[adjective][species]

You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
- Mark Zuckerberg (http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/13/zuckerberg-privacy/)

 

Many furries choose to interact with the world using two or more identities. At the simplest level this might be a legal (“real”) identity and a furry (virtual) identity, and many furries maintain several more.

It’s a simple exercise, internally, to manage multiple identities. People typically see themselves as a background manipulator, with various outwards-facing facades depending on the context: work identity, furry identity, kink identity, and so forth. This compartmentalization is normal, and everyone—furry and non-furry—does it to a degree.

It’s less simple to keep outward-facing identities separate and discrete. For the most part, people are happy enough to allow their identities to leak into one another, such as when one’s co-workers meet one’s family. Problems occur when people want to keep some element of themselves private: perhaps their sexual behaviour, perhaps a hobby that is prone to misunderstanding… furry, for example.

Facebook presents a problem, because it’s largely a central clearinghouse for identity. You might consider Facebook to be designed for the internal manipulator of the multiple identities; not for expression of the identities themselves.

The Google Plus social network is similar to Facebook in that there is a ‘common names’ policy. G+ requires a consistent name across all products that require a Google account. And that name most be provable: either a legal name or a pre-existing pseudonym with a provable history. So you can’t be Jane Smith in some contexts and Blazing Hyena in others; it’s one or the other.

It makes sense that social networks require close ties to the legal identity of their users. It’s a business opportunity: if a Facebook login (say) becomes an online-based de facto proof of identity, then this becomes a service they can sell.

That sounds bad, but it’s not unreasonable for a business to be motivated by the potential to create a new market. Businesses exist to make money. It is absolutely reasonable, of course, to expect businesses to be law-abiding and moral, just not benevolent.

Today, in 2014, it seems like we’re having a sea change in the way identity is stored and proved. Currently proof-of-identity is a service offered by governments; a way of assuring the integrity of individual transactions like voting, or getting a driver’s license. But the ubiquity of online social networks is providing a second route to proof-of-identity. Large fiscal institutions like credit agencies or banks already track individuals, creating a type of identity assurance, but their reach pales in comparison to the scope of identity services potentially offered by the likes of Facebook.

Governments are currently looking into the best ways to manage the transition to online identity (see here for a discussion of the UK government’s plans). It may be, in the not-too-distant future, that businesses like Facebook will provide legal online identity assurance.

Of course there is no (current) requirement for proof of online identity, and social networks like Facebook are opt-in. And there are other ways to prove your online identity, ways that don’t require a connection to your legal identity or ‘common name’.

Services like Twitter and OpenID offer a consistent virtual identity, one where Blazing Hyena doesn’t need to be connected to Jane Smith. But even here, Jane is at risk of ‘doxing’, and anyone who links her to Blazing Hyena will be able to find out whatever else Blazing Hyena is up to.

Unfortunately it’s not possible to maintain persistent multiple identities without risking them being linked. Guaranteed and absolute privacy is impossible: there is necessary conflict between physical identity and virtual identity.

Consider Jake Rush. Jake is a LARPer, the sort of hobby that is prone to be misunderstood, and so he kept it separate from his work identity. He is an attorney.

On March 20 this year, Jake announced a bid for Congress. His online LARP identity was shortly discovered, and he became a figure of fun. Pictures of him in costume were published alongside out-of-context quotes… you can imagine the rest. Jake’s use of multiple identities was seen as him having, to quote Zuckerberg, a “lack of integrity”.

Still, online anonymity is not always desirable. Consider Michael Brutsch, a programmer who was the subject of an article on Gawker in 2012. Online, Brutsch was known as Violentacrez, moderator of a subreddit dedicated to posting covert, voyeuristic photos taken of women in public (‘Creepshots’) as well as the creator of another subreddit dedicated to posting sexualized images of underage girls (‘Jailbait’).

Brutsch’s outing as Violentacrez seems like a positive step, but the ethics of his outing is not so black-or-white. The journalist who did the research and wrote the article (Adrian Chen) is, essentially, enforcing Zuckerberg’s single-identity ideal. Chen could not have written the article if he had a separate online identity himself. His decision to out Brutsch demonstrates the risk taken by anyone with multiple identities, be they abhorrent (like Brutsch) or innocuous (like Jake Rush).

It’s a pity that having multiple identities poses these risks and challenges. Identity play is completely normal, and part of a healthy internal life. Furry might be seen as an edge case, given that our identity play includes obfuscation of species, but that doesn’t make it internally problematic.

Having said that, there is a lot of research that demonstrates that a hallmark of maturity and good mental health is self actualization (ref). Self actualization is a term that describes how the various elements of one’s identity are integrated into a balanced whole, including positive acceptance of unusual elements. Examples of unusual elements of identity might include gender identity, or sexual orientation, or sexual interests. (That’s not to say that identity play via personality splitting is a negative thing; quite the opposite in fact. But it’s a complex issue and the subject of many articles here on [adjective][species] – click here to browse our ‘identity’ tag.)

Consistency of identity is a good thing from a psychological point of view. But this refers to internal personality—the internal manipulator of facades—and not the editing of outward-facing personalities depending on the context. It is normal and healthy, and respectful of those around you, to manage outward appearance to match society’s expectations. To use an extreme example, it’s okay to enjoy masturbating to weird furry porn (and be happy about that), but you probably shouldn’t share the details around the office watercooler, even if someone asks you what you did on the weekend.

Interestingly, there is evidence that having disparate identities is an indicator of poor mental health. This specifically includes furries: the IARP have shown that furries with diverging fursonas are more at risk of negative psychological states like repression or dissociation (ref).

Some personality splitting is normal. It’s normal to act and feel different in different contexts: online vs offline, friends vs family, lovers vs workmates. Yet there is a lot of value in being able to act in ways that reinforce the validity of your identity. It’s good to meet online friends in real life. It’s good to turn sexual fantasies into sexual realities. It’s good to talk about the furry world with non-furry friends. And it’s good to talk openly about sexual fetishes, or sexual and gender identity.

There is a balance to be found, and it’s not easy. It’s good to merge our online world with our offline world, but this should to be done in a safe fashion, and should be respectful of those around us. Some editing and personality splitting is necessary and reasonable. It is completely unreasonable to suggest, as Zuckerberg does, that managing different versions of yourself in order to respect other people and to stay safe is ‘an example of a lack of integrity’:

To get people to this point where there’s more openness — that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it. I just think it will take time. The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy concerns.
- Mark Zuckerberg

 

Zuckerberg’s point of view is completely reasonable if you happen to be male, white, heterosexual, and rich. He is speaking from a position of privilege, one that disregards the need for privacy for those of us who don’t conform quite so easily to the mainstream. (But then nobody would mistake Mark Zuckerberg for a philosopher, or suggest that he is well known for his emotional intelligence.)

There is always risk that an unusual online identity will be linked with a staid offline identity. This is not a problem if, like Zuckerberg, you can express yourself fully and still meet society’s norms. And it’s easy for such privileged people to assume that their experience is universal.

For the rest of us, we must bear the risk that we will have our ‘hidden’ selves outed. We’re especially vulnerable if we hold any public or semi-public position. The accusation we risk facing will be a familiar one to many furries: something along the lines of “pretends to be an omnisexual transgender fox on the internet”. We’re not doing anything other than expressing ourselves, yet we’ll be tarred by the suggestion of weirdness, and of lacking integrity.

We furries risk being shamed for being ourselves. There is no solution, beyond carefully curating our online presences to give ourselves as much privacy as possible. Unfortunately, it’s a challenge that comes with the territory.

 

- with thanks to Drat for the inspiration and the help

Guest post by Courtney “Nuka” Plante, PhD social psychology student at the University of Waterloo, furry, and co-founder of the International Anthropomorphic Research Project.

To paraphrase Lao Tzu: “There are many paths to enlightenment.” This statement is just as true of science as it is of philosophy or spiritual fulfillment. In science, knowledge is seldom gained through one perfectly-designed study that single-handedly topples all preexisting theories. Rather, the progress of science involves the convergence of dozens or hundreds of studies by numerous scientists, all with different approaches to the the topic at hand.

The reason science progresses this way becomes apparent as you delve into the empirical literature. Search as you might through the annals of scientific history, you will never find a perfectly-designed study. Every study has its confounding variables, alternative explanations, limitations in generalizability, problematic variable operationalizations; the list goes on and on.

Why are there no perfect studies? Is history rife with bad scientists who simply cannot design a good study?

Quite the opposite, I contend. Designing a “perfect study” is about skillfully deciding how to approach the unavoidable tradeoffs that arise in empirical science. It is about crafting your study so that its strengths speak to the question of interest, while its weaknesses are either minimal or, at very least, overcome through converging evidence with other studies.

Those empirically studying the furry fandom are bound to these same realities when it comes to study design. Whether it’s the folks at [adjective][species] or the social scientists that comprise the International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP) they both aim to answer questions about the furry fandom through the collection and interpretation of data. While this overarching goal may be the same, the individual questions and the means of collecting data differ drastically. Asking whether the [a][s] approach or the IARP approach is “better” or “more correct” is misguided, as it overlooks the fact that both approaches can provide converging evidence through complementary methodologies, and together they can answer a broader range of questions than either approach could by itself.

To illustrate this point, I outline several of the tradeoffs that we have to contend with when deciding how to study the furry fandom. By emphasizing how [a][s] and the IARP differ in our approaches to these tradeoffs, and by showing the merit in both positions, I hope to show that the cause of furry science is advanced through researchers pursuing both approaches.

Trade-off #1: Research Questions – Description vs. Inference

The first challenge a furry researcher faces is deciding which question(s) they wish to answer. At first glance, this may seem like little more than plucking the first inquisitive thought about furries from one’s mind. In reality, a research question must be precisely honed to be useful. Consider, for example, a question like “What’s the deal with furries?” This question is too vague to be pursued: how would one even begin to collect data to answer such a question? While this is a particularly extreme example, we, as researchers, are often asked similarly vague or ill-defined questions, or questions which do not lend themselves well to empirical answers from curious, well-intentioned furries:

“What makes foxes different?” – Different from what? How do you define “different”?

“Are furries screwed up?” – Compared to who? How do you define “screwed up”?

“What about people who say they’re not furries, but they’re clearly furries?” – How do you even begin to find and study such a group? How do you know when you have found one? And what is meant by “what about”?

Such examples hopefully illustrate the importance of having a clear, well-defined research question that can be answered empirically. The questions that guide our research generally fall into two camps:

Description – These questions ask about the frequency, average, or range of something. They may include questions such as “What percent of the furry fandom is homosexual?” (approximately 22%), “What is the age of the average furry?” (approximately 22 years old), or “Are there more foxes or wolves in the furry fandom?” (wolves). Descriptive questions are “snapshots” of the furry fandom.

Inference – These questions ask for a conclusion to be reached on the basis of some kind of comparison. This usually involves comparing one group to another, one characteristic to another, or comparing something over time. They may include questions such as “Are foxes more likely to be outgoing than wolves?”, “Do furries have a better sense of community than anime fans?”, or “Does spending more time in the fandom reduce furries’ likelihood of developing depression?”

Descriptive questions are more frequently asked of us by furries themselves, who are most interested in learning about the state of the fandom. In contrast, academics (e.g. psychologists) are less interested in getting an accurate picture of the furry fandom and tend to be more interested in broader implications (e.g. what furries can tell us about fandoms in general) or mechanisms (e.g., what causes furries to feel a sense of community). As such, academics tend to ask more inferential questions.

[a][s] caters primarily to a furry audience: the vast majority of its readers are furries, and it is run by furries. As such, [a][s] tends to pursue, collect data on, and report answers to descriptive questions that interest furries. In contrast, the IARP, while catering to a furry audience, also aims to publish research in academic journals and has, on its team, a number of non-furry social psychologists. As such, the IARP tends to pursue more inferential questions, questions that aim to either understand the mechanisms underlying phenomena in the furry fandom or to generalize beyond the furry fandom to other groups or to humanity more generally.

Both approaches serve an important purpose. Descriptive approaches help us to better understand the “landscape” of the furry fandom, while inferential questions help us to understand the mechanisms driving participation in the furry fandom, and how the furry fandom relates to other fandoms. Where both approaches provide converging evidence (e.g. showing that 21% of furries identify as completely heterosexual and that this number is significantly less than in the general population), they bolster our confidence in the obtained findings.

Trade-off #2: Presentation – Simplicity vs. Accuracy

A consideration that is perhaps less central to study design, but is crucial to reporting, is the way we present our data. Decisions about data presentation are guided by two primary factors: the nature of the data and the audience who reads the data.

Descriptive questions yield descriptive data, which lends itself nicely to a multitude of visualizations (e.g., pie charts, area charts, etc). Summary statistics, such as averages, ranges, and standard deviations can also be used. Such decisions depend both on the perceived knowledge of the reader and the intended medium of the presentation. For example: a good visualization can convey a tremendous amount of data very efficiently, and lends itself well to concise summaries which can be easily shared and distributed. In contrast, a paragraph of summary statistics, while perhaps more informative, may be less readily parsed by readers, may not feel as intuitive, and may not be as easily shared as a single figure. Moreover, if the audience lacks the statistical sophistication to understand what a measure of variance is, presenting such statistics may confuse the reader, effectively undermining the point of presenting the data at all.

This is the tradeoff of data presentation: conveying the data as accurately as possible while making it as memorable and easily readable as possible. Almost inevitably, the more accurately the researcher attempts to be with the data, the more complex it becomes. Imagine, for example, a simple statistic like “The average convention-going furry is 26 years old”. This number, in and of itself, is relatively straightforward: a person can walk away remembering “con-going furries are about 26 years old on average”. In contrast, if I said “Convention-going furries ranged from 18-66 years old, with a mean of 26 years and a standard deviation of 2.5 years in a distribution that was significantly positively skewed”, while this would be a more accurate picture of the age data, it may be overwhelming for a reader who has no concept about the significance of the data’s range, distribution shape, or variance statistics.

Where this trade-off becomes a slight nuisance in descriptive data, it becomes a large issue in inferential data. Take, for instance, a question about the relationship between fursonas and self-esteem. One way of reporting this data would be to say “in general, furries with fursonas who were significantly different from their non-fursona self tended to have lower life satisfaction”. It would be more accurate, however, to state that “the extent to which a person indicated that their fursona differed from their non-fursona self significantly negatively predicted life satisfaction, B = -.455, p < .001” (and, if one wanted to be particularly stats savvy, they could throw in the t-value, MSE, and calculations of Cohen’s d). Such a sentence, while again more factually correct, would be far less likely to be useful to a casual reader, who only wanted to know whether or not fursonas were related to life satisfaction.

If the goal of the researcher is to inform a general furry audience, they have to write at a level that will be understood by this audience. While the approach of the IARP is to provide some statistics where it is possible to do so without compromising the ability to easily understand the results, we tend to err on the side of a more readable presentation of the data, with the rationale that if the reader takes away nothing from the finding because they cannot interpret it, then we might as well have not presented it at all.

Trade-off #3: Sample – Representativeness vs. Convenience

One trade-off plaguing researchers in the social sciences is the tension between wanting to acquire a representative sample and the inconvenience of acquiring such a sample.

At first blush, it may seem like a matter of laziness: if the goal is to do good science, one should always strive to get the most representative sample as possible. It is bad science, after all, to make claims about the entirety of the furry fandom when you have only collected a small, biased subset of the broader fandom. While this may be true, two important factors need to be considered: pragmatics and the reality of sampling.

Pragmatically, there are only so many resources available to researchers. [a][s] operates within the constraints of a website, while the IARP, while able to conduct online surveys and attend conventions, is bound by the realities of budget limitations and an ethics board. As a result, [a][s] and the IARP collect different samples of furries.

[a][s] is consistently able to reach a large sample of online furries, usually larger than that of the IARP. [a][s] samples are also a better representation of the broader fandom because they are able to include minors, who comprise a significant portion of the furry fandom. The IARP are unable to study minors due to the limitations of ethics boards, which require parental consent. In contrast, the IARP routinely collects data from furries at conventions, who may have less of a web presence and thus be otherwise missed by the [a][s] survey.

Each sample, taken in isolation, suffers from significant limitations. But taken together, they overcome each other’s weaknesses and, where the data is in accordance (e.g., [a][s] estimates that about 21% of furries self-identify as exclusively heterosexual while the IARP estimates this number to be approximately 24%), we have greater confidence in the data’s representativeness of the fandom as a whole.

The reality of sampling is such that it is impossible to get a perfectly representative sample of any group. The most representative sample of a group would involve studying every member of the group itself. In the furry fandom, where boundaries are ill-defined and where furries may not attend conventions or know about the IARP or [a][s] online surveys, it is impossible to get a perfectly representative sample of the fandom as a whole. Instead, we, as researchers, do our best to maximize the size of our samples, to collect samples as broadly as possible, to avoid systematic biases where pragmatically possible, and to qualify our findings by recognizing the limitations of our samples.

As an illustration of this last point, the IARP has, stressed that, until 2012, the “control” sample was significantly flawed in that it was comprised of people who, while not identifying as a furry, were nevertheless attending a furry convention or were taking the online survey which had been advertised on furry websites. As such, all comparisons to these control groups were to be qualified by a recognition that they were not ideal control groups. More recently, efforts have been made using online crowdsourcing websites such as Mechanical Turk, to create a control group that is more representative of a general American population. While, again, it is not a perfectly representative sample, and itself suffers from its own biases (e.g., people with enough internet savvy to use Mechanical Turk), it nonetheless represents a systematic improvement in sampling techniques. This striving for improved sampling techniques, coupled with the use of converging evidence from multiple samples, provides the best solution to this trade-off.

Trade-off #4: Study Design – Correlational vs. Experimental Design

A trade-off that goes hand-in-hand with the description vs. inference trade-off is that between correlational and an experimental design.

A correlational study involves simultaneously assessing several variables of interest. Perhaps the most common example of a correlational study is a survey, the type commonly employed by [a][s] and the IARP. With a correlational study design, a researcher is able to not only provide descriptive statistics regarding the state of the furry fandom, but they are also able to look for patterns in participants’ responses: for example, are participants who report having been in the fandom for longer more likely to identify as homosexual?

By running simple statistical tests (e.g. chi-squared tests, comparing the magnitude of correlations against zero, etc), researchers using correlational designs can identify trends, but with an important caveat: correlation does not equal causation. These analyses only allow researchers to see that there is, indeed, a relationship between two variables: say, for example, between length of time in the fandom and sexual orientation. Such designs, however, say nothing about the direction of this pattern or which of several alternative explanations is true: is it the case that homosexual furries are more likely to remain in the fandom for longer, that as furries spend more time in the fandom they become more homosexual, or is there a third variable (e.g., identifying with a stigmatized minority group) that predicts both homosexual identification and length of time spent in the furry fandom?

While correlational data can be useful when it comes to providing a snapshot of the fandom and the pattern of results between variables, a simple correlational design cannot lead to conclusions about casual order (although there are some correlational designs, including longitudinal designs and cross-lagged panel designs, which can better address these problems relating to “which variable came first?”). On the upside, correlational studies are relatively easy to implement and can be relatively simple to analyze.
In contrast to correlational designs, researchers can employ experimental designs. The IARP regularly conducts experiments in its own work. Experimental designs involve the manipulation of a variable with random assignment of participants to the experimental conditions, and then assessing whether or not this manipulation led to systematic differences in the variables of interest.

For example: in a recent study, the IARP created three versions of its survey: one that asked furries to compare themselves to anime fans, one that asked furries to compare themselves to sports fans, and a control condition where furries made no comparisons. These different versions were mixed up and handed out to participants at a convention randomly, so that participants were randomly wound up in one of these three conditions. The variable of interest in this study was furries’ beliefs about whether or not being furry was something biologically determined. Because furries were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions, there were no systematic differences between the groups except for which comparison (or no comparison) they were asked to make. As such, any systematic differences between the groups could only have been caused by the manipulation of comparison group. Because of this, the differences that we observed (furries who were asked to compare to anime fans were more likely to say that being furry was something biologically determined than furries who compared to sports fans) were said to be caused by our manipulation, and not by something else.

Experimental designs, unlike correlational designs, allow us to make statements about the direction of causation, which allow us to test questions about psychological mechanisms. As you can see, however, such designs can be far more difficult to implement, and are typically limited to studying a small handful of manipulated variables at a time. They also require a high degree of precision, as an ineffective or problematic manipulation can lead to interpretation difficulties. Finally, such designs may also be highly artificial, as attempts to manipulate the independent variable, while effective, may not reflect naturally occurring events, leading some to conclude that differences between conditions are artificial and do not reflect real-world patterns of findings.

While it may be tempting to say that all questions should be answered with experimental designs, it again comes down to a matter of pragmatics and appropriateness. Descriptive questions, for example, may not warrant experimental designs or the use of inferential statistics to interpret them: if a person simply wants to know what percentage of the fandom identifies as homosexual, an experiment is not necessary. Furthermore, because experimental designs can be so resource-consuming, there is simply not enough time nor resources to run every experiment we would like to run.

