[adjective][species]

Guest post by Shining River. Shining River lives in the high lands of Utah and began participating in the furry community in 1998. Now a fifty-something greymuzzle, he has been a reader of poetry since his early adult years. Besides furry art and literature, he is interested in Scottish and Irish culture and Western American folk culture and history. You may see him in public performing with one or two of our local Scottish bagpipe bands.

Why do some of us read, and occasionally write, poetry?

Because we find in poetry a language of emotion and intellect that somehow corresponds to events of our own lives, emotions that we have felt, and revelations that other persons have seen and felt similar circumstances and thoughts. Our attraction to a particular poem, or individual poet, or themes in poetry is often determined by how we feel about ourselves, our connections to others, to the world, and to the past. For many of us in the furry community, our relationship to animals is more than just looking at art images on our electronic media, or enjoying the good times at cons. Animals have a special place in our lives and we construct our mental lives at least partly upon them, whether they are real animals or not. We read and write them into our life.

Poetry involving animal themes, written by modern poets, is somewhat difficult to find. My research has shown me that there are very few modern poets who have a large body of animal themed works. Poets in general write about a broad and profound range of human events and subjects but animals and our relationships to them are only a small part of modern academic poetry, perhaps because the lives of humans gives them so much material to draw upon. When they do write animals into their poems, they may not be writing about a specific animal but the animal may be the poet’s symbol or metaphor for a subject, or for the poet himself or herself. A good example of this is Denise Levertov’s Talking To Grief in her use of the dog as a simile for her experience of grief. Her poem is an example of how authors, and any of us, may use poetry and other forms of writing to make difficult experiences in our life easier to mentally grasp.

Talking To Grief

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

Mark Strand’s Eating Poetry describes the poet himself and his enjoyment of poetry as a happy and active dog.

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

It is rare that the poet lets the animals speak directly to us. Mark Strand does this in his Five Dogs, and Koon Woon in his Excerpts from “In Water Buffalo Time”. Reading these, the reader will see what a good job a skilled poet can do in personifying an animal.

(excerpt from In Water Buffalo Time)

…Yet a man, with all his skill on an abacus, is afraid
Of things he cannot see. The man and his family
Are afraid of dark, gloomy gods handed down to them
And buy copious amounts of incense and charms.
My mother, whose teats I suckled for only a brief while,
Gave me no such gods of thunder to fear.

I don’t even fear tigers. A man is cursed with worry:
Thieves because he has too much, fires because he is careless,
And ghosts because he offends others.
But I, with the gold-pleated sky for a blanket,
Sweet-smelling rice straw for a bed, a breeze from the river,
I have recompense for my toil, with the village symphony
Of crickets, cicadas, and bullfrogs,
I shall say beasthood is as good as Buddhahood…

Much of modern poetry with an animal theme is either the poet’s description of the animal or a narrative, the telling of a story, of the animal. Robert Bly offers us his observation of cattle in a barn (in a prose poem), with a poetic conclusion.

Opening the Door of a Barn I Thought Was Empty on New Year’s Eve

   I got there by dusk. The west shot up a red beam. I open the double barn doors and go in. Sounds of breathing! Thirty steers are wandering around, the partitions gone. Creatures heavy, shaggy, slowly moving in the dying light. Bodies with no St. Teresas look straight at me. The floor is cheerful with clean straw. Snow gleams in the feeding lot through the other door. The bony legs of the steers look frail in the pale light from the snow, like uncles living in a city.

   A barn is a sort of house…the windowpanes clotted with dust and cobwebs. The dog stands up on his hind legs to look over the worn wooden gate. Large shoulders watch him, and he suddenly puts his legs down, frightened. After a while, he puts them up again. A steer’s head swings to look at him, and stares for three or four minutes, unable to get a clear picture from the instinct reservoir, then suddenly bolts…

   But their enemies are asleep, the barn is asleep…These breathing ones do not demand eternal life, they ask only to eat the crushed corn, and the hay, coarse as rivers, and cross the rivers, and sometimes feel an affection run along the heavy nerves. They have the wonder and bewilderment of the whale, with too much flesh, the body with the lamp lit inside, fluttering on a windy night.

Death and loss in animal themed poems

Loss, tragedy, dying and death have been common themes in poetry since the begining of literature. These themes are also found in modern animal themed poems.

In reading the work of the modern poets of the late 19th century and the 20th century, it may be helpful to keep in mind how most people regarded animals in that time. Until almost the middle of the 20th century, in both rural and urban areas, domestic animals were considered to be machines to be worked and exploited until the animal died. Vachel Lindsay’s The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken, and Donald Hall’s Names of Horses express this. Wild animals were regarded as another natural resource to be taken by force, as in William Stafford’s Meditation and James Dickey’s Approaching Prayer.

(excerpt from Approaching Prayer)

…The sun mounts my hackles
And I fall; I roll
In the water;
My tongue spills blood
Bound for the ocean;
It moves away, and I see
The trees strain and part, see him
Look upward

Inside the hair helmet I look upward out of the total
Stillness of killing with arrows. I have seen the hog see me kill him
And I was as still as I hoped…

The modern poets are capable of expressing a feeling of poignancy regarding aging and loss as we find in Robert Creeley’s part 6 from his poem Later when he writes,

(excerpt from “Later”, part 6)

…After all
these years,

no dog’s coming home
again. It’s skin’s

moldered
through rain, dirt,

to dust, hair alone
survives, matted tangle.

Your own, changed,
your hair, greyed,

your voice not the one
used to call him home…

Mark Strand also writes poignantly of loss and decline of life in his Five Dogs.

(excerpt from Five Dogs )

…I am the last of the platinum
Retrievers, the end of a gorgeous line.
But there’s no comfort being who I am.
I roam around and ponder fate’s abolishments
Until my eyes are filled with tears and I say to myself, “Oh Rex,
Forget. Forget. The stars are out. The marble moon slides by.”

Although throughout history humans have had favored pets and we do find writing in both prose and poetry from earlier times expressing more sentimental feelings toward them, descriptions of the death of animals as harsh and even cruel are common in animal-themed poetry. An outstanding exception to this is W.S. Merwin’s more contemporary Fox Sleep, which is essentially about the Buddhist ideas of enlightenment. In that poem, the death of the fox is an expression of the idea of release from the Karmic wheel into enlightenment and nirvana.

(excerpt from Fox Sleep)

…I spoke to them
   about waking until one day one of them asked me
When someone has wakened to what is really there
   is that person free of the chain of consequences
and I answered yes and with that I turned into a fox
   and I have been a fox for five hundred lives
and now I have come to ask you to say what will
   free me from the body of a fox please tell me
when someone has wakened to what is really there
   is that person free of the chain of consequences
and this time the answer was That person sees it as it is
   then the old man said Thank you for waking me…

Robinson Jeffers includes an idea of rebirth in his poem, Vulture.

(excerpt from Vulture)

…I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, “My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work: they are not for you.” But how beautiful he
     looked , gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light
     over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak
       and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes–
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after
       death.

And finally, James Dickey’s The Heaven of Animals offers us a revelation of their Heaven.

(excerpt from The Heaven of Animals)

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains it is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open…

Poetic LOLs ?!

We of the furry community know that animals can be fun and funny, and so do some modern poets.

Billy Collins’ Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House is a good example. Gary Snyder’s Smokey Bear Sutra is amusing, witty, and wise. Philip Levine’s A Theory of Prosody is a poem with more subtle humor, shown when he writes about his cat who applies a sharp claw to his hand as he is writing, to get him to briefly stop writing. The reader must observe that the poem has some awkward line endings (presumably caused by the cat) in order to grasp Levine’s jest.

(excerpt from A Theory of Prosody)

When Nellie, my old pussy
cat, was still in her prime,
she would sit behind me
as I wrote, and when the line
got too long she’d reach
one sudden black foreleg down
and paw at the moving hand,
the offensive one. The first
time she drew blood I learned
it was poetic to end a line anywhere to keep her
quiet. After all, many morn-
ings she’d gotten to the chair
long before I was even up…

So, furry readers, there is modern poetry out there in the literary world that speaks to us. I continue to look for animal-themed poems and I hope those of you reading this will enjoy what I have found so far and that you will seek out even more.

See here for a full list of all referenced works, and many other animal poems, hosted at Shining River’s Dreamwidth journal.

In the coming days, [adjective][species] will be publishing small subsets of this long list of animal poetry, curated by Shining River. We hope you enjoy.

Doug Fontaine is a writer, ployglot, and generally talkative otter. Read more at his SoFurry account.

This article will touch upon the reason having a fursona is so essential for many members of our community. Whether we have a spiritual or a more down-to-earth relationship between our normal and furry selves, the fandom accentuates what is otherwise a purely personal fantasy.

Art, literature, music, blogs, videos, and more; they all serve to express common interests within their respective communities. Through drawings, stories, and even this article, we portray our fascination of anthropomorphic animals, similar to other subcultures and their main interests. We have sites dedicated to furry artwork, podcasts with furry hosts, even famous musicians and authors who consider themselves furries (such as Fox Amoore or Kyell Gold). We hold numerous gatherings throughout the globe. In 2013, Anthrocon (currently the largest fur con) was estimated to have generated $6.2 million in direct spending (ref) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA.

However, an interesting phenomenon has occurred in the furry fandom that separates the subculture from “the norm”.

The foundation of our community has been overtaken by original fan-made content. Okay, maybe my last statement needs some explanation and examples. By “foundation”, I mean the source, the spark from which the furry subculture emerged. Fred Patten—a historian and writer—identified the first usage of the term “furry” as occurring in 1980, (the question originated during a debate regarding anthropomorphic beings at the NorEasCon II World Science Fiction Convention in Boston) (ref). The fandom has grown exponentially, inspired and nourished by animated and illustrated media featuring creatures with humanoid characteristics, such as SWAT Cats, Robin Hood, The Lion King, Looney Toons, etc. along with novels that draw our attentions to talking feral animals.

We have come a long and perhaps, sometimes tedious, way from Albedo Anthropomorphics by Gallacci to social websites dedicated to our own furry creations such as Fur Affinity, SoFurry, etc. Through three decades, the fandom seemingly lost (not completely) its interest in Watership Down, Redwall, Kimba: the White Lion, and Disney’s Adventure of the Gummi Bears. Instead our focus has been directed, now more than ever, at our own creations; stories, artwork of fursonas, fursuiters…

Beloved characters and popular fursonas such as Sea Salt, November, Buddy, Lupin Assassin, difFURently, and Fender (just to name a few) are maybe more likely to ring a bell than Kimba, Mattimeo or Matthias the Mouse, and Bigwig. We are valuing our fans and their works more than what made us admirers in the first place. That is not a criticism, quite the opposite, but rather an acknowledgement of an impressive feat. Our fandom has become an internet Ouroboros, if you catch my drift. It doesn’t rely on external factors/contributors anymore to survive, to create new content – Fursonas!

Commissioners fuel the artistic side of the furry subculture with drawings of their characters. Numerous of artwork depict the individual furs, you! Writers blog and compose tales in which their own or fictional anthropomorphic characters thrive. Kyell Gold, a fellow fur is a prime example of how our fandom can create stable careers in furry literature. Roleplayers actively participate within the community to engage others with their own fursonas. At the majority of conventions, “Fursuit Parades” are held as fursuiters animate their fursonas with hugs and muzzle boops and murr sui-…you get the idea.

A fursona isn’t a mere description of who you are, or just a drawing of your furry self within the furry community. It initiates for many their participation to the subculture, entrance fee if you want. Our fursonas are as much part of the fandom as the fandom is a part of our fuzzy or scaly alter egos.

To misquote Karl Marx via George Orwell: “Animals of the world, Unite!” Whether you see your character to be your totem animal, a personification of your inner self, or a better version of who you see yourself to be, be proud to show the fandom what you’ve got! Without individual characters and fursonas all over the world, our community would be solely devoted to artists/artisans/authors/etc. rather than being the welcoming family, cherishing every single contribution you want to offer.

Americentrism is the tendency of some Americans to assume that the American point of view is the dominant one. Expressions of Americentrism in furry are almost always benign, but they are everywhere.

America is a big place and if you live in the US—more so than just about anywhere else (save perhaps North Korea)—it’s sometimes easy to forget that the rest of the world exists. Americentric comments probably go unnoticed by most Americans, but for the rest of us, they are a constant reminder that Americans can appear self-obsessed or (at worst) ignorant.

Americentrism usually manifests as a subtle slip of language. The effect is similar to language that reinforces social norms, for example when someone assumes that a doctor is male, using “he” by default. One mistake doesn’t do any real harm, but if you’re female and exposed to this assumption over and over again, it can have a cumulative effect.

I have a couple of examples from my American cohorts here at [adjective][species] coming up, but first let’s take a look at a recent example by one of the giants of the furry community.

Fred Patten, furry historian and reviewer, recently published a review of a volume of L’Épée d’Ardenois over at his new home at Dogpatch Press. (Fred moved to Dogpatch Press recently after becoming frustrated with editorial delays at Flayrah.) Fred’s opening line:

“This is part of Lex Nakashima’s & my project to bring American furry fans the best of new French-language animalière bandes dessinées.”

 

Fred doesn’t mean “American furry fans”, he means “English-speaking furry fans”. He has managed to forget that people speak English other than Americans, a slip that would be scarcely believable if only such errors weren’t so common. If you’re a non-American, this line sticks out like a sore thumb, and will probably be the last line you read—why, after all, spend time reading the thoughts of someone so apparently thoughtless?

My next example, one I’ve used before, is from the annals of [adjective][species]. Zik has published a few articles over the years, most notable his series profiling furry communities around the world. His title for this series is Foreign Furry Fandoms.

Alliterative allusions aside, the idea that anything non-American might be reasonably considered “foreign” is plainly ludicrous. It only works if you assume that America is the centre of the world, and that everything else is somehow on the fringes. Zik didn’t intend to marginalize some 6.7 billion people (or at least the 900 million or so non-American English speakers), yet he has managed it through the subtle exclusionary language of Americentrism.

I mentioned this to Makyo, [adjective][species] founder and owner, who opined that it wasn’t a problem. After all, I was told, site tracking software shows that 98% of [adjective][species] readers are American.

Is this true? Of course not. The site tracking software just isn’t very good at identifying country of origin from IP address, and it defaults to American if the location is uncertain. Yet worldly Makyo—this conversation took place over a beer in London—was happy enough to assume just 1 out of 50 [a][s] readers came from outside the land of broad stripes and bright stars.

It’s very difficult to guess the real furry nationality breakdown. Looking at convention attendance (ref), it’s clear that the non-American population is large, and growing.

Attendance at non-American conventions, for example, is about 20% of total attendance, an increase from basically nothing in the last 15 years.

This proportion is increasing: total attendance at non-American conventions is growing at a faster rate. Non-American convention attendance is growing at 25-50% per year whereas American convention growth has been around 15% per year for some time.

Of course Americentrism is not a furry phenomenon. It’s everywhere. The winner of many domestic American sporting competitions are named “world champions”. And Americans insist on locating American towns with nomenclature “Town, State” and in the next breath locate a non-American town with “Town, Country”—as in “Paris, Texas” and “Paris, France”. This makes it seem—to non-Americans at least—as if Americans think that Texas and France are directly comparable entities.

The general term for this sort of behaviour is ethnocentrism, and it’s a worldwide phenomenon. At best it’s mildly annoying, and at worst is can be xenophobic. Americentrism can certainly be anywhere on that spectrum, although within furry it mercifully seems to be limited to the benign-if-boneheaded end.

More generally, it comes about through a known psychological idea described by Daniel Kahneman as WYSIATI – What You See Is All There Is. Our human brain is lazy, and so tends only to consider information that is easily accessible. It takes time and mental effort to think beyond our small world (Kahneman calls this our ‘slow’ brain), and so we simply tend not to bother.

So Fred Patten doesn’t think that only Americans speak English; Zik doesn’t think that the word foreign means “non-American”; and Makyo doesn’t believe that 2% of our readers are non-American. It was just lazy thinking, something that we all do.

And you, dear American reader, probably do it to. I hope that the idea behind this article comes to mind next time you’re lazily implying that the American experience is universal. (Hopefully you’ve read this far, and are not currently furiously crayoning a missive to your local congressman, or perhaps bleating to some Reddit echo-chamber, or whatever it is Americans do when presented with a spot of contrarianism.)

It would, American reader, be a pity if you had stopped reading, because this is the point where I talk about how great your country is and how there is some truth behind the idea of American exceptionalism, Americentrism’s older and wiser sibling. I know how you like it when people say nice things about America: I have seen your sporting events and award shows on TV. So, to honour America, let’s look at ways that the USA is a special place.

The United States constitution was created as a reaction against the paternalism of the Great British ruling classes. The USA was founded on the principles of seventeenth-century liberalism, a philosophical counterpoint to a state-led community-centred nation.

The US culture is thus one of individualism, one that values liberty, egalitarianism, and populism. Control resides with the people more than the rulers – the spirit of the United State is, essentially, anarchic. From the outside, the United States looks free, anti-elitist, and rather violent.

It is these values, which are as far as I know (and as far as Seymour Martin Lipset, from whom I am basing all these reflections on American culture, knows) are unique in our world. The United States is the closest thing that the world has to a genuinely egalitarian nation. This, of course, has its plusses and minuses, a discussion always best kept within the confines of a free democratic election.

America’s culture and her post-WWII wealth led the US to become the dominant cultural force in the second half of the 20th century. It’s no coincidence that the furry community first appeared in this environment, and no surprise that the rest of the world is lagging years or decades behind. The origins of our furry culture are American, however today’s furry culture is not an exclusively American one.

Every country has its own version of furry culture. Attending an American convention as an outsider, as I have done on several occasions (and written about for [a][s]), is a foreign and often disorienting experience. Yet there are many genuinely international commonalities in our furry world that we all experience whether we are Russian or French or Australian or American.

Our community is a genuinely international and internationalist phenomenon. How to describe those elements of furry culture that are universal? – I’d start with inclusive, peaceful and tolerant. I’d say that we engage in abstraction of physical identity. I say we place high value on friendly physical contact and playfulness. None of these identifiers are uniquely American.

They are ours.

It’s Ursa Major Award season. Furry’s biggest and best awards are now open for nominations of the best of 2014’s anthropomorphic art. Anyone and everyone can take part.

The Ursa Majors are intended to be the furry equivalent of fandom awards, such as Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards. And while it’s fair to say that an Ursa Major doesn’t have the resonance or recognition of a Hugo, the competition is in rude health, with around 1000 people casting their vote over each of the past few years.

Yet the Ursa Majors aren’t flawless, and it’s not always clear what purpose they are intended to serve. Are the Ursa Majors providing any value to the furry community?

The biggest strength and biggest weakness of the Ursa Majors is the voting system. They are a popularity contest, with the winner chosen by popular vote. This is good because it’s inclusive, and bad because it favours already well-known works, instead of more complex, more meritorious, and more niche works.

Exhibit A: the 2013 Ursa Major Award winners included Pokemon, Frozen, and My Little Pony. It’s reasonable to say that recognition of these works add nothing to the furry community, and that the creators of these works couldn’t care less.

Yet these award winners, and the similarly mainstream and well-known winners that are awarded year-in year-out, are a good reflection of what is popular in the furry community at the time. This is a positive thing not just because it’s the natural outcome of an open vote, but because it provides something of a historical snapshot of furry in any given year.

In general, works that are by-furry for-furry tend to lose out to those with mainstream or fan popularity, at least in some Ursa Major Award categories. There are exceptions, and those are where a work (or artist) has gained a very strong following within furry itself. Kyell Gold is a good example of this: he was a shoo-in for Best Anthropomorphic Novel, up until the point that he voluntarily excluded himself from the Ursa Majors in 2012.

In his reasoning for withdrawal, Kyell said: “I’d like to help the fandom’s literary scene mature, and part of that is showcasing more of the authors that are doing really good work. My name’s already up there in the lists; let’s see some of the other people.”

Essentially, the value of an Ursa Major awards had declined for Kyell, because he already had an established fanbase, and that he didn’t see much value in the award merely confirming that fact at the cost of other writers. It is easy to make the same argument (writ large) for the likes of Frozen and My Little Pony, although of course in those cases there is nobody who cares enough to even acknowledge the Ursa Majors, let alone withdraw from them.

Of course, some fans of Frozen, My Little Pony, and Pokemon will have enjoyed their respective victories, just as fans of Kyell Gold will have enjoyed seeing him acknowledged. And by virtue of the popularity of these works, they attract more participation in the Ursa Majors, and more discussion on their relative merits. (To put it another way: in any given year there are for more furries who have seen ten animated films with anthropomorphic content than, say, read ten furry novels.)

It’s worth adding that the Ursa Majors tend to award childish works (i.e. Pokemon, My Little Pony, Frozen). This is also a natural outcome of the popular vote, which will always favour the lowest common denominator. This is why you are much more likely to see Paddington Bear in the Ursa Majors 2014 “Motion Picture” shortlist than, say, Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance. (Not that either of them stand a chance against Guardians of the Galaxy.) This isn’t a bad thing, just a another reason why the Ursa Majors are unlikely to highlight anything new or surprising: to a large extent, they tell us what we already know.

The committee that runs the Ursa Majors, the Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Association (ALAA), have introduced a partial solution to this shortcoming, creating in 2011 a juried “Choice Award“. The Choice Award, which is selected by internal ALAA voting, is given to a work judged to be “outstanding”. It’s an opportunity to highlight a worthy but lower-profile anthropomorphic work.

The Choice Award has been given twice, in 2011 and 2013. The 2013 selection was, to my mind, a bizarre choice: The Ursa Major was given to a My Little Pony fan-made musical animation called Children of the Night. And while the animation in Children of the Night is impressive for an amateur and fan-made effort, it’s hardly a great work of art, or lacking a ready-made and attentive audience.

Having said that, the Choice Award is not judged by me, it’s judged by the ALAA. I suspect that the MLP fan animation choice is a product of the ALAA committee, which is made up of four principals (plus a dozen or so “convention representatives”). The four are Fred Patten (age 74), Rod O’Riley (50), Kay Shapero (64), and Bernard Doove (57).

All four are legends of the furry community, have been instrumental in the creation and moulding of the furry community, and still keenly contribute today. All four were involved with the early days of furry, back when it would have been best described as a fandom, before the shift towards the identity-based subculture we know and love today. Their choice of an amateur My Little Pony video feels, to me, like a fannish choice.

I don’t question the quality of the their judgement, but I do think it’s a pity that the Choice Award wasn’t used to recognise some of the outstanding new wave of furry graphic art that is being produced. RRUFFURR Two, for example, is an outstanding avant-garde anthology that attempts to redefine the form of the graphic novel into something explicitly furry… and was published in the same year that Children of the Night was uploaded to YouTube.

There are several Ursa Major categories where by-furry for-furry art does not have competition from the mainstream: essentially books, published illustrations, and websites. These categories, websites aside, tend to draw the lowest voting numbers but provide the greatest value to the furry community. Furries looking to explore niche furry art can confidently dip their toes into the water based on the Ursa Major nominees and winners.

Interestingly, furries compete strongly with mainstream publications in the comic strip and graphic novel categories. I think that this is a sign that mature art is emerging from the furry community in these areas, and I would point towards a couple of recent highlights here on [adjective][species] for further evidence of that: my review of PIES, by Ian King, and Makyo’s look at Rory Frances’s comics.

There are three categories that cover comics and graphic novels, categories that probably need rethinking in 2015, as the world moves away from physical to digital media. The Ursa Majors were founded in 2001, and while the categories made sense at the time, it’s hard to see the need for separate awards like “Other Literary Work” (which includes “comic collections & serialized online stories”), “Graphic Story” (“comic books and serialized online stories”), and “Comic Strip” (“newspaper-style strips, including those with ongoing arcs”).

Another overdue update is the separate categories for “Website” and “Magazine”. Over the past couple of years, Flayrah has been nominated for “Magazine” (but not “Website) while [adjective][species] has been nominated for “Website” (but not “Magazine”). In fact, in 2013, all five nominations for “Magazine” were internet-only. It’s not clear to me why Flayrah is grouped with, say, In-Fur-Nation, while [a][s] is grouped with Fur Affinity.

(Okay, it is clear to me. It’s because that’s where nominations were made. I am going to take a stab in the dark and guess that some sites were nominated for both categories, and the Ursa Major committee pragmatically opted to excise one. My point is that the categories themselves have become anachronistic.)

All in all, these quibbles are minor. While I think that the purpose of the Ursa Majors is muddied by its reliance on popular vote, I don’t see any obvious way this might be changed without affecting the healthy participation rate. Without a doubt, the Ursa Majors are the most relevant and worthwhile formal furry award. They are useful to furry consumers looking to explore furry works, and they are of undoubted value to the furry winners.

The Ursa Majors are decided in two stages: nomination (which is open until 28 February), and voting (which opens on 15 March). The most popular five nominees make a shortlist, which goes on to final voting. Effectively, you vote twice – like a French election, the least popular candidates will not reach the final stage.

So get nominating. You can nominate as many of as few works as you like in each category.

Here at [adjective][species], we have highlighted several worthy 2014 Ursa Major nominees. You might consider including these in your nomination form and, perhaps, vote for them too:

• Big Teeth by Rory Frances (Best Graphic Story)
• PIES by Ian King (Best Other Literary Work)
• Harvest by Clair C. (Best Comic Strip)
• Paper Bag by Jean-Baptiste Gaudet (Best Dramatic Series or Short Work)
• Species Popularity by Sex, Gender & Sexual Orientation by Ruxley (Best Other Literary Work), a popular visualization published here on [a][s]
• Tongues of Beasts and Angels by Khed (Best Other Literary Work), a terrific piece or writing published on [a][s] back in January

…and of course [adjective][species] (Best Website)

Nominations for the 2014 Ursa Major Awards

Real Apex Preds

Today’s art post is about the work of Rory Frances.  Rory is a comic artist in the Seattle area, working with a variety of themes and incorporating his own unique style.

This first image is taken from his comic Big Teeth.  On the surface, Big Teeth is the story of two friends who have gotten split up at a party, but beneath that, it’s an intricate examination of predator, prey, and scavenger dynamics.

Rory’s art is full of wavy, hasty lines, though it’s worth noting that this does not imply that his art is, in itself, hasty.  Everything is carefully placed within an image, and the action that goes along with the genre of comics is evident in the movement of each pane.

YAAAAH CUBE

This is evident in the flow of his work, Hype Cube, wherein the characters move sinuously from one panel to the next and the text breaks the boundaries of those very same panels.  The colorist of the comic, Sloan Leong, also utilizes the technique of changing the mood of the story through the use of color: as the story advances, so does the overall color scheme used in each panel.

Performing is only fun in some situations, I think.

Finally, his recently published comic, Boys Are Slapstick (18+ link for sexual situations) in the ‘zine ZEAL, is a fantastic deconstruction of the ways in which we perform and act for others in very intentional, if occasionally fictional ways.  We have brought up the idea of front-stage personas here on [a][s] before, and I think that a lot of this particular work hearkens back to that idea through the clever use of cartoons and “fictional” characters.

You can find Rory’s work on Tumblr and follow him on Twitter for more updates!  If you’re interested in supporting his work, you can also find him on Patreon.

Guest article. Mikepaws is a professional photographer who has been involved with furry for eight years. This article was originally posted on his personal journal at mikepaws.co.uk.

Last week, a friend on Twitter asked a question, “Who does the copyright on a fursuit photo actually belong to?”

As a professional photographer, and member of the furry fandom, I thought that it was a perfect opportunity to do some research on the law, the copyright of photographs and rights of models/subjects.

So here I present to you my thoughts and opinions on photography rights for fursuiters and photographers.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, if you seriously do wish to seek legal advice. Please speak to one!

So the simplest question of all: Who owns the copyright to a photograph?

The answer 100% is the photographer who took the image.

If you borrowed a friend’s camera and took the photo, it is owned by the person who pushed the shutter button.

Only time a photographer does not own the rights to their image is if they are the employee of another organisation, such as a publication or media company that pay for the services of the photographer.

Let’s say a fursuiter pays for a photographer to take images, unless it is in writing that the rights are forfeited by the photographer, to you (the fursuiter) than the creator of the image (the photographer) still owns full rights to the image.

Now I can just hear all the fursuiters reading this letting out shrieks of horror. But I am afraid it is true, most fursuiters in legal terms would almost never own the image and it could technically be used for editorial or commercial purposes.

In the cosplay community, they do have one right, “the right to publicity” in the US. A right to privacy exists in the UK law, as a consequence of the European Convention on Human Rights. However this applies more to cosplay than fursuiters, because most people participating in cosplay are showing their faces and have to consent if a photograph is being used commercially under most circumstances.

This however is forfeited in a public place, this is why street photography is legal. There is no need to contact anyone, anywhere in order to commercially sell photographs taken in public. Photography on private land is similarly unrestricted. However, landowners are permitted to impose any conditions they wish upon entry to a property, such as forbidding or restricting photography.

However in my discussions with members of the community, many are arguing that a photo of the fursuiter constitutes a derivative work. A photograph can also be a mechanism of infringement of the copyright which subsists in another work. For example, a photograph which copies a substantial part of an artistic work, such as a sculpture or painting. This why photography is banned at Art Shows in conventions, for example.

This is really the grey area that needs to be addressed, many of us as fandom photographers will respect the wishes of our fellow furries and understand the value that a character may have for an individual. We therefore have an informal code of conduct which is often agreed to by attendees at a furry convention.

The photographer Tom Broadbent, famous for his project ‘At Home with the Furries‘ follows similar attitude to many photographers within the fandom of keeping an open and honest dialogue. Letting the costume owner know what the purpose of the photoshoot is, if it isn’t just for personal use. This generally is the only protection that fursuiters have, is talking to their photographers for an understanding and if they really want to be safe then get a model release form.

But then we have to picture a scenario where you (the fursuiter) are photographed by, a freelancer in the street entertaining people, and then goes on to sell it to a international photo library. Your rights to privacy have been made void by the fact you covered your face with your costume. The costume itself isn’t trademarked and is not connected to any copyrighted brand. There’s almost nothing you can do except to contact the photographer and politely request the image be removed.

“Most furries would likely be very disappointed to know how few rights, if any, their characters have,” stated Wylde Rottie, who hosted a panel at MFF on copyrighting. “Fursuits would likely be considered Useful Articles, like a costume or piece of clothing, which are not copyrightable.”

Wylde then went on to explain why the trademarking of fursuits would drastically change the open and creative atmosphere of the community:

“It’s important to acknowledge why those protections don’t really exist legally. Imagine the bad precedent it would set by allowing someone to have copyright to a suit. What’s to stop someone with one fursuit from claiming rights over a suit made subsequently and/or of similar design? At most, someone could attempt to have their suit/design trademarked in some way, but the bar for that is so much higher that I have a hard time thinking of any circumstance in which someone could successfully get a suit design trademarked.”

 

So to summarize:
“Under law, it is the photographer who will own copyright on any photos he/she has taken, with the following exceptions:

• If the photographer is an employee of the company the photos are taken for, or is an employee of a company instructed to take the photos, the photographer will be acting on behalf of his/her employer, and the company the photographer works for will own the copyright.
• If there is an agreement that assigns copyright to another party.

(Source: The UK Copyright Service)

My thoughts on this subject first came up in August 2014 when Getty Images sent a photographer to capture images at Eurofurence for editorial/press use. It demonstrated that there was a loophole, photographing in public areas of Berlin and the hotel where the convention’s media policy did not apply and by not being an attendee they hadn’t agreed to the terms and conditions of entry associated with being a badge-holder.

Conventions need to be very clear to point out where public and private land is to their attendees, and fursuiters should ask photographers if they are suspicious of their intentions before they take images and afterwards will need to seek permission to copy/print photos outside of personal use.

Meanwhile us photographers, who create and hold the copyright, must make sure to defend our works from theft/illegal publication and always be clear with fursuiters about what we are doing with our images and continue to uphold our informal agreements to contact and ask owners of fursonas/characters consent before images are used for commercial or editorial/press use.

However we must never feel that we cannot continue to have fun and collaborate together to create amazing images which document this colourful community and its energetic costumers who bring life to lovingly hand-crafted fursuits.

Detailed Links/More Infomation:

The UK Copyright Service
The US Copyright Office

Chimaera is a series of five sculptures of animal-people by Kristine & Colin Poole, a couple working out of Santa Fe. The sculptures are of animal people, with a focus on nudity and sexuality, featuring the juxtaposition of animal heads on human bodies.

Fauna, by Kristine & Colin Poole

The idea behind these sculptures is nothing new. The figures are overtly sexual and sexualized. The sexual drive is common to all mammals, human and non-human, and so the use of non-human heads on a sexualized human body highlights our status as mere animals.

It’s a common trope in anthropomorphic art, common enough to be upended three hundred years ago in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver’s final misadventure is to the island of the houyhnhnms, rational horses that have been stripped of identifiable animalistic drives, akin to Star Trek’s vulcans. Humans appear on this island, absent of reason and logic. By making the humans overtly ‘animalistic’ and the horses ‘rational’, Swift is able to highlight the base drives behind many of our actions, and also how extreme rationality can led to inhumane acts.

Kristine and Colin Poole’s intent is less complex. On her website, Kristine says:

“The Chimaera series reinterprets world mythology and cultural stories through anthropomorphic imagery and explores the relationship between human and animal expression, spirits and emotions. These figures emphasize the unity of our cultural roots and revisit the allure of storytelling—how people have, since ancient history, told stories of human and animal attributes combining with magical results.”

 

Each sculpture is intended to call back to a specific story or myth, so the goat-girl* above is intended to be the goddess Fauna, the female complement of Faunus (and Roman counterpart of the better-known Pan). Below we see a representation of the Egyptian deity Bastet:

Pretty Little Pussy, by Kristine & Colin Poole

To me, the connection of these sculptures to myth and storytelling feels like post hoc reasoning. I don’t think that the connection holds up to analysis.

Going back to Fauna, her body is that of a young woman, perhaps in her early 20s. She is in good shape and her breasts are a good size—maybe B or C cup—and perfectly symmetrical. It’s fair to say that her body is a mainstream idealized representation of the female form.

Fauna’s pose is overtly sexual, thrusting her chest out to increase the focus on her breasts, with the left hand on her hip drawing attention to her crotch. Her legs are spread, and she is wearing a g-string that is out of context with any supposed connection to ancient storytelling, or the muddying of the animal and human worlds.

I would describe Fauna’s body and pose as porny. There are no identifiable animalistic elements below her head. It feels to me like the animal head helps us to perceive her as purely sexual, lacking human agency and of value only for the pleasures her body might bring. You could make the same comments about Pretty Little Pussy above, and of Z’s Tease, below:

Z’s Tease, by Kristine & Colin Poole

Z’s Tease is a supposed reference to Zarafa, a giraffe gifted to Charles X of France in 1827. Zarafa is similarly posed to Fauna, chest out (breasts) and wearing a g-string (crotch), but with the added oddity that Zarafa is a real giraffe rather than a myth. The attempt to link Z’s Tease with Zarafa feels like the Pooles are reaching to find an appropriate myth with which to connect their porny giraffe.

To put it another way, I think that the artistic pretence behind the Chimaera series is bullshit. They are, I think, simply intended to be sexy.

There is one male figure in Chimaera, Hot Diggety Dog:

Hot Diggety Dog, by Kristine & Colin Poole

Diggety may be male, but it’s pretty clear that he is also designed to appeal to the (gay) male gaze. His very human rear is the focus of the piece, and like the female sculptures he is posed to maximize his sexual value at the expense of any human agency or intelligence. It’s telling that his pose is one of supplication, and that his genitals are well hidden from view. He is a senseless object to be admired.

I would have more time for Chimaera if the attending discussions, or interviews with the Pooles, made any reference to the sexual value of the five figures, or even if their explanations simply held water. As it is, at least looking these photographs, I’m inclined to consider them on the same level as the Orangina animals: well-constructed, sexy, artless.

In one interview, the Pooles explained that they started with the human body, adding the head once they decided “what animal would best embody” the expressions of the human portion. I think that this reinforces my instinct that the animal head is an afterthought, a way of ensuring the sculptures can be sexual without the bother of having real human feelings or emotions.

A line in Colin Poole’s website biography is also telling: “…his corporate client list reads as a “who’s who” of Fortune 500 companies.” I think that, for all the craftsmanship and references to storytelling and myth, the Chimaera sculptures are fundamentally intended to sell. I bet they only attract male buyers.

This sounds more negative than I was intending. I caveat my analysis by pointing out that I am looking at photographs, which means that I cannot properly comment on the sculptures themselves. There is no doubt that a lot of skill and craftsmanship has gone into Chimaera, and it may be that close inspection reveals depths to the works that aren’t clear in these photos.

For me, the best work of art to come from Chimaera is a posed shot of the Pooles working on Fauna.

Kristine & Colin Poole, ref

This photo makes the passive carnality of Fauna overt, and positions the sculptors as her owners. It’s the artist-as-pervert, where Fauna is literally bent to the will of those that give her agency.

Putting aside the clumsy references to myth and storytelling for the moment, Chimaera can be seen as the deliberate and overt dehumanization of objects of sexual desire. Colin Poole’s art in particular features the female form and sexuality. The animal heads on human bodies, which he has previously explored in his paintings, may be a deliberate attempt to remove any personal agency from his subjects, leaving them as pure sexual objects, beautiful carnal animals to be admired and consumed.

Looking at Chimaera from this perspective, the sculptures are less anthropomophic and more zoomorphic. They are humans, but with those elements needed for human communication and intelligence—faces, brains—replaced with that of senseless animals.

Contrast this with typical depictions of Pan, such as this sculpture rescued from the ruins of Pompeii, following its destruction almost 2000 years ago:

Pan and the Goat

Pan’s carnality is the focus of this sculpture, but he clearly has human agency, very different from the subjects of Chimaera. His coupling with the goat blurs the line between human and non-human: Pan is clearly human and the goat non-human, yet they are able to share mutual lust. There is a lot that could be said and written about this piece, which was displayed as part of the Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum at the British Museum last year, but clearly it runs deeper than mere carnality.

I would love to have the opportunity to see Chimaera in person. It is currently being shown in an exhibition space in Santa Fe (details here). If anyone plans to make the trip, let me know.

Kristine Poole (www.kristinepoole.com)
Colin Poole (www.colinpoole.com)

* Corrected about 90 minutes after publication. I originally, and wrongly, called Fauna a deer-girl. Thanks to Keito in the comments for spotting the error.

Pornography tends towards extremes. Genitalia is emphasized and often over-sized; bodies are idealized; the sounds and smells of sex are either downplayed or overplayed.

Such distortions of the real world are both good and bad. They are good because it’s what people want, and people should be free to fantasize however they wish. They are bad because they set an unrealistic precedent for the real world. And so people enjoy consuming outlandish depictions of sex while often simultaneously feeling bad for personally failing to meet that unattainable standard.

The problem especially obvious when it comes to pornography that depicts women with penises, or men with vaginas*. These depictions are, give or take, of transgender people, and are usually wildly unrealistic. It’s bad enough that such pornography reinforces the tendency for transgender people to be thought of as biological curiosities, and worse that the terminology used to describe this pornography—d-girls and c-boys—is degrading.

This article is about the conflict between two competing demands. There is the libertarian demand for freedom to produce and describe pornography in a straightforward and useful fashion, and the humanitarian demand for transgender people to be treated in a respectful and reasonable fashion.

(And one quick warning before I go on: beyond this point I will be direct in my use of crude terminology.)

Terms like dickgirl and cuntboy are indisputably degrading. The main problem is objectification.

There are relatively few transgender and genderqueer people, with 2 to 5% of the population estimated to experience some degree of gender dysphoria, i.e. a difference between their gender and biological sex (ref). The number is much higher in furry—up to one in four of furries report differences between their gender and biological sex (ref Furry Survey, although the answer varies depending on how you treat the data)—yet still a minority. And like most minorities, people are assumed to not be transgender or genderqueer unless proven otherwise, so the numbers of visible non-cisgender people appear much lower.

Pornographic representations of transgender people, such as dickgirls and cuntboys, are common. In such pornography, in furry or anime or elsewhere, they are usually represented as being purely sexual beings. To refer to a transgender person as a dickgirl or a cuntboy is to define them by their genitals and sexuality, as an object that exists for sex and sexual gratification. Context doesn’t really matter—such terms are dehumanizing regardless of intent.

Women suffer a similar problem. It is common for women to be objectified (i.e. denied human agency) by men, inside and outside pornography. This is a pervasive problem in most societies around the world, and is one the main drivers of feminism and feminist theory. The problem is not always obvious to see because we tend to accept the world as it is, so let me give you a simple, convenient example:

“It was the difference between the way a lion hunts to catch and devour its prey and the way a squirrel collects and stores nuts for winter.” (ref)

 

That quote is an excerpt from Nev Schulman’s book, In Real Life. You might know Nev as the feckless peanut who was featured in the Catfish documentary, and he now fronts MTV’s Catfish TV show. He is writing about a personal epiphany that led him to consider women as more than just potential sexual conquests.

Nev thinks that he has grown to respect women, but notice how he compares women with unthinking objects. Pre-epiphany they are prey; post-epiphany they are resources. He hasn’t learned a thing: to him, women are mere objects—to be consumed and forgotten while he moves on to his next meal. And while Nev’s peanutry is an extreme example, objectifying language towards women is everywhere.

Similarly, to refer to transgender person as a dickgirl or a cuntboy is suggest that they are defined by their sexual utility, and therefore to inherently deny their humanity.

The second problem with these terms is the focus on genitalia. Biological sex and gender are two different things, and the emphasis on the ‘dick-‘ and the ‘cunt-‘ suggest that this is of more, or at least equal, importance as the ‘-boy’ and the ‘-girl’. It’s not. To assert that genitalia defines gender is wrong, and is wilfully offensive towards those furries who experience a difference between the two. It is blatantly transphobic.

Dickgirl and cuntboy are not the only dehumanizing words used to describe transgender or genderqueer people. Terms like shemale are similarly objectifying. There are also words that are less overt but come associated with a history of oppression, such as ‘tranny’, which is comparable to using ‘faggot’ to refer to a gay man. These terms are never okay to use in reference to a person unless you have specific consent to do so.

Hermaphrodite (or herm) is another offensive term widely used to describe furry pornography, broadly in reference to intersex people. Hermaphrodite is a deprecated Victorian medical term used to describe a human with two sets of functioning genitals, one male and one female. Yet this is something that does not, and cannot, occur (in humans). It is misleading and stigmatizing.

(For the record: an intersex individual is someone who does not have typical genitalia at birth. Intersex people can be male, female, or somewhere in between. With intersex people as with everyone else, biology does not define gender.)

So that’s one side of the coin. Objectifying and dehumanizing language is clearly to be avoided.

Unfortunately, objectifying and dehumanizing language is also useful. In pornography, dickgirls and cuntboys are not intended to reflect reality—they are intended to be sexual objects. Characters in much, if not most, pornography are (basically) mindless: they have little more reason to exist than to provide a template for sexual fantasies. In many ways, it’s just narrative efficiency.

And some characters in porn—furry and non-furry—are genuine hermaphrodites. To give an example, Bernard Doove has written many stories about chakats, a ‘true’ hermaphroditic species with a biological imperative to have sexual congress every day. This might not be great literature, but presumably it satisfies the desire of its intended audience. To call these characters hermaphrodites is reasonable.

There is a fundamental conflict here. On one hand, we wish to treat people with respect, on the other hand sexual fantasies often tend to be about the physiology and not the person.

This philosophical conundrum is one that has been debated at length in the last 100 years or so of feminism. Early feminism was influenced by Immanuel Kant, who felt that sexual objectification is a natural human response but a fundamentally dangerous and negative one. He wrote:

“sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. … as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one” (Kant Lectures on Ethics, 163)

 

Kant concluded that sex outside of monogamous marriage was wrong. He felt that the marriage contract ensured that people would be morally respected, and not just used for sexual purposes and discarded. And while I think we can all agree that Kant is a churchy priss, he is correct that we have a problem: especially when it comes to young men.

As a general rule, men mature physically faster than they do emotionally, with empathic skills still developing up to around age 30. An emotionally immature person tends to see themselves as the hero in a movie, where they are the only actor and everyone else is a minor player. A child only thinks of themselves; an adult will naturally appreciate and consider the interests of other people. Unfortunately many emotional children are also physically mature men in their teens and twenties… a big furry demographic.

Young men are more likely to consume pornography and fail to consider that real-life people are more than mere objects. Arguments for censorship of pornography are usually geared towards restricting access for young people, fearing that it reinforces the natural tendency towards self-centrism. It’s a reasonable argument, although not in line with modern thought, feminist or otherwise.

Nowadays, people accept that objectification can be pretty great, as long as it is done in a consensual fashion. Rather than requiring Kant’s marriage contract, people can choose to objectify or (be objectified) as they wish, as long as no enduring harm is done. This argument (which I have simplified) is one that is largely pro-pornography, pro-sex work, and sex positive.

So it is okay to depict rape or murder in furry pornography, tag it as N/C or vore so people know what to expect, while simultaneously agreeing that rape and murder are not things to be enjoyed outside of a fantasy context. And it’s okay to enjoy Doove’s hermaphroditic chakats while also treating intersex people with respect.

The issue becomes muddied when you consider furry characters. Furries like to play with identity, and it’s common for furs to have an avatar that diverges from biological reality. That might be as simple as a large penis, or more pertinently those furries who roleplay as hermaphrodites, and those as transgender-but-with-a-focus-on-genitalia.

Further, it’s common for representations of furry characters to be objectifying, a phenomenon not restricted to non-cisgender fursonas. It’s common for female transgender furry characters and also male cisgender characters to have overt genitalia. And that’s all good. The problem comes about because these fursonas refer back to real people, and our two groups of furries with enormous cocks—the women and the men—are treated differently.

Our cis male fur—let’s call him Starfox—tends to be given agency by default in human society and so his fursona’s sexuality is seen in that context. However our trans woman—let’s call her Krystal—is regularly fetishized and objectified in human society, a problem which might be reinforced by the sexuality of her fursona.

Krystal has a choice to make. She can choose to hide or understate her sexuality (which is bad), or she can choose to express it and risk reinforcing the perception that she is a sexual object first-and-foremost (which is bad). Starfox, despite having the same choice, doesn’t face the same consequences.

There is a balance to be struck between the freedom to explore sexual identity, and the requirement to treat culturally underprivileged people with respect and humanity. In general, and as always in such a situation, it is the privileged people who must change their behaviour.

This doesn’t mean that terms like dickgirl and cuntboy should always be off-limits. They are useful at times, such as categorizing pornography. It is a fact of life that many people enjoy pornography that depicts something that is biologically impossible or otherwise incompatible with real life, be it objectification or racism or weightism or sexism or non-consensual activities or chakats. There is nothing wrong with enjoying such fantasies.

There is, however, a need to consider those people who are negatively affected by such language, and sometimes this means taking active steps. Examples of good practice include use of appropriate trigger warnings ahead of non-consensual pornography, and the replacement of offensive terms like ‘dickgirl’ with alternatives like ‘futanari’. Where alternative words don’t exist, new ones can be coined—in discussions with people on this topic, a friend of mine with a cuntboy character who is uncomfortable with the terminology (but finds the porn totally hot) half-jokingly suggested switching to the satirical ‘vagentleman’.

There is a good example of the issues here over on a Weasyl journal written by Rampack. Rampack’s point is that troublesome words like shemale, cuntboy, herm et al should never be used. It’s a well-made argument but one that doesn’t leave space for those people who choose to play genuinely hermaphroditic characters, or want to find some totally hot cuntboy porn on e621. Once you pick away at those grey areas and edge cases, Rampack’s point can be seen as one against ignorance, where furries are using these terms without a proper understanding of how they can be damaging. Rampack’s intended target isn’t the responsible furry vagentleman, it’s the emotionally immature solipsist.

The conflict between the desire for sex-positivism and the desire to treat everyone with respect is not just a furry problem. It is a universal issue, and has been central to much of the growth and internal conflict in 20th century feminism. In all cases, the goal is to allow depictions of objectification in pornography, while reinforcing the requirement for any real life objectification to be consensual.

It’s a complex topic. Suggested relevant and further (lay) reading follows. (Kant does not appear.)

Feminist Perspectives on Objectification
Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification
Enjoying the Problematic on our sister site Love Sex Fur

* this sentence corrected on 9 Dec 2014. It originally read “…women with male genitalia, or men with female genitalia”. Thanks to Lucian at genderterror.com.

PIES is Ian King’s first graphic novel, although he contributed a small comic—a small and meditative exploration on sleep—to the first edition of RRUFFURR. His RRUFFURR comic features the same hero and acts as an inessential mini-prequel to the richer and deeper PIES.

PIES is long at 114 pages, and completely wordless save for ‘PIES’, which is spelt out on the protagonist’s hoodie. It is available to read online for free and also in a high-quality print version, printed on heavy paper and bound in a textured cover. It’s well worth the $20 for a physical version.

For a debut, PIES is incredibly assured and nuanced. It’s clear that King has invested much time and thought into the editing and presentation, as well as the detailed illustrations. It joins the increasingly mature output from artists in the furry community, quality work that can stand alongside the very best of today’s independent graphic novels.

PIES follows our hero—I’m going to call him Pies—on an allegorical journey, that starts when he hops into an inner tube on a beach. He drifts away, and for the remainder of the book he has little or no control over his destination. Like the ageing process, where we all get older one day at a time regardless of our actions, Pies floats along towards his unknown but certain destination.

I showed PIES to a furry friend of mine recently, who remarked that he didn’t realise he’d need his ‘2001: A Space Odyssey brain’ to follow the story. It was a comment made in jest but it gives you a good idea of what to expect. PIES is abstract and wilfully obscure at times, but like the final third of 2001 it’s clear enough that our hero’s journey is a metaphor for his own life.

The torus of Pies’ inner tube is a recurring motif in PIES. Each torus represents a moment where his journey will forever change, a point of no return. This reflects the entropy of life, where we exist in an unchanging world until suddenly we don’t: when we turn 18 and become a legal adult; when we get married; when we hurt someone; when we have children; when we are diagnosed with a terminal disease. Pies’ world changes irreversibly when he reaches these waypoints, and while memory can conjure up images of the past, we must move on and exist in the world as it is now.

This is well-trodden ground, but PIES stands out by exploring this journey in an unusual way. Pies is alone, but PIES is not about loneliness. His journey is that of his life, but PIES is not about ageing or the transience of youth. PIES is, instead, about the greatest experience that life has to offer: love.

Pies carries a love note through his journey. In an early, sublime sequence, Pies drifts off to sleep while gently floating down a waterway. The sun has set, and the points of light reflected in the water become confused with the stars in the sky. As he falls asleep, the points slowly grow and morph until they crystallize into an endless sea of faces. For a moment, in his dream, Pies becomes one of those points of light: part of a community, a group of people (well, animal people) who are all experiencing their own journey, together alone.

There is peace and fellowship in the shared experience. Pies and everyone else are each drifting along in their own way.

In the next panel we see Pies’ lover, clutching the same love note, drifting along a different waterway in a different vessel but looking up at the same sky. It’s clear that the two of them share a close bond, and in Pies’ dream, the connection they share seems real and tangible. Their love is something Pies carries with him in his heart, as represented by the note itself.

Love is so close to a palpable presence, you sense it must be physically real. It can be expressed through a lover’s touch, but that’s just a fraction of the full feeling. The touch of someone you love is merely the sweet cherry on the substantial cake.

Think now, reader, of a loved one: a partner, a relative, a friend. Notice the physical sensation, not of their body, but of their essence. You may feel bereft, as if there were something nearby that you need. Yet the sensation is simultaneously tantalizing and fulfilling.

We lose our loved ones as we go through our journey. People die. We move. We break up. We drift apart. Yet the feeling of love is still there, ready to be conjured again and again, tinged with the bitterness of grief for what we have lost. But grief is not sadness. Grief is a close neighbour of joy, the joy that we would feel if we could see someone we’ve lost just one more time, the joy that we feel when a loved one walks into the room. Grief is the knowledge that we will never again feel the love without also feeling the loss.

But we will lose them all, eventually.

Pies will not see his lover throughout his journey, outside of his dream. But Pies carries his love everywhere. His last act, as he eventually is pulled down under the waves, is a defiant, celebratory fist in the air. A fist containing his lover’s note.

As well as the story of Pies’ journey, PIES is a formidable technical work of art. Geometric shapes and mesmerizing organic patterns appear and reappear, collapsing and coalescing through the story. It’s a book that deserves to be experienced on paper.

You can buy PIES for $20 if you are in the United States here, or here for everyone else.

You can also read PIES online for free at fieldghost.com.

The relative anonymity of Ian King and PIES within furry is a bit of a puzzle. It is a major, meaty, immensely enjoyable animal-person graphic novel.

The high-profile artists who produce well-regarded works of art within furry tend to be technically accomplished. However their works, while pretty, are often artless beyond the illustration skills. That’s not to say that popularity isn’t deserved, just that more intellectually complex works like PIES (or, say, Paper Bag) rarely seem to attract much attention.

Furry graphic artists are taking advantage of an old trope, the use of anthropomorphic characters as a frame for exploration of the human condition. Animal-people give the artist freedom from the constraints of the real world, which means they can engage in flights of fancy without any implied requirement to adhere to the laws of physics and nature. In many ways, this is what we furries are doing in our lives: by adopting an animal-person identity, we are freeing ourselves from mundane social mores, making it easier to explore our own path with less pressure to conform to the mainstream. (As in: “hey I’m going to roleplay as gender x while being attracted to gender y, because let’s face it, it’s not that weird if you consider that I’m already an animal person”.)

The furry community is spoiled for riches when it comes to graphic novels and comics exploring these ideas—be they intellectual like PIES, or whimsical like Clair C’s works. These graphic novels and comic strips are rare examples of furry artists producing world-class works.

On release of the physical PIES book, King compared it to Werewolves of Montpellier, an acclaimed graphic novel by Norwegian artist Jason. The two books are very different in many ways—PIES is joyful and abstract; Werewolves is maudlin and direct—but the comparison feels apt. They are both complex works of art that rely on a world populated by animal-people to tell a story with an undercurrent of emotion and with minimal dialogue. The animal-people are essential because they prime the reader to trust the artist to maintain the internal logic of each story, without worrying about the ways it deviates from reality. Both books deserve a wide audience, an audience that PIES has not (yet) found.

The group of furries producing high-quality and serious graphic art is growing. RRUFFURR collects short pieces from several artists and accordingly feels like a great introduction. But I don’t really know where to go from there. Is there a hub for publications from our promising artists, collecting amateurs like Redacteur and professionals like Artdecade? Does someone have a carefully curated Tumblr follow list?

In the meantime, take a look at PIES. It deserves to be shared and read and cherished. And Christmas is just around the corner.

I don’t often read Reddit – the site and I get along fine, I just can’t seem to maintain interest in any subreddit for more than a few weeks – but I do occasionally find a good link or two when I wind up there. Most recently, I was trawling several different subreddits about gender and came across a set of delightful concepts that I think fit in well with the furry fandom.

I talk quite a bit about identity here on [a][s], to the point where I worry that I talk about it a little too much. Time and again, however, the importance of identity is brought home to me, and I can’t help but sit back, amazed at the ways in which it changes the ways in which we think about ourselves and interact with the world around us. Time and again, I find myself reminded that I’m a part of the huge, weird, delightful subculture, and there is no small aspect of identity that plays a part in that.

I’ve gone through something of a sea-change in the last decade or so. Over that period of time, of course, one would be expected to change a great deal, metamorphose into something new and different. However, a sea-change is one of those things that makes the most sense in retrospect. It’s in looking back over the past ten years of my life that I can really say, “Goodness, I used to be a completely different person.”

It’s not a bad thing, really. In a lot of objective ways, it’s a good thing that I came to terms with being an adult. I feel a lot healthier now. I’ve taken steps to set my life in accord with how I wish my life was, and that means doing all sorts of things, from visiting a therapist and psychiatrist regularly, to getting that eye exam I’ve always known I’ve needed.

I’ve also started to come to terms with being a transgender person. This was something that I’ve known about myself in some form or another for nearly a decade, but not had the courage to do much but hide it, often even from myself. In the last few years, though, I’ve come out to myself, my husband and partner, my friends, then my work, and within the last few weeks, my immediate family. It means a lot to me to have those closest to me know…well, me. It means one thing to interact with someone on a regular basis, but an entirely different thing to have that interaction be honest and open, something which I hadn’t had in the eight or so years leading up to this.

Another change that I’ve found myself going through is a shift in the company I keep. I have a lot of friends, for which I’m thankful, but I’ve noticed that, over the last few years, a lot more of the friendships that I’ve started to form and really begun to cherish have had, at some level, interaction that involves gender. I’ve been searching for meaningful ways to connect with the world around me and that often involves hunting down people with whom I share a common interest, goal, lifestyle, or identity. It’s something I’ve talked about on here before, even, how furries tend to seek out the company of other furries. In the last two dozen months, I’ve been working, both consciously and subconsciously, to seek out the company of those going through similar journeys with gender as myself.

Both of these concepts fit in neatly with a paper surrounding the concepts I mentioned at the beginning of this article. The paper, titled “Witnessing and Mirroring: A Fourteen Stage Model of Transsexual Identity Formation” by Aaron Devore (linked below) centers around the ideas of witnessing and mirroring. These two concepts, witnessing and mirroring, play fundamental roles in the interaction of a furry with the furry fandom, and why help explain why our subculture is a plural, rather than simply a solipsistic phenomenon.

The paper is an interesting one, from a personal standpoint. It goes through a fourteen step process that generalizes much of the transgender process of acceptance and self-actualization. While only some of these stages fit with my interaction with furry, I’ll reproduce the entire list here for completeness’ sake:

1. Abiding Anxiety – Unfocused gender and sex discomfort.
2. Identity Confusion About Originally Assigned Gender and Sex – First doubts about suitability of originally assigned gender and sex.
3. Identity Comparisons About Originally Assigned Gender and Sex – Seeking and weighing alternative gender identities.
4. Discovery of Transsexualism – Learning that transsexualism or transgenderism exists.
5. Identity Confusion About Transsexualism – First doubts about the authenticity of own transsexualism or transgenderism.
6. Identity Comparisons About Transsexualism – Testing transsexual or transgender identity using transsexual or transgender reference group.
7. Tolerance of Transsexual Identity – Identify as probably transsexual or transgender.
8. Delay Before Acceptance of Transsexual Identity – Waiting for changed circumstances. Looking for confirmation of transsexual or transgender identity.
9. Acceptance of Transsexualism Identity – Transsexual or transgender identity established.
10. Delay Before Transition – Transsexual identity deepens. Final disidentity as original gender and sex. Anticipatory socialization.
11. Transition – Changing genders and sexes.
12. Acceptance of Post-Transition Gender and Sex Identities – Post-transition identity established.
13. Integration – Transsexuality mostly invisible.
14. Pride – Openly transsexed.

Part of the reason that I wanted to post the entire list is that I really feel that a lot of my own journey through furry follows along similar lines. After seeking out fantasy worlds in which I could be myself, I learned about the furry subculture, then cautiously tested the waters before finally not only adopting the identity of being a furry as my own, but accepted it to the point of being proud of my membership, leading to articles like these. It’s a good feeling, having an identity that feels comfortable and valid, having a way of life that doesn’t cause friction on a base, internal level.

This is where witnessing and mirroring come in. My experiences are fairly common among furries – that is, I’m hardly experiencing anything new among members of our subculture. I participate in the simple online role-play that seems part and parcel to our fandom. I’ve got a personal character. I occasionally get art of myself, sometimes with others. It’s a good life that a lot of us have latched onto.

It’s this interplay between personal identity and social interaction that makes up some of the most interesting bits of furry life, however. Within Devore’s article, the author brings up two concepts which “run though the lives of many people as they search for self-understanding.” ‘Witnessing’ is simply the act of being witnessed embodying an aspect of one’s identity by an outside party. ‘Mirroring’, in the context of this article, is sort of like the complement: it is seeing aspects of one’s identity embodied in others around oneself.

Both of these ideas play an important role in the formation and bolstering of identity. Witnesses to our true selves help to reinforce the ways in which validate our identity as furries. This is part of the reason behind fursuiting in public, telling loved ones about furry, and so on. As Devore puts it, “When dispassionate witnesses provide appraisals which conform to one’s own sense of self, it leaves one with a feeling of having been accurately seen by others who can be assumed to be impartial.” The opposite is also true, however, as is evidenced in the backlash seen within our subculture when the media represents furries in a way that is seen as unfair or inaccurate: being witnessed as something that we know we are not is damaging in inverse proportion to how validating being witnessed as we are can be.

Mirroring is perhaps closer to the surface for many furries. It is precisely the act of seeing in others that portion of identity we find within ourselves that lends the greatest validation to our membership. Devore sums it up in a neat hendyatris: “Each of us needs to know that people who we think are like us also see us as like them. We need to know that we are recognized and accepted by our peers. We need to know that we are not alone.” It is by seeing and interacting with others who we perceive as like us that we find reaffirmation of our identity. We’re not alone, we’re not crazy, we’re just being ourselves together. This is so important to furry that we have elevated the convention experience to something akin to gnosis.

These concepts do not simply apply to furry at the surface level, but at least once removed: furry, I would argue, provides a framework within which it is more comfortable for one to present as the identity close to the core of one’s being than the world at large. That is, by being a space which we would consider safe and welcoming, one is more likely to accept and adopt an identity that might carry with it a social disadvantage outside of the subculture and find both witnesses and mirrors to help bolster the sense of self.

This came up recently as a friend confided in me that it was much easier to count the furries that they knew who were not trans* in some way than to count the furries that were. We’ve talked here before about how the fandom is welcoming to the underprivileged group of gay and lesbian members, but that is also true of trans* members as well. Even the reporter from Kotaku who visited Further Confusion 2013 noticed this.

I think that part of the reason comes down to something that a reader shared with us back in 2012 that is worth repeating: “Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics.” That is, by virtue of having all these mirrors of our identity at the ready, we’re more likely to share the weal and woe that go along with the rest of our lives and knit all the closer together. Perhaps I’m conflating, but it seems that it is more easy to share and invite witnessing with someone who mirrors oneself in another aspect of identity – that is, to come out as gay or trans* or any other aspect of identity to someone who shares this furry identity – and several others have shared similar feelings.

My sea-change over the last ten years or so has been one primarily centered around gender identity. I’ve subconsciously torn down aspects of the identity hammered into me in my youth and built up new ones. I’ve set aside relationships with work and school that were unhealthy and sought new and affirming ones. I’ve changed my name, changed the way I talk, changed the way I dress. It’s the type of thing that is easily summed up into three sentences in spite of the ten years of progress. However, it’s also the type of thing that required the social aspect to be firmly in place. I required the witnessing of my delightful husband and fantastic partner, of my parents and coworkers, just as I needed the mirrors of all of the friends I’ve made in the last few years who share the same path as myself.

And these things hold true for furry as well. I’m indebted to all of the fantastic people I’ve met through the fandom and through this site for witnessing my own growth as a member of this community and for being such fantastic mirrors, things we all need in life. Thanks, as always, for following along with my own journey. If you’re curious about the rest of the paper that was at the core of this article, it is available online for free here.

How and why do furries choose their species?

Species choice is a question that interests us at [adjective][species] a great deal, and we know it interests the wider furry community. It is a choice that is at the core of the furry identity, one of the key building blocks toward the way we present ourselves within the furry community.

We have a wealth of data on species and character selection, thanks to many years of the Furry Survey and the work of the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP). We are able to correlate species choice with hundreds of different variables… yet we have been able to identify little tangible that drives a furry towards choosing, say, a wolf rather than, say, a horse.

I had a chat with Dr Courtney Plante (aka Nuka)—IARP researcher, furry, and [adjective][species] contributor—to explore what we have learned, and discuss why it’s such a difficult question in the first place.

We have already presented several data results and visualisation on species popularity and selection, notably:

• A visualisation showing species popularity, sortable by sex, gender, and sexual orientation.

Example of our species visualisation – click the picture to play with the interactive version

• Word clouds summarising the language people use to describe their characters. We think that this provides insight into how people create and build their furry characters.

Word cloud example: why lions are lions

 (Makyo has written two articles looking at species selection and character creation in more detail: Part 1 & Part 2.)

Interestingly, the data often tends to disprove common assumptions about furry characters. For example, male foxes are often (jokingly) thought of to be gay. Yet the opposite is true: foxes are most popular with straight male furs:

Foxes are popular among straight, cis, men

We also tend to assume that furries, on first joining the community, will start as something fairly generic before species-hopping to something more unique or personally representative. So we might expect that the most popular species—wolves, foxes, dragons—would be more popular among furs in their first year or two in furry. Yet the data shows this to be incorrect: there are no clear correlations between species choice and time in the fandom.

Species popularity stays pretty static over time – click the picture for a much clearer, interactive version

This formed the starting point of our discussion, which I have edited for clarity.

JM: There is no obvious trend towards or away from certain species as people spend more time in the fandom. This surprises me.

Nuka: Me too; social identity theory has an off-shoot called “optimal distinctiveness theory”, which states that people like to stand out… but not too much.

If you lump people into too big a group, they find ways to stand out… If you make them stand out too much, find ways to fall back into the group. I think when furries first get into the fandom, furries are ‘distinct’ enough that all that matters is fitting in. I think that many furries latch onto a common species (wolves, foxes, etc…).

However, as furries spend time in the fandom and it becomes a more normative part of their life, they start to realize that they don’t feel distinct enough anymore… they’re “just another fox” or “just another wolf”. So they tend to make themselves more distinct. I notice, again anecdotally, that VERY few wolves or foxes will say “I’m just a wolf” or “I’m just a fox”, there’s often a qualifier, something that makes them more distinct. A particular subspecies of wolf (e.g., “arctic wolf” or “timber wolf”), or a particular color (e.g. “blue wolf”), or hybridization (“wolf/fox hybrid”), etc. Or, as you suggested, they may change their fursona to something that they feel more precisely represents them, which just so happens to include being more distinct than “just another wolf”.

JM: I recall talking with Klisoura and Makyo about their trials and tribulations collecting species data. Furries give a lot of information that makes them difficult to easily categorize. They deal with the problem by allowing one datapoint for each species mentioned, so a foxwolfdragon is counted as one fox, one wolf, and one dragon. That might also contribute to our preponderance of wolves.

Note to self: title for future [adjective][species] article: A Preponderance of Wolves

Nuka: Ugh… tell me about it. I’ve analyzed species data all of ONCE… In our biggest dataset ever, we looked at species data for more than 4,500 furries. Never again…

It took me almost a full week on Wikipedia trying to figure out what some of the things WERE. And then realizing that no matter how I tried, it was next to impossible to organize the data in any meaningful way (it’s easy when it comes to “foxes” and “wolves”, for example… but where do you put a person who puts “canid?” What counts as a “big cat”? Is there a meaningful difference between a “big cat” and a “little cat”, from a psychological perspective?)

In the end, I’ve given up on trying to get anything meaningful out of the species data. I’ve picked away at it again and again, and lo and behold, we’ve found no systematic differences between people when it comes to fursona species. A lot of things matter when it comes to your fursona (e.g., how it relates to who YOU are), but the species it manifests itself as doesn’t seem to be one of those things.

JM: We have published our visualization that looks at species versus sex, gender & sexual orientation. There are some big differences, and not always the ones you might expect.

Nuka: I certainly won’t deny the possibility that there are statistically significant differences when it comes to things like sex / gender / sexual orientation and species choice. But three issues are at play here:

a) The less important one: When you’re looking at dozens of species, coupled with rather large sample sizes, by sheer chance alone you’re going to find blips in the data that come up as statistically significantly different, but which are relatively spurious, or of such small effect size as to be negligible. For example, if I look for statistically significant differences in the gender composition of 100 different species, I will, by chance alone, find 5 that are statistically significant.

b) That first point aside, there may be some legitimate differences in the gender / sex / orientation composition of different species that are not merely a product of chance. They may be particularly large effect sizes and may be particularly compelling. The next question is this: is this something idiosyncratic to this species, or is this part of a more substantive, meaningful difference. For example: Let’s say that, lo and behold, people who self-identify as cows are far more likely to be females than males. And let’s say the effect size is huge and replicates across samples. So it’s not due to chance. Well, does it tell us something substantive about the psychology of people who pick cows, or might there be a far more mundane, idiosyncratic reason? Well, if cows are female (as opposed to bulls), then it might make sense that there is an overrepresentation of women among this species. The reason is pretty idiosyncratic, however, and really doesn’t contribute much to our understanding of the psychology of fursona selection beyond what we can say about cows specifically.

c) The final point, which is related to the previous one: is there any theoretical reason, a priori, to have hypothesized these differences, and are they “differences that make a difference”? As a psychologist, I love a good theory. I love when, based on previous research, I can create a new hypothesis and predict some aspect of human behaviour from it. So, if we find a difference in gender composition of a species AND it’s not due to chance AND it’s not idiosyncratic to that species (e.g., something similar happens to related species, or to species who share a particular dimension), then it’s worth asking how this helps us build a better model of fursona-creation? How does this help further our knowledge of the motivations underlying furries’ chosen species? What does this tell us about the processes underlying fursona creation? And can we use this to predict new information? If we know that people who choose cows as a fursona are more likely to be women, does this tell us anything about people who pick foxes and wolves? People who pick mammals? People who pick realistic species? And, more importantly, do these differences make a pragmatic difference? Does knowing that a person picked a Cow over a Fox help us meaningfully predict some aspect of their real-world behaviour (e.g., self-esteem, aggression, openness to experience, extraversion, etc.)?

This is why I’ve given up on species analysis within our own data. In our own analyses, we’ve found nothing systematic, nothing that wasn’t idiosyncratic, nothing that was of theoretical relevance, and nothing that reliably predicted something of real-world substance. 

That said, I’m also open to, and intrigued by, data that has been far better organized and more thoroughly and systematically assessed. I don’t rule out the possibility of something meaningful being there. I’m just dubious of it. Despite lay theories that many furries have about what fursonas tell you about a person, the evidence, at least as I’ve seen it, suggests that this is more a product of post-hoc reasoning and the availability heuristic at play.

JM: What about the differences between character and self? Does it matter if your fursona is an idealized or actual version of you?

Nuka: This one is probably the most exciting to me. From studying fantasy research in the last two years, I’ve come to realize that people often trivialize the content of fantasy. They think that because something is fantasy, it has no bearing on the real world.

Our most recent research suggests that it really DOES matter whether your fursona is a better version of you, represents you, or whether your fursona is an all-around unlikable person. People may think, when they’re creating their fursonas, that they’re doing so on a whim, that the choices they make simply reflect preferences (e.g. “I just like wolves” or “I guess I just identify with cats…”), but it turns out that the form of one’s fursona and how one situates their fursona relative to themselves speaks volumes about their actual self-esteem, life satisfaction, depression, felt anxiety, etc.

JM: This is a terrific bit of research. I wrote about it at the time for [a][s], and it touched on a few areas that I’d looked at. I share your excitement: it’s fascinating stuff.

I didn’t find this so surprising though, although it’s possible that the research has moved in different directions from my thoughts.

It makes sense to me that a fursona is a kind of personality experiment. We have a lot of people in their 20s, and as we all know personality doesn’t really solidify, at least from a Big 5 perspective, until age 30 or so. I see fursonas as a kind of personality experiment, an exploration of things that might be. So someone with a divergent fursona has a lot more maturation to do than someone with the fursona that closely represents themselves. And maturation correlates with things like happiness & life satisfaction, and negatively correlates with things like depression and anxiety.

At least that’s how I saw it. Does that match up with your research? Is there a correlation between fursona and age?

Nuka: *laughs* Depending on who you talk to, the idea of personality “solidifying” is incorrect (at any age). One of my colleagues believes that the concept of personality itself is a false one, that there is no “personality” per se, given that it is so often determined by the situation one finds themselves in.

This perspective is in line with the idea that a fursona gives a person “another context” where their personality may differ. If I’m a shy, quiet person by day, my fursona gives me a context within which to be an outgoing, extroverted person. And it may be the case that, insofar as a person actively seeks out such novelty in experience, it may be correlated with better well-being all in all.

When you say “a correlation between fursona and age”, what exactly do you mean? A correlation between felt closeness to fursona and age? Between similarity of fursona to self and age?

JM: Well, we know that people become happier as they age (ref), which correlates with self-acceptance or self-realization. If closeness-to-fursona is a sign of having a good relationship with yourself (which makes sense to me), then perhaps that’s something that happens with age. So maybe the effect you’re seeing is just part of the normal maturation process.

Nuka: I agree completely that as people age, they come to self-accept more, and an increase in felt connection to fursona would be predicted by this.

What’s interesting to me (and to my colleagues) is how furries compare to non-furries on this. We’re starting to show evidence that furries, relative to non-furries, tend to be behind the curve at bit, at least in their early 20s, when it comes to resolving big questions about ‘who am I?’ But spending time in the fandom tends to predict an increase in solving these kinds of questions, until furries not only “catch up” to the rest of the population, but actually come to surpass them, becoming even more satisfied with themselves.

JM: So, yes, is there a correlations between closeness-to-fursona and age?

Nuka: I believe so, but it’s confounded with years spent in the fandom. An older person is likely to have spent more time in the fandom, and if they’ve spent more time in the fandom, they’re more likely to feel closer to their fursona, one of the motivations to hang around.

I haven’t checked this in the longitudinal data from our ongoing study, though I’m doubtful we’ll find any aging effects yet. One year of difference isn’t exactly a lot, even across a population.

JM: Thanks Nuka. I’m looking forward to seeing what you discover as your research moves forward.

Last week [adjective][species] featured Paper Bag, a short film exploring the furry condition. It is an autobiographical documentary (of sorts), made by and starring Jean-Baptiste Gaudet, aka Panda Man.

I interviewed JB about Paper Bag, talking about the structure and content of the film, his relationship with Panda Man, and—of course—the contents of the paper bag itself.

We also have a short one-page comic to share, that acts as a companion piece to Paper Bag:

Click through to image source on Fur Affinity

[adjective][species]: I wanted to start by asking about the two-part structure of Paper Bag. You rely on black & white and noir conventions in the first half, before shifting to high-contrast colour and narrative immediacy in the second half. The change coincides with the detective’s discovery that he is fictional. Can you tell us a little about your reasons for structuring the film in this way?

JB Gaudet: It is a student film I made at the end of my third and final year of Bachelor’s degree. First year was mostly theory, 2nd year was focused on fiction and 3rd year was focused on documentaries. I was therefore asked to make a documentary and that… didn’t suit me. At all. I like watching some from time to time but I had neither the will nor desire to direct one. But I had to make one. So I asked myself “how can I make a film that could feel like a documentary and could be considered like one while it actually was pure fiction”.

Then I saw this. The video that justified the return of the Nostalgia Critic and explained what relationship Doug Walker had with his character. I realised I had something similar but with my Fursona “Panda Man” through the stories I wrote. So I decided, like Doug Walker, to arrange a meeting between my character and me. Since he was a private detective, the best way was to send him on an investigation on me.

I chose black and white for the first part because it’s all from the point of view of the character who is a pure Film Noir archetype and color for the 2nd part which is from my point of view. And so, there is first a fiction that leads to documentary about myself and my relationship between a fictional character and I and how we look at and face reality.

The color scheme is simple in that regard. Since Panda Man is a private detective and a classical Film Noir figure, black and white was an obvious choice for his part as it set the right mood and an easily recognisable visual code for most viewers. When Panda Man disappears and leaves me alone, he becomes the voice of the camera that I talk directly to and since the “fiction” has left the movie, all that is left is me and therefore the colors of reality coming back. The high contrast is not a conscious choice, I am color blind and I trusted my friends on this but they told it reflected my hypersensitive state in the “face camera confession shot”.

[a][s]: It’s interesting that you say that Panda Man is a classical film noir figure, when he also represents a version of yourself. It is common for furries to try hard to create something unique about their fursona beyond just the species, whereas Panda Man is closer to a simple archetype. Did you make him a simpler character for the film?

JB: Indeed. That’s because unlike in the stories of my FA gallery he isn’t personally concerned by the events or the story, so he appears more like a plot tool than a real character. But that’s only because he doesn’t have the time to express complex thoughts, he’s onscreen for less than 5 minutes whereas I am for over 10 minutes.

[a][s]: It seems like the switch from black & white to colour signals a switch from the ‘imaginary’ part of the film to the ‘real’ part of the film. Panda Man largely disappears for the second half, and the story becomes directly personal, a truer exploration of your own feelings.

I wonder if you feel it is a weakness to have two identities – Panda Man and JB? Does Panda Man exist so you don’t have to face the reality of being yourself?

JB: It’s not a weakness to me, he’s more of a shield that helps me trudge and face reality. I’d prefer to be strong enough to face it head on like a strong lone wolf but since I can’t do that, rather than not advancing, I prefer his help to being helpless.

[a][s]: Who do you personally prefer: the cool, lone-wolf narcissist of Panda Man, or the introspective and complex JB?

JB: Panda Man. He always knows what to do, how and where to go. I don’t.

[a][s]: Over time, have you become more like Panda Man? Has Panda Man become more like you?

JB: I have become more like him, less ashamed of existing and less afraid of showing off my talents.

Panda Man has become more detailed and more complex as a character but has never started to resemble me. He has always been like an archetype, easily recognisable, uncorruptible and unchangeable.

[a][s]: I was chatting with a furry researcher recently, talking about the differences between character and self: the closer each of us are to our furry character in personality, the happier we are likely to be.

I wonder if you have observed this – as you have become more like Panda Man, have you become a happier person?

JB: I have indeed. I fall back into “depression” whenever I lose my job or don’t have any plans/projects which is totally different to how Panda Man would act. He never lets himself go.

[a][s]: In the first half Paper Bag, Panda Man is quite dismissive about certain traits he discovers about you – I guess those are the sorts of things that might make you fall back into “depression”.

But among the negative things he discovers—overweight, poor little rich boy, inability to finish projects, lack of friends, etc—he also discovers your homosexuality. Panda Man seems to be negative about that as well. I wonder if that is a deliberate choice?

JB: He’s critical about it but not negative.

After the first call with me, he thinks he’s figured it all out: a gay couple case of jealousy. It is linked to France’s recent acceptance of gay marriage over 2 or 3 years ago and just means that, it´s not because gays can marry that marital disputes won’t appear. Since straights have gone through such things in the past, they’re “used” to it. It is commonplace. Gays don’t and they will do the same backstabbing divorce shit when divorcing like it was new.

And the thing he’s critical about isn’t homosexuality itself but more my relationship toward what being gay means in France in 2013 and the details that still bother me about it when they shouldn’t. Mostly how I still have to hide to whom I can say it to because they might be homophobes and unaccepting.

[a][s]: Paper Bag is different from most furry films because it explores furry as it relates to identity exploration. Other furry-made short films have tended to just be dramatic stories that happen to involve anthropomorphic characters, e.g. Bitter Lake or Kaze Ghost Warrior.

I was wondering if you could talk about the furry aspects of Paper Bag, and talk about how you’re being different from those other films while still being ‘furry’.

JB: I think Paper Bag is different from others because it doesn’t use the furry fandom or furryness as plot device or an excuse for a pointless/cliche/predictable/formulaic movie. And as you said it explores the question of self identity through the fursona. The fursona not the fandom. The deeply personal aspect of this movie I think makes this movie works so well and explores the very old question “who am I?” in a previously unexplored/little known way.

[a][s]: In the second half of the film, did you consider having Panda Man appear as an anthro character (rather than a human) once his true nature was revealed?

JB: No, I didn’t.

[a][s]: I wanted to ask about the paper bag itself. You mentioned in an earlier conversation that an early draft of the film revealed its contents, but you decided to change that in the final version. Can you talk a bit about why you made that decision?

JB: It was during a reading of the script that my script doctor and friend Grégoire Cutzach advised me not to because it would be best to leave people guessing what the hell is hidden in the paper bag and putting what THEY wanted in it. The mystery, he said, is more suggestive than the Truth.

The advice was sound and coherent so I listened to him.

[a][s]: Finally, it is the contents of the paper bag that are the reason you’ll “end up single”. It’s a bit of a downer, and also a bit surprising given that you come across in the film as honest, disarming, and actually rather charming.

I imagine that the contents must be something to be hidden below everything else: the homosexuality, the furry alter ego, etc. Must you always hide something from the world, in order to be able to exist in it?

JB: Thank you for the compliments. (^_^)

It is something entirely hidden indeed. And yes because there are things we choose to consider “private”. And what is private is either something you keep to yourself or tell to the few friends close and trustworthy enough. And the reason they are private is that the world won’t accept, doesn’t want to deal with or simply doesn’t care about them.

The contents of the bag are private but weighted so heavily on my mind it justified the writing and making of the movie. I needed to express myself about it and the movie was the outlet I needed. Except those who worked on the movie with me, no one knows nor guessed the content of the bag. Hearing what other people would put in it helped me came to terms with its content.

Paper Bag is a short autobiographical film about the furry condition, by French film-maker Jean-Baptiste Gaudet (also known as Panda Man on FA).

It’s a terrific and startling short film, one that treats furry as an idea, rather than as a genre. Just the way we like it here at [a][s]. Enjoy.

For all you furry francophones, there is a version without subtitles:

The boffins over at the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP) have just released a summary of some new research on fandoms.

This is the first tranche of results following a Canadian government grant to research and compare fandom groups. The intent of the work is to explore similarities and differences between fandoms, with the aim to understand underlying relationships: in effect, what makes different fandom groups tick.

It’s difficult to draw definitive conclusions from survey results geared towards general fact-finding rather than specific analysis. However there is good evidence that shows that the furry experience is different from that experienced by other fandom groups. We are different—furry is arguably not a fandom at all—and the data illustrates that.

The data compares what, at first blush, looks like an unlikely threesome of disparate groups: furry, anime, and fantasy sports fans. The dataset is enormous, so Dr Courtney Plante (aka Nuka, and occasional contributor to [adjective][species]) has kept it simple by presenting relatively straightforward results without detailed statistical analysis. (Figures from his analysis appear here with his permission.)

It’s still a lot of data. My review here is really only scratching the surface. There is a lot to be uncovered in the IARP writeup, which I encourage you to read in full: https://sites.google.com/site/animeresearch/iarp-2014-3-fandom-survey-results.

There are four samples in all: furries (all attendees of Anthrocon 2014), online anime fans (recruited via anime websites and fora), anime convention-goers (A-Kon 2014), and online fantasy sports fans (recruited online via Mechanical Turk).

The best point of comparison for the furry group is probably the anime convention-goers, as the other two samples were collected online. Conventions have a barrier to entry, and so both these samples exclude fans who either don’t choose to socialise in person at conventions, or otherwise aren’t able to travel and attend.

(In general, convention-goers tend to be older, more affluent, and more socially motivated than the same fandom group measured online. This generalization is borne out by the IARP results, by comparing the data from convention-going furries with online data collected by [adjective][species] and the IARP, and by comparing the convention-going and online anime sample sets.)

Looking at the overall demographics, the convention-going furries and anime fans show a range of fairly predictable similarities and differences. Ages are similar:

There is a big difference if you look at biological sex: furries are very male, whereas the anime fans are fairly evenly split.

As expected, there are big differences in sexual orientation. Previous surveys have shown that heterosexual furs are less likely to attend conventions than non-heterosexual furs*, and that’s what we see here. Less than a quarter of Anthrocon attendees are straight.

The variety of sexual orientations (and non-cisgender people) at Anthrocon are probably the biggest reason why furs are more likely to be in non-traditional relationships.

Conclusion: furries are an interesting and varied bunch.

Curiously, there is one area where the anime fans are a lot more diverse: ethnicity. Furries at Anthrocon are much more likely to identify as “white”, almost 90%.

The difference here probably comes down to affluence. Anthrocon is a destination event, and so predominately attracts those people who have the means to travel. In the United States, affluent people are largely white people: of the top 10% of earners, 87% are white (ref) compared with 63% in the general population (ref). While the implied cause-and-effect connection here is a bit shaky, it’s probably reasonable to conclude that furries who are able to afford to travel are more likely to be white.

A-Kon, on the other hand, is held in Dallas. Anime conventions are more common than furry conventions, and therefore tend to attract a more local crowd (because they have a bigger fandom to draw upon). Dallas is just 51% white, and thus can be expected to attract a more ethnically diverse group.

Curiously, neither furries nor anime fans measured particularly highly (compared with sports fans) on ‘nerdiness’. The nerd scale shown here is assesses the extent to which people identify with various aspects of the stereotype of being a nerd.

The key differences between convention-going furries and anime fans comes down the level ad type of engagement with our respective communities. Furries own very little fandom content:

And the content that furries do own is much more likely to be pornographic:

The content owned by anime fans is predominately art created by companies and studios for fan consumption. This is the foundation of fandom, and it is not surprising to see such high levels of ownership among anime fans.

The content owned by furries is different. We are much less engaged with content created for mass consumption by profit-driven ousiders, and much more likely to be engaged with furry on a personal level. Dr Plante noted that the pornographic content owned by furries was “nearly always in the form of drawn artwork, often portraying one’s own fursona and/or other characters/fursonas“.

Furries are engaged with art and other content created within the furry community. We are self-sustaining, and we exist regardless of mass-produced content intended to engage a fandom audience. That’s not to say that we aren’t furry fans, more that fandom is only a part of the wider furry experience.

For those furries who have visited furry conventions as well as fandom conventions (anime or sci-fi, say): consider the respective focus on hype and marketing for things that are for sale.

A furry convention is likely to focus on community-produced activities, like pawpet shows, fursuit games and charity drives—whereas a fandom convention is more likely to be anchored by the attendance of people famous for creating popular (and profitable) art for fandom consumption (and currency).

I’ll add that this isn’t black-or-white. There are profit-driven enterprises existing in the furry universe, just as there is fan-created content in anime and other fandoms. It’s the relative proportions that are different, and it is this that separates furry from fandoms, including the fandom that furry once was.

Furries are more likely to be motivated to participate in the community for belonging, and a feeling of self-esteem. These differences are caused by furry’s focus on communal and introspective aspects, where furry can become an important element of personal identity.

Not surprisingly, this means that furries tend to identify with the furry community more than anime fans identity with their fandom group.

This is, I think, data that clearly suggests how and why furry deviates from other fandoms. Dr Plante sums it up better than I can:

“Psychologists are beginning to recognize that there is a difference between fanship – identifying as a fan of something, and fandom – identifying as a member of a fan community. It is possible, for example, to be a fan of a particular television show (fanship), but to have little to no interest in interacting with other fans of the show (fandom).”

 

It’s the furry community that makes and defines furry. These results support other research performed by the IARP, which illustrated the importance of the furry community for identity development and social support. Or, to put it another way, introspection and friendship.

There is a lot of other fascinating data presented in the IARP summary. Highlights include an insights into furry personality, life satisfaction, and propensity for depression. I urge you to read the whole thing: https://sites.google.com/site/animeresearch/iarp-2014-3-fandom-survey-results.

* This reference updated on 11-Nov-14. Comment is based on comparison of Furry Survey data (collected 100% online) with IARP data (collected 45% at conventions; 55% online). Homosexuality on Furry Survey: 22%; IARP 29%.

[adjective][species] turns three today!  RandomWolf seems to have misunderstood what the party was all about, and brought all his graphs.  Too late now, though, he’s taking a mental census of the partygoers.  Art by the delightful Clair C., whom we have featured here before.

Hrmmm…

Thanks for sticking with us through the years!

Austen Crowder has been a furry for 14 years. This memoir appears in her short story collection A Fuzzy Place: Short Stories from a Life Shaped by Furry Subculture. Austen is also the author of Bait and Switch.

It took Kara eight years to turn into a kitty and two years to die.

Kara is me – at least, an idealized me. This is what furries do, right? Create a persona and project ourselves and our story onto them. Let’s just say that Kara was a normal human student at a Liberal Arts College. There she turned into a five-foot-nine cat: white fur, pink nose, gorgeous yellow eyes that glittered in darkness. She fought adversity to learn how to be comfortable with her new form until, finally, the world rewarded her with acceptance. Parades, homecomings, and pats on the back surrounded her as she learned that being a cat was actually pretty cool.

I’d usually cook up some half-assed explanation of how Kara came to exist – magic, genes, interdimensional shifts, virtual reality, fables – but I won’t. Not today. You see, Kara doesn’t exist. Kara is a lie. Kara has always been and always will be a lie. A veil between me and honest, exposed, vulnerable storytelling. I’ve told Kara’s story so many times that the formula feels comfortable, like well-worn socks or my favorite shirt.

Kara was just a thin veil to protect myself from the truth of my life: a way to experiment with not-me before being not-me was okay to consider. Her ears catch imaginary sounds and the tug she feels at her tail comes from imaginary hands. Her life is carefully constructed to tell a single narrative: person A realizes they are no longer person A, learns how to be person B, and through some macguffin skips over all the heartache and pain of realization to become B. Great for stories, not so great in implementation.

Let me tell you the truth about Kara and I.

I bought my first fursuit in 2003, just before my first furry convention. It came from a local costume designer that did work for community theaters; this was before the fursuit market exploded onto the scene. I walked out of Costumes by Margie wearing a baseball cap fitted with two long, brown rabbit ears. The designer had run coat hanger wire through the ears so they’d stay upright, and when I put them on I could feel them catching wind like two sails. Goosebumps surged down my neck.

I remember driving home with a herniated disk in my back, the pain almost unbearable, but the motivation of having that suit was more than enough to keep me upright, mile after mile, in hopes that it might fill up a hole in my life that needed filled.

You see, I had spent the past six years imagining myself as anything but myself. Story after story told the same tale: Kara realizes she’s a kitty, becomes a kitty, and lives with the consequences of becoming a kitty. Sometimes Kara was a wrestler turned into a squirrel. Sometimes Kara was a bunny finding his way to nonviolence. Sometimes Kara was even a boy turning into a girl, though those stories were always, always hidden at the bottom of the pile, heaped on with shame and misogyny.

I was on the preschool playground when I first realized the difference between boys and girls. A group of girls were bouncing around on balls with little pommels to hold onto. I joined them. They looked at me like I had shot a puppy. They got off their balls and made their way to the jungle gym and when I got up to follow they just screeched about cooties and, giggling, left me bouncing on my ball. The boys all gathered around a dirt clearing and a basketball hoop. They shoved at each other, fought to see who was top dog. Always one-upping. Always finding the weak link. I knew my place and it wasn’t with them, but my place kept running away and I couldn’t understand why. The ball kept me bouncing up and down, up and down. I closed my eyes and imagined myself like a kangaroo, bouncing up and down on long feet. Soon I’d have to get up and learn to play basketball with the boys but for now I was just alone with my thoughts, away from the echo of laughter and cootie shots and boys who knew something was wrong with the kid who tried to play with the girls all the time—

For my first convention I wore the rabbit costume all weekend. It was a partial costume: rabbit sleeves, rabbit booties, ears, and a facial prosthetic blended into my own face with makeup. I ate in it, partied in it, trolled the convention floor with it. I remember walking out into the crisp Chicago air, wind whipping through my rabbit ears, surrounded by new friends who I’d only ever met behind the keys of a chatroom. I kept thinking to myself, “This is it. This is what was missing from my life.” Over and over again it rang, mantra-like, as I hoped the weekend would drag on into endless eternities. Home. I had found home and comfort in this hotel: a place where I could be myself.

At the end of the day, though, the makeup had to come off and there I was, visibly myself again. Globs of spirit gum would stick to the whiskers of my beard for days after the cons and I’d pick at them, lost in memories of that grand escape. Becoming Kara, even if only for a moment, was just that powerful.

The problem was that Kara was never enough. When the daydreams wore thin I turned to stories. When the stories didn’t sate me it was on to the costumes. From costumes, novels; from novels, entire imagined worlds where escapism gave way to starved, desperate wish fulfillment. Nothing kept the hunger at bay. I wanted to live Kara’s life. With every story I clawed deeper, hoping to find something more, some untamed forest that would sustain me.

Here Kara would discover the uncaring nature of the world. She would discover a compulsion to groom herself at awkward moments, or a group would rise up to protest her existence. Maybe she would grow tired of feeling different and would try going back to being anything but a cat. She’d hide the ears, tuck the tail into a pant leg. Anything to put the genie back into the bottle.

I dated the same girl in high school for four years. Her family owned a nice farmhouse on the edge of our small down. Her parents were pretty great about leaving us to our devices. I remember coming over after a wrestling meet one weekend with my gym bag full of girl clothing and holding it up to her, sheepish, my face flushed, eyes diverted to the ground. “It’s weird,” I said. “It’s just really really weird but I keep having dreams and I can’t make them stop and I just need some help. Please.” I said it to her. I can’t believe I said it to her. She tried to be cool and take this in tow but I could see it, bubbling beneath the surface. Her discomfort. Her revulsion. Our relationship was over but I couldn’t even see it beneath the joy of finally feeling like I looked pretty. Right, even, but that didn’t make sense at all—

I got angry. I wrote gut-punching stories where I tore apart the illusion. Kara couldn’t ever be happy as a cat. Kara could never find peace. I tore and tore and ripped at the fantasies until they reeked of anger. I put guns to Karas’ heads. I dragged them through all the hells I could imagine. I hoped to any god who would listen that the Karas would fail, leaving me contented and able to put away this silly little itch I had for running around dressed up like a rabbit with a bunch of people I knew from the internet.

Still the ending was always the same: Karas became what they were supposed to be. No matter how much hell I tried to rain down on their heads, the Karas always found a way. That frustrated me most of all: even in the confines of my own imagination these rabbits and foxes and sqiurrels and cats somehow came out okay. I was trying to tell myself something that even I couldn’t listen to.

Furry cons grew and changed. Instead of a space where I could kill my identity it became a place with friends, memories, communities. I did panels on writing. Kara moved into allegory: stuffy tales full of meaning and pomp that come along with spending thousands of dollars to study stuffy tales full of meaning and pomp. Destroyed relationships became gut-wrenching confessionals. Tragedies turned into slices of life. I met queer people. Year by year I worked toward a full-cover on the sexual orientation bingo board: women, men, trans, cis, the whole nine. Always searching, and always uncomfortable.

I felt like I had to keep writing about Kara. The suits and the role play came and went but Kara was always there: the itch I couldn’t scratch. Kara’s stories became boring. Her stories moved toward acceptance and affirmation. There I was again, shouting at myself. Story after story where Kara begged me to let go, relax.

I spent four years at an all male college the same way a mannequin would spend a summer in a display window. Happy-looking, with all the accoutrements of a college guy, but I was listless. Lost. The rabbit suit now had a sequel and a new partner; the three of them lived by a small gym bag of women’s clothing that I only dragged out when roommates were gone. I was ashamed; I was hurting. I felt like I was slowly descending into a unique madness that would end with discovery, disgust, disowning.

Still, Kara was there. Happy despite all the battles I tossed her way.

I am wearing a skirt at a convention. It’s hard to believe but the little skirt swooshes and swishes around my legs and there it is again: I’m out in public wearing a skirt. Nobody stares – stranger things happen at these cons. The convention hall buzzes to life with a laser show, a DJ, the sweaty sway of bodies moving to the beat. I’m tipsy-going-on-drunk and there is this cute guy I just met laying on the ground before me. I straddle him. We kiss – for some reason it feels right, despite the fact that my girlfriend is there, watching, demanding I get it out of my system. Deep down I know the boy isn’t what I want: it’s what he promises. I am wearing a skirt and straddling him and giggling and acting sheepish like a good little girl and goddamnit I feel *right* here like this. My mind races. Terror grips at me with one hand: joy with the other. I feel conformed. I feel terrified. But I take him by the hand and we disappear into a nameless hallway and disappear into a room together.

I stopped wearing the rabbit suit all the time. I’d still bring it to conventions but putting it on felt like a duty, not a joy. People liked the look. I hated spending the time to apply the makeup. Still Sly rabbit had to show up at a convention and I did my duty to make that happen. The problem was that Sly Rabbit had ceased being enough to scratch the itch. Close, sure. But even with the rabbit suit and the ears I felt the costume, not the change. I was still me, and that annoyed me more than anything.

I started teaching. It was not exactly my shining moment. Teaching turned me into a nervous, twitchy husk; and I’m pretty sure that in deciding to take that job I put the educational lives of 120 impressionable kids at risk. I went to work and failed. I came home, graded papers, and was told by my superiors that I failed. Everything sucked. Even Kara seemed to fade as my life was slowly enveloped in a never-ending torrent of badly-plagiarized papers, parent calls, and kids who insisted on pushing every raw, exposed nerve they could find on their teacher, Mister Austin Crowder.

Weekly nervous breakdowns were the rule, not the exception. It’s no wonder I was shown the door after a single year, which left me with three months to figure out where to go next. I picked at stories and tried to find a way to move forward but I kept coming back to Kara. Kara becomes a bunny and becomes happy. Kara is actually a good teacher despite the fact that she’s a bunny. Kara was everything I wasn’t; everything I wanted to be.

Kara ran through fantasylands. Kara grew and changed. Her stories became more personal. Kara started turning into a girl. Kara, nee Karl, becomes a girl and learns to live happily. Karl turns into a cartoon hedgehog girl. Karl turns into Kara, the vixen. Kara is trans. Kara is trans. Kara. Is. Trans.

Then it came to me – I wanted to be Kara. I was unemployed, unsure of what I needed to do with my future, but there it was. Kara.

With each passing story Kara became less and less about being a bunny or a fox and more about being female. Not a bunny, or a squirrel, or any of the things with ears, tails, wings, scales, or other sorts of imaginary appendages I’d seen at a dozen different conventions. I wanted to be that girl. Kara. The girl who was changed in my stories, faced adversity, and came around to her happily ever after.

For the first time in my life I knew what I wanted. It burned in my chest. It terrified me to the point where I would freeze at random moments. I despaired. I raged. I knew it was impossible, but Kara kept beckoning.

I’m laying on the cold concrete of the basement of my girlfriend’s new house. Earlier I tried to strangle myself and I’m just so angry about it that I’m doing something, anything to burn off steam. I’m on the ground, exhausted after endless push-ups to run down the energy, when I find the box cutter. Its blade dances across my wrist, back and forth, and I realize there and then that this is it. This is how I die. The blood will flow to a drain under my chin as I scrape, going ever deeper, and then Kara is falling, falling, deep enough to fill the gaps between me and eternal darkness.

Something broke in me. I didn’t care what others thought. I went out dressed and realized that getting stared at wasn’t as horrible as I thought. All those years writing about Kara, the weirdo who stood out in every crowd, I feared being her. Being out. Being different. But here I was, sashaying through theaters and bars in women’s clothing, feeling like a completely refreshed person, and nobody seemed to care.

I don’t know. Maybe Kara prepped me. Maybe writing so many stories about her helped prepare me for social alienation and scowling looks I got while I stumbled through the rough, rough first steps of my own transformation. What matters is that wanting to be Kara taught me how to embrace myself. I spent years writing about characters only to realize that I’d been writing about myself the entire time. Every Kara had a simple message to me: despite what I thought, I wasn’t me.

The stories were never about Kara. Kara was a flashpoint: a particular moment of my future, crystalized in a thousand stories about an identity I hadn’t quite come to understand. Kara was the force that kept me going. Once I passed the threshold she couldn’t stay with me.

You see, Kara couldn’t grow. Austin grew. Oh, dear god did Austin ever grow! She earned the “e” the judge put into her name through an endless parade of arguments with friends, hard work, and the overwhelming fear that things could come crashing down if even one thing went sour. Austen moved to the big city and discovered she was a lesbian. She met an amazing woman and some amazing friends and started writing stories with characters who weren’t Kara, and for the longest time Austen felt like she was cheating, somehow, on the character that had plagued her for so many years.

Kara’s story dies when Austin disappears. Kara is just a woman who learns to be okay with being a kitty. That’s all Kara can ever be for me: a metaphor for change I needed to make in my own life. A security blanket that outlived its usefulness.

One door closes and another opens. I don’t know what is behind it. But what matters is this: I have written Kara’s story for eight years, and two years ago I decided to live it. When I did I killed off Kara forever.

My name is Austen, and this is my furry story.

 

With Gamergate’s rabid sexism gaining traction in mainstream media, this seems like a good opportunity to review how we furries are doing. We have demographic similarities with gamer groups—we’re geeky and male-dominated with a heavy online presence—and, like gamer groups, we have had issues with sexism.

Any serious journalistic attempt to understand Gamergate, a loose banner for a small but loud group, inevitably starts with “it’s complicated”. After all, how can a small group of people ostensibly worried about ethics in game journalism end up earning a reputation for vile harassment of women? The short answer seems to be that there is an undercurrent of sexism within gaming, and that internet flamewars and clusterfucks over journalistic integrity have, for one reason or another, managed to attract a extreme misogynistic subset of the larger group.

(To put it another way: we know that geeky groups are precious about the art that inspires their fandom. Gamers concerned about changes in their community can be expected to react much like, say, serious Star Wars fans reacting over the sale of Star Wars IP to Disney. There is nothing wrong with intense advocacy against change, but there is a serious problem if this devolves into harassment and rape threats.)

Furry’s problems are similar in style to Gamergate. The most obvious touchstone is the drama that began in late 2010, when a prominent male artist was accused of sexual assault by initially one woman, and eventually several. The women involved were subjected to abuse that was similar in tone and style to the targets of Gamergate.

It is probably fair to say that misogyny within furry isn’t as extreme or widespread as it is within Gamergate. However we certainly have a problem, something we here at [adjective][species] have written about, on several occasions.

The most common response to the suggestion that furry is sexist? Denial. This is a natural reaction for anyone who has never personally experienced or noticed any sexism. It is also natural to see an accusation of sexism as an attack on furry, and so it’s natural to be defensive.

In the writing below there are several concrete examples of sexism, including review of a scientific study that demonstrates that women experience sexist behaviour within furry. I encourage you to read (if you haven’t already), digest, and share.

Furry’s sexism is largely a product of our demographics. We are around 80% male, and that affects the way we collectively respond to the world around us. Furry culture naturally reflects who we are, and we will naturally give more regard to things that are more important to more people.

So while it is right to say that furry is a sexist culture, it is not right to say that furries, themselves, are sexist. (Although some certainly are.) Sexism is part of our cultural wallpaper, always there but largely unseen. Here at [a][s], we are trying to draw attention to this, because we love furry and we want it to improve.

We have published several articles that explore aspects of furry and sexism in detail:

Eight-Twenty, by Makyo: an introduction to furry’s skewed demographics and the anatomy of inherent sexism.

A Bitch About Furry, by JM: an exploration of sexist language common in furry.

How to Pick Up (Furry) Women, by JM: for single heterosexual and bisexual men, how to get to know furry women in a respectful way.

Dogpatch Press on Women, by JM: a look at an egregiously sexist but well-meaning article published elsewhere.

Gay Furries and Sexism: A Recursive Loop, by WitchieBunny: how the preponderance of gay furries leads to reinforcement of misogyny.

Furry Women at Furry Conventions, by JM: hard data demonstrating the challenges that women uniquely face in furry environments.

For six glorious weeks in 1990, Battle Kat dominated the World Wrestling Federation. He wore an adorable sparkly black cat mask, pawpads on the bottom of his wrestling boots, and a cute pawprint on his bottom, as if one of his catboy fans had run through some soot in his rush to give Battle Kat a cheeky pre-match “peptalk”.

Yes, Battle Kat was lame, although he was hardly Robinson Crusoe in the early 1990s WWF. With Hulk Hogan gone and other big names aging and/or fattening, the writers waved in a series of characters with all the complexity of the back of a breakfast cereal packet. Battle Kat joined similarly nuanced early-90s characters such as the Big Boss Man (prison guard), Doink (evil clown), and Repo Man (clarification not required).

Battle Kat used “cat-like” moves in the ring, which means that he occasionally made vague claw-shapes with his hands, and incorporated laboured and largely pointless acrobatics into his offense. Compared with the lumbering wrecks still going from the 1980s heyday of rock-n-wrestling, Battle Kat was agile and young, but was neither if compared with someone, well, agile and young.

I have a soft spot for professional wrestling. I started watching a year or two after Battle Kat’s brief stay. WWF wasn’t on TV in Australia but I (and a friend) would rent shows from the local video store. It was the early 90s, so the characters were broadly drawn—the main event always seemed to be Yokozuna (ostensibly an evil Japanese sumo wrestler but clearly just an unusually fat American Pacific Islander) vs The Undertaker, who is probably best described as a superhero designed by Tim Burton on a bad day—but the action was terrific fun after a few beers.

We both loved The Undertaker of course, but my secret favourite was a character named IRS, otherwise known as Irwin R. Shyster. IRS dressed like Gordon Gecko from Wall Street, complete with suspenders and tie. He would come to the ring, remind the audience to pay their taxes, and then get roundly thrashed by some random good-guy. Alas, he never crossed paths with Battle Kat.

IRS was everything good about everything bad in early-90s WWF. He was young, charismatic, and a talented athlete. But his character made no sense whatsoever. Why on earth would an IRS employee accuse a professional wrestling audience of tax evasion? And why would victory in a wrestling match give him the moral authority to enforce payment?

Inevitably, Mr Shyster and The Undertaker crossed paths. The writers tried ever so hard for the conflict to make sense… why would an inland revenue man dislike an undead superhero? Simple: Irwin was piqued by The Undertaker’s refusal to pay taxes associated with his own burial. Genius!

I encourage you to watch this 50-second video on YouTube to see the full, glorious, explanation. (Sample IRS comment: “Being six-feet under is not a tax shelter!”)

I never understood why people hated IRS. Good government is the foundation of a functional democratic society, and taxes fund government. IRS was just a hard-working, righteous civil servant.

I only learned why he was hated so much later—his character was designed to antagonize the American tendency towards small-government libertarianism. (I’m Australian, and at the time the left was arguing for freer international trade to facilitate improvement of government services, while the right was arguing for introduction of progressive taxation to facilitate improvement of government services… not quite Reaganomics.) IRS probably got cheered in New York. And Canada.

Battle Kat was cut from the same low-irony cloth as The Undertaker, however was sadly never to enjoy the Dead Man’s longevity. The wrestler under the cat mask was Brady Boone, who was fired a month or so after BK’s introduction. Boone then suffered the double humiliation of seeing the Battle Kat being played by a replacement (that lasted two weeks), and of his month as Battle Kat being the pinnacle of his career. After being fired, Boone spent years of playing a barely-infringing-on-WWF-copyright knock-off character (Fire Cat) in minor federations in the US and Japan.

Boone finished his career as a referee in Ted Turner’s successful WCW. Sadly he was killed in a car accident in 1998, at age 40.

He did leave a legacy though: in his time as Fire Cat, he mentored an up-and-coming 21-year-old. That young man went on to have a long and successful career, and incorporated several of Battle Kat’s signature athletic-but-pointless moves into his style. The young man will turn 44 in a few weeks, and is well known to any modern wrestling fan. His ring name is Rob Van Dam.

We talk quite a lot about furries and sexual orientation here at [adjective][species]. We do so because furries are unusual. For example: we are spread out almost evenly across the full seven-point Kinsey Scale, from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual).

Furry sexual preference on the Kinsey scale

We have looked at the tendency of furries to re-evaluate their sexual preference over time, how sexual orientation relates to species choice, how there is a lot of homosexuality but not a lot of homosexuals, and how all of this affects and informs furry culture.

We get all this data by asking about sexual orientation in the Furry Survey. However there are two responses that we collect but rarely mention: those who are asexual and those who are pansexual. Unfortunately, like many unusual sexual orientations and identities, these two groups are often overlooked or ignored inside and outside furry. Such behaviour contributes to a phenomenon known as erasure, which roughly describes how society acts as if entire groups of people don’t exist.

The [adjective][species] tendency to ignore these groups when reporting and analyzing Furry Survey data contributes to erasure of these identities within furry. This article will explain how and why we have treated our asexual and pansexual data, and hopefully help redress the balance.

Let’s look at the asexuals first.

There isn’t much research on asexuality, with the only significant source of data being a 2004 British survey that showed approximately 1% of the population reporting “no sexual attraction to a partner of either sex” (ref).

This conclusion has been subject to some criticism, based on the methodology and the 71.5% participation rate. There is evidence that people with unusual or stigmatic sexuality are more likely to refuse to respond (or respond honestly) to such surveys: homosexuality, for example, is often under-represented using such methodologies. Accordingly there is a good argument that asexuals are more prevalent in the 28.5% who did not participate, and therefore make up more than 1% in the general population. It is not clear what the real number might be.

In furry, we know the answer: around 5% of furries identify as asexual. This number does not vary with age or time in the fandom:

Asexuals are often invisible in conversations and analysis related to sexual identity because they are seen to be irrelevant to the topic at hand. This can cause them to be ignored altogether, which in turn can lead people to believe that they don’t exist.

But the challenge for asexuals isn’t just erasure. Arguably the larger problem is that asexuals can be treated with suspicion and disdain, because asexuality is often assumed to be a symptom of a problem.

For example, asexuality is sometimes assumed to be evidence that someone is unloveable or unattractive, that their professed lack of sexual drive is just a defensive strategy. The “asexuals are losers” trope is everywhere, such as in this example from Red Dwarf:

Source http://fuckyeahreddwarf-.tumblr.com/. This “joke” by the way, sets up Rimmer’s confession that his only sexual experience was with a concussed women who kept calling him “Norman”. Date rape: hilarious.

It is also common for asexuals to be assumed to be suffering some kind of mental or physical health issue. And while it is true that health issues can sometimes lead to a reduction in sex drive, it is unreasonable to assume that a low sex drive is due to a health issue. Asexuality isn’t a health problem.

Finally, asexuality is often thought to be something that people “grow out of”. While it is true that some asexuals will come to re-evaluate their sexuality and identify as something else, there is no evidence of movement away from asexuality over time.

In furry we can show that asexuality is not temporary, as is clear from the data I presented earlier. This is in contrast to data on furry heterosexuality:

The static nature of the data regarding asexuals within furry is partly why we tend to overlook them here on [adjective][species]. It is difficult to provide interesting analysis on the lack of a trend. For example, when I wrote about how heterosexual furries tend to re-evaluate their sexual preference, I opted to remove the asexual data because it didn’t add to the discussion.

We come across the same issue when we talk about furry sexual behaviour. The asexuals are (usually) simply not relevant to the subject at hand. It’s also fair to say that, in general, people are more interested to read about sexual behaviour than the absence of sexual behaviour.

So while we have the data on asexuals, we are yet to discover anything especially surprising or novel.

More pertinently when it comes to data analysis, asexuality is a bit of an apple among the oranges. It is included as an option to a question about sexual orientation, but asexuality is not a sexual orientation (although some people dispute this).

Asexuality, like a lot of labels around sexuality, is a slippery concept, and so people don’t always agree on what it means. It is usually defined as someone with low sexual attraction*, or no feelings of sexual attraction at all. Asexuals may or may not masturbate, they may or may not have sex, they may or may not be inclined towards a relationship.

Asexuals often experience some romantic inclination, although this may be lower, along with their sexual attraction. Accordingly asexuals are usually thought, in addition to being asexual, to be somewhere between the extremes of exclusive homo- and heterosexuality along with everyone else. They simply experience less sexual interest, tending towards zero, something which inspired the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) symbol:

The AVEN asexuality symbol. The top of the triangle represents the spectrum from heterosexuality to homosexuality, the lower portion shows sexual orientation tending towards zero.

Of course, it’s difficult to place yourself on the Kinsey Scale if you don’t experience any meaningful sexual or romantic drive.

Asexuality is probably better thought of as an identity rather than a sexual orientation. But that doesn’t make it any less important or real.

Recently, here on [adjective][species], we published a visualization that showed how species choice varies with sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Due to an early design decision, we didn’t show our data on asexuals. That was a mistake.

Our failure to present species data for asexuals is an example of erasure. Please accept my apology—the fault belongs to me, JM.

I have one extra request for the asexuals: do you think we should continue to provide “asexual” as a sexual preference option in the Furry Survey? The alternative would be a separate yes/no question, which might allow a more nuanced response for someone who considers themselves, say, both asexual and heterosexual.

And this brings us to the pansexuals. Like asexuals, pansexuals are rarely mentioned here on [adjective][species].

A pansexual is someone who experiences sexual and romantic attraction where gender is irrelevant. It is similar to bisexuality, but different in that “bisexual” may imply that gender is relevant, and broader in that “bisexual” may imply a lack of interest in people who are genderqueer.

The difference between the two is subtle. I strongly suspect that many, if not most, bisexuals would be happy enough to be labelled pansexual. If anything, pansexual is a better term because of its implied inclusion of people who don’t fit on the gender binary.

Here at [a][s], we usually lump pansexuals in with bisexuals and report them together, usually simply as “bisexuals”. It’s a simplification, one of the many simplifications we make to help us present data in a clear format. In this case, it’s clearer to reduce the number of categories, and we think it’s okay to do so given that the differences between bisexuality and pansexuality are marginal.

We do this with our Kinsey data as well. If you respond to the Furry Survey as either “completely heterosexual” or “mostly heterosexual” (Kinsey Scale 0 and 1 respectively), we lump you into a general “heterosexual” category. Similarly, our homosexual category is a combination of Kinsey 5 and 6, and our bisexuals are Kinsey 2, 3 & 4 (plus pansexuals).

When we do this, we are compromising accuracy for simplicity. It’s a trade-off and we hope we’re striking the right balance. Without such compromises, things can get complicated: even the Kinsey Scale and labels like pansexual and asexual are inherently limiting, because it’s unreasonable to expect something as complex as sexual orientation to be completely explained with one word or a number on a scale. Unfortunately it’s necessary for analysis.

As it turns out, bisexuals and pansexuals within furry tend to exhibit similar patterns in the data:

I hope that’s okay, pansexuals. We at [adjective][species] love you all, truly. And we know that you (might) love each and every one of us back.

 

* Edit 1 October 2014: the original version of this article stated that asexuality is usually defined as someone with a low sex drive. This is incorrect: asexuality is someone who experiences little or no sexual attraction.

[adjective][species] may be the best place for furry non-fiction and opinion writing, but it’s not the only place. In recent weeks we have been blessed with some outstanding pieces published around the traps, which I would like to share with you here:

• Some Notes on Contemporary Furry Affairs by Michael Arthur over on Hooded Utilitarian. It’s an intelligent and critical look at Scar (subtitle: A One Night Stand with the Lion Queen), Rocket Raccoon, and Bojack Horseman.
• Rob Checks His Privilege on Rob Baird’s blog. Rob is a furry writer, talking about creating and consuming “problematic” art and porn.
• An Interview with Neonbunny, by Patch over on Dogpatch Press, following Neonbunny from San Francisco counterculture to his promotion of furry nightclub Frolic.

Enjoy!