and encouraging them to donate may lower artists’ revenues.

This all needs to be be justified – and the way to do it is to include the organizers’ charitable goals as part of the event’s mission, as stated within its organizing document or bylaws. These statements don’t have to be super-specific, just ‘part of the purpose of this organization is to help raise funds for other non-profit organizations in the areas of X and Y’.

Documenting the nature of an event’s charitable commitment provides clarity to organizers, who are often faced with difficult decisions about resource allocation – e.g. do we save this surplus for future year’s events, or give it to charity? (I’ve seen this play out at a board meeting.)

Organizers may also determine that charitable activities are not going to be part of their core mission. This is good to know, as it can lead to a frank discussion of what is permitted, resulting in more-specific policies – e.g. “each staff member may spend up to 1/8th of their required work hours on charity-related events” or “1/10th of staff positions may be dedicated to charity”. (That doesn’t mean that staff can’t spend more time on charity as individuals; just that the convention’s members aren’t going to pay for it.)

The formal nature of an organization can hint at whether charity should be considered a key part of its operations. For example, Anthrocon is a non-profit social/recreational club (501(c)(7)), with the “sole purpose of [operating] a yearly convention in order to bring together devotees of anthropomorphics from near and far, in a relaxed social atmosphere where fans of all ages may feel welcome [… and is] dedicated to keeping its cost of attendance to a minimum.” You wouldn’t expect such an organization to be focused around fundraising.

In comparison, Midwest FurFest‘s Midwest Furry Fandom and Further Confusion‘s Anthropomorphic Arts and Education are charitable organizations (501(c)(3)); both have support of animal-related events written into their public mission statements (MFF, FC/AAE), albeit as secondary goals. When attending these events, you might reasonably expect a portion of your membership fee to go directly towards charitable goals – or at least to see significant fundraising activities.

Tax-exemption issues aside, neither approach is objectively “better” from a governance perspective; what matters is adherence to the mission. For example, Anthrocon does in fact raise significant amounts for charity—through a variety of entertaining social events—but if it started giving away large chunks of its own money, it’d be reasonable to ask why the membership fee was not reduced instead. Conversely, MFF regularly helps to raise large sums and donates directly to its sponsored charities; if it scaled back its support, there’d be questions to ask.

[There might, of course, be good answers in both cases, such as “large donations improve the guests we can attract” or “we bought art panels this year” – but there should be some reasoned justification based on the organization’s mission.]

In conclusion: if an organization you’re involved with is spending significant time and money on activities outside its documented mission, you should ask why… and if you’re running it, you should fix that, either by scaling back these activities, or including them within your organization’s formal mission.

This doesn’t just apply to charity, of course; but it’s particularly easy to get wrapped up in “doing good deeds” and forget that an event is meant to be serving the interests of furry fans, not our furry friends – or alternatively, to let your charitable activities languish, while claiming it’s still an important part of your mission.

With the proper mission wording in place, and a practice of evaluating ongoing activities against it, staff can make better decisions – and organizers can be more confident that, when they move on, their original goals will endure.

I wrote this post after a brief comment by tfbaxxter on NordicFuzzCon 2015 (a great con, by the way!), but I’ve been interested in charitable activities at conventions for years – this was just a good opportunity to write about it.

“Erotic target location error” (or ETLE) is a theory that describes how fetishes might develop. It was first mooted in the early 1990s, but has been largely ignored by psychologists and sexologists since then. In 2009 it was revisited, and possibly reinvigorated, by Dr Anne Lawrence for a paper in the Journal of Sex Research titled Erotic Target Location Errors: An Underappreciated Paraphilic Dimension.

The ETLE theory is simple enough. It suggests that people who experience normal sexual attraction sometimes associate peripheral objects with that attraction, creating a fetish towards that new object. So a foot fetishist might originally have been attracted to, say, women, but they have experienced “location error”, making feet their preferred erotic target.

Dr Lawrence proposes that furries are an “uncomplicated” version of ETLE. Furries, she says, are sexually attracted to stuffed animals, and that fursuiting (or as she calls it, fursuitism) is an attempt to transform into an erotic ideal, i.e. a stuffed animal. Furries are therefore autoplushophiles.

The table above mentions plushophiles only, but Dr Lawrence makes clear that she is referring to furries as a whole, using the blanket term “furverts” later in the paper. She uses either term to refer to people who display sexual attraction towards stuffed animals and/or “anthropomorphic cartoon characters”, a classification that covers a large majority of our community.

Dr Lawrence’s paper is long at 22 pages, and she spends only a half page or so on furries. She concludes that section with: “Formal study will be necessary to clarify the nature, prevalence, and interrelations of plushophilia, fursuitism, and autoplushophilia among furverts and to document the nature and extent of any co-occurring paraphilias.”

If you think this sounds bonkers, you’d be right. A close reading of the rest of the paper helps understand how and why Dr Lawrence has got it so wrong.

Dr Lawrence is a sexologist (and former anaesthesiologist) who identifies as an autogynephilic transsexual* woman. That is, she is MTF transgender, and believes that her gender identity is fundamentally driven by her attraction to women, which is a kind of ETLE called “erotic target identity inversion”. She believes that many transgender women can be considered to be heterosexual men with ETLE. Those men who wish to transition are similar to those men who get an erotic thrill from wearing women’s clothing. Dr Lawrence believes that transgender women are essentially just heterosexual men displaying fetishistic behaviour. She calls them “men trapped in men’s bodies”.

* her phrase

You will not be surprised to hear that this is controversial. It’s a fringe theory, but one that is considered valuable by some respected sexologists. (The personal identification of Dr Lawrence, and others, as autogynephilic transsexuals is evidence that the theory is a useful one in at least some cases.)

Dr Lawrence’s paper is an attempt to have ETLE included in the DSM-5, and also for MtF transsexualism to classified as a paraphilia (i.e. a fetish). It’s an outrageous paper, full of falsehoods and blatantly misleading rhetorical techniques, all in the service of her stated goal of influencing the DSM-5. The ludicrous section on furries is joined by other so-called “uncomplicated erotic target location errors”, seemingly included only to bolster Dr Lawrence’s main point. The paper would be laughable it weren’t published in a relatively high-profile journal. On my reading, Dr Lawrence comes off as a crank who is interested in advancement of her own pet theory at the expense of anything resembling good science.

That’s not to say that some transgender women aren’t autogynephilic, or that some furries aren’t autoplushophiles. Both cases are true.

A tweet from someone who might be considered to be an autoplushophile. Tweeter is anonymous by request.

 

The problem with Dr Lawrence’s paper has nothing to do with the concept of ETLE itself. The problem is that she over-reaches, not least by suggesting that ETLE should be emphasized as fundamental to understanding “non-homosexual gender identity disorder in men” and fetishes in general.

Side note: Dr Lawrence’s use of the phrase “non-homosexual” in the above quote is a tacit acknowledgement that her argument fails if you consider the simple case of transgender women who are attracted to men. She says:

“One can think of homosexual MtF transsexuals as the most feminine of gay men, persons who are so naturally feminine that it is easier and more satisfying for them to live in the world as women than as men.”

 

I include this quote as an example of Dr Lawrence’s willingness to make pat, apparently post hoc rationalizations whenever evidence contradicts her theory. She roughly supports this statement with several references from the 1980s, plus one from 1997, eras not known for their appreciation of the full range of possible gender identity. Similarly she makes no comment on non-binary gender, a growing set of identities and expressions that provides counter-evidence to the supposed prevalence of ETLE as a driver for people who are not cisgender.

There are many other problems with Dr Lawrence’s paper. These include:

• General misuse of terminology, including use of the term “error” in ETLE. She assumes that fetishes are the result of “mental dysfunction” and therefore use of the word error “reflects an objective assessment, not a subjective or moralistic one”. She specifically rejects the phrase “erotic target location variant”, which is preferred by other researchers.
• Misgendering of trans people. It’s bad in this paper but worse on her website, where for example she repeatedly refers to a transgender women as “he”.
• Consideration of the long-debunked theory that fetishistic behaviour might be linked to childhood head injuries. (She dishonestly presents this geriatric idea as a straw man to be dismantled later on.)
• The suggestion that “sexual inexperience” and “lack of social confidence” predispose men to fetishism.
• And many, many others.

It’s no surprise that Dr Lawrence’s screed failed to have an impact on the formulation of the DSM-5, and that she remains a fringe figure in her field. Yet her work, some of it at least, has a lot of value. Science always needs contrarians, and her willingness to challenge the status quo can encourage work that may lead to improvements in such a complex field. It is also laudable that her research is apparently inspired by consideration of her own condition as an autogynephilic transsexual: it gives her work poignancy and legitimacy.

Unfortunately those qualities are not present in her section on furries. ETLE is a sound concept to help think about people who are autoplushophiles, but it should be obvious to any vaguely-informed observer that such descriptions don’t apply to furry as a whole.

Dr Lawrence’s set of references tell the story:

• That Vanity Fair article (2001)
• That Salon article (2000)
• An episode of Entourage
• A book titled Deviant desires: Incredibly strange sex (billed as “lavishly illustrated”)
• Plus two newspaper articles, from 2000 and 2007 (one of which doesn’t reference plushophilia, and the other adopts a dreary sneering and titillating attitude towards sex)

It would be hard to imagine a lazier collection of references. I can’t see how her research on furries meets the standard for a high school essay, never mind a paper for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Dr Lawrence’s furry section starts with the description of a man who masturbates using plush animals, and has the fantasy of becoming a plush animal himself. On its own, this seems like a valid, uncomplicated example to explore ETLE and autoplushophilia. However Dr Lawrence goes further, using her references to classify all furries as “persons who display sexual attraction to plush animals, engage in sexual behavior while impersonating such animals, or both“. She states that fursuiting is an example of this, coining the term fursuitism to mark this as a fetish activity. She sees fursuitism as an example of autoplushophilia i.e. the erotic desire to become a stuffed animal.

She does include one caveat, that fursuiting is not always an erotic practice. Her scientific, peer-reviewed reference for this statement? Wikifur.

Despite the obvious and abundant shortcomings of Dr Lawrence’s paper, it will likely lead to further research on furries from a sexology perspective. Interest in further research may be driven by both the utility of ETLE as a mechanism for exploring the genesis of fetishes, and Dr Lawrence’s status as a high-profile contrarian in a complex field. Certainly, of all the many ways that researchers have approached the topic of furry—sociology, psychology, animal geography, feminist theory, and others—sex is a notable absence.

Further research can only be a good thing, not just because it will add to the growing knowledge of what underpins our unique community. It will, we hope, be of a lot more value than Dr Lawrence’s contribution.

You can read more about Dr Anne Lawrence here:
- http://www.annelawrence.com/ (her personal site)
- http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/anne-lawrence.html (a trans resource site that discusses, among other things, Dr Lawrence’s 1997 resignation as an anaesthesiologist after she examined a patient’s genitals without the patient’s permission)

Doug Fontaine is a writer, ployglot, and generally talkative otter. This is his second article for [adjective][species]. Read more at his SoFurry account.

If you’re looking for some furry smut story, then you’re definitely barking up the wrong tree here. But don’t be a scaredy-cat; muster up your courage and be as brave as a lion. Reading something informative can be as stimulating as a story with furs breeding like rabbits. Whether you’re as sly as a fox or as strong as an ox, you might have noticed a prevailing presence of animal related idioms in the English language. Okay, no more monkey business; let’s explore animals in our cultures throughout history.

Disregarding my previously ill-managed animal puns, we have already been exposed to stories with big bad wolves, cunning foxes, and a little mole who knew it was none of his business (a German children’s story about a mole who wanted to find out who pooped on his head… [Ref 1]) at an early age. These anecdotes were used to teach us about moral conduct, the consequences of our actions, and not to build houses out of straws or sticks. Mainly deriving from well-known German folklore and authors such as the Grimm brothers, many fables incorporate animals as symbolic representations of different concepts.

The wolf more commonly sighted during 17th and 18th century Europe is portrayed as evil, dangerous, and even gluttonous, as this “beast” posed a real threat to small villages and its agricultural farming based lifestyles. Between the years of 1764 and 1767, “La bête du Gévaudan” (The Beast of Gévaudan) [Ref 2] plagued the central French province. Not only had this wolf-like creature killed numerous precious cattle and other domesticated animals, but its most distinct ‘achievement’ at that time was the frequently reported human casualties.

In contrast, sheep and lambs are viewed as pure and innocent. They are thus connected to ideas of childhood, they are nurtured and raised by farmers like children. The Wolf and the Sheep, Three Little Pigs, and The Wolf and the Seven Goats all imply the hazards of interacting with strangers – “stranger danger”. Using this as a point of reference, we can zoomorphize our children as farm animals, frolicking around carefree and unaware of the danger that lurks behind every corner.

However, Animal Farm by George Orwell suggests that both adults and children alike are animals characterised by our respective social classes, where horses and donkeys symbolise the middle-working class whereas pigs represent different Russian communist politicians during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Civil servants like police officers are portrayed as dogs, loyal and true to their master – the law.

Of course, the main goal of this socio-political satire was to criticise Joseph Stalin (in a very ingenious way). Orwell certainly did not purposefully publish Animal Farm to support and encourage anthropomorphic literature.

The personification of animals has more complexity than merely bestowing upon them human characteristics such as speech, clothes, complex ideas and emotions, and silly hats. T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats depicts the group of domesticated felines with their own ‘non-human’ features. In the very first poem “The Naming of Cats”, the American-born poet specifically underlines that “no human research can discover” [Ref 3] the intricacy of a kitten’s name. This theme of cats having their own feline social and cultural structure opens up to new window through which we can view animals and anthropomorphism.

Needless to say, we are extremely fascinated of our own conventions and behaviour, to the point where we project human idiosyncrasies onto our furry critters. We have created entirely foreign yet understandably similar mannerisms for felines (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – T.S. Eliot or Felidae – Akif Pirincçi) and canines. Plague Dogs by Richard Adams paints the story of two feral canine protagonists. By introducing their own lingo, expressions, and turns of phrase difficult for us humans to understand, Richard Adams presents a separate canine language/culture independent from ours.

From ancient Greek fables to 20th century ground-breaking literature, there is no doubt that relating our own problems, concepts, and interactions with those of animals have played a key role in sculpting cultures around the world.

One of the most famous civilisations which feature anthropomorphised creatures is Ancient Egypt. A flourishing culture, around 3000 years BC, has repeatedly shown humanoid Gods with animal heads in their mythology. Naturally the wolf, a predominantly Nordic canine, was replaced with the jackal (different species, same symbolic connotation). Sekhem Em Pet [Ref 4] (commonly known as Anubis), God of the Dead is shown on many sculptures and drawings as having the head of such an African canine. Cats weren’t necessarily deities but worshippers in ancient Egyptian times were nonetheless plentiful. They were used as pest control, killing mice and other vermin that would potentially harm crops and spread diseases. These domesticated felines were regarded as a good omen as many mummified cats were later found in tombs, suggesting that they played a large role in the afterlife of many ancient Egyptians. Whether animals helped us during our daily lives or guided us through the afterlife, we are accustomed to relating them to our culture and existence.

Both in Egyptian mythology and Native American tribal culture, birds and insects were more likely to have been given spiritual meaning than their Eurasian counterparts. Birds of prey, such as the falcon or the eagle, are regarded as divine messengers or even as divinities themselves. Bees or other pollinating insects foreshadow progress for example.

Native American totems include animals [Ref 5] which are not mentioned in other mythologies at all. Of course, contrasting biomes contain a variety of different species. The American otter for example represents joyfulness, playfulness, and helpfulness, whereas the brown bear is seen as a totem of introspection, dreams, and will-power. As the indigenous Americans possessed a rich nomadic culture, there was no need for farming animals (with the exception of horses). Thus the wolf adopted a more spiritual undertone than the ferocious gluttonous beast this canine is described in Europe. We can clearly see how one animal might be viewed differently depending on our lifestyle.

Up until now, we have spoken of figurative meanings and metaphors concerning animals. Their ominous presence in our literature, our mythology, and our cultures prevails throughout history. But we as humans have shared this world with thousands of different creatures, and have incorporated them into our daily existence to the extent that they are essential for our survival. Take care of the living beings (whether animal or human) around you, for you never know how much an impact they have in our lives.

***

References
1. Holzwarth, W. and Erlbruch, W. (2014). The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit. [online] Goodreads.
2. Unknownexplorers.com, (2014). Unknown Explorers – Beast of Gevaudan. [online]
3. Eliot, T.S. (1952). Complete poems and plays. 1st ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, p.209 line 23
4. Marvunapp.com, (2012). Anubis (Egyptian god). [online]
5. Legendsofamerica.com, (2011). Native American Totems and Their Meanings. [online]

Furries often prefer to date other furries.

There are a lot of good reasons for this. For starters, we’re pretty awesome. We also tend to feel that furry is a full and honest version of ourselves, something we love but can only express in appropriate spaces. Furry is something to edit out in restricted social settings (like work, or extended family), and something to enjoy when we are free to be ourselves. And it’s a lot easier to express furriness in the company of other furries.

This is great, however furries are thin on the ground. And while we tend to socialise online en masse, it’s not always easy to meet someone you might be interested in, and who might also be interested in you. It’s especially difficult if you’re a heterosexual man – the numbers are not on your side.

Fortunately, science is here to help. The February 2015 issue of Evidence-Based Medicine includes a long review of online dating, looking at data to support successful strategies. It’s comprehensive but enjoyable to read – in the acknowledgements they “thank the potential dates who turned down one of us repeatedly”—and it contains a lot of lessons that can be applied to the furry world. I have distilled those down here.

Your online presence is important, and you will want to update your main profile, perhaps your Fur Affinity user page. Tell your friends that you’re making changes, as this will have the triple effect of reminding potential partners that you may be available, soliciting input and interest from your social group, and counteracting the natural tendency towards procrastination. Research shows that it’s normal to procrastinate during this step, and that going public with your plan can provide motivation to get started, which can then generate the urge to follow the task to completion.

Don’t worry too much about details. Attraction is a largely subconscious phenomenon, so keep it simple and concentrate on making a good first impression. Don’t include a simple list of your interests, friends, or links to community groups. Make sure your profile picture is attractive – it may be worthwhile commissioning something new by a well-regarded artist.

In your profile, mention that you are single but don’t mention that you are looking for a relationship. Be positive about yourself and your interests. Don’t include anything negative. About 70% of your profile should be about yourself, and about 30% should be about what you like about other people. Something like “I’m an open and happy person, and I enjoy spending time with happy people” is good.

Use simple language, which (believe it or not) will make you seem more intelligent and likeable. (This is the main reason why RandomWolf, the [adjective][species] mascot you see frowning down at you from the top of the page, will remain forever alone.) Be lightly humorous if you can, and ask your friends to check for spelling mistakes.

It’s important to stay close to reality, so personal stuff about your non-furry life is good. Mention where you live, and your personal situation, but remember to avoid dry lists: don’t say “I have a sister”; say “I’m proud of my sister, who is doing really well at school”. It’s better to talk about traits that make you personally likeable (kindness, for example), rather than mentioning academic achievement.

If you can, choose a screen name that starts with a letter towards the beginning of the alphabet. Your screen name should be neutral or positive – avoid negative terms: so “Lightning Wolf” is a lot better than “Storm Wolf”. (This may all sound a bit silly, but there is a lot of evidence showing that names have a measurable impact on success in many areas of life, not just dating.)

You should emphasise similarities between yourself and the things you find attractive in other people. That means there is going to be a few repeated words in the 70% about you, and the 30% about others, and that’s okay.

Adding photos of yourself to your gallery is a good idea. Choose photos where you in a group of people, where others are looking at you and smiling. (It matters less whether you are smiling.) If you can find a photo where you are touching someone—keep it sane, perhaps a hand over a shoulder, or on an upper arm—that’s great. The toucher is perceived to be of a higher status, so avoid photos where you are the one being touched.

When you make initial contact, make it a text message – a private message on a social networking site is good, so a Fur Affinity note is better than a shout. Make a comment that is individually tailored to the recipient (even if you’re quietly messaging a few people at once), which should be a single positive remark about your target’s profile or photo. Be reasonable though – over-the-top flattery will appear dishonest. Invite them to chat further, using rhyming poetry (which has an instinctive appeal), ideally using their name as the rhyme.

Making rhymes is harder than it sounds, by the way, especially if you’re trying to rhyme with a furry name. There are no reasonable rhymes for “wolf”. You might find an online rhyming dictionary to be helpful. Avoid the natural temptation to rhyme “fox” with “cocks”.

Your initial contact should be three or four sentences in total. Don’t ask any direct questions, just mention that you’d like to chat and leave the ball in their court. Don’t follow up: if nothing happens, nothing happens.

If you make contact and they reply, there is no value in leaving them waiting for a response. (The Fonz and/or Charlie Sheen may have counselled you to delay your response, however I’m happy to say that science has proven them wrong.) Don’t keep them waiting.

Start your chat with simple, open-ended questions like “What did you find interesting in my profile?”, and avoid yes/no questions. Spontaneous humour is good. Share trivia about yourself.

You should aim to move your chat to more direct methods over time – from asynchronous communication (like FA notes), to chats over Telegram or Skype, and eventually to video chat. The faster this happens the better: three to four weeks is a sign that the two of you are doing well. If you live near one another and you haven’t met, it’s better to meet face-to-face sooner rather than later – this may take anywhere from a few days to a few months.

Initiating online conversation is difficult. Continue using open-ended questions as a conversation starter until the two of you become more comfortable.

Be relentlessly positive, for example by saying nice things about your friends or people within furry you both know. (You might wish to mention how much you like [adjective][species], for instance.) Keep in mind that your opinion of other people will tend to reflect on you: so if you say such-and-such is lazy, this will make you seem lazy.

Negative comments, even just criticism or snarkiness, are much more memorable than positive comments, and so need a lot of positivity as counter-ballast. You shouldn’t always agree with someone—in fact it is helpful to disagree initially and then change your mind—but you should avoid direct criticism.

As your electronic relationship progresses, you will want to reduce uncertainty, in both directions. That means sharing personal information about yourself, and asking personal questions of your prospective partner. If you have specific questions, ask via the written word.

You will be able to tell if someone is hiding information or being deceptive if their response has suddenly reduced detail, or if they avoid using words like “me”, “mine”, and “I”. If you’re unsure or someone is being evasive, press for a straight answer. It’s natural to worry that being direct and persistent might come across as negative or badgering, but research suggests that it’s the best course of action.

Having said that, don’t worry too much if someone has lied about themselves to you. It’s natural and normal for people to present themselves as they hope to be in the future, not as they are right now. If you discover that someone has been lying about their academic qualifications, or employment, or living situation, or age – in general that’s not a big deal.

In video chat, your appearance and body language is important. Make sure you’re well-presented, sit upright, and check that your environment is presentable. Use hand gestures to emphasise points, and provide feedback to demonstrate that you are listening, perhaps by nodding your head or smiling at appropriate moments. Mimic your potential partner’s movements (subtly), and smile slowly so that it spreads across your face over a second or so. These movements indicate that your chemistry is good. Humour helps too.

If you make a mistake or say the wrong thing, ignore it. Mistakes are much more noticeable to ourselves than to the other person, so you might just get away with it. And if the other person starts to feel like they don’t meet your standards, demonstrate that you are nothing special by doing something clumsy, perhaps by spilling your drink during a chat. (It is counter-productive to make yourself seem too special or rare.)

It’s important to plan for termination of your video chats. You want to end on a positive note: there is a lot of evidence that the end of an experience is the most memorable by far. This phenomenon is called “duration neglect”, where experiences tend to be remembered as a series of snapshots rather than a reflection of the experience yourself, and the end of an experience remembered most vividly.

So if you have something negative about yourself to share, reveal it in the middle of a conversation. If you have something positive, save it for the end.

And if your relationship is solely online, and you live apart from one another, you should still work towards meeting face-to-face: the sooner, the better. Good luck!

Finally, please keep in mind that none of this is prescriptive. But it should help you negotiate the complex process of getting to know someone romantically.

One important post-script: if you are a guy looking to meet women in furry, be aware that harassment is a real problem in our community. Many women stay away from public furry gatherings and conventions because they are unwelcoming, and many others have developed coping strategies to deal with unwanted attention. Don’t approach a woman at a furry gathering unless they are already a friend or you are being introduced by a mutual friend. Do it online, be respectful, and be mentally prepared to be ignored or tacitly rejected.

You may guess that I have left this for last because I want you to remember it as particularly important. You’d be right. Read more here.

RandomWolf has a few questions for you.

We’ve collected a lot of data with the furry survey.  A lot.

From 2009 to 2013, the Furry Poll accrued nearly 30,000 responses, allowing us to see not only the general ways in which the furry subculture is structured, but also the ways in which it changed in that span of five years.  We’ve pulled all five years of data into a single resource which will be made available soon, both as a raw dataset and as a new visualization, a data explorer that will allow you to plot many different variables against each other.

As I’ve said before, the Furry Poll is not, never has been, and certainly never will be a scientific study of the furry fandom. That is the purview of many other qualified folks inside and outside of the fandom, and one ought to look to the IARP for such information. If one wants to think of the Poll, it’s best to think of it as a market survey: a simple view of the market as viewed through the eyes of willing participants. The goal is not to make broad and sweeping statements of absolute truth about the furry subculture, but to view through our communities eyes the demographic and psychological makeup of the community. It’s a snapshot of how a good portion of the community views itself.

This year, we’re bringing you an all-new survey structure, and we will be collecting data in this format for the next five years to compile into the next longitudinal segment. If you’ve taken the Furry Survey before, remember that you can (and should!) take it once per year.

New this year, the survey is broken down into three sections: demographics and overview (featuring improved handling of characters, as well as gender expression and identity), a psychographic battery (similar to a personality test), and questions about sexuality and interests. As always, all questions and sections are optional, and you need only fill out what you’re comfortable with. Additionally, we will be welcoming responses from individuals who do not consider themselves members of the furry subculture in order to see the ways in which furries are different from non-furries.

Click here to head to the survey!

On 7 December 2014, the Midwest FurFest hotel was evacuated after an apparently intentional chemical attack. No culprit has been identified to date, but many furs reasonably assume that the attack was motivated by anti-furry hate.

We at [adjective][species], endlessly furry-positive as we are, have been the subject of quite a few impotent and easily ignorable threats since we started back in 2012. Some of them have even suggested that furries should be targeted by chemical attacks, such as in this Encyclopaedia Dramatica thread (from January 2014):

It is, of course, incredibly unlikely that there is any connection between Encyclopaedia Dramatica‘s teenage rage and the MWFF attack 11 months later. Hate is common; attacks are rare.

Internet hate, on its own, does little harm. And while it’s fair to say that perpetrators of violence are more likely to engage in hateful speech on the internet, the corollary is not true, at least not significantly. It is not fair to assume that hateful people are more likely to be responsible for a physical attack.

This reasoning is the same as the suggestion that video game violence leads to real-world violence. While violent people are more likely to enjoy violent video games, it’s wrong to suggest players of violent games are any more likely to be violent than the general population. Similarly expressions of hate cannot be assumed to lead to hateful acts.

There is a loose connection though, and it’s an important one. Expressions of hate, especially when there are many of them, create an environment that normalizes hatred. It is in this environment that real-world threats develop.

So while our teenage peanut’s intolerant ejaculation counts for nothing on its own, in combination with dozens of similar discharges it creates the impression of a genuine anti-furry community. This facade of community encourages the small fringe of people who may actually do physical harm, making them feel their acts are justifiable and righteous. Our hypothetical MWFF attacker(s) would undoubtedly lurk or contribute in such circles.

This doesn’t mean that people who perpetuate hate are responsible for the actions of a tiny majority. However they are, unwittingly, contributing – a contribution that would be easy to condemn if hate weren’t so easy and seductive.

Hate creates a sense of belonging, an illusion of fellowship. A community can coalesce over any shared interest, even something as intangible as shared hatred for some ‘other’. While hate-driven groups vary wildly (and can even be objectively right or wrong – you might consider both of the extreme ends of the vaccination ‘debate’ to be largely driven by hatred), they always have a few things in common, such as:

• Members of the group feel that they are in the right, or at least righteous.
• The group is self-reinforcing, which means that they look internally for confirmation of their thoughts and actions, rather than externally. This is sometimes referred to as an “echo chamber”, a phenomenon that occurs when you surround yourself with people who already agree with you.
• The group is primarily defined by what it is “against”.
• The focus of the hatred is thought of as a monolithic entity with a common goal, rather than a collection of individuals.

These features mean that those who disagree with the hate group will tend to be belittled and immediately discarded. Anyone who has come across hatred online will know that there is no value in trying to reason with the group.

Hate-driven groups fail when they are exposed to individuals from the target group. This destroys the collective group delusion that there is a monolithic “enemy” that must be fought.

One example of this phenomenon is the decline in homophobia in the United States. It’s a good example because there has been a pitched battle in recent years over whether same-sex couples should be denied the right to get married, and there it’s lots of data on the topic. (An objection to same-sex marriage doesn’t always equal homophobia, but it’s a close-enough correlation for my purposes.)

There has been a big shift in public opinion away from denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, a change which has created an environment where more gay people can be open about their sexuality. The correlation is no coincidence: of those people who have changed their mind about same-sex marriage, more than half have done so because of “cohort replacement”, which is researcher-speak for “I didn’t know any gay people before, and now I do”.

What’s striking about this result is that there is little indication that people have been swayed by reasoned argument. Hate-driven ideology doesn’t tend to change in the face of facts.

Counterintuitively, there is evidence that the opposite occurs: opinions tend to become entrenched and more extreme in the face of reasonable counter-argument. Research has consistently shown that when someone has a strong – but demonstrably false – belief, attempts by others to correct that fact tend to fail, and may in fact increase the confidence in the false belief.

One study on the topic looked at political beliefs. It showed that people on either end of the ideological spectrum—conservatives and liberals—would change their mind about a falsely-held belief only if the change supported their pre-existing views. Conservatives retained the belief that WMDs had been found in Iraq (they have not), and liberals retained the belief that President Bush had banned stem-sell research (he had not). Only these groups, those with an extreme ideological position facing facts contrary to their position, would fail to be corrected.

Political ideology is very different from a hate group, but the lesson is the same: there is no value in attempting to directly correct an apparently false or misguided belief. On balance, such attempts are probably counterproductive. There is no point attempting to reason with an anti-furry.

Worse, attacking or attempting to correct hate-driven groups can easily lead to the creation of new hate-driven groups. It’s easy, and reasonable, to become angered by hate, and counter-hatred hate groups can show all the internal camaraderie, righteousness, and outwards negativity of the targeted group. Predictably, all such groups do is create conflict and entrenchment of everyone’s pre-existing opinion.

I used a political example earlier because I know that there will be several readers who fall to the relative extremes of either side of the political spectrum. The rest of us will probably be able to think of a friend who are so inclined. And you can bet that many of the conservative readers will insist that WMDs were indeed found in Iraq, and that many of the liberals will insist that Bush did indeed ban stem cell research, even though both positions are provably wrong. (Perhaps members of each group will say something like “even if it’s not technically true, it’s still essentially true”.)

I make this point because hate isn’t about true and false. It doesn’t matter if your argument is correct: your facts are unlikely to make a difference.

But you can make a difference by following the example of rapid change in American attitudes towards same-sex marriage. Exposure to positive counter-examples does lead to positive change.

I would suggest: look at the way you spend your social time. Some of that time will be positive, some will be neutral, some will be negative. If you hold a strong, personally-important opinion, consider ways you can reduce the time you spend negatively, and increase the time you spend positively.

As individuals, we all have a small responsibility towards society, and we can choose to make our impression a negative or positive one.

Hating something is easy. Hate is juvenile. Hate is natural. We all feel it to some extent. It’s a product of our evolution as social beings, of members of a race collected in tribes or villages. We are driven to distrust, fear, and hate the amorphous “others”, a Darwinian survival strategy we have encoded into our DNA and social structures. But in our modern interconnected world, it’s a destructive strategy of parochialism, hate, and bullying. You can see it in action in any high school.

Liking something is difficult. You may attract haters. If you are vocal about liking furry, you may attract anti-furries. But for every vocal hater there will be people in the background, silently listening and thinking and learning and appreciating.

Simply being positive and visible, when and where you can, makes you an ambassador for your beliefs. And every idea needs positive ambassadors – the most visible ambassadors, especially in fringe communities, are rarely the best. Just look at furry.

Please note that submissions are now closed.

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled furry introspection to bring you this message from Lunostophiles:

For the past week, [adjective][species] has been focusing on furry themes in non-furry poetry. It’s been really great, as a poet, to see Shining River writing about the use of animals in verse, and all they can represent (both realistically and metaphorically). Poetry sometimes has an issue of gatekeeping, even if it’s self-imposed, so it’s nice to have open discussion.

But I think we should take this one step further.

I, as a proxy for [adjective][species], want to see what you, the fandom, have to offer. We are holding a poetry submission drive, with the hopeful outcome of publishing and showcasing a few great poets here on the website!

A few rules, though:

1. Submissions must be either about animals (realistically or metaphorically), or about the fandom. This means you can write about a specific animal, or an animalistic ideal, or about cons, fandom politics, or what it means to be a furry. As long as it has some sort of relation to animals/furries, we’ll accept it as a submission!
2. Submissions must be currently unpublished. While we will totally accept submissions that have been posted on Weasyl, SoFurry, Fur Affinity, or other sites like it, we will not be accepting anything that’s been published by any web- or print-based publication. If you had to submit it before, you can’t submit it here.
3. Submissions do not have to be new. If you have a poem you really like that’s a few years old, that’s still fine! Submitted poems don’t have to be for the express purpose of this application.

Our hope is to get a few really stand-out submissions to post on [adjective][species]. Please submit by the end of March. There is no limit to size, form, or style—be creative, be original, and write about whatever you want within the parameters.

I’m so excited to curate this collection, and I can’t wait to see what you all submit!

Submit your poetry by email to: [email protected]

Day 3 of our curated animal poems, courtesy of Shining River

Robert Sward Uncle Dog: The Poet at 9
Robert Frost The Bear
W.S. Merwin Vixen

Day 2 of our curated animal poems, courtesy of Shining River

Billy Collins Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House
James Wright A Blessing
Ted Hughes The Thought-Fox

Day 1 of our curated animal poems, courtesy of Shining River

William Stafford Later and In Fur
Galway Kinnell The Angel
Carl Sandburg Wilderness