Correlational studies are often far easier to run and interpret. While it would be nice to know the direction of causation for some effects, it is often implausible or simply impossible to manipulate some variables. For example: if a person wanted to know whether or not having a fox fursona led to systematic differences as compared to having a wolf fursona, a true experiment would involve randomly assigning some participants to have a fox fursona and others to have a wolf fursona. Given that people create their own fursonas, this is implausible as a design. Another example of this involves biological sex: given that we cannot “randomly assign” people to be biologically male or female, questions about direction of causation in these regards are impossible to test experimentally.

To summarize this section, while [a][s] tends to employ correlational designs and the IARP tends to employ a greater mix of experimental and correlational designs, this does not mean any one design is more valid or useful than another. While a significant correlation from an [a][s] survey may not mean that we can necessary make claims about direction of causation, such studies may provide converging evidence, alongside an experiment or longitudinal study from the IARP, which help to strengthen the conclusions we make about our findings.

Trade-off #5: Survey Design – Brevity vs. Data Breadth

The last trade-off I will mention is the trade-off between a survey’s brevity and its breadth. [a][s] surveys have always been shorter than IARP surveys, which can often exceed more than 200 questions in length. While, at first blush, this might seem to suggest that IARP surveys are simply “better”, there are number of significant limitations that arise from having a longer survey:

• Firstly, longer surveys require more resources: more payment for participants to complete a longer survey, more time to analyze more variables, and (at least in the case of printed surveys) larger printing costs.
• Second, larger surveys may dissuade some participants. For example, if, at a convention, the IARP is attempting to hand out a 10-page survey, there will likely be potential participants who will turn down the survey simply because it will involve a time investment they are unwilling to make. Far from being trivial, this may represent a potential bias in the sample, which may only be including furries who are particularly motivated to take a long survey instead of doing other events at a convention.
• Third, longer surveys carry with them the possibility of participant fatigue: participants completing the first ten questions of a survey are likely more attentive, thoughtful, and patient than participants who complete the last ten questions of a 250-question survey. This leads to the possibility that data collected in longer surveys may be of poorer quality than data collected through shorter surveys.

As with the previous trade-offs, the message should be clear: while there are advantages to having surveys that include hundreds of variables, the weaknesses of such designs should be complemented through the implementation of shorter surveys. Shorter surveys are strong in their ability to draw more potential participants and to retain participant attention. This is why [a][s], with its shorter surveys, are a welcome complement to the more lengthy IARP studies.

Conclusion

I started this article off by suggesting that there are no perfect studies, nor is there one perfect way to summarize, analyze, and present the data from any one study. As my (admittedly brief) review of the different trade-offs involved hopefully makes clear, researchers are just as much artists as they are scientists, balancing each of these trade-offs to create studies that maximize the ability to answer the question of interest while minimizing weaknesses.

The best strategy for overcoming the weaknesses inherent in any one design, interpretation strategy, or presentation is through converging methodologies: approaching the same topic from multiple directions. The IARP believes, as we hope the folks at [a][s] do, that having multiple researchers who share the same goal of better understanding the furry fandom, and who set upon this goal through different approaches, represents the ideal way to get the fullest, most accurate picture of the furry fandom and to provide the best answers to the most questions, from furries and non-furry academics alike.
For these reasons, I choose to see the IARP and [a][s] not as rivals, but as partners in science, each seeking a slightly different, but converging path toward enlightenment.

Guest post by Rick Griffin.  Rick is the creator of Housepets and can be found on FA, DA, and Weasyl, as well as on Patreon. Rick will be Guest of Honor at Confuzzled this May.

I often find, when I’m trying to discuss furry with someone, that we tend to get hung up on personal definitions. Now, while this is considered a boon for the fandom ­– furry can be ANYTHING you want, man! Just like, open your mind, and let the furry flow through you! – this is often a problem when we’re determining whether or not we really do have something in common beyond just the label.

The thing is, most of the time when I talk about furry, I mean it is the most original sense of the word: I like cartoon animals (for varying degrees of the word “cartoon” and “animals”). This sometimes means it’s very hard to discuss cartoon animals in a general fandom sense without someone stepping in and saying “Furry isn’t just about cartoon animals!”

Yes, I know that. I got that. I’m not attempting to marginalize anyone, but you have to admit that the proportion of cartoon animal fans tend to vastly outweigh the others. And when I speak, sometimes I’m just attempting to speak from a very specific platform, for which we all have a word: “Furry”

But what do we actually mean when we say “furry”? I’ve been a member of the fandom since about 2004, and if there’s one thing that’s certain is that everyone has their own personal definitions. But that doesn’t mean furry means anything…we all clearly have some scope in mind when we talk about it, it’s just that our personal scope and visions do not always align with others.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but the first thing to keep in mind is that this is a descriptive overview of the word furry – that is, how people actually use the word, as opposed to prescriptivist, what people want the word to mean. Another thing to keep in mind is that definitions are by nature exclusionary – by saying this with a certain meaning, we are naturally excluding that. As much as we would like furry to be all-encompassing, we don’t actually mean the broadest, most all-encompassing definition every single time we say “furry”. This isn’t always a problem – but I’ll explain what this can result in in the third part of this essay.

Also, this list is mostly paraphrased and isn’t exactly academically rigorous. I just do this stuff as a hobby.

What We’re Trying To Say

Furry can mean:

1. The furry fandom in general, and/or a member of said fandom.
   • Furry is primarily defined by whether you consider yourself a member of the fandom. That said, it’s apparently entirely possible to be a furry but be in denial about it.
   • “I’m not a furry, I only draw anthro art!”
   • It might help their case if there weren’t these people that suddenly make an about-face and embrace furry communities despite having been in denial about it. Some people liken this to coming out, but I think this may only be because of the stigma associated with furry. So apparently, it’s very, very hard for some people to stop being interested in anthropomorphic animals just because the stigma is present.
   • There are some people who add on a specific this-or-that to the fandom such as sexuality/fetish and spirituality, but neither of these actually seem to be requirements to fit the definition in mainstream circles, even if they may be ubiquitous.
2. Those people who have freaky costume sex at conventions.
   • Usually used by people who have no idea what furry is. Currently, this is the way some people believe that furry is categorized, and likewise it may seem that the content is of no real consequence so long as said people can get their freak on while dressed as anything else.
   • There are, naturally, people who do have freaky costume sex at conventions. Some of said people may embrace the word “furry” and insist to other people that this is, in fact, the definition of furry (or thereabouts) and everyone else is a liar.
   • These people do not have a monopoly on the word furry any more than anyone else does. Most people in the fandom tend to only accept this as a fringe expression; if said people evaporated overnight, the core of “furry” would remain intact.
   • Likewise, zoophilia is presumed to be to some outsiders a core association with furry, but within the fandom, it is not treated with any exclusivity to the definition.
3. An anthropomorphic character made in the scope of the fandom, exclusively.
   • For some definitions, since furry is a fandom, furry characters are only really encompassed by the fandom, and characters outside the fandom are not furry.
     
4. Any anthropomorphic character in any media, inclusively.
   • The fox version of Robin Hood was never intended for the fandom but still appeals to the fandom, as does the mythological god Anubis, etc; although some might argue the point, a completely identical fancharacter would be considered furry, so . . .
     
5. An anthropomorphic character which is sexualized and not any other funny animal character.
   • “Why do you furries have to ruin everything!? He’s not a furry because he’s an action character, he’s not sexualized at all, and you have to go and add sex to it” Speaking of main character from Dust. JUST the character being categorized as furry, no porn of him was in context.
   • People outside the fandom who perceive it as full of undesirables will usually insist on this definition, although it usually reduces to “Stay away from my childhood you perverts!”
   • Some people inside the fandom do use this as a differentiation for purposes of describing whether or not something is pandering or not pandering – but what exactly this value is, nobody seems to have a strong grasp on (see 6)
6. An anthropomorphic character that sticks to the “mode” of the fandom.
   • Mode is a mathematical term meaning the most frequent value. This is different from mean (averaged value) and median(middle value).
   • The mode of the fandom, the “house style” as I’ve called it, is where you have an animal face put on a human body first, then usually comes body covering, a tail, animal feet, claws instead of finger nails, etc. to varying degrees depending on the taste of the artist. Basically this sticks to one kind of animal, but there’s also nothing stopping hybrids or fictional species from getting the anthro treatment.
   • This usually has nothing to do with what some people draw as a dividing line between “furry” as in fandom-appealing, and their personal “not furry” category, such as werewolves. Within the fandom, if the werewolf fits the house style (wolf head AND NOT classic movie style, although see 12), it’s usually furry whether you want the association or not. Any specific division of definitions here are on a per-person basis and are not usually accepted by the fandom at large.
   • The degree to which any given character is described or detailed in hard sci-fi explanations, “realism”, NON-realism, “tooniness”, any kind of created-world explanations or lack thereof, ties to mythology, folklore, literary precedent, huge tracts of land, etc. may collude with peoples’ personal definitions/guesses as to whether or not a furry character/setting is pandering to the fandom or accessible to those outside the fandom, but it has little to do with defining “furry” itself.
7. The “mode” of the fandom including those derived from non-animal sources, but treated as though they were superficially animal.
   • Again, this usually starts with altering the face in order to fit the “house style” rather than pasting a ladyface onto the front of an aircraft carrier. (see 13)
   • “Does an anthro fighter jet count as furry?” Can have vastly different responses based solely on whether or not it sticks closer to the “house style” of face-first. Some anthropomorphic aircraft are “translated” into being dragon-like first, for instance, andthen anthropomorphized. Others think that this isn’t going to be “furry” anyway as there are no animals involved at all. (Usually,“I don’t know what it is, but it’s not furry”)
   • Might be a reason why fans accept The Brave Little Toaster as fandom before they accept Cars. (Personally, though, I just think Brave Little Toaster is a vastly superior movie.)
8. The “mode” of the fandom including strange non-human-derived biology.
   • Such as centaur bodies, etc.
   • This is just an extension of “hybrids”; I’m only mentioning it to make sure it’s covered even though it starts to get distant from “human”. I have seen some people argue whether or not these should count as furry because furry is anthropomorphization and a lot of the purpose to strange biology is to get even further away from human.
   • This is probably why aliens with sufficiently animal quality are accepted or rejected at this level (see 9, 12 and 13)
9. Invented species that more-or-less are within range of the “mode” of the fandom.
   • These are not intended to be “human” or any particular animal or mythological creature, but nonetheless bear traits similar to that of the fandom mode, especially if they were invented inside the fandom (sergals, etc)
10. The “mode” of the fandom, but only if they have fur/are mammals.
    • “Ugh, cat Bowser? Now the furries will want him” To which the response was, “Uh, furries are already hot for Bowser”
    • Sorry to inject myself here, but I find this needlessly pedantic. I have no problem with the terms “scaley” (settle on a spelling please) or “avian” but we all technically agree they fall under a similar umbra.
11. The “mode” of the fandom, plus “feral” characters.
    • “Drawing dirty pictures of Simba (or Rainbow Dash) can’t count as furry because they don’t have a weird human body”
    • Anthropomorphism can literally be reduced to something having any human traits applied to it, so you only need to meet that minimum requirement.
    • Or not. Some furries are very interested in non-human things, so they don’t want their real-animal characters excluded. (Because “furry” brings to mind animals, not anthropomorphism). May include characters like, say, Godzilla, who are ambiguously anthropomorphic.
    • Some people make a distinction between furry and feral, sometimes on whether or not they display human intelligence (hard to pin down) or sometimes simply whether or not they can talk (easier to differentiate).
    • Some people just use “feral” to differentiate the most-animal-like from anthro characters, but this usually requires further defining when the line between human and animal is inevitably blurred.
12. Any character with any animal traits whatsoever.
    • Including aliens with animal traits, regular centaurs, mermaids, all sorts of mythological beasts that fall outside the fandom “mode”, Naruto, etc.
    • Often the most confusing definition, often because a great many furries who appreciate the fandom mode know that this wasn’t what they were searching for when they were looking for furries and got cat girls instead.
    • Especially when some people are cool with cat girls and then wonder why so many fandom artists are obsessed with obscuring human faces.
    • “I don’t understand why centaurs don’t count as furry.” The Nostalgia Critic said this in one of his commentaries – technically it falls under this definition so there’s nothing stopping centaur fans from being considered furry, but furry is more well-understoodby definition 6…so this confusion doesn’t help matters at all
13. Any character with any nonhuman traits whatsoever.
    • This includes non-animal-like aliens, fey, humans with skin made of rock, Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast, etc.
    • This technically all fits the definition of anthropomorphism, it’s so far away from what we usually mean when we say “furry” that I have no idea why people need to muddle the definition on this point except to confuse outsiders.
    • In this most broad sense, furry IS just an extension of sci-fi and fantasy, it’s just a reaction to the human-centric mainstream.
    • It’s still confusing as heck.

What We Probably Mean

These definitions seem to be arbitrary, and given that they are ultimately arbitrary, everyone gets to decide for themselves what they like. But I don’t know if them simply acknowledging the fact that everyone has their own personal definition is the end point of this discussion.

Usually, we have a premise of expectations when it comes to our definitions. This part is going to be more conjecture, so feel free to disagree with some of the hypotheses I’m presenting here.

So what do we believe furry IS when we say something is furry or not furry? I think within the definitions posted, I ended up outlining three broad meanings (again, not exhaustive) with smaller distinctions inside each, because each of these will usually vary widely between people.

A. Furry-As-Fandom-Membership

Furry is almost always treated like a fan definition rather than a professional one. Someone can then claim membership or non-membership, but to a certain degree, one can also deny membership despite having all the other hallmarks. Hallmarks usually include, as its premise of the fandom membership, being a fan of anthropomorphism (usually of animals, depending on your other definitions). I think some people drag this a bit too far – if you ever liked Bugs Bunny at all you must be a furry (in which case my dad would be a furry and you’d have to stretch that definition really, really hard).

I think most people in the fandom would reasonably assume that if you’re a fan of a property due to the presence of anthropomorphism, and that said presence could reliably predict your enjoyment of other properties, then you are probably a furry, as in, if you were to seek out a fandom that covers your interests, this one would be it. Creating a new fandom just to avoid the word “furry” is in this case redundant, despite what one might believe to be its inherent flaws (even with the name). After all, one can be a gamer and not associate at all with the abuses that go on in tournament play fanbases even if they’re the largest fanbases that gaming currently has – it doesn’t make one less of a gamer to do things differently.

B. Furry-As-Fandom-Clusivity

Clusivity is the distinction between being either inclusive or exclusive. This means whether or not we call works made outside the fandom “furry”. Since furry is a fan-definition, unless somehow furries creep into the professional world, occasionally when people say “Furry” they mean fan-created work only, and not professional work that happens to have fans in the furry fandom.

Fandom-centric work, that is, media specifically made for furry consumption and not general public, is often seen as pandering. But most furries first established their interest in the furry fandom from work that was not fan-media (Sonic, Lion King, Star Fox, Dungeons and Dragons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Rescue Rangers, werewolves, Looney Tunes, My Little Pony, a random character from any media that doesn’t even focus on anthro, etc). While each of these usually have their own fandoms that are not furry – that is, there are fans of these properties for reasons other than an anthropomorphic fixation – it seems odd that membership in the furry fandom would instantly exclude the non-fandom properties that attracted fans in the first place.

But as I have said it is a fan definition only – the furry fandom is sizable but not so much that it’s a demographic with considerable buying power, or else the market would be more sustainable than it currently is. So, most properties, unless they are made by people who identify with the fandom, would not be considered to be geared for the furry market in particular, but would nonetheless find fans in the furry fandom who will think of it as furry, regardless of whether or not it’s “furry” in this sense of the word.

(Also, this occurs whether or not they appreciate the considerable amount of porn they’re invariably going to generate.)

C. Furry-As-Fandom-Composition

This is the one that is more up-in-the-air because we’re usually running on definitions of furry that are simultaneously paired and also exclusive from one another. This is not to say these definitions do not have crossover demographics – they do, and to a considerable degree. But it has caused consternation and confusion in the past when, say, both How To Train Your Dragon and Toy Story 3 were both nominated for an Ursa Major Award in 2011.

When we say “furry” there’s almost no question whether a fox person who stands on two legs and talks is counted as a furry or not. It’s almost the literal definition, as any definition of furry would be hard-pressed to exclude a bipedal fox character from its scope. So, this one is usually easy – it’s when we move out from this into the broader definitions that it gets harder for some people to agree whether or not it is “furry”.

For instance, is the movie Cars “furry” (if we were to speak inclusively)? As in, would you really expect it to appeal to the exact same demographic that sees the bipedal fox as the most basic ideal? When put up like this, it’s easier to see where one might and might not agree to these being in the same fandom, because to an extent they are not.

Besides the narrower technical definitions (machines with human bodies, taurs, whether lizards should be furry or “scaley”) there’s often a divison in the fandom, and it starts from basic premises. None of these premises are “more right” than any other because, just like the narrower technical definitions, they rely entirely on the taste of the individual.

We could mean

1. “furry” is JUST the house style of anthropomorphic animals and animal-like things,
2. “furry” is all animals-in-media regardless of degree of anthropomorphism, or 
3. “furry” is the same as anthropomorphism of any kind so long as it’s not ‘just human’ (or sometimes even ‘just animal’) and therefore shouldn’t favor premise 1 over any other.

These are all radically different premises. Nominating How To Train Your Dragon confuses both 1 and, to a degree, 3, because the movie goes out of its way to make sure its dragon characters are seen as animals, even if they’re a BIT idealized for humans. (Namely, they have impeccable communication skills, but they don’t talk and the narrative expects you to treat them like just animals)  It confuses 1 if they consider the distinction between furry and feral to be whether or not the character speaks (and there are plenty who do) and find it outside the scope of the fandom to go any farther. People who start from definition 2, because they see the fandom as a base for appreciation of any animals in media whatsoever, don’t see any problem with the nomination.

Nominating Toy Story 3 confuses both 1 and 2, even though by all technical accounts it fits into premise 3 which we presume to be the full scope of the fandom. Even if Lotso might technically make the definition, he doesn’t make it a furry story by premises 1 and 2 any more than Alan Rickman makes Die Hard a British film.

Now, this is mostly conjecture on my part of where I think a lot of confusion and dissension crops up in the fandom based on my analysis of how the word furry is used – that is, what we think we’re saying when we say “furry” and the sorts of expectations we have of the fandom as a result. You might not even think of furry as being premise 1 2 OR 3 exclusively – you may be interested in all three but still consider your interest in “furry” itself to be limited to 1 or 2 – so if you find something “off” when something like Cars is brought up in discussion of furry, it might help to understand on which scope you’re basing your assumptions.

Personally, I think that there’s a large part of the fandom that runs off of premises 1 and 2 and are bothered that 3 always needs to be dragged in even when they’re not interested, but they can’t go off and play with their own definitions because they have to acknowledge 3 all the time (Due to the scope allowed by convention organizers, website owners, etc), like they’re nodding and saying “yes, I suppose I’m part of the fandom that finds Lightning McQueen sexy thinks anthropomorphic cars are inherently neat” and actually thinking maybe they belong somewhere else, because they thought this fandom was for cartoon animals.

Not that the fandom is in any danger of being taken over by non-cartoon-animal-fans, it just seems odd that we’re loathe to admit that most of us are here primarily for cartoon animals.

Guest post by Thesis White. Thesis is a writer-artist, cognitive science student, and peachy dalmatian who loves creating their own discourse. (Thesis is on Twitter and FX.) This is their second article for [adjective][species].

“That is their [animals’] happiness: they see all life without observing it. They’re buried in it like crabs in mud. Except men, of course.” ? John Gardner, Grendel

We each cite different reasons for identifying as furs, which range from childhood exposure to cartoons to simple sex appeal. However, in a psychological, cultural sense, that doesn’t tell us much about the underlying function our fursonas serve in our lives. Why do we like putting ourselves in furry bodies and characters?

In order to answer this question, I propose we examine the phenomenon culturally, similarly to the way we would think about monsters. These creatures, having existed in culture for thousands of years, have riddled our literature and oral tales; the oldest surviving text in the English language is Beowulf which tells of the monster Grendel, depicted right. Egyptian gods and Greek monsters go even further back.

At the most basic level, furs and monsters are visually similar. Both contain distortions of human and animal bodies, and both are imaginary. Both were culturally crafted and designed, and may have features that appear frightening. However the most important similarities are what they say about the culture that created them.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University (who can actually be found on Twitter), wrote a book of essays in 1996 called Monster Theory: Reading Culture, and in it he argues that monsters (and by extensions, furries) are reflective of the norms of different cultures. They represent the boundaries we draw around what is acceptable behavior and identity by existing outside of it, and ultimately drawing us to explore those borders of possibility. Allow me to break this down;

In his first essay within the book, which is titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses), he breaks down his theory quite eloquently. Not all of his theses are relevant, so I don’t discuss them in this article. (A short, concise explanation of the text is available here.)

His first thesis is “The Monstrous Body is Pure Culture”. By this, he means that monsters like griffons or zombies do not randomly appear, but they are reflective of the times and places they represent. Aliens are a relatively new concept that came into popularity with the rise of space exploration, and they reflect our fear of the possibility of non-human intelligent life. We humans are an advanced species, and simply being able to escape our home planet naturally leads us to question if other species on other planets also had this ability. This is a frightening concept, and thus was born aliens, green, bug-eyed entities to physically embody people’s anxieties.

His third thesis is that “The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis.” In each society exists norms and standards for identity and behaviors that each classification should enact. Monsters simply represent the distortions of those categories of personhood, “suspended between forms” (Cohen 6), having a place both in two concepts and at the same time, being neither. An easy example would be Frankenstein, who was neither fully dead or alive. He smashed the boundaries between the two by becoming reanimated, having some qualities of a human being (compassion, rage) but also close to being dead (stitched together body parts). When this happens, “[monsters] demand a radical rethinking of boundaries” (6) that forces us to come to face our conceptions of any boundaries, and not just death.

He later stipulates that the concepts that monsters border are usually “political, racial, economic, [and] sexual” (7). A political example would be in the United States’ history; colonists justified their westward expansion and settlement on Native American lands by making the Natives into monsters. They were described as irredeemable savages due to their non-European culture and their place on the land that the colonists wanted, thusly justifying their nothing short of horrible treatment. The Greeks often told the story of Queen Pasiphaë and the Cretan Bull, where the Queen slept with a bull and afterwards birthed the Minotaur, a man-monster born through the violation of borders around human sexuality.

Consider how taboo bestiality is today, which may be similarly embodied in Greek culture by satyrs. Most people wouldn’t ever imagine that sex with non-humans would become morally acceptable. I am not here to argue the merit of that taboo, but to note that there has been a real, significant impact of stories like this one. You may decide for yourselves what borders sexuality should or should not have, but know that monsters, as Cohen would say, “[Police] the Borders of the Possible.” We are limited in our conceptions of life, death, sex, race, and more by what creatures we chose to embody in our moral grey areas.

However, a peculiar thing has happened in recent history; that which bumps in the night has suddenly become friendly. For decades now, we’ve made those same monsters laughably funny, icons of brands, friendly, and even sexy. Between Young Frankenstein and Teen Wolf, we’ve gained a sudden interest in exposing what monsters mean for us. Could a werewolf be attractive, or a vampire romantic? Cohen’s sixth and seventh theses focus on the fact that, in truth, we desire to break down barriers of what we can be or not be, we enjoy questioning our assumptions about life and everything because we find more meaning by doing so.

Furries are caricatures of humanity. Our characters sprung from a long history of anthropomorphics, yes, but we learn about ourselves by fetishizing and personalizing furs. We enjoy their large, cute eyes and kind-hearted, warm personalities. Yes, they can have nicer bodies than anyone that’s ever lived, but what are we really exploring when we create fursonas – monster representations of ourselves? I have two theorized, possible borders that I feel they break down and force us to consider. Please note that these does not represent furrydom, a large spectrum of concepts and ideas, in its entirety.

The first grey area is hypersexuality. Today, with the rise of easy access pornography and the destigmatization of certain sexual practices (homosexuality, some fetishes), we are freer than ever before to explore sexual possibilities. However, there are cultural forces in place that prevent us from exploring entire areas of sexuality, like whorephobia, the taboo of beastiality and more oscure fetishes, the fear of non-monogamy, even the idea that our sexuality is non-dynamic (eg. we feel that someone is and always has been gay, straight or otherwise without acknowledging that it could change). We punish socially those who try to move outside of these confining views; the straight majority of the world stigmatized homosexuals by claiming they had started the spread of HIV, some even citing is as a plague brought down by an angry God for the violation of his strictly heterosexual ways. Furries break down this barrier by serving as non-STD bearing, attractive, and happy, blatant promiscuity, even blurring distinctions between natural conceptions of human-on-human sex.

The second and more obscure possible border is evolution. We as people who trust in scientists’ judgement are currently faced with conflicting ideas. Humans assume themselves to be above and more important than animals, but evolutionists claim that we are born from them and that the only distinction between humans and animals may be language and the complexity of our societies. What if we are acting on animal instincts, and that our modes of behavior are inherited? What does it mean if we do in fact agree that we are just evolved monkeys? (You can see this fear directly in Planet of the Apes.) Who we are and how we act varies by culture and context, but (loosely defined) scientific fact dictates that we are products of a genetic game, and that suggests that we may be no more significant than, say, our dogs. I’m not making a claim to an answer, but it’s possible that our obsession with furry creatures represents our interest in the fundamental differences between humans and the organisms around us. We quite literally embody ourselves in hybrids of humans and mammals, reptiles, and more. Our scales and tails ask us to question what it means to be distinctly human.

While these may be two of the possible borders where furries (and monsters) exist, we need to realize that there are more. Hiding underneath the veneer of pleasure we experience from our furred experience is the terror of category destruction as felt by outsiders aware of us. If we try diving into what our furry selves mean, we could discover more about ourselves and the subculture that the paleofurs began to create for us.

 

Purple Zebra by CC (gokart on Weasyl, click for link)

Can we all agree that zebras are awesome?

Excellent. Then let’s take a quick look at the phenomenon of the urban zebra.

Zebras are notoriously hard to domesticate. Unlike horses, zebras have no history of selectively breeding to make them a suitable pet. It does happen, but there are all sorts of problems.

Many experts argue that domesticating a zebra is dangerous, impractical, and inhumane (ref).

Zebras are dangerous because of their kick, which is significantly more dangerous than a horse kick. For starters, zebra kicks are aimed: a zebra looks backwards, between its legs, to increase its chances of hitting the mark. This is an evolved prey response: in a fray with a lion, this is often the zebra’s best chance for survival.

Secondly, zebras are aggressive creatures. They kick and they bite with little provocation and no notice. This is also likely a product of their status as prey animals – if your survival strategy was largely to loll around in the open and hope to not be eaten, you’d have a nervous disposition too.

Pictured: IT’S A ZEBRA CROSSING

The dangerous nature of zebras is a large part of what makes them impractical domestic animals, but it’s also their capacity to learn. Experience suggests that zebras take a long time to ‘break’, and rarely achieve a long-term placid demeanour. They have short attention spans, mood swings, and are stubborn.

Zebra herd behaviour is a problem as well. A typical zebra herd includes a single male associated with a group of females, and the females have a strict hierarchy. The females will attack one another if the hierarchy is challenged, much like a chicken pecking order. In general, the dominant female walks at the front of the herd, with the other females following in order of dominance. This behaviour makes managing more than one zebra in a domestic environment especially challenging.

Some argue that training and riding a zebra is also inhumane, in part because zebras require very harsh treatment to manage their aggression. Zebras are also not as sturdy as horses, who have been bred to handle the weight of a human rider. Some experts judge that riding a zebra will inevitably cause the animal pain and possible injury.

It’s instructive that zebras have never been used in any significant capacity as beasts of burden in sub-Saharan Africa. Areas afflicted with the tsetse fly are unsuitable for horses, who suffer animal trypanosomiasis, which causes weakness and death (zebras are immune). Domestication of work animals is seen in many human civilizations, yet zebras were never domesticated by indigenous African people.

Even so, zebras can be domesticated and have been domesticated. In many parts of the world, including parts of the United States, zebras are classified as horses and so are subject to regulations that allow them to be kept as pets. They are expensive (a zebra foal will cost you upwards of $10,000), and so could probably be best described as vanity items for the rich.

But they are out there. Zebras ‘races’, usually with only two participants, take place from time to time but they’re not as much fun as they sound. The zebras don’t race: they mostly wander about aimlessly, paying little attention to the direction of the racetrack or the rider’s urgings.

Zebra racing at Fairgrounds Race Course, New Orleans, USA

Zebra racing got the feature-film treatment in Racing Stripes, a 2005 kids that tried to channel the cute-talking-animal spirit of Babe. It’s a genuinely terrible film, following the story of a zebra who dreams of becoming a champion racehorse. There is a lot to dislike, not least two horseflies who have ‘stereotypical black guy’ and ‘stereotypical white guy’ characterizations and banter back-and-forth in the kind of casually racist fashion that stopped being appropriate sometime in the 1980s.

Racing Stripes also features some godawful CGI, some terrible attempted accents by the supporting cast (who are all South African pretending to be from Kentucky), and a plot that sees Stripes cheat his way to victory. In his review, Roger Ebert said “There are kids who will like it, but then there are kids who are so happy to be at the movies that they like everything. ”

Probably the highest-profile and most successful example of zebra domestication was Walter Rothschild (1868-1937), an eccentric British zoologist. Rothschild, a member of the famous financial dynasty, trained zebras to drive carriages around London, most famously in Hyde Park and around Buckingham Palace.

Walter Rothschild in Hyde Park, London

The picture above is the most famous picture of Rothschild’s zebras, and it shows that Rothschild knew a thing or two about zebra behaviour. If you look closely, you’ll see that one of the leading animals is a horse (the photograph is framed to hide this as much as possible). The single leading zebra is the dominant female, and so the following two (female) zebras can be harnessed behind her without challenging the natural herd dynamic.

Rothschild never trained his zebras to carry a rider, identifying the zebra’s lack of back strength, and the risk to humans due to general zebra skittishness. Even with this precaution, one of his zebras killed a groomsman with a well-targeted kick.

Rothschild again, in his amazing zebra deathcarriage

Those of us in the UK can visit Walter Rothschild’s collection at the Natural History Museum in Tring, some 40 miles north-west of London.

Those with more visceral tastes may choose to skip the museum and instead enjoy some ex-zebra. Zebra meat is easy to come by in most countries, most likely found at an African-themed steakhouse or specialty butcher. I’m vegetarian nowadays and so I’ve missed my chance to try it, but I’m told that zebra is a mild-tasting red meat, similar to beef or horse. (Curiously, zebra is easy to come by even in those parts of the United States where horse meat is taboo.) Zebra is a lean meat, and so prone to becoming dry if overcooked. Order it rare.

The furry identity can be seen as a kind of voluntary psychological experiment. We are disconnecting the idea of ‘self’ from the reality of our physical forms.

All people do this to some extent. Furries, at least those who socialise through the guise of an animal-person avatar, are a special case. The disconnection is more clear, and more extreme.

Collectively, we may be experimenting with identity on a scale that has no comparison in human history.

The loose connection between our human bodies and our furry identities is fascinating from a psychological point of view. There is a fledgling discipline related to our behaviour—transhumanism—which researches both the virtualization of identity (such as the furry identity), and the integration of technological augmentation (more on that later).

Let’s take an extreme example: a furry who engages with society entirely through a furry identity, and who thinks of herself as an animal-person ‘on the inside’. Her identity is expressed entirely through her furry avatar, and her human self is just a biological mechanism. Let’s call her Furry Zero.

Most furries are like Zero in some ways; she is simply at the extreme end. Those furries who don’t have a furry alter-ego are at the other extreme, and the rest of us are somewhere in between. Some people are further along the spectrum than others.

It’s different for everyone: the reader may wish to consider themselves as an example.

I’m going to use myself as an example: I have a virtual furry identity. I’m not an edge case like Zero, but I’m pretty far along the spectrum. Internally I prefer to think of myself as JM, animal-person, but my identity is partly associated with the human biological organism named Matt.

For Zero, her human body is a purely physical entity; her furry identity is purely mental.

In case this all makes me, or Zero, sound a bit fruity, it’s worth mentioning that all people do this to a degree. There are always differences between each person’s physical form and mental identity.

For starters, let’s look at how parts of the body are sometimes considered critical to identity, and sometimes considered irrelevant. Starting at the irrelevant end, consider fingernails. It’s rare for people to feel any loss of identity when they trim their nails, but it does happen (ref). Moving into more relevant body parts, the fingers are important to identity for more people, and so the loss of one is more likely to be personal. And more people will be affected by the loss of an arm, and so forth.

The biological items most often important to identity tend to either be identifying features (such as a face), or those that allow us to fulfil basic human functions (such as legs or genitalia). The point here is that each person’s identity only includes a subset of their physical body.

Zero has no association between her physical body and her identity. So she feels no loss when she cuts her fingernails, and if she lost an arm she would feel pain and be inconvenienced but would not feel any loss of identity.

The difference between each person’s physical form and mental identity extends beyond personally ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’ body parts. There are also aspects of identity that exist outside of physical form.

This process is called virtualization of identity, a path well-trod by furries (led by Zero), and is becoming common in the modern world. People are living more of their lives online, creating virtual identities that are different from their physical selves. This is happening mostly in small and subtle ways, but it represents a big shift in the way humans interact with each other, and the way humans perceive themselves.

The shift towards online identity has created some wonderful opportunities and improved the lives of countless people. (Not least is the ability for physically disabled people to interact in a way where their disability is irrelevant.) It has created some problems too, and these problems are what interest psychologists (and editors of tabloid newspapers) the most.

Inhabitants of the world are rapidly moving online, with internet penetration exceeding 40% of the world’s population (ref). People are exploring differences between ‘online’ identity and ‘real world’ identity. The first steps towards separation of these two identities is typically modest, but is already causing societal change.

A whimsical example can be seen in the Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem (summarized here). In a simple ruling by the Court in the salad days of the mid-1990s, it was determined that ‘virtual’ sin is not ‘real’ sin. The decision was made over a crude augmented reality technology, which was designed to give the experience of eating pork: the user would eat baked tofu while being exposed to a virtual reality that invoked the look and smell of real pork. They judged:

“In our view virtual pork is totally permissible, has nothing to do with real pigs, and thus can be enjoyed by Jews.”

 

This apparently common-sense ruling was (predictably) cited as precedent a couple of years later after someone engaged in virtual adultery. In considering virtual pork, the Court failed to guess how virtual experiences can be real, and how they can inform identity just as much as something that happens in meatspace.

Zero, and the rest of us furries, are several steps ahead on the journey towards virtualization of identity. We experienced the challenges of online relationships long before mainstream society or the Rabbinical Court, and we continue to lead the way into deeper water. The experiences created by our collective transhumanism provide clues to changes that society might expect in the future: social groups may grow with less reference to geography; people may become less class-oriented; society may see more diversity in sexual behaviour, sexual orientation, and gender.

Virtualization of identity is a kind of transhumanism driven by modern technology, but it’s not the only kind. A second change in the way humans create identity is driven by technological augmentation. This is where people look for technological solutions to mental problems. We can see the first steps in this direction with on-board vehicle technologies such as collision detection or ABS (which will overrule the human driver), and wearable technology like smartwatches or Google Glass.

Technological augmentation becomes useful for what researchers call ‘high bandwidth’ problems. The human brain is very good at activities like pattern matching, but cannot process large amounts of data. High bandwidth problems are those that require a lot of information from the outside world, information that would normally overload an individual’s processing capability.

The human/Darwinian response to high bandwidth problems is a kind of mental ‘tunnel-vision’, where we focus on important data in a way that cuts out a lot of background information. An example of this is the psychological phenomenon know as ‘flow’, where a person becomes immersed in a complex problem, becoming less aware of his surroundings. He will put more mental resources towards solving the problem, but will receive less information about his ambient environment.

That extra information can be important. Technological augmentation can gather this information to help us: either by overruling our actions, or by summarizing that information in a manageable form. Such augmentation is most advanced in modern combat environments (background info from Psychology Today here), although we are starting to see it appear in some of today’s consumer goods.

The societal response to transhumanism—both virtualization of identity and human augmentation with technology—is, to date, lacking sophistication. Most commentators could broadly be classified as either Luddites or Libertarians. These two groups of opinion, the techno-pessimists and techno-optimists respectively, are considered by experts to be simplistic and fundamentally flawed (ref).

Experience shows that, when technological augmentation is available, then people will enhance. Zero will certainly take advantage of technological enhancements to her physical self, because she doesn’t have any personal attachment to her human body beyond its biological function. So why not upgrade?

We furries are transhumanists. We adopt virtual identities that uncouple our selves from our physical forms, and we are inclined to explore augmentative technologies like Oculus Rift or FaceRig.

There is little doubt that the growth of transhumanism will bring huge changes on human society. Many of these changes will have unpredictable effects, just as with previous technological revolutions. But societal upheaval is rarely a bad thing: human society has been changing rapidly since the Industrial Revolution, a time that (for all its ups and downs) has seen massive improvements in worldwide literacy and life expectancy.

As human society continues to change, it’s reasonable to expect that things will broadly continue in a positive direction. And we humble furries are, at least when it comes to transhumanism, the vanguard.

You might recall Rabbit’s recent article on furries who pre-date the furry fandom —the Paleofurs.

He is continuing to hunt for examples of paleofurs. Help him out over at his dedicated Tumblr: paleofurs.tumblr.com.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but in Real Life most of the furry fandom—for now, at least—lives in human bodies. We were all born with them, every last one of us. Some may claim souls of more diverse origin, but the flesh and blood nature of their humanity is beyond question. So, when I state that all of us are human and share common hard-wired human traits and frailties I hope people won’t throw too many stones.

For we are human, you know. Thoroughly, depressingly, and very completely so. We see the world through human eyes, hear with human ears, and process these inputs through a nervous system that, though we rarely consider the matter, was shaped solely by evolutionary forces and therefore is brimming with billions of years worth of illogical prejudices and mistaken priorities. Surviving long enough to produce successful offspring is the only thing that matters to Mr. Darwin. Not, for example, having the ability to apply dispassionate and objective logic to all situations. Yes, we’re the best-thinking creatures we yet know of. Yet at heart we’re still just another breed of animal, not immaterial shining globes of energy free from worldly distractions like hemorrhoids and noisy neighbors with ill-mannered children. Not only are we animals, we’re animals equipped with powerful drives and blind instincts, beasts who snarl and fight and sometimes even murder each other for reasons that an immaterial energy sphere would find totally incomprehensible. We’re demonstrably territorial, extraordinarily sexual, protective of our offspring and…

…we live in a social structure that requires a leader in order to function properly.

Over the years I’ve read a good bit about the difficulties involved in establishing how much of human behavior is the result of nurture and acculturation versus hard-wiring. While laboratory experiments tend to have great difficulty establishing beyond reasonable doubt the existence of very many hard-wired instincts in infants, I tend to look upon the incredible difficulties inherent in such research and take an anthropological/pattern-seeking approach. While the amount of variety in human culture is staggering, some patterns tend to repeat themselves a lot more often than others. These patterns, I believe, tend to reflect underlying hard-wiring. For example, practically all primitive societies that live in small groups of a few families tend to follow a “big man” model of leadership. This is perhaps the most egalitarian leadership structure humanity has ever known, and it can still be seen reflected again and again in human interaction wherever groups of about ten or so adults who know each other well need to cooperate for a short time period. In such groups, when a decision needs to be made a discussion develops. At some point someone will suggest consulting a person—usually but not always male in primitive societies—who everyone respects and looks up to. This is the “big man”. The discussion will then be taken to him, and he will offer an opinion. Great weight—greater than that of any other individual—will be placed on what he says, though it should be emphasized that the decision might well in the end go directly against his advice. Eventually when everyone feels there’s been enough discussion the decision is made and life goes on.

Many years ago I read an anthropological study on “big men”- this was more than twenty years ago and predates my connection to the World Wide Web, so I fear I can’t cite a source. But just as in America the taller you are the higher your pay is statistically likely to be (ref), “big men” did indeed tend to stand a bit taller than their village-mates. While I’ve never come across a study of their relative intelligence, I’d love to see one. Because, you see, I suspect they’d come out as merely average. They owe their status as leaders, in my estimation, not to the superior power of their minds or any great ability to foresee and forestall future troubles, but rather because at a very deep level their physique and personal charm/social skills  serve to calm and reassure their “troop” and make them feel good about submitting themselves to him.

As stated above, human minds and cultures are the result of billions of years of evolution, the most recent (and therefore most significant) pre-human eras having been spent as apes and pre-apes. We’re still apes in many ways so subtle that we tend to overlook them entirely because they loom too large in our existences to see. And while I rather hate to point this out, for all the nice things one can say about apes (they’re clever and highly entertaining creatures, for example) they do not select their leaders in a careful, reasoned way. The biggest and strongest males usually end up on top, frequently as the result of physical intimidation and combat. The rest of the troop not only willingly submits to the resulting leader, but seems to take great comfort basking in the shadow of his superior power and size. (“My leader can beat up your leader, ha ha ha!”)

We humans don’t do a much better job selecting, that I can see. And the older I get the more evidence I see that we’re looking for exactly the same traits that our simian cousins are. Or nearly the same, at least. We’re definitely looking for the same physical aspects, but as sentient beings humans also esteem high social skills and things like fashion-sense. (My leader is a snappier dresser than your leader, ha ha ha!”)

Is it really necessary for me to hammer home just how poorly we select our leaders? What percentage of the time does the taller candidate win the office of the President of the United States? Sixty-one percent according to some sources, with the effect having grown far stronger since the advent of television. Perhaps even more significantly it’s been more than a century since a shorter-than-average man held the office, and campaign aides notoriously spend weeks and months negotiating in painful detail issues such as how high and wide the lecterns at presidential debates will be, so as to flatter their own candidate’s appearance as much as possible. I’ll also mention in passing that many contemporary observers were quite certain that Nixon was defeated by Kennedy simply because he refused to wear makeup during their famous first-ever televised debate, fearing that if word got out the voters would think him effeminate. (This was in the very early days of the medium, keep in mind, and even leading politicians had very little to no practical experience with being on-camera.) The result was that Kennedy looked bright, young and fresh while Nixon’s features seemed washed out and his chin and jowls carried a disreputable-looking five-o-clock shadow. Voters who listened to the debate on radio tended to score Nixon the winner. TV-watchers, however, overwhelmingly felt that Nixon had lost, and badly at that. Again according to contemporary observers this was the turning point. And it was based strictly on physical appearance.

Lots of species select their leaders irrationally. Why is the biggest, toughest male mountain sheep the only one who gets to breed, after proving himself by driving the rest away? Yes, the decision process clearly works in terms of natural selection. But… Is the biggest and toughest and hardest to kill sheep automatically the best leader?

As a student of history I could go on for hours about what an awful job we humans have done in terms of selecting our leaders. Again and again we’ve chosen to follow those with big shoulders and average or even lesser brains, tall and handsome (mostly) men with fashion sense and wonderful social skills who again and again have led us into ever-deeper abysses. And in far too many cases we’ve loyally followed them to the brink and beyond, singing their praises (and by reflection our own) right up until that terrible crash at the bottom.

As a fandom, so far I think we’ve been lucky. Part of it is that so few of us are what general society would consider to be leadership material to begin with. Early in my fandom days I read a rather disparaging article on furries that referred to us as “zeta males”—in other words, the very opposite of traditional leader-types. My own experiences in and contact with the fandom lead me to believe that in actuality many of us—like me—were zetas as kids, and having suffered the pain of such low social status during our formative years mostly live our adult lives as lone wolves trying to eke out a social existence outside the conventional structure while accumulating as little additional scar tissue as possible. Though some of us have served as real-world leaders at need and for short periods (I’m one of them, and suspect it was made possible by the fact that I have huge shoulders)—most of us know better than to even make an attempt at real-world leadership. We are who we are as a group—there’s no sense denying it. High-level social skills and fashion sense are not our forte.

This makes us a mixture that seems to function a bit differently in groups than most of our peers. While the “big man” model of leadership breaks down for most folks when groups reach a certain size, instead of moving on to despotism, monarchy, a republic, communism or democracy (Wow! You play Civilization too? Cool!), furs seem to make that model stretch far beyond its usual limits. Perhaps it’s because we internet so well and the main problem with “big man” is the difficulty of allowing everyone enough airspace to speak until satisfied. Or maybe it’s because having felt so much social pain ourselves we’re more tolerant and listen a little more patiently. I don’t know the answer, but it seems to me that despite the use of formal titles like “Con Chair” an awful lot of furry get-togethers—particularly the smaller ones—are run based mostly on this most primitive of all leadership models. And that’s in my opinion the good news about us—”big man” is the fairest and most natural leadership system I know of, and when it works well creates the happiest society.

But there’s bad news, too.

Remember that big old ram who’s won the right to be Top Sheep after so much dominance-proving head-knocking? He didn’t put himself in harm’s way because he thought head-knocking was fun—otherwise it’d be the year-round pastime of athletic mountain sheep everywhere. Instead he was driven to prove himself numbero uno despite heaven only knows what kind of pain and suffering in a world entirely devoid of headache powders. His physiology made the decision for him—his conscious mind (if any) was merely along for the ride. What makes you think humans are any different? Our own internal and irrational need to ascend the status/leadership ladder is a well-known phenomenon, and has provided the motive force behind some of our most spectacular behavior. Leadership and status-related drivers like religion and sex have served as the primary motivators for such completely rational historical undertakings as building the pyramids, sailing a thousand ships to Troy, the Crusades and putting men on the Moon. The total percentage of human effort and energy expended on matters related primarily to increasing individual or group status in the social hierarchy and participating in the drive to the top of the heap would be simply stunning if it could ever be calculated. I’d personally guess something north of seventy percent.

We furs are hardly immune to such powerful human drives. Indeed, as the fandom has expanded and leaders have come and gone I’ve been frankly shocked to see how shabbily—and how predictably—they’re treated. Typically they originate by distinguishing themselves as convention organizers, or perhaps especially gifted raconteurs, entertainers or artists. They become “big men”—people consult them regarding their problems and give their replies disproportionate consideration. As time goes on they’re given the opportunity to take on more and more responsibility and be listened to by more and more followers. And they accept those opportunities, of course; the drive to become a leader— it was referred to as “the drive (or sometimes urge) to alpha” when I was a young man— is a basic instinct. Then, seemingly suddenly and out of nowhere a certain invisible line is crossed and they’re no longer beloved consensual “big men” anymore, but rather “swelled heads” and “guys who can’t squeeze their egos inside an elevator with them, so they have to take the stairs.” The rivals, in other words, are ready for a good head-butting contest. They want what the existing fandom leader has, and due to their basic irrational lust for the top slot they want it so badly they can taste it. But first they’re going to snipe from the brush for a while and weaken their target via a thousand small wounds. Who knows? Maybe he’ll give up and just suddenly disappear from the fandom entirely.

It’s terribly sad to watch this happen again and again. A new potential leader-type rises, rises, rises… Then he’s ripped out of the sky by his former devoted followers with extreme prejudice and claws fully extended. While this phenomenon also exists in the “real” world—and some individuals within the fandom fly higher than others before falling victim—we seem to have a far more vindictive case of it than most groups. I suspect it’s because the drive to the top truly is one of the great irrational motivators of human behavior, one that far too many furries have been forced to suppress in their everyday lives. So when they see someone else becoming what they themselves would very much like to be they… Well, out come the claws in force.

It doesn’t help that we’re such a young fandom, either. Youth tends towards both extreme idealism and broken-hearted finger-pointing once the hero is seen to have feet of clay just like everyone else. “My god, he gets drunk at conventions sometimes in the evenings! I’d never have imagined it! And they say his apartment is always a terrible mess. But look at this new guy over there—his comic strip is so funny, and no one’s heard anything bad about him yet. So let’s go to him for advice next time instead of a slovenly alcoholic! Besides, look at those shoulders! I don’t know just why, but they make me feel so happily inferior and willing to submit!”

And so the wheel turns yet again as our fandom raises up leadership figures one after another, first to achieve the dizziest of heights and then be dashed down and destroyed by humanity’s irrational drives and instincts. While I never get to know most of them, being short on social skills even for a fur, I’ve learned over time to feel sorry for them at every stage of the process. The higher they rise the more thoroughly their soul will be ripped to shreds on the way down. And all of this thanks to monkey instincts none of us asked for and most aren’t even aware of. So far the score is a hundred percent; I don’t know of a single would-be fandom leader who’s escaped this cycle completely.

And for my own part? Well… If you’re a former fandom leader and someday I walk up to you out of nowhere and offer to buy you a drink, well…

Now you know why.

Seventeen years ago, at about this time of year, a female friend publicly accused me of hitting her.

There was a party at the house I shared with four others, and she was invited. At the end of the night she came into my bedroom. And a couple of hours later, she called a friend of mine, very upset, saying that I’d hit her. She probably told other people as well; I don’t know.

But I didn’t hit her. We didn’t even make physical contact. She was lying.

Here’s what happened next.

Short answer: nothing negative, to me at least.

Long answer:

This isn’t something I’ve ever really talked about, let alone explained in detail. It’s not easy. I’m going to try to use direct language as much as possible. Let’s call my accuser S.

About a year earlier, S was a housemate in the same house. She and I struck up a friendship, and we slept together a few times. It wasn’t a friends-with-benefits situation, nor were we in a relationship: it was somewhere in the middle. It fizzled out and she moved out soon afterwards.

The next time I saw S was at the party. We didn’t really talk to one another until after I went to my bedroom. She let herself in; said “why don’t we talk anymore”; I said something to the effect of “this isn’t the time or place for this conversation” and walked out. She left, and that was it until I heard about her accusation the next day.

And then a surprising thing happened. Nobody treated me any differently. I protested my innocence to people who asked, and people believed me.

Over time, S became an object of derision. My friends decided that she was upset because she “didn’t get any”. When they mentioned her in conversation, she would be called a “fat slut” or a “crazy bitch”.

At the time, it was a relief to be trusted. In hindsight, how can it be, in a he-said-she-said situation, that the accuser is considered to be wrong by default, and the accused presumed innocent? Of course my friends would be more inclined to believe me due to our pre-existing relationship, but why I am so unquestionably trustworthy, and why is S so untrustworthy?

The answer comes down, fundamentally, to sexism. This particular case could be seen to be an example of rape culture, a broad term that describes how society tacitly permits or excuses sexual assault.

In the case of me and S, there was no suggestion of rape or sexual assault, but the situation had a definite sexual flavour. The thought processes of my friends can be seen in the language they used. S’s behaviour can be distilled down to two “bad” traits: being interested in having sex, and expressing emotions.

Women often find themselves in a bind when it comes to sexuality. If a women presents herself as sexual being, she risks being characterized by men as a ‘slut’. Conversely, if she refuses to present herself as a sexual being, she is just as quickly characterized as ‘frigid’. Even in 2014, sex is a taboo topic for women in many environments.

This frigid/slut dichotomy can be clearly seen in a lot of popular movies. Consider a mainstream film, with a male lead who has a female love interest. There is a good chance that the female love interest will be, simultaneously, both sexy and chaste. Typically, she will wear sexy clothing and flirt with our hero, but also have no apparent sex life outside of their sexy banter.

Example: Carly Spencer from 2011′s Transformers: Dark of the Moon

S’s sexuality was one target of my friends’ jibes. Their language implies that she did something wrong simply by being interested in sex.

Zaush does this too, when he defends himself against allegations of sexual assault, such as in this tweet.

A widely-circulated screencap of Zaush’s Twitter, click for source

Here, Zaush implies that the sex is evidence that his accuser has done something wrong. He also writes as if he is a passive victim in the whole affair, reinforcing the idea that sex is something that women “give” and men “get”.

The second “bad” trait that my friends noted in S’s behaviour, further demonstrating that she can’t be trusted, is that she was upset. S expressed emotions, so she is presumed to be ‘crazy’, as if this were some guaranteed biological outcome of the condition of being female. This is another catch-22, where women who don’t express emotions can be accused of being ‘ice-queens’. (Men, of course, are either passionate or pragmatic.)

I’m quite confident, that had I actually hit S, my friends would have concluded that she ‘drove me to it’. They probably would have used rationalizing language like Zaush does:

Notice how, in these two tweets, Zaush presents himself as the completely logical victim of a ‘crazy’ woman. At no point does he take any responsibility, and nor does he in any of the myriad journals and other written records I’ve seen.

This creates a lose-lose-lose situation for women who are sexually assaulted. If they make an outright accusation, like S, they aren’t believed. If they make a vague accusation, perhaps without naming names or going into detail, they can be accused of spreading malicious rumour. And if they say nothing at all, as some of Zaush’s alleged victims have chosen to do, then people will assume that nothing happened.

It’s through this final option, where women who are assaulted choose to stay silent (perhaps because of the abuse they risk receiving if they speak up), that sexual assault becomes invisible. And then it becomes easy to assume that sexual assault doesn’t exist, or at least is vanishingly rare.

In Zaush’s case, the primary accusation against him was made in a private conversation, and not mentioned in any public forum. The accusation only came to light when FA’s private messages were leaked. So even though the accusation was detailed, specific, and made in private, the accuser was still presumed to be lying by many furries.

Further, she cited several other women who had experienced similar problems with Zaush—again, aired only in a private message. The fact that these women have not publicly accused Zaush is seen by some as ‘proof’ that these attacks never took place. But of course, if they did come forward, they too would be discredited with the twin sins of having sexual desire and of having emotions.

This is rape culture, and even if it sounds like an OTT term to some ears, what it describes is very real. Nobody thinks that rape is acceptable, and everyone would like for rape and sexual assault to never happen. But the culture of many male-dominated spaces, including furry, creates an environment that forgives the assaulters, and facilitates future assaults.

A further example of rape culture is the number of people who will believe that an accusation of rape or sexual assault may be false. False accusations are incredibly rare: a study by the UK Crown Prosecution Service found only 35 false allegations of rape (out of 5,561 prosecutions), and just 6 false allegations of domestic assault (out of 111,891 prosecutions)*.

* Ref Violence against Women and Girls Report 2012-013

Of course, there are no statistics available for informal accusations, such as those levelled against myself and against Zaush. However those statistics show very clearly that false accusations are very unusual… and yes, I accept the irony of that statement given that I was falsely accused.

The challenges faced by women who have been assaulted is worse in a male-dominated community like furry (we have about 4 men for every woman). This isn’t to say that all men (or all women) think the same way, just that the preponderance of men puts increased focus on the male point-of-view.

In hindsight, I think that S accused me of assaulting her because she wanted to hurt me. I had unwittingly hurt her.

I’m (fundamentally) gay. The affair that S and I had was unbalanced: for me, it was little more than casual sex with a friend. It’s fair to guess that she had romantic feelings towards me, and I certainly did nothing to contradict that idea. I find it hard to read my own motivations, but maybe I was just trying to avoid conflict, or maybe I trying to prove to myself that was heterosexual after all.

I probably let her believe that there was a relationship on the horizon, and it would have been a painful process as she slowly learned that was never going to happen. Perhaps she was still optimistic on the night of the party.

I don’t want to be too hard on myself, because I was young and I didn’t have the slightest clue what I was doing. And the same goes for S, and her accusation: her actions were about as reasonable and sophisticated as my own.

I don’t think I, on the cusp of 40, would treat someone so poorly nowadays (although I suspect there are one or two people who might beg to differ). At the very least, I think that my actions (and S’s actions) are forgivable. I hold no grudge against S but I remain sorry for the way I treated her.

And my sexist, rapey friends? They aren’t my friends anymore. Nowadays I spend my time with furries. We’re an imperfect bunch, and as a group we have a long way to go to make our community a safe place for women. But I think that we’re improving.

Following the close timing of two events that caused a good deal of drama in the fandom (explained below), some of the [a][s] contributors exchanged e-mails to discuss the situations and what they and the response to them said about the fandom. Below is a slightly edited (mostly for clarity and continuity and to exclude the names of contributors who did not wish to be included) transcript of the e-mails that went around for a couple days, followed by “closing statements” from contributors who wished to make one. What follows are the opinions of the individual contributors, which should not be taken as any official position of [adjective][species], and which are offered in the spirit of [a][s]’s mission of figuring out just what the heck we are doing in this wonderful furry world of ours. As some of the contributors note, this topic is not particularly relevant to being furry, but it is relevant to the furry fandom.

Topics covered in the roundtable:

The “FA drama”: Dragoneer announced that Zaush would be joining the Fur Affinity code revamp team. Some members who had been working on an FA revamp already felt that Zaush had been given too much authority and that their work was being thrown out; Dragoneer and Zaush dispute this. In addition, the elevation of Zaush to a position of authority in FA brought back the story from a few years ago in which he was accused of sexual assault.

Links:
Initial Accusation from Yiffyleaks
Zaush on Twitter
Summary of accusations on Vivisector
Another accusation on Twitter
And another on Livejournal
Zaush’s recent response to the rape and FA revamp issues

The “FC drama”: after Saho was announced as the con chair for next year’s Further Confusion, somebody revealed that he had previously been arrested for domestic abuse and supplied details.

Tweets:
https://twitter.com/FuzzWolf2000/status/426026956316897280
https://twitter.com/FuzzWolf2000/status/426027268725411840
https://twitter.com/FuzzWolf2000/status/426027311561859073
https://twitter.com/lupinesilver/status/425158407231127552 (police report on the domestic abuse arrest)

The Yar putter story was featured on Grantland.com. In the course of investigating claims of a “miracle putter,” the reporter found that the inventor was a trans woman. She later committed suicide, possibly related to the uncovering of her past.

http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v-story-a-letter-from-the-editor/

Links have also been left in the discussion at the point they were added.

Roundtable discussion

Kyell Gold:
Hey smart people,

Since yesterday, I’ve had things kicking around my head that I wanted to say about the FC/FA dramas that’ve been going on, mainly addressing the points:

1. Leaping to judgment on social media/the way we abbreviate things and therefore change them (eg. the first I heard about the FC drama was “FC con chair beat up handicapped roommate,” implying “roommate at FC,” which was not true, and in fact the rest was not true either; the handicapped roommate was the one who tried to break up the domestic assault).
2. Whether unsavory/criminal behavior in a different arena does or should affect an individual’s suitability to lead or direct community institutions.

Either of those could actually be an article, and then I thought that they are actually fairly big ideas and it might actually serve this topic better to have a discussion among several informed parties who might have slightly (or very) different points of view on the whole thing.

What do you guys think? If yea, who wants to be included? I was thinking basically an e-mail chain over a couple days that I (or someone else) could then edit into a reasonable article. :) I’ll kick it off tonight or tomorrow when everyone’s had a chance to respond.

JM:
Hi everyone

Gosh, well, this is pretty serendipitous timing. Just a couple of hours ago I emailed Makyo with a proposal regarding possible [a][s] coverage of the FA foofaraw (the FC one is news to me).

I had also reached the conclusion that it’s a complex situation that would be well served by a diverse group of moderate voices. It my hope that it would provide a thoughtful counterpoint to the ongoing shouting match between extreme opinions on either side.

My idea was to do a bit of research, to come up with primary sources of information rather than relying on hearsay or rumour. And then use that dossier to solicit articles from various people: everyone here, plus our guest writers, plus other interested parties. The resulting responses could then be posted over a short period of time, perhaps one per day.

So, yeah, count me in for sure.
[...]

Jakebe:
Count me in! I’ve been thinking a lot about this — not only about the FA/FC thing, but about the growing prevalence of the whole “pitchfork mob” thing in general. It’s a really troubling trend, and we should definitely address what’s happening in our community.

Klisoura:
I certainly think it’s good for [a][s] as a credible lens on the fandom to report on topical events. […] I have heard nothing about this FC spat. From what I can tell the FA, ah, foofaraw is one more in a lengthy number of such squabbles it has attracted, which I think is an interesting entrypoint in and of itself.

To that end I think Jakebe’s angle is very strong. The Internet has gravitated towards pitchforkism, to which “unsavory behaviour” is often used as a means rather than an end (I think here about the meta-reporting around Assange or Snowden, and the occasional bits of commentary we saw around whether these were being preferentially reported on rather than other more central topics).

Alternatively the Yar putter story also describes a very interesting arc, where pitchforks are concerned. In the fandom’s case, who’s driving the narrative? To what end? Or is it completely organic, that on the Internet, mobs occur and the nucleation sites are irrelevant?

Makyo, I know you and I have talked about The Goff before, and I think some of that work has shown up on [a][s] in the past — has anybody written about context collapse as it regards the fandom specifically or online communities in general? boyd tends to write about online as it mirrors or recapitulates real-world relationships but for the most part this is almost entirely online…

Kyell Gold:
Links to tweets about the FC thing:

https://twitter.com/FuzzWolf2000/status/426026956316897280
https://twitter.com/FuzzWolf2000/status/426027268725411840
https://twitter.com/FuzzWolf2000/status/426027311561859073
https://twitter.com/lupinesilver/status/425158407231127552 (police report on the domestic abuse arrest)

I think the Yar putter story (http://grantland.com/features/the-dr-v-story-a-letter-from-the-editor/ for those who haven’t read it) is similar but different; the fandom stories are both aimed at people in positions of power. The impression I get is that the Yar putter story arose out of ignorance, while the fandom stories stem from a desire to enact justice ourselves: look, we can punish this bad person by removing their power in the community (get FC to name a different chair, leave FA for another site). There is perhaps some pride in our community, but I don’t see the discussions being of that tone (“how can such a thing happen here?”); I see more the vigilante justice angle. We often feel powerless in the face of crimes going on in our world, so when faced with bad behavior in our community, it makes us feel righteous and empowered if we can do something about it. The problem is that we demarcate the situation too quickly, because we want to line up on the side of good, which is easiest if we define the other as bad.

Klisoura:
I was directing the Grantland story (thanks for linking) to Jakebe’s E-mail, mostly. There’s an interesting case study at the simplest level (“we should’ve consulted a style guide”? Really?) but there’s also a meta-story around how, when, and why the Internet mobilizes. I have seen people writing about this chaotic lynch mob mentality in the recent past (the woman who tweeted that AIDS joke comes immediately to mind) because it seems to point to a darker side of the Internet’s ability to bring people together, at least in the popular narrative (cf. the Arab Spring).

I have no idea how old it actually is. I was in high school when I was, through various LGBT connections, swept up in the controversy over the then-new J. Michael Bailey book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which had a strong Internet dimension. In that case the response, which in retrospect was probably disproportionate and not entirely rational, had clearly defined loci (chiefly Lynn Conway and Deirdre McCloskey) and at the time this was acknowledged. There was a sense then, too, of vigilanteism; Dr. Bailey was in a position of authority, and trans folk had even fewer advocates then than they do now.

The sense of righteousness is probably important. I also observe that there is sometimes an insular sensitivity that people in the fandom have — the sense that, being already looked down-upon, furries have to be quicker to address transgressions. So there’s also an element of what is not quite self-preservation, but is a sense that it’s not just righting a wrong done to someone else, but demonstrating that one is a good steward of the community.

Kyell Gold:
I think the “metafurry” angle really is served by examining the reaction of the community. A lot of this isn’t specific to furry, but Jakebe’s described well the way reputations grow and echo in the fandom, and certainly the reliance of furry on FA and the part that played in this are important. After all, the rape allegations around Zaush first surfaced a couple years ago; it was only when he was appointed to help redesign FA (and then was counted as staff, apparently, so he fell under that protection and comments deemed harassing to him were deleted) that things came back and got worse.

JM:
Here are some links that can serve as source material for the FA thing:

http://archive.is/vtPdV
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2enszue&s=7#.Ut1yvrSwppg
https://forums.vivisector.org/index.php?topic=442.msg4109#msg4109
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=250m1jp&s=7
http://bridgeportcat.livejournal.com/96818.html?thread=707122#t707122

It’s mostly screencaps and message logs that provide pretty compelling evidence that Zaush has coerced young women into sex, and has otherwise acted in an unwelcome fashion.

I think a lot of the problem lies in that both issues are unsatisfying in their complexity. There is no outcome that is “good”, just shades of badness. People, especially (I suspect) literal-minded furries, are inclined to look for an ideal solution to a problem. And that doesn’t exist in either of these cases.

I can’t help but think that this adds fuel to the fire: the vigilantes want justice, and the apologists want to ignore the whole thing. And neither of them have a perfect, or even particularly good, case to make. So as you say, it’s easier to paint an opposing party as ‘bad’, rather than accept that one’s own position is imperfect.

Still, I do think that it’s okay to make a judgement. Should Zaush help run FA? Should Sasho be chair of FC?

I have my own opinions, which I’m going to keep to myself for the time being, because I don’t really think it’s important. But suffice to say that neither the vigilantes nor the apologists would be especially satisfied.

Jakebe:
Thanks so much for the links, guys! That’s an awful lot to read but I’d better get educated.

In regards to the FA thing, I really think that the fandom’s reaction is not *just* about Zaush, or *just* about Dragoneer, but a whole lot of different things coming to roost. There’s been a low-level dissatisfaction with the administration of FA for a while, from outages to the time it takes to get anything done to the seemingly-inconsistent reactions that the admins have regarding blow-ups. There’s a bit of a “good old boys” club perception that’s solidified at this point, where it really feels like Dragoneer and company are more interested in protecting their own than doing what’s best for the site and community at large. […]

Zaush has been a controversial figure for a long time, and any goodwill he might have had jumping aboard the project evaporated early when the people previously working on a redesign were booted. He has a fairly terrible reputation amongst large swaths of the fandom, so — even though there may not be solid evidence for it — it’s easy for a lot of people to believe that he would force himself on women at the very least. Between the perceived corruption and unprofessionalism among the current FA administration, the feeling that the FA community has been underserved for years (fostering the attitude that “Dragoneer doesn’t care about the little guy”) and Zaush’s bad reputation, it’s a fairly perfect storm.

I think what I would like to focus on is the argument on both sides upholding either Zaush or the accuser. Both sides are jumping to conclusions based on the unproven statements of either party involved, and the only difference for most of us is that Zaush already has the reputation. On the other hand, those asking for proof have to realize that definitive “proof” of sexual misconduct is incredibly hard to come by, and without witnesses, some sort of recorded evidence or an admission by the accused, all we HAVE is heresay.

The specific situation is thorny enough, but the reaction to it has proven to a fertile ground for all manner of discussions about our community that has long been overdue — the pitchfork mentality/instant social justice phenomenon that’s been sweeping through Internet circles for a while now (which might read as an apology for Zaush) and the overwhelming ignorance about sexual assault and victim-blaming that’s been uncovered in the wake of the accusation (which might read as support for his accuser).

The Grantland issue is a really fascinating one, by the way. I read the EIC’s apology three or four times, and I have to say I’m quite impressed with it. I think he’s openly admitted his ignorance about trans* matters, pointed out exactly what he could have done differently to prevent this from happening (for example, pointing not just to any style guide, but GLAAD’s style guide *specifically* for writing about trans* people in a journalistic setting) and outlined exactly what he planned to do moving forward to prevent a recurrence.

The staff of FA could learn a lot about that. They’re trying to be more transparent, Frith bless ‘em, but they have a lot to learn. They need to realize exactly what the fandom is complaining about (a difficult thing to do, given the deafening outroar surrounding it), address those points directly, and admit where they’re wrong. They need to be specific about why they’re choosing the path they are (in this case, keeping Zaush) while being sensitive to the unhappiness of people who hoped they would choose differently. And they should directly address an intolerance of sexual harrassment and any code of conduct they have for their admins and staff.

But that’s just my opinion. :)

Kyell Gold:
Zaush’s recent response to the rape and FA revamp issues: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5434971/

Thanks for the links. Reading through them (I hadn’t seen the full text of the Dragoneer/Ferality exchange before), I think Dragoneer comes off better than my initial impression. The distilled version of Dragoneer’s behavior is being reported as “he told her ‘stay quiet or you’ll get shit on,’” and while that’s not entirely inaccurate, he did treat the situation more thoughtfully than that. She’s not asking him whether she should report a crime to the police; she’s asking him whether she should post something on his site and also advising him that someone might be using his site to abuse women. He at least said he would look into that (no evidence whether he did or not). He was truthful with her about what would happen if she just posted allegations and advised her to seek out corroborators to her story and/or provide evidence—and he *did not tell her not to do it*. Could he have gone further? Sure. He could’ve said “I’ll monitor your post and will advise people that uncivil discussion will lead to suspension/banning per FA rules.”

I think that leads to another interesting question. Furry doesn’t have a central authority of any kind. We look to people like the leaders of FA, the chairs of conventions, and to some degree the other popular figures in the community for guidance in difficult situations because they have the widest reach. Do those people have a responsibility to the community to be role models? I use that phrase specifically to call back to Charles Barkley saying that he shouldn’t be a role model, that he was just an athlete. Dragoneer could say that he isn’t in charge of the furry community; he just runs an art site. But the fact is that what goes on on that site is a reflection, in part, of what he chooses to allow there, and the same goes for convention chairs. FA chose to ban adult art of cubs even though (as JM recently wrote) the legality is debatable. They also choose to allow just about everything else, and that’s more or less FA‘s style: we just provide the platform, and you figure out what you want to pay attention to. They do ban people for certain behaviors–part of the recent drama as well was centered around people who were suspended and their comments deleted when they tried to post about Zaush. I haven’t seen Dragoneer respond to that, if he has at all.

Similarly, I was rather discouraged when I tried to talk to a convention chair about including harassment awareness programming in their convention and got a brusque “talk to programming about that” reply (even though that convention, like many furry conventions, had experienced reported incidences of harassment). Con chairs are, I think, more responsible for promoting responsible behavior at their conventions, and it’s been heartening to see harassment policies become common on convention policy pages. FC in 2013 included a harassment awareness panel at their convention; this is not being mentioned in any of the discussion about their new chair.

foozzzball posted a journal today (http://www.sinisbeautiful.com/?p=443) that is related to what Jakebe concluded with, and which I think is something we shouldn’t forget: in the rush to stake out positions on either side, people risk making the atmosphere so aggressive and poisonous that it is a deterrent to other people who might want to bring personal issues to light. The science fiction fandom has had a wave of people demanding safe spaces at conventions and other gatherings, and the fact that furry fandom has not had a big harassment scandal does not mean there is no harassment in the community. Friends of mine have specifically reported attempted and successful harassment, always by men toward women (“attempted” in this case meaning “discouraged by a large boyfriend”), at several different furry conventions. I know that conventions now have a posted harassment policy, but I haven’t yet figured out how to check that staff are properly briefed on how to handle a complaint brought to their attention. Anyway, the point is: if you were watching this drama unfold over Zaush and a lot of his supporters were talking about how the victim was probably lying, or probably just seeking attention, how would you feel about going public with a harassment complaint? From what I’ve heard, the incidents have been easy to dismiss as not worth raising a fuss about [Just want to clarify that this is not my thought, but the opinion of the victims I’ve talked to— “well, I felt uncomfortable but no harm was done so I’ll keep quiet”—and one thing harassment awareness tries to change is this reluctance to make waves if nobody was “really hurt,” because if bad behavior isn’t checked, it can escalate], but what happens when one isn’t?

The issue of harassment in the fandom has been bothering me for a while, but it’s a hard one to get around and probably outside the scope of this discussion. But I do think it’s important that the community understand that we have to provide a safe space for people who are taking the incredibly difficult step of going public with personal issues. Otherwise this stuff just gets swept under the rug and people keep on doing it.

JM:
[…]

Doing research for previous [a][s] articles, I spoke with a lot of women who have received unwelcome attention, been sexually harassed, and have been raped by male furries. I think it’s a much bigger problem than people realise, because these women simply stop attending public furmeets, and so the problem isn’t visible.

I would judge that Zaush’s offences are pretty bad, and not easy to dismiss at all. It’s wrong to say that it’s rape—none of his victims have claimed that—but he has clearly made unwelcome advances, he has clearly coerced people into sex (which is a common form of abuse among furries, based on the women I’ve spoken with), and it’s clear that a lot of women are not comfortable with him being in a position of seniority. And in the end, it’s the victims who get to decide whether they have been hurt.

And this is the main point: people don’t seem to be concerned for the harm done to the victims. I thought that Zaush’s defensive journal missed the point entirely: he addressed the specifics of the complaints about him, but he didn’t seem to show any respect for the feeling of his victim, and those women who feel uncomfortable with him in a position of power. He doesn’t seem to be sorry for the harm that he’s done, and I think that’s a problem.

This is why I think Dragoneer has made an error of judgement. Zaush shouldn’t be in any staff position on FA because it sends the wrong message to the furry women who use the site. It’s easy to feel that FA has ignored the victim and rewarded the perpetrator.

Having said that, and perhaps like you Kyell, I feel that the opprobrium aimed at Dragoneer is unfair. He has been a furry punching bag for a while, and in this case I don’t think he’s guilty of anything other than a lapse of judgement. I think he has been caught wrong-footed: from his perspective, all he has done is ask a qualified person to help out with the site.

Jakebe:
[…]

I agree that Zaush and Dragoneer appear mainly concerned about protecting their reputations and side of things, but I wouldn’t think that’s surprising given their history and positions. I think this is an opportunity for both of them to address the broader nature of the accusations against them, why they seem to have gathered steam and what they plan to do to address that image. Going back to what Kyell asked a little bit ago, the fact that they’re highly-visible members of the fandom who wield a great amount of control over one of the main tools it uses means that they have a responsibility to deal with the public/political side of things. I understand that a lot of furries who find themselves thrust in the spotlight have neither the training or desire to manage public perception, and I truly sympathize with that. But stepping up to fill a need in the fandom provides you with a great amount of power, and we all know what happens with great power….

That’s really at the base of this issue. Whether he realizes it or not — whether he wants it or not — Dragoneer is a powerful member of the furry community and he hasn’t been transparent or responsible with that power in the past. Even though his involvement in this whole thing might be fairly “minor”, that lapse in judgement combined with previous ones have really caused this whole thing to get away from him. I don’t know if he has people who can tell him what’s happening from a public relations perspective, and the best thing to do from here. But he certainly needs it.

This was the end of our roundtable discussion. Not a formal end (sorry, JM), but the point where we felt everything had been said. In order to bring a bit of conclusion to the discussion, I asked all the participants to contribute a paragraph for their “closing thought.”

JM:
Furry is a broad church and there are no police. As a community, I think we have a responsibility to help create a positive, inclusive, and safe culture. We are male dominated and so we, collectively, need to go out of our way to make sure that the voices and concerns of women are heard – much like a heterosexual-dominated society must go out of its way to hear homosexual voices and concerns. In my opinion, Zaush’s elevation to his role at FA sends the wrong message: it suggests that the furry community is one where female victims are marginalized.

Jakebe:
As a community of creators and personalities with no hierarchy, no one sets the tone for the furry community but us ourselves. We each have a power that’s unique among other geek cultures, and with that there’s a responsibility that I don’t think enough of us realize. The reactions of indifference, skepticism and hostility towards people standing up for the rights of the “other” within our own community show us that we have issues with that responsibility that absolutely need to be addressed. It also shows us that no matter whether we feel we’re wolves or dragons or rabbits, we’re still subject to the same flaws of human nature as our mundane cousins. We still struggle with different perspectives, and it’s good we’re talking about it now instead of pretending that difficulty doesn’t exist.

Klisoura:
The ability of the Internet to summon itself into crusading armies/lynch mobs is not new; it predates 4chan and Reddit and Twitter, although they have provided our most recent examples. Relative anonymity and instantaneous, asynchronous communication enable our propensity for tribalism by making these tribes ad-hoc, fluid, and temporal. The standard of membership is minimal — at least, “having a position”; at most, pontification ;) — and the costs, and opportunity costs, of participation are low. Where they are, or can be made to be, attached to themes of social justice (as, for example, cats in bins) it even creates an outsized return on even these minimal investments by lending a genteel sense of vindication to the tribe. So it goes. Now, if furry was a religion, it would have perhaps only one commandment: “we are a co-created fandom.” It is a truism deeply held: like Batman of old, with his Batcycles and Batarangs, we esteem ourselves to “furry” versions of everything. Not just fiction, but furry fiction (as distinct from fiction with anthropomorphic elements). Not just ostracism, but furry persecution. Furry slang, furry avatars, furry conventions. It’s conceivable that what we have here is not just a standard Internet momentary convulsion of discontent, but a furry convulsion — all the same, on reflection I suspect that, excepting the involvement of a lightning-rod furry website, with lightning-rod personalities at its center, there’s nothing particularly furry about it, and furry as a lens does not shed any particularly novel light.

Kyell Gold:
As editor, I get the last word here. :) One of the things I think is really valuable about this roundtable is that we approach the issue from different angles: intellectual interest in the situation, emotional attachment to the community, and investment in the type of problem and protection of the weak. Uniting all of these is the recognition that we are all part of the furry community, a small group that has no elected leaders, and that we bear a responsibility to all members of our community. At the same time, those people who have leadership roles in our community (convention chairs, leaders of community sites) also have a responsibility to be responsive to the community above and beyond the duties they perform in those roles. We’re all in this together, and that means more than just being a bunch of happy anthro animals running around drawing and writing and partying. It means taking care of each other, and that means not only taking care of people who take personal risks, as pointed out above, but also forgiveness for people who have already paid the penalty for their mistakes. Railing against emotional outbursts on Twitter is like shouting at the ocean, but let’s try to weigh issues in our mind before we weigh in online. And remember that everyone involved, whether horse or fox, wolf or rabbit, dog or cat, is a person and deserves to be treated like one.

Guest post by Hemms. Hemms is a Fox from southern California who has been in the Furry Fandom for 7 years, since discovering it when he was 14 on Christmas Morning in 2006. A Lifestyler through and through, Furry is the driving motivation behind everything he does and studies. He is a student of Anthropology and forever a dreamer. He seeks to understand Furry culture, History, and dreams of a unified Fandom that realizes just how important and powerful it really is. Hemms is on Twitter and Fur Affinity.

In my seven years as a Furry I have witnessed what I believe amounts to a cultural revolution that occurred beyond the view of the public at large. I frequently attest to the view that the Furry Fandom is not just a fandom but a culture in its own right. I don’t expect this view to be the same for everyone.

There are Lifestylers and there are Hobbyists, and the argument over which one is the correct “way to Furry” is an argument that still rages in this Fandom despite this matter having supposedly been settled with the Burned Furs conflict in 1998. Arguing over whether Hobbyists aren’t Furry enough or that Lifestylers really ought to calm down and take off the tail in public is pointless. I’m not writing this to assert whether one view or the other is the right way or not. I’m writing to assert that there is a reason why the argument is still deemed important enough to be worth arguing.

The interesting thing about this argument is that both sides of the Furry ideological track agree that the other side is still Furry. The Lifestyler v. Burned Fur argument could have splintered the Fandom, but it didn’t, and I theorize that the reason it didn’t is the same reason we still see the argument as having value. The Furry Fandom isn’t your garden variety fandom that springs up around a television show or a book or web comic. We are a Fandom stemming from an idea, not a product or franchise, and with that idea I believe evolves ideals that culminate in what I call The Furry Dream.

The other fandoms of this world rely on a company or artist to produce the works that the fans follow, and without which there would be no fandom. The Furry Fandom relies on no such company. We only rely on ourselves to perpetuate the culture of our Fandom, and because we rely on ourselves we value voluntary self-governance.

The heads of Furry conventions, people like Uncle Kage, are Furries themselves and run our Fandom’s most important cultural centers based on the input of the people they serve. Think about anime fandom or Star Wars fans. The source material of these fandoms must be produced by someone who isn’t necessarily in the fan community. Fans must wait for this material to be made and shipped, and if it isn’t, then the fandom may die off. Their material is made largely without their input, and if they don’t like something it’s almost impossible to change it. It also makes it so that the gap between fan and producer is almost impossible to bridge. A fan cannot easily become a producer for their fandom in a way that amounts to more than fan art. But Furries decide our own course in our Fandom, and I don’t think we could imagine it any other way. It doesn’t naturally function any other way. If it did, we would lose a key part of our unique “Furriness”.

Uniqueness is in and of itself a value of this Fandom. We don’t just tolerate diversity in this Fandom, we celebrate it. Diversity is seen as a great benefit in this Fandom, and the more of an individual you can be the better. This Fandom is and always will be the port in the storm for the downtrodden refugee of the status quo.

When this Fandom was founded it was derived from the pre-existing fandoms of anime and science fiction, people who were already on the fringes of society and who were already doing a good job at diversity . When the Furry Fandom became its own entity, it had people from all walks of life, and in order to function it immediately destroyed social barriers that sometimes cripple the rest of the world. It normalized homosexuality; it legitimized other alternative sexualities; it liberated sexuality in general; obliterated the gender binary; it removed race as a playing factor to someone’s acceptance; mixed far-flung lifestyles; made class unimportant, and; above all, made self-expression take importance over group conformity.

Without self-expression there would be no creativity, and with no creativity there would be no Furry Fandom. The two go paw in paw. When you have a million people all with different ways of expressing themselves, which leads to a million different ways of being creative, you get a people whose continuity is fueled by their diverse individuality. That individuality becomes a necessity, and thus a value. That individuality causes a proliferation of the definition of what the self is, what a Furry is, and that’s why the whole Burned Fur vs. Lifestyler argument is still discussed, although no consensus is ever reached. We could define, once and for all, what a Furry is, but we don’t want to because we all came to this Fandom as individuals and want to stay that way because we all understand what it is like to be different. We don’t want to box in our individuality. We know how to function very well with diversity (and the rest of the world might want to take some notes).

But these are all just values, and I haven’t touched on what The Furry Dream actually is. Well, logically, the Dream must be the fulfillment of these values. Why did you join this Fandom? More importantly, why did you stay? It’s like explaining the American Dream. There is a soundbite that is commonly quipped, but most Americans have an idea of what the ephemeral American Dream is for them, and for everyone it is a little different. The ways of attaining it are infinite, with multiple ideologies about how one does so. But if The Furry Dream were to be written out in a way that made it applicable to all, I think it would read something similar to this:

“We the Furries dream of limitless diversity, creativity, self-discovery, and autonomy.” And may I add, “We will fight to keep it.”

 

Furries Aeterna

Butene isomers

GreenReaper—WikiFur founder, Inkbunny owner, and Flayrah editor-in-chief—was at the centre of an online foofaraw in December after someone asked him about comments he made in 2011:

A screencap from LiveJournal that has been widely circulated

He said: I’m not going to call someone “he”/”she” if they are not physically male/female.

His point of view is uncomplicated (if unsophisticated). In short:

• He prefers to use pronouns to refer to primary sexual characteristics.

@coyoteseven I believe gender is a subjective and fluid value, and so prefer to use pronouns to refer to primary sexual characteristics.
— GreenReaper (@WikiNorn) 1:12 AM – 28 Dec 2013

 

• The correct use of words, including pronouns, is primarily an issue for the person using them.

@coyoteseven My point: the correct use of words, including pronouns, is primarily a matter for the person who must choose which to use.
— GreenReaper (@WikiNorn) 1:10 AM – 28 Dec 2013

 

To many people, this will seem like a small semantic issue and hardly worth thinking about. To other people, this will seem like a very big deal indeed. It’s actually both: it is a semantic issue, but an important semantic issue. And as is often the case with this sort of thing, the truth is more complex than parties on either side might suggest.

First, let’s talk about pronouns in general.

We use language to describe the world. Nouns—words like bus or apple—can represent a specific object. We hear a noun (car) and we dredge up its meaning from our memory, giving us a mental image of a car.

Pronouns are words that are a step further away from the object in question. They refer to the most likely recent noun, so in “I saw a car, it was green”, it stands for ‘the car’ and so the car is green. Pronouns only work when their meaning is clear, so in “I saw a car and a motorcycle, it was green”, it’s not clear which it is intended.

To use a more colourful metaphor, consider a Zelda inventory system. A noun is the equivalent of opening your inventory and choosing the item you wish to wield. It’s a bit cumbersome, but it’s clear what you’re getting. Alternatively, you can create one-button shortcuts to one or two commonly-used items. Here, the shortcut button is like a pronoun in the sense that it refers to whatever object was last mapped to it. If you want to grab an item not currently mapped to a pronoun-shortcut, then reach for that cumbersome noun.

Gendered pronouns—he, him, his and she, her, hers—are recognised by psycholinguists (yes, that is a real occupation) as being particularly awkward (ref). There are two main problems: firstly that people tend to associated gender stereotypes to anyone (or anything) awarded he or she; secondly, that our use of gender pronouns is in a state of flux. Gender pronouns have become political.

In the last few centuries of the English language, the male gender has been used as a default (e.g. “one giant leap for mankind”). The female gender does get applied by default to some objects, notably ships or countries, but not many. Default usage of the male pronoun started changing in the 1960s, as an outcome of the feminist movement.

Feminists noted that women, in language, tended to be treated as an exception, in terms such as ‘actress’ or ‘WPC’. The feminists felt, quite correctly, that this reinforced the general idea that being female was some sort of deviant condition, where being an actress or a WPC was a special case of a ‘normal’ actor or police constable. This is what’s known as a ‘marked term’, and it’s an indicator of inequality. (It happens towards men as well as in ‘male nurse’, homosexuals as in ‘gay marriage’, and other races as in ‘Asian driver’. In all cases the marked term implies some sort of shortcoming.)

This change is causing growing pains. Some marked terms are easy to remove (an actress is just an actor), but some are built into the terms themselves, like batsman or mankind. Language is changing to reflect the fact that women are (or should be) considered equal to men, but we’re not quite there yet. Some people defend the deprecated language and refuse to change; others overuse politically-correct jargon that isn’t in wide usage; most people are somewhere between.

A more recent, and very welcome, change in many parts of the world is an awakening to the special challenges of people who do not fit into the he/she gender binary. Many people are neither completely male nor completely female (including around 25% of furries, ref), and so the use of gendered pronouns for such people can be wrong. However English has not yet widely adopted a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun, which leaves us in a quandary. What do we do?

The answer, as it turns out, is pretty simple. The Oxford English Dictionary, a reference for the establishment if there ever was one, agrees with most LGBTQ activists that the best available (or least-worst) gender neutral pronoun should be used. (The OED also points out that the use of they/them/their instead of he/him/his or the female equivalent is a revival of a practice dating from the 16th century, and common in 19th century literature, such as Dickens.)

Gender-neutral pronouns aren’t perfect, and can be awkward. But then pronouns in general can be equally awkward, as anyone who has ever tried to write about gay sex can attest. It’s easy to get mixed up with ‘he’ and ‘he’. Consider this snippet from David Plante’s diary, Becoming a Londoner:

“As for Stephen himself, I sometimes wonder if he wants me to write in my diary events in his life that he himself would not write in his – as his telling me, with glee in the telling, that years ago he was in Switzerland and had sex with a young man in a bush, after which he gave the young man a huge Swiss note, but the young man thought this too much, so he gave Stephen change.”

 

Notice how Plante has to keep repeating ‘the young man’ so as to differentiate him from Stephen’s ‘he’. But even then, the final ‘he’ has changed to mean the young man, and so Stephen has to be named. There are five uses of ‘he’ in this sentence: four meaning Stephen and one meaning the young man. Plante has had to change his Zelda inventory shortcut midstream.

Plante has constructed his sentence to avoid awkwardness and ambiguity as much as possible. As so should we when using gender-neutral pronouns.

(Side note: there are some gender-neutral neologisms, which in my opinion are best used when they are already expected by the audience.)

In the GreenReaper example, he wasn’t juggling gender-neutral pronouns. He was misgendering transgender furries. He either referred to a transgender woman as ‘he’ because of the presence of male genitalia, or a transgender man as ‘she’.

He defends the correctness of his language, saying that he is very picky about such things.

@the_macbean As someone whose mother was an English teacher, I am very picking about the correct use of language.
— GreenReaper (@WikiNorn) 3:07 AM – 28 Dec 2013

 

But here, he is unambiguously wrong, and I hope his mother would tell him so as well. The OED is perfectly clear, saying under gender that:

• pronouns refer to gender; and
• gender is defined as “the state of being male or female (with reference to social or cultural differences rather than biological ones)”.

Pic of my Paperback OED 6th ed. courtesy Señor Blurrycam, who was visiting that day

When GreenReaper says he “prefer[s] to use pronouns to refer to primary sexual characteristics”, he is using pronouns incorrectly.

@coyoteseven I believe gender is a subjective and fluid value, and so prefer to use pronouns to refer to primary sexual characteristics.
— GreenReaper (@WikiNorn) 1:12 AM - 28 Dec 2013

 

Knowing GR’s commitment to British English—he continues to ‘spell colour with a u’ despite having moved to the United States some years ago—I hope the authority of the OED will prove irresistible.

But that’s really just semantics. The major issue here is the importance of pronouns and gendering to trans people.

Trans people are subject to massive prejudice. To be transgender is to be familiar with the fear of violence.

When people wilfully misuse gender pronouns, it’s a reminder of that threat, similar to the way that a gay person may feel threatened by someone using the term ‘faggot’. This is why people are shocked when GreenReaper says things like “Ultimately, your wish to feel safe does not trump my wish to feel honest.”

Another widely-circulated LJ screencap

This is the point things become a bit more complicated. GreenReaper deserves a lot more understanding for his point of view. He is not, as it turns out, cisgender himself:

@the_macbean The irony is that if anything I identify as female gender-wise. But I am physically male, so have no problem being called “he”.
— GreenReaper (@WikiNorn) 3:13 AM – 28 Dec 2013

 

GR is genderqueer. He believes that ‘he’ is probably the most appropriate pronoun for him because his biological sex is male, and he is applying that semantic rule to other people.  From his perspective, he is being asked to make allowances for people, where people are refusing to countenance such allowances for him.

He is, and I hope he forgives me for saying this, showing his age (WikiFur has him 31 years old). Things are changing for the better for trans people, however only really among younger people (ref). GR isn’t old in the grand scheme of things, but he grew up in a world that was significantly less sensitive towards the non-cisgender. For example, in some circles it’s becoming common for people to ask each other which pronoun they prefer:

Courtesy pi-ratical.tumblr.com. Click image for link to source.

GR is aware of this drive, but doesn’t think this it is a positive development. I’m guessing that his opinion would be different, and would be respectful of people’s preferences, if he had grown up in an more visibly-trans world, where such behaviour was encouraged.

If GreenReaper is transphobic, then he may be a self-hating transphobe, a phenomenon which can occur when people learn to adapt to an environment where they feel they can’t be themselves. If that is the case, then he deserves understanding and no small amount of love.

I’m more inclined to say that he is not transphobic, or at least not wilfully transphobic, and is simply acting in a way which is consistent with his own experiences. We all do this to an extent; it’s never easy to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes. GreenReaper is failing to respect transgender people, but this may be no more than a simple lack of empathy or imagination.

GR is a friend of [adjective][species], and had helped helping Makyo with a panel at Further Confusion earlier this year. It’s my hope that he will find a more moderate point of view in the future.

I shared this article with three people before publication: GreenReaper, Thesis White (who wrote on gender recently for [a][s] and prefers gender-neutral pronouns), and a transgender friend of mine. Here is how they responded:

GreenReaper says:

Gendered pronouns convey implicit assertions about a third party. I believe sex is a superior basis for such assertions – it is more objective, stable, and verifiable than the social construct we now call gender, resulting in more consistent usage. Two parties may disagree over a person’s masculine nature; they are far less likely to disagree as to whether they are male.

 

Yet whether we base pronouns on sex or gender is immaterial. The core issue is that pronouns are not a personal choice, to be “respected” – they are chosen by others, as expressions of their beliefs about us.

 

I’m glad to use neutral pronouns, as the OED suggests – but some insist I use those which are contrary to my evaluation of their person. *That* is what I have a phobia of: making a false statement of belief which, in the context of my other statements, may deceive others.

 

No-one may rightly compel a falsehood. Yet this is what my fiercest critics want; they would be equally unsatisfied if I based my usage on my impression of a person’s gender, because I might disagree with their self-evaluation.

 

This article’s suppositions about my psychological state are well-meaning, but incorrect. I do not hate myself, nor trans people – merely the idea that, as a journalist and an individual, I might not be free to speak my mind.

 

Thesis says:

GreenReaper equates sex with gender, and assumed sex with pronouns, but as a Queer theorist, I would argue that sex and gender are indeed not the same, and pronouns themselves most importantly refer gender regardless of body. While he may feel one way about his own identity, his transphobia comes in the form of denying others their identity. His own identity seems reminiscent of early 1900′s gay men that crossed dressed, but did not identify as women; transness has come a long way since that stage. Ultimately, his mistake comes from not respecting people’s word about who they are.

 

My transgender friend says:

My reaction to GR at the time was to immediately delete my Inkbunny account and stop using Flayrah and Wikifur. Referring to a trans person with the wrong pronouns is deeply upsetting and continuing to do so knowing that upset is… sociopathic? He’s hurting people because of some messed-up logic. It’s either a lack of empathy and understanding, or it’s transphobia. His own issues with gender make me think he’s more broken than bigoted.

One day, a fox and a cat were walking through a field. The cat seemed unusually distracted, however, despite the fox’s animated conversation. While the fox surely noticed, she did her best to try and draw the cat out through sheer ebullience. It had worked in the past, why not now?

 

“What’s bothering you?” the fox asked, relenting.

 

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the cat.

 

“Come on, if it was nothing, you wouldn’t be such a sourpuss, now, would you?” the fox joked.

 

The cat was unamused. “It’s…really nothing. I can’t say. It’s a secret.”

 

“That’s three things. Is it nothing, can you not say, or is it a secret?”

 

The cat blushed in his ears, “It’s a secret.”

 

“Can you tell me?” asked the fox.

 

“No, then it wouldn’t be a secret anymore!” frumped the cat.

 

The fox and the cat walked on in silence for a bit. The secret was clearly bothering the cat, but the fox couldn’t think of how to help.

 

“I know,” said the fox, brightening up. “You can tell your secret to my tail. Not even I know what my tail thinks. You can get it off your chest, and no one need actually learn your secret.

 

The cat thought for a moment, and then nodded, “Okay, but put your paws over your ears!”

 

The fox put her paws over her ears and stood still, admiring the scenery, while the cat put his muzzle in the dense fur of the fox’s tail and whispered his secret, weaving it through the fur. The fox heard nothing but the rustle of pawpads in fur, the cat felt immensely better getting whatever it was off his chest that he needed to, and the tail, to this day, has never let slip the cat’s secret. That is why it is said that a good way to feel better is to weave your secrets through a fox’s tail: they will surely be kept safe with not even the fox knowing them.

The idea of considering furry from a mythological standpoint springs from a few discussions over the last month or so with a friend (who has written for [a][s] before) about the ways in which we consider the bigger-picture topics of the fandom. Drilling down deep into the realm of data is certainly a worthy exercise, as all of those details help fill out the picture we carry in our heads, but just as worthy is exploring that overview we carry along with us as a whole.

The contiguous furry subculture has relatively little in the way of its own mythology. This is almost certainly an aspect of a subculture, rather than something specifically furry, but no less worth investigating for that – after all, we, as furries, are the ones who have to live with a relatively sparse mythology. What exactly are the ramifications of that?

I know that there has been a lot of discussion recently, here on [a][s] and elsewhere, about what exactly makes a furry, what the fandom is, and so on. Better minds than mine have tackled this question, and so I defer to them in all cases. However, for the purpose of this article, I’m going to talk strictly about what I’ve called “the contiguous fandom” in the past. That is, I’m going to talk about self-identified furries – those who call themselves members of our subculture and participate with that in mind. While I feel that several of our articles might have wider reach without that consideration, I also feel that the idea of limitations on one’s one work are a good way to keep that work from getting out of hand. To use a bit of jargon from work, I’d really like to avoid scope creep. With that in mind, let’s consider the question of mythology and membership.

Anthropomorphism and mythology are deeply entwined. So deeply entwined that I had to stop and think for a few minutes on how to even start that sentence: “is anthropomorphism subordinate to mythology, or is it the other way around?” One need only do the briefest of investigations into most any culture’s mythos in order to come across some instance of anthropomorphized animals. Similarly, one need only do a bit of research to find some bit of mythology surrounding just about any animal one comes across. Some of these are specific, some referenced only vaguely, but the large majority of them surround archetypes embodied by those species.

Furry, as a whole, does not have much in the way of myths. There is likely a very good reason to this, which I’ll get to in a bit, but first I think it’s worth disentangling ‘myth’ and ‘archetype’. A myth is a story bearing social weight. It’s not a story that’s important to society per se, though sometimes it is also that, but it is one of the components that add cohesion to society. Knot is an example of a modern myth which greatly exemplifies this concept. Unlike an epic, which often includes concepts of redemption and rebirth, myths usually surround one literary conflict and do not always resolve that conflict. In Knot, the conflict is the princess’s sadness – or, more broadly, the concept of depression – which, while not destroyed utterly as it might be in an epic, is at least resolved with some sort of moral; here: not bottling up your sadness. Myths are often the vehicles for lessons, in that way.

Archetypes, however, are more like the characters within myths. It’s not to say that, for instance, Coyote is an archetype, but rather that Coyote embodies the Trickster archetype. The very idea of someone clever, resourceful, not always successful but never daunted by failures – that is the archetype, Coyote is the actor, and the myths in which he plays a part are the vehicles for the lessons they mean to teach. Metamyths build on top of this as a plot element, but often include several of the same aspects as myths themselves (Snowcrash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson touch on this, and Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell is a good example).

Furry has its own set of archetypes. Some of these are an artifact of what I’d call the A-Z divide. That is, while we broadly describe our subculture in terms of anthropomorphism, it often plays out more like zoomorphism. That is, rather than necessarily giving animals human traits, we take our regular human interacts and mix in animal traits – mostly desirable ones – that lead to a coherent story. We tell our tales of human life, except with animals, or in rarer cases, involve species as a mechanic: fennecs who hear all, the canid sense of smell, and so on.

Apart from those, however, we have come up with a few different sources for our own archetypes. One that might actually have its roots in the early days of the furry fandom is the idea of “The Sexy Anubis”, though finding the actual original source material must be left as an exercise for the reader. Although there are surely those who have found Anubis, or at least the figure thereof, if not the god himself, attractive, just as surely as there have been other modern re-tellings of his role (American Gods by Neil Gaiman being an obvious example), our subculture seems to have taken this and ran with it, creating a figure that features widely in erotic art and comics. This extends beyond Anubis, of course, on to Renamon, Krystal, and so on; as well as beyond sexuality, as is evidenced by some species which wind up in tribal situations more often than others (otters and wolves, I’m looking at you).

This leads me to the next source, which is that of re-purposing appropriation. I’ve talked about appropriation more in depth before, but it plays a specific role at times when creating an archetype to be used by the community at large. Some of this shows in the ways in which we select our mythical creatures as characters: Lunostophiles, with whom I had the original conversation, is a Cheshire cat, and brings up that there are rather a lot of those, as well as gryphons, dragons, and centaurs, but not as many minotaurs, sea monsters, or mandrake roots. Much of this is due to how poorly these would fit in with the rest of the culture that we’ve built up: one usually without humans, whether or not they have the heads of bulls, one that takes place on land, and one requiring mobility.

Finally, there the archetypes based in part on fact, whether or not it has been proved. The ideas of lone wolves or strict pack hierarchy among wolves have been disputed by science, yet still play a firm role within our subculture. Although I’ve yet to run into any lemmings within furry, I would not be surprised if similar attitudes surrounded them based on popular knowledge, or even widely available fictional resources, such as the Redwall series.

In the end, perhaps this is one thing that keeps us a subculture, subservient to other cultures’ mythos, instead of something higher. Taken this way, the lack of canon becomes less defining. There are other subcultures that lack a canon, such as gay culture in America in the 70s and 80s, yet which retain visible archetypes. However, it may simply be a subculture thing to lack myths. I’ve bookended this article in my own poor attempt at a myth that might be found within furry, but it’s really sort of a stab in the dark, not based on any existing archetypes.

How about you, dear readers? What archetypes do you see within furry? What myths are there, whether or not they exist yet? Share, share!

One day, the fox was walking along the edge of the meadow, but kept getting scared and anxious. On one side of her was the meadow, but she felt open and exposed there, too easily seen. On the other side was the forest, which, while cooler than the sunny meadow, was also fraught with shadows and, as she imagined, many lurking things.

 

The fox hadn’t always been this anxious, but ever since word had spread that the cat had felt so much better after weaving his secrets in her tail, so too had the wolf, the rat, and the dragon, each pulling her aside to have her put her paws over her ears and unburden themselves of their secrets. The fox was proud of her role and did her best to keep the secrets safe.

 

The longer she walked, the more she bushed her tail out to try and make sure that the secrets were well-hidden.

 

Eventually, the fox met up with her brother and they both continued along the path. The fox’s brother, noticing his sister’s tail all fluffed up, asked, “Did you get shocked by lightening? Your tail is all puffed up!”

 

The existence of a secret is half of its betrayal, and so the fox thought quickly, before shrugging broadly, “Oh, I just brushed it, and that always leaves it feeling so matted down, so I figured I’d let it air out some in the shade sometimes, and in the sun sometimes. It feels good!”

 

The fox’s brother gave her an odd look, but she did have a point – he had just brushed his tail and it did feel rather stuffy. He bristled his fur out as well and walked with his sister between sun and shade.

 

”Besides,” he thought, ”This will help keep safe all of the secrets I have in my tail from my sister who can never know.” For he too held the confidence of many, but was always careful to keep it secure. This is why a fox’s tail will puff out when they feel anxious or threatened.

In many ways I’m not a very typical fur. I’m almost fifty-three as I write this, work in a blue collar field, and have little to no interest in furry art or artists. (I’m into furry fiction to the near-exclusion of all else, fandom-wise.) I don’t have a “furry-name” or “fursona”, and my first fursuit, if I still had it, would be older than the word itself. I would never have heard of half the fandom-famous anthro-cartoon characters if it hadn’t been for the fandom itself, because I was already an adult—even in many cases middle-aged—when the programs aired and became part of the rest of the fandom’s childhood. Perhaps most tellingly, I was thirty-seven years old before I ever heard the word “furry” used in its fandom sense. In other words, I lived most of my life in the universe that existed before there was a furry fandom, and remember it well.

This world was the world of the “paleofur”. The time before any of us knew there were others like us, who shared our interests and tastes. Before the internet brought us together, in other words, the long, long era when being a fur was a terribly lonely and to some degree even shameful thing.

One of my other great avocations is history, particularly military history of the early and middle twentieth century, and I continually read books on the subject. While I’ll admit that while I’ve made no dedicated effort to dig up paleofurs, having no idea of where to even begin looking, I’ve sort of kept my eyes open along the way for clues in the hope of coming across a kindred soul or two. And so far that’s exactly how many candidates I’ve come across—two.

The first I was very, very lucky on. Over a decade ago I was reading about P-47 strafing tactics during the latter part of World War Two when I came across a link on P-51 ground attacks. This in turn led me to an article…

…written by a man who claimed to have made several combat P-51 sorties over Germany at the very end of the war in a bunnysuit.

Now, I’m familiar with the fact that American flyers were often issued big, puffy coveralls called bunnysuits meant to keep them warm at altitude. This was most emphatically not one of those. The pilot in question, who had a nice eight- or ten-page website, said that he’d written home to his wife for a warm one-piece garment, and she’d sent him a bunny suit complete with ears and tail. Since it was all that he had that was warm and fit well enough he sort of had to wear it. (Longtime furries like myself, I’m quite certain, can take one look at the previous explanation and know a bowl of complete mush when they see it.) At any rate, as near as I can recall he flew two or three sorties right at the war’s very end in the thing, and slept in it as well despite what must’ve been a truly titanic wave of wisecracks coming his way. This man, I submit, was clearly a paleofur.

Sadly, I came across this truly excellent website very late at night and didn’t finish reading it (though I noted it hadn’t been updated in some time). I carefully bookmarked the page and got back to it about a week later. But it was gone. My guess is that the gentleman passed away. I failed to even note his name, which saddens me greatly. And no, I no longer have the bookmark—that was at least five computers ago. At the time I never dreamed I’d ever write an article on the subject or anything like that—the fandom was still far too small to have generated much in the way of a demand for such and showed few signs of ever getting to be a tenth the size it is today.

My second paleofur “find”, while less certain, was a huge shock. It was Winston Churchill—you may’ve heard of him. While I’ve covered the subject in some depth elsewhere, I’ll point out quickly that he owned and loved to play with children in a fursuit (gorilla), exchanged what looks very much like modern furry RP letters with his wife all the way down to her playing a cat and he a dog, and also (though this is entirely subjective) was enormously creative and artistically gifted, traits which seem quite common among furs. (He won a Nobel for literature and was a gifted-enough watercolorist that many experts agree he was a significant artist of the twentieth center totally apart from his political and literary life.)

So, I can hear my gentle readers asking right about now. Furries have existed in the past as well as the present. This is no great surprise.

No it’s not, really. After all, we see half-humans featured in Egyptian and even cave-wall paintings as well. Wondering what it’s like to experience the universe from behind the eyes of another species is probably nearly as old as sentient man. But what’s fascinating to me are the common threads, the similarities and sense of brotherhood that we—or at least I, being a former paleofur myself—instantly feel once the connection is made. More than a few social scientists and probably a fair number of psychologists and psychiatrists as well have looked with wonder upon our fandom and attempted with greater or lesser degrees of effort to figure out what makes us tick. I would submit that one valid approach to the truth would be to study the lives of those who were demonstrably furry before there even was a supportive fandom-base to welcome them out of the wilderness, who can’t be said to have simply joined a highly-accepting fandom for social support, but who instead revealed their inner furriness only at the risk of social censure, sometimes quite intense.

So, I’m making a rather bold suggestion here. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only one in the world so far who’s taken any real interest at all in the paleofur phenomenon, and I’ve mostly gotten a whole lot of nowhere. At least a small percentage of the fandom, I think, might be at least marginally interested in a web page devoted to collecting information on more paleofurs; our cultural furfathers, so to speak. Such a page would be fun, educational, and perhaps might even serve as a useful research tool for the sociological types. I’d do it myself, but I’m so computer-inept (and exist so far from the social centers of the fandom) that my efforts would certainly be doomed before I even began.

Is anyone else out there interested?

And now comes the time when I have to write a very important, rather personal article. Again.

I can see you all bracing yourselves already. “Oh no, here goes Makyo…”

I actually feel kind of bad for starting the article out like that, to be honest. Recently, my boss (and biggest ally at work) resigned by calling us all into a meeting and announcing, “So now is the time when I announce you that I’m quitting” and we all sat there in stunned silence. Was he kidding? It was certainly in his style.

It’s tough to have your most important personal ally leave through something that could just as easily be taken as a joke. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one expecting him to start out that way and then launch into some sort of deadpan “ha ha just kidding here are the plans for machine view we have to get it done by 14.04.”

I’m hardly leaving. I’ve invested quite a bit of time, no small amount of money, and basically just as much of my furry life as I can in this project – it means a lot to me. I think it’s a fantastic outlet for myself, and a pretty good resource for the community, providing both the resources needed to investigate furry on many levels, as well as a place for any others to do so. This has allowed [a][s] to become precisely what it has.

As I’ve mentioned before, I had few plans for [a][s] other than to maybe just be an outlet for me to kvetch about furry. I thought it would be a simple little place for me to write down my thoughts about what bugged me, or at least fascinated me, about this subculture. There’s no small amount of that, after all – no one version of any community is going to fit any person 100% given that a subculture is made up of at least as many versions as there are members.

Once I started poking around more, thinking more, and especially giving the site its own personality rather than just some wordpress blog with a bad crop of one of my own commissions at the top, things started to head in their own way.

I was pleased. Often, in fiction writing as well as music composition, the point at which a piece really starts to take off for the creator is the point at which it starts to take on a life of its own. Not that it violates the outline or plan or anything, just that characters start to fill out the story and play their roles, the melodies start to take their own inevitable paths toward resolutions (or not, as the case may be).

One thing that I’ve noticed, however, is that the part of us that is actively engaged in the process of creation, however subconscious it may be, can surprise us. More than that, creation does not take place in a vacuum. Rather, the process of creation is the product of not only ourselves, but also the various levels of society in which we reside. The creation that is [a][s] is not just some isolated production of Makyo’s view of furry. That view of furry changes as I grow, and as furry changes.

I grow and change because there are people in my life that come and go, influences that wax and wane. When I started writing, I was dealing with some of the troubles I was having with gender in my life by role-playing as a mix-gendered character, hiding it from those around me because of feared backlash. As I slowly opened up to myself and others, so to did the circles in which I counted myself a part: I started talking more with people with similar experiences and, though I’m a little sad to admit it, lost touch with some of the absolutely delightful folk I met online while in the beginnings of my exploration.

So of course [a][s] is going to change. I’m going to change over the process of two and a half years, there’s no reason that the things that I produce are, for some reason, not going to change!

Keeping that in mind, take into account the fact that, over these last few years, the site itself has grown to include a separate project, Love – Sex – Fur, focused on the curious intersection of furry, romance, and sexuality. It has grown to adopt the Furry Survey from one of our initial contributors, Klisoura. It has grown to include not just myself and Klisoura, but also JM, Kyell, Zik, Rabbit, Jakebe, and many guests besides. All of these additions, most especially the additions of written contributions help to shape the ways in which [a][s] grows. It’s self-reinforcing, too, a type of feedback: the site attracts a certain type of mind that writes in a certain way, which attracts more of the same, building in strength and attracting more of the same until it starts to refine itself.

These last few months have been pretty tough for me. The issue of mental health crops up with some frequency here on [adjective][species], but I think it’s one worth covering, from the point of view of introspection, and particularly due to furry as a factor, as well as a utility in the recovery process.

I know it may perhaps seem routine at this point, but it wasn’t intentional that I take each winter off from [a][s] and several other projects as some sort of sabbatical. Rather, my genetic propensity toward seasonal depression, and mental illness in general, tends to lead to inadvertent medical leaves primarily in the fall and winter.

I first started to take the concept of mental health seriously in my later years of college when I started having trouble making it to work on time because I was terrified of the people I’d encounter on the way. I was afraid that there was some aspect of myself that was attracting attention. I was worried that walking in a certain way, or perhaps too close to others, would lead to accusations of sexual harassment. I was worried to the point where I started having to plan my arrival on campus between classes, or if I happened to show up during a rush, to move from bathroom to bathroom on the way to my lab in the library, from the animal sciences building, to the plant sciences building, to the general education building, to the library, and to my chair, moving from island of stillness to island of solitude.

Much of this subsided with the adoption of a regular schedule in a much smaller and more restricted environment when I took my first job. I’d drive for an hour (53 miles) by myself to the office, hang out with the same four or five people out of a group of twenty or so for eight to twelve hours, then drive for another hour to my home, where I lived with the same two or three others.

At first, it was actively refreshing! The drive was a nice way to unwind after work, especially on those days when I was working ten or twelve hours: not only could I just Not Work for a while, but I was alone and didn’t have to interact. I discovered audiobooks and plowed through several over and over again, taking comfort in the lack of surprise in a repeated storyline.

Eventually, the 60-80 hour weeks started to wear on me, as did the job itself, and I noticed that it was easier for me to hide in my cube, or simply head home and spend the entire weekend indoors, or perhaps in the backyard engaging in some solitary hobby or another (I’m a big fan of home brewing – there’s few surprises and basically zero conversation involved in mashing grain by oneself).

I’ve written about it before, but as it piled up, I found myself seeking medical help, even to the point of medication in the form of anxiolytics. This eventually culminated in a mental health emergency that lead to forced time off work, and eventually leaving the job for one that would be a better fit for my well-being.

[a][s] had drifted from where I felt that the site would’ve gone had it just been me, and I felt torn.

I had this idea that [a][s] would be some grand outlet for exploring the furry fandom in such a way as to be all inclusive and yet still introspective, a place for data and doxa, an accessible place without being condescending.

Pure dreams, of course. Once the project started to take off, my role in it was limited to my own production, and once others came on board, the project took off in a purely unpredictable direction. It was exhilarating and fantastic to watch, seeing the ways in which others also thought about the fandom joined in and started taking the conversation all the further.

The benefit of this, and particularly of the voice of JM, is that the site grew rapidly without becoming unstable. The growth is visible not only in the plain-old-numbers sense of our viewers per day has increased, but also in the spread of our articles. Some were picked up by FurCast, some were discussed on Flayrah, one was even nominated for an Ursa Major Award, along with the site as a whole.

The downside, however, was that as the direction of the site shifted and steered in other directions, I felt as though my own contributions were less and less relevant. This is embarrassing for me to admit, of course, but worth admitting all the same. I felt that what I had to offer when the site started out was not worth offering to what the site has become, based solely on the numbers game I was playing in my head.

To me, there felt like two obvious choices available: I could try and steer the site back toward what I wanted at the risk of its accessibility by a wider audience as well as every other author that participated, or I could step down from my own contributor status and let the site go in the direction it seemed destined to go.

Binaries are false (at least, most of them), however, and destiny only means so much when there are multiple parties with their own free wills (or semblance thereof, but that’s out of scope for this article) acting within a single setting. And besides, I run the tech side, and the organization’s in my name. So the true reality is that there’s some middle road, some third path to be taken to ensure that the site fulfills its potential without slowly narrowing in scope until the audience of everything outside that scope becomes irrelevant and bored.

In 2012, as I recovered, I took the winter off. However, during the summer of 2013, I was blindsided by the fact that, despite a lifetime of some semblance of consistency, the symptoms of panic took a hard left into psychosis-ville and I found myself stuck in London, head jerking violently to the left every few seconds, hearing voices telling me to throw myself to my death from the office balcony, and believing with an earnestness never before experienced that the entirety of the world knew every terrible secret of mine.

There’s a lot to be said for the ways in which the mind works to adapt to situations that force a reevaluation of the way of life. There comes a point, however, when your mind throws up its hands (or paws, or wings, or what-have-you) and basically just refuses to come out of its room, subsisting on pita chips and hummus and brandy until the world changes its mind, straightens up, and flies right.

Of course, the world had hardly changed at all. I mean, sure, work trips are stressful, and I came home at a bad time with the Colorado floods, but there wasn’t anything happening in my life to warrant the magnitude of my own personal breakdown. And that’s what it was: a breakdown. The term isn’t a medical one, but is generally accepted a temporary, drastic mental shift featuring large and out of place anxiety, depression, or other psychological symptoms, and for me this took the form of debilitating panic attacks, auditory aberrations, the return of a nervous tic, and various other symptoms.

I stopped writing. I very nearly stopped working, and was subsequently reprimanded. I haven’t contributed to any side projects (my own or others such as Weasyl) since. I maxed out my credit card on treatment. I spent all of my energy on improving, with the gracious help of my partners and friends.

I left [a][s] in the hands of JM, as I did before, and couldn’t have asked for a more capable administrator while I sorted things out. In that time, guest articles were published, correspondences managed (with some notable exceptions, for which I’d like to offer public apology in addition to my private ones).

Had this been just a Makyo Production, I would’ve lost everything and not had much of a reason to continue after the shame of having to stop, no matter the legitimacy of the initial reason. It’s hard to invest so much of oneself into something, fail so completely on a personal level, and then just start right back up.

Thankfully, this isn’t a Makyo Production. Never will be. I’ve got a job, a husbandog, a catfriend, two pups and a kitty, a house-husky, and a whole host of friends and acquaintances I can lean on for support. I’ve got obligations outside of [a][s], just as JM does; just as Jakebe and Rabbit and Zik and Kyell and Klisoura do.

The root of the problem, then, comes down to one of identity. I had built up in my mind this picture of myself as an avatar of a website. Nothing so grandiose as to be delusional, and quite a bit more paranoid than that implies. Every interaction with the organization, whether or not directed at me, whether or not positive or negative, became a personal indictment, the entirety of the subculture that had been my home and to whom I had looked up to for more than a decade now looking down on me and deeming me unworthy of even contempt. It was an extension of the paranoia infecting my personal life.

That’s not even remotely close to the reality, though. In retrospect, it’s one of those instances that’s relatively clear in hindsight, even if completely obfuscated in the heat of the moment. I think it’s worth a brief discussion on the way [a][s] actually works.

[a][s] is a platform. It’s a collection of individuals who are willing to put in somewhat regular effort in investigating the furry fandom, plus a welcoming base of support for any individuals who would like to make a point about the fandom through a guest post. As far as published opinion goes, there is no such thing as an [a][s] viewpoint. There is no direction for the site except outwards. All the site can be is embodied in the contributors and creators, which is exactly as it should be: the precise same thing applies to the furry fandom as a whole. There is no guiding light. There is no canon. There are no leaders. There are no directions in which our community should or ought to head, because the directions in which our community should head consist of simply “outward”.

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

Love – Sex – Fur is not an endorsement of sexuality within the context of furry in any sense, but an exploration of the intersection of two very important parts of life for so many in our community. There is no denying that sex and sexuality play an important part in the human experience (evidenced by so many laws, regulations, social mores, and taboos surrounding it), and when it comes down to it, we interact with each other in the context of human society. And yet the furry subculture plays an enormous role for many of us, so it’s no wonder that there is some intersection. It’s as much worth acknowledging and exploring as species selection and character creation.

Our goal, in moving forward, should be to emphasize this, and we have already taken steps to that end. The goal is for [a][s] to be less some news outlet “voice of the community” – we aren’t, and it’s questionable whether such a thing is possible – than to be a platform for introspection and exploration. We are less a voice than we are a medium. Seriously, I think the project compares more favorably to publishing platforms such as Medium than anything else. As Rabbit put it, it’s a platform for exploring the “why” and “how”, rather than the “what”, “where”, “who”, and “when”, something that can only be done by all of us. If there is any steering to be done of the project, I think it is to ensure that this is more visibly the case.

The fandom is enormous, and [a][s] is a view of this enormous thing as it evolves over time. There are at least as many different views of the fandom as there are members of it, if not more. This is a feature, I think, rather than a defect: after all, if we were all so thoroughly aligned that there were fewer views of our subculture, then the complexity of our community would be replaced with loudly agreeing with each other.

I thought in my moments of panic that maybe I ought to step down, or perhaps force [a][s] in one direction. In reality, both were the products of my own anxiety, so thoroughly a part of who I am that my mother, in an email, apologized to me for her role in my genetics (an apology borne out of anxiety if ever there was one, with absolutely no recourse to reality).

I try to tie my own writing back to furry whenever possible, and I think I’ve done an okay job of including it throughout this screed, but I think it’s worth calling out one last time that furry is one of those anchors that keeps me tied down to a grounded and full life. This community provides me with a support structure that I feel was honestly lacking from my life before, and I’m not only super pleased that I have it, but super pleased that it’s available to anyone and everyone, no matter how they need it.

Didn’t make it to Further Confusion this year? Made it, but missed our talk?  Don’t worry!  I actually remembered to turn on the camera this time!  Click through for a video of the panel portion of our presentation, “Exploring the Fandom Through Data”.

As always, the slides and data for the presentation itself are available on github.

I’ve long been fascinated by the art of communication. While writing is my forte, I’m also fascinated by radio—I was a teen-aged disc jockey for a time at an educational station—and just about all other forms of gasbaggery. One of the things that has struck me most profoundly over the years is how much all the various means of exchanging thoughts and ideas have in common with each other at the basic level.

Over the years I’ve chosen a very few favorite literary passages and other odds and ends of communication and thought long and hard about what makes them work so well. One is an excerpt from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, more specifically the arrival of the Midnight Circus Train. Another is the last few paragraphs of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which never leaves me dry-eyed. A third is a lesser-known but still famous scene from book five of the Horatio Hornblower series (Beat to Quarters was the American title) by C.S. Forester in which the protagonist, half-mad from noise and terror and the strain of command in the most brutal sort of combat struggles to maintain his sanity as he (largely by pure force of will) stands for hour after hour in the hot sun with the corpses of his friends and shipmates piling up ever deeper all around him. These are all three of them brilliant gems of the literary art, and each achieved much of their impact using very different techniques. Indeed, they share only a single thing in common.

Not one of them is one syllable longer than they absolutely must be in order to achieve the effect intended. Indeed, each is remarkably short compared to the power they command in the reader’s mind. Not a shred of “non-essential” or “second-rate” material is present to water down the impact of the rest.

It wasn’t literature that first caused me to notice this phenomenon—like many children my age I was required to memorize the Gettysburg Address. The Address was only a few words long, yet if ever a national leader has delivered a more powerful or timeless message I’m unaware of it. According to my history teacher, during that era speeches—and American political speeches in particular—tended to drone on for hours and be filled with highfaluting twenty dollar words, impressive gesticulations, eyerolling, appeals to heaven and seventy-four other sorts of tommyrot nonsense audiences would never tolerate today. By contrast, Lincoln’s speech was over before some of the audience were even aware he’d truly begun. Again we see the same pattern, in this case expressed so powerfully that eventually it redefined the art of speechifying in America if not worldwide—brevity, brevity, brevity. Let not the second-rate water down the Really Good stuff. After all, if it’s not on-point then it’s not what your audience came to hear about/paid to read.

Which leads me to the real point of this piece…

[adjective][species], as I understand it (and correct me if I’m wrong here), wants to be seen as the “literary” or “intellectual” news source of the fandom. There’s nothing wrong with that—this world has plenty of room for both The New Yorker and Mad Magazine, after all. No one enjoys a good “thought piece” more than I do, and I’ve even been honored to write a couple-three of the things myself in this venue and others. But there are dangers here, some of which are less obvious than others. When one sets out to intellectualize about the fandom, for example, it’s first essential to have something valid, on-topic and interesting to say. Such articles are in very short supply for a “furry New Yorker”, I’d imagine, so it’s understandable that the focus may have to widen sometimes merely in order to obtain new material. The demand for quality, on-topic articles is bound to exceed the supply, especially considering what the authors are being paid. The danger is, however, is that if you water things down enough pretty soon you’re really not running an intellectual magazine about furries and the furry fandom anymore. Don’t get me wrong—if I were to attempt to force myself to write at least one “deep” or “introspective” furry article a month for [a][s], well… I have the self-discipline to crank something out, were I foolish enough to make such a commitment. But would it really be up to snuff or invariably of interest to the average fur?

No. Not a chance. I just don’t have that many good ideas. And that’s why I believe that [a][s] should be about the really good stuff and only the really good stuff. It is of this that true greatness is made. If the cost is a shorter magazine or fewer issues per year, then let it be so. After all, there are only so many genuinely profound things one can say about a given fandom. This is the lesson of the masters of communication—not a syllable should wasted, nor should a sentence (or an article) be off-topic. Instead let there be laser-like focus on what is truly of interest to the fandom and creating excellence in how this material is presented. Most of all, let not the editors worry themselves excessively over rejecting (or heavily editing) that which does not belong.

I congratulate [a][s] for attempting something incredibly difficult in terms of what they aspire to be, and I’m also very proud to be associated with them. (Or at least I hope that I’m still associated with them after posting this article!) I’ve always been all about high aspirations and reaching for the very top, and I think that [a][s] is doing exactly that. Let Flayrah—a publication equally high in my regard, for various reasons—deal with the “what” and “when” and “where” of the fandom; that’s their forte. [a][s], in my own opinion, should be where a reader seeks the “how” and (even more importantly) the “why”. These are far tougher questions, requiring a different mindset and format to deal with properly, and…

Oh, my.

I’ve gone on a bit too long. Haven’t I?

Furry cub porn, love it or loathe it, is a fact of life. There is demand for cub porn within our community, and so there will always be supply.

I have written before about the ethical aspects of cub porn here on [a][s]: I am, with some qualifications, a defender. There are certainly valid arguments for censorship or restriction of cub porn, not least the impression it can give to non-furry friends and family. Those interested in the ethics should start with my article—In Defence of Cub Porn.

Those interested in the legal status of cub porn should read on.

Cub porn is banned on Fur Affinity; it’s allowed on Inkbunny as long as human characters aren’t involved; it’s largely unrestricted on SoFurry. The administrators of these sites each have their own philosophy, but all are united in that they don’t wish to engage in illegal activity.

As it turns out, the legality of cub porn varies widely across the world.

Important disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this article is not legal advice.

In the United States, cub porn is legal.

The First Amendment of the United Status constitution effectively prevents laws that may abridge freedom of the speech or the press. This is unusual because it affords special protection to speech: politicians are unable to prohibit, say, hate speech.

There are some exceptions in United States law. A judgement in 1942 (Chaplinksy, ref) concluded that ‘fighting words’—those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace—are not protected by the First Amendment. But ‘fighting words’ exceptions are very rare. So, for example, the Westboro Baptist Church are allowed to picket funerals.

The protection afforded by the First Amendment extends to pornography, which is accepted as a valid form of speech. A landmark ruling in 1985 (Hudnut, ref) concluded that even pornography depicting rape, bestiality, torture, and a whole bunch of other things mostly related to explicit subordination of women, is protected by the First Amendment.

And, yup, a ruling in 2002 (Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition, ref) confirmed that simulated child pornography is protected by the First Amendment. This struck down a law passed in 1996 (The Child Pornography Prevention Act), which was intended to ban such pornography, among other things.

So, in the United States, furry cub porn has been tested in the courts directly, and it is perfectly legal.

Porn involving animals, or depictions of animals (or animal-people) is also okay. However some American states have animal cruelty laws that prohibit bestiality, so while it’s legal to own real-world bestiality pornography, it may not be to legal to produce depending on where you live.

The United States is a big cultural force, and so it’s easy to catch a few episodes of Law & Order, and assume that such a libertarian perspective is common across the western world. It’s not, as we shall see later in this article.

In the United Kingdom, cub porn is illegal.

In the UK, it is criminal to possess pornographic images that include a participant is under the age of 18. The image doesn’t even have to depict a sex act: it’s illegal if the image simply ‘focusses principally on a child’s genitals or anal region‘.

The law applies whether the image is real or simulated. And it covers any image where ‘the predominant impression conveyed is that the person shown is a child despite the fact that some of the physical characteristics shown are not those of a child‘.

This has been the law in the UK since 2009, when parliament enacted the Coroners and Justice Act (ref).

In Canada, cub porn is illegal.

Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes the right to ‘freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication‘. This is a similar wording to the United States First Amendment, but Canada makes an exception for simulated child pornography.

The question was settled in the Canadian courts in 2001 (Sharpe, ref). The courts stated that it is criminal to possess ‘material that poses a reasoned risk of harm to children [and] it should include visual works of the imagination as well as depictions of actual people’.

The court’s definition of such illegal material almost definitely extends to furry cub porn. The court concluded that simulated child pornography (such as imported-from-Japan pornography that depicts underage animal-people) ‘poses a reasoned risk of harm‘ because paedophiles may use such images to groom potential victims. It’s not quite as clear-cut as the UK law, but it’s safe to conclude that some, if not most, furry cub porn is illegal if you’re north of the border.

In Australia, cub porn is probably legal.

Australia, like most countries, bans child pornography however the law specifically applies to only real children. Pornography of simulated underage characters has been shown to be legal via the court system.

There are a couple of minor exceptions to this. Firstly, Australia has strong laws against depictions of sexual violence. For example, a US-produced gay porn film with the (predictable, awesome) title Tight Ends & Wide Receivers, is banned in Australia because one of the ‘players’ is shown being struck in the crotch by an errant football, which counts as ‘sexual violence’. (You’ll be pleased to hear that he recovers, thanks to some imaginative physical therapy.) Possession of some underage pornography, usually in the form of imported manga, is sometimes prosecuted under these sexual violence laws (which apply whether the pornography is real or not). The punishment is usually a small to moderate fine.

There is also one example from Australia where an unlucky man was prosecuted for being in possession of crude Simpsons pornography, presumably depicting Bart and/or Lisa (ref). This judgement drew worldwide widespread derision (and giggling) and almost certainly would have been struck down should the accused have bothered to appeal. (He chose to accept the court’s punishment, which was a A$3,000 fine.)

In New Zealand, cub porn is illegal.

A New Zealand man was jailed in 2013 for having a few pornographic clips depicting nominally underage animal-people, for ‘possessing objectionable material’ (ref). It all seems pretty clear-cut, however this case was complicated because the man had, several years previously, indecently assaulted a teenage boy. It’s probably fair to guess that the prosecution was driven by fear that he would continue to abuse children, rather than a desire to stamp out a dangerous tide of so-called ‘pixie sex’.

In South Africa, cub porn is illegal.

South Africa’s laws are very similar to those in the UK. It is illegal to own child pornography, which ‘includes any image, however created, or any description of a person, real or simulated, who is, or who is depicted or described as being, under the age of 18 years‘. This law has been in place since 2003, as part of the Films and Publications Act (ref).

In Scandinavia, cub porn is (probably) mostly legal.

You’ll have to forgive me for being a little vague here, however I’m outside of my English-speaking comfort zone.

In 2010, in Sweden, a man was prosecuted for possession of what sounds like furry cub porn: underage comic characters with cat ears and tails. His prosecution was overturned on appeal, and presumably this sets the precedent that such pornography is not illegal.

Similar laws exist in Norway, Finland, and Denmark, however these have not been tested to my knowledge. I am relatively comfortable concluding the furry cub porn is probably not illegal in those countries, although of course there are differences from country to country: for example, bestiality pornography is unambiguously legal in Denmark (as long as the animal isn’t harmed) but unambiguously illegal in Norway.

In Western Europe, cub porn is (probably) mostly legal.

Laws vary from country to country, and I’m stymied by language. A general theme seems to be that simulated child pornography is illegal only if the characters might reasonably be mistaken for real children. The presence of age-play in Second Life seems to be a common concern.

Based on my (limited) research, I guess that pornography involving underage furry characters is unlikely to be specifically illegal in most parts Western Europe. I was unable to find any convictions involving pornography that might be comparable to furry cub porn.

Can you help?

If anyone able to shed light on other countries, or provide more detail, please leave a comment or drop me a note ([email protected]).

Guest post by Khed (@khedhorse). To the furry community, Khed has mainly been an equine amateur artist. But outside the furry community, he’s a grad student who can’t stop analyzing religion and furry things – often at the same time.

In April 1906, at a home at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street, Los Angeles, fire fell from heaven.

This was no fiery column defending fleeing Hebrew slaves nor cause for a modern-day Elijah to slaughter idolatrous priests. To those at the Bonnie Brae home, these were the “cloven tongues of fire” that had visited Christ’s apostles at Pentecost. They were a sure sign of Jesus’s saving power, in latter days come again into the world.

And they were literal tongues, too. Late one night, a black pastor and a white friend were kneeling in prayer when the latter let loose a flow of ecstatic syllables. The next day, the pastor, William Seymour, did the same. And when Seymour acquired a church-turned-warehouse-turned-stable as his new mission center—the famous Azusa Street Mission in downtown LA—hundreds more, of all races, experienced the outpouring of divine power. Those on the margins of society, generally poor, found in this power meaning for their lives, healing from their ills, and salvation for their souls and communities. Missionaries, believing themselves endowed with the power to speak foreign languages spontaneously, set out penniless but joyful to spread the Good Word.

And there was neither black nor white in Christ Jesus to these revivalists. To onlookers in an America in which racial barriers were being erected and fortified, the expressions these early so-called “Pentecostals” took for signs of divine favor were horrific breaches in social protocol. Seymour’s erstwhile mentor, from whom he had learned of the gift of tongues, denounced the “Negroisms” on display under Seymour’s ministry: seemingly nonsensical ululations, jerky dancing motions, raucous exclamations, weeping faces and bodies collapsing, beatifically smiling all the while. Black men were embracing white women, a clear racial transgression for those of the time that was all but overtly sexual: everyone knew black men couldn’t be trusted around virtuous white women. While the Azusa Street Revival under Seymour’s leadership was revolutionary in its deconstruction of strict racial boundaries, it suffered the fate of all revolutions: the disapprobation of those who defined “decorum” as “like us.” Even today, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t scoff at the so-called Pentecostal gifts of the Spirit, from healings to tongues to handling snakes.

It is these tongues by which Pentecostals came to be identified. In the Biblical account of Pentecost, recorded in Acts 2, the body of the early Christian church is gathered together shortly after Jesus’s Ascension when, in the midst of prayer, the Holy Spirit descends and they begin speaking in tongues. While some in the surrounding crowd heard untutored Jews speaking their foreign languages and, in amazement, converted, others heard merely gibberish and dismissed the Christians as drunks.

In mid-May 2013 I turned on the radio as I pulled out of the Irvine Regional Park. It was tuned in to Radiolab, on which the anchors were interviewing people who had discovered or recovered linguistic ability as adults. They all expressed that a sort of peace, a oneness, a connectedness evaporated with each word they learned or relearned. The need for mediated communication, sequences of arbitrary sounds, reminded them of the irrevocable distance between minds. Language, the constriction of syntax and diction, cut off and enclosed them.

I had been at the park for my first ever furry event, the SoCal FurBQ. Though I’d been lurking in the fandom since 2001 and contributing art since about 2006, I had never had the means to go to an event. Beforehand I was absurdly worried (as I always am when I approach new social spaces) that something would go horrendously wrong: I wouldn’t be able to strike up conversations, it would be just as drama-ridden as the worst online interactions I’d heard about, or events would be overrun by the more sensational parts of the fandom which endlessly capture outsiders’ attention and to which I tend to give a wide berth.

But it was alright. There, I shed my name; I was “Khed” to those I met. I shed my species; I wore my giant toucan beak. I shed my self-censorship; I could use the words “anthro” and “TF” in public without any reservations. I even drew a horse transformation—in the open air, with people around!—and got compliments instead of strange stares. I felt an uncanny sense of openness, of possibility, of potential for new connections.

Language is more than words, though. Though writing is notoriously imperfect (hence the rise of emoticons), even speech has its insufficiencies. A grammar book does not include all we communicate, the structures of discourse that form the riverbeds of knowledge through which we flow. Meaning runs through gesture, through posture, through facial expression, through habits of action and methods of taking up space we are barely coming to understand scientifically. While language and culture do not determine what we can or cannot think, Newspeak-style, they do regulate the channels and categories in which we think. Human, animal, vegetable, mineral; female, male, straight, gay; black, white, Latino, Asian, other; general audience, mature, adult; actual and virtual, digital and traditional, fiction and not.

The furry subculture is based around a single core idea: that the sun-bright line some ancients drew between humans and other beings is permeable. We straddle that limen with great aplomb, building communities and structures within our communitas.

We actually reconfigure our language as well. While only a minority of furs wear fursuits, we should beware of reifying the difference between “real” and “virtual” that we likewise ignore so adeptly. If we collapse the digital and the fleshly worlds into a single plane of analysis, all furries by definition are fursuiters. After all, when someone asks in furspace what species I am, I say I’m a horse. My friends who are less attached to their species often speak of “wearing” one body or another, and in Second Life these headspace images are almost translated into three dimensions.

But there is something about virtual avatar embodiedness that distinguishes it from fleshly embodiedness: there are forms of communication to which we are attuned, if only subconsciously—touch, among others—that can only be approximated through pixels. In online furspace, speaking “furry” is a matter of two dimensions: length and width, word and image. Sometimes other dimensions, sound and time and motion, make appearances, but they’re rarer.

In fleshly furspace, speaking “furry” requires the breaking of human modes of linguistic and extralinguistic discourse. However, furspace in its liminality enables this rupture. If I’m a horse and you’re a wolf, we can employ more unique vocalizations, gestures, and interactions than would be possible were we both human. Wearing a fursuit, a body-mask, facilitates this; being unseen but seeing in public enables varieties of expression.

A charism (plural: charismata) is a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Xenolalia is defined as the supernatural ability to speak in extant foreign tongues. This was the sort displayed at Pentecost proper, bringing on accusations of inebriation – but also conversions.

Glossolalia is defined as the supernatural ability to speak in unknown tongues, especially in prayer or praise. This was not explicitly demonstrated at Pentecost, Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians presupposes it when he admonishes the church to refrain from speaking in tongues unless someone interprets the speaking concurrently. The measure of appropriateness is whether others are edified; for Paul, unintelligible language does not uplift and can be a stumblingblock.

Linguists who have investigated glossolalia have found it, in general, to be strings of phonemes sampled from the speaker’s native language.

Fursonas are perplexing to the outsider. To some things they can relate: sports mascots, cartoons, fables, and special effects makeup are all familiar enough. They have their defined places in our broader culture. But furrydom does not speak these languages, though it has borrowed much of their vocabulary. What was a pidgin cobbled together from various cultural productions has, in its furry re-articulation and intergenerationality, become a creole. Our stopgap, ad hoc business-speak full of vulpine archers, racing lapines, and catpeople on starships has evolved into a native tongue, one with many dialects—some nearly mutually unintelligible—and innumerable redefinitions and neologisms. Our one-time fandom has gone subculture and begun budding subcultures of its own.

And within that subculture, transgressing the human-nonhuman boundary (in whatever way) allows us to transgress other boundaries more easily. Gender, sexuality, and racial performances and tensions are not as intrinsically associated with animals; they are human, even though we can and often to read such performances into animals. Even when the general culture anthropomorphizes or symbolically appropriates animals in certain ways, furry performance can draw from other symbolic dialects, including ones we ourselves have created. My performance as a horse, for instance, contradicts many of the masculine assumptions that have seeped into human-referent but equine verbiage: stud, stallion.

But even though animals are regularly the subjects of common metaphors, the extent of the furry affinity for such metaphors—and perhaps our denial of metaphor—set us apart. This different approach doesn’t always gel well; we speak tongues that others cannot understand or ones they deride. Little children, for example, can easily proclaim that they wish to be a cat or a dog when grown up. It’s a joke they’ll grow out of when they learn about real careers. When an adult dives into the extralinguistic excess of animal-play, however, his or her fellows not only react against the confusion of human and animal, but the rejection of norms of age and maturity. Animals are among the juvenile, domestic things one puts off when we join the sexual, capitalist, individualist, sub/urban world. Admission of a child-identified interest—animals, cartoons, so forth—by an adult—defined by production and sexual capacity—evokes  reactions ranging from disapproval to accusations of perversion. They hear some phonemes they recognize and fill in the gaps with exaggerated stories of minor or major breaches.

From Azusa Street Pentecostalism spread across the world. Very often newspapers, printed in the tens of thousands, brought news of the revival long before missionaries arrived to preach in person. Seymour’s ministry was cut off at the knees when two followers stole his mission’s printing press and subscriber lists. By this point, though, the fire had ignited and could not be extinguished. In the century since Azusa, not only have Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches proliferated, but some mainline Protestant and Catholic churches have taken on “charismatic” practices. At present, some scholars estimate the number of Pentecostals and charismatics in the world to be around 250 million – roughly a quarter of world Christianity. Though Pentecostals come from every socioeconomic stripe, Pentecostalism has flourished in those areas, often poorer, where charismata offer solutions to social, familial, and bodily suffering unavailable otherwise. And in the process it has sometimes served to bridge seemingly intractable fractures in society.

Contrastingly, furrydom has spread mainly through the so-called “developed” nations, leading some to believe that it eases the alienation brought down on First-Worlders by an economic system that splits them up as units of human capital. It can provide identity, ritual, even calendaring to otherwise monotonous lives. I feel it does so by tapping into what Harvey Cox, in his analysis of Pentecostal growth, called “primal speech”: communication that transcends the bounds of human linguistic, social, and bodily categories to release an effusion of pent-up anxieties and bond humans together. Furrydom might also share in a sort of “primal hope” with Pentecostals: the Millennial ideal that someday the world will be better. Whether better means social acceptance of a fetish, deeper and more visceral relationships, a reintegration of nonhuman animals into the sphere of moral consideration, or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ depends on who you ask.

My faith tradition gave up glossolalia years ago in an effort to discard enthusiastic elements that could disrupt ecclesiastical hierarchies and reflect badly on a church struggling after years of social, legal, and economic repression to become respectable. I envy Pentecostals their exuberant worship from time to time, wishing that I would not be constrained to the grammars and words of English in conversations with the divine.

And sometimes I can’t help but wonder if God listens when I practice my whinny.

King Crow is a well-regarded novel, written by Michael Stewart and published in 2011. It’s a tale of a young man who is exploring identity—his own and that of other people—as if everyone were anthropomorphic birds. The young man is introverted, hyper-focussed on specifics, and unable to grasp complex social dynamics.

It opens: When I look at people, I wonder what sort of birds they are.

There’s a pretty good argument that King Crow, with its anthropomorphics and its exploration of the challenges of being an introverted young man, is the sort of thing that furries would be interested in.

And yet few furries will have heard of King Crow, and even fewer will have read it. It’s very likely that you, reader, are hearing about it for the first time in this article, and that you’ll never hear of it ever again. King Crow isn’t on the furry radar.

But this article isn’t really about King Crow. This is about what furries are choosing to read instead, and it’s not found in the literary fiction section.

In Issue #1 of the relaunched Claw & Quill, Huskyteer writes: “If you happen to be under nine, you’re spoiled for choice in the anthropomorphic literature department“.

She’s right. It’s always been that way. Over on LiveJournal, a fur named Perri hosts an informal Furry History Project: mostly a long, incomplete list of anthropomorphic media (TV shows, comics, movies, etc) over the years. There are hundreds and hundreds of examples, and a quick scan suggests that around 90% of them are media that were created for children.

Maybe Perri’s lowbrow list reflects his preferences rather than the community at large? Well, the hifalutin Furry Writers’ Guild lists nine ‘Literary Classics’… and more than half are children’s books.

It seems that we are, collectively, a group of adults that are choosing to pay attention to furry literature that’s created for children. But that’s a bit of an overstatement, and even then it’s an observation, not a complaint.

We furries are more likely to discuss children’s books (and TV, and movies, and comics, and other media) because it’s the lowest common denominator. This doesn’t mean that we’re simpletons, it just means that (quality) furry children’s books are something that many of us have in common. We are no longer children of course; we have all aged and become adults. As we have aged, our tastes have diverged from the relative simplicity of children’s media. And so we are much less likely to find people who share our esoteric (adult) interests, and much more likely to find people who share our simpler (childish) interests.

Discussion of popular culture, by its nature, tends to overwhelm and drown out discussion of media that appeals only to a niche crowd. This creates a positive feedback loop, where popular culture receives more attention, and so it becomes more popular. You can see this clearly in meatspace retail, where store owners need to maximize sales—you’re much more likely to find Harry Potter in a tiny airport bookstore than, say, Redwall.

It happens online as well. There are no physical spaces to fill, but popular items still attract the most attention, marginalizing non-mainstream items. There is plenty of non-mainstream stuff out there, but it’s not always easy to find, and you’re much less likely to find people with whom to share the experience.

By way of an example, consider this ludicrous article posted on Flayrah back in June. It’s written by crossaffliction, and it’s about the works of a sculptor who works with anthropomorphic animals. So far, so good.

(I wouldn’t normally poke fun at Flayrah or anyone else, however I feel justified in this case because crossaffliction makes an aside referring to [adjective][species] as ‘furries spouting pretentious nonsense‘. You might consider this to be a mere equalizer.)

Crossaffliction, who cheerfully admits that he is a bad art reviewer, sees the sculptures as ‘just like “feral” characters drawn by furries‘. He thinks that the sculptures don’t, or can’t, have any merit beyond their facade; he is reducing them to their simplest component, how closely they reflects real life. Crossaffliction seems like someone who would rather look at a photograph of some irises than Irises.

Crossaffliction writes on A Rush Of Blood To The Head, a sculpture showing two goats with human erections, in an awkward but passionate kiss.

A Rush Of Blood To The Head by Beth Cavener Stichter http://www.followtheblackrabbit.com/Rush.htm

The sculpture is an exploration of taboo, challenging the viewer to react against an image which is clearly counter-natural. The goats’ kiss is unnatural but it’s the erections, almost fencing one another, that draw the attention. The sculpture draws a automatic reaction of disgust, in the way we all do when presented with some hitherto unexpected perversion of nature. We can’t help but recoil, and at the same time we wander why we are being manipulated so.

So why does it seem so wrong? Surely it’s homophobic to suggest that it’s the penises, but it’s clear that the two sets of genitals are not (naturally?) compatible. Or maybe it’s the just the animals that are being sexualized in a human way. Or perhaps it’s the juxtaposition between the tenderness of their embrace, and their taut, aggressive muscle and sinew.

A Rush Of Blood To The Head is, I think, an exploration of the pathology of homophobia. It’s an image which is decidedly confronting, even among a society of the presumably liberal people that are drawn to sculpture exhibitions, and even among furries, who are used to seeing sexualized, anthropomorphic animals. It’s a complex work of art, although perhaps will only make sense in today’s world of changing attitudes towards homosexuality. I wonder if it might seem a bit twee or anachronistic in the future.

Crossaffliction’s take? ‘I find the main difference between Stichter’s art and the average furry “feral” artist is that Stichter has a degree, shows her art in real galleries as well as online, and can spout pretentious nonsense about two goats making out with raging hard-ons better.‘

A subsequent search through crossaffliction’s contributions to Flayrah reveal that, since this gem, he’s submitted some 30 articles. More than half of those have been about My Little Pony.

Which brings me back to my point. This situation is no negative reflection on crossaffliction. He is no art critic, but he is a MLP fan. In this he stands alongside a hell of a lot of other intelligent, thoughtful, worthwhile furries. In fact, crossaffliction stands ahead of most because he is taking the time to contribute to Flayrah, giving back to the furry community that he clearly loves. I know I’ve spent a bit of time poking fun, but I genuinely respect and appreciate his time and effort. (Also, he started it.)

It’s no shame that the likes of My Little Pony or The Lion King are important to furry. It’s a natural outcome when something appeals to the largest group of people: the Lowest Common Denominator.

There is plenty of highbrow furry stuff out there, it’s just low profile. For example, see The Hooded Utilitarian, a culture criticism blog that intelligently looks at furry from time to time, such as this excellent missive from Midwest Furfest 2013. Or RRUFFURR, a furry comic anthology that could stand equal and alongside any well-regarded indie equivalent.

We can see this here at [adjective][species], too. Those of us who have been writing here for a while know that, if we write about something outside of the furry mainstream, we will attract fewer readers. But that’s okay, because we’re not writing to attract eyeballs; we’re writing to contribute to the furry community in a way that is meaningful to us, just like crossaffliction is doing when he writes about MLP over on Flayrah.

So I may not be able to strike up immediate conversation with a random furry about, say, Never Cry Wolf or Pom Poko, even though they are two films that deal pretty directly with furry spirituality, or whatever we’re calling the Furry Condition. But I can still share these films with friends, or write about them here, or maybe choose to discuss my own appreciation for MLP instead.

Furry artists—those who are serving the furry community—are aware of this too. They will have more success if they are able to engage the furry mainstream. A visual artist has extra incentive to draw porn; an author may be inclined to work within a familiar genre, perhaps romance (like [a][s]‘s Kyell Gold) or sci-fi (like [a][s]‘s Phil Geusz).

This means that successful by-furry for-furry art tends to be middlebrow: popular enough to draw an audience, but no so low that the niche is already filled by the non-furry mainstream. Like the ubiquity of children’s books, this is a necessary consequence of furry’s place in the world.

Harlan Ellison, science fiction legend and professional grumpy old man, complains that sci-fi isn’t taken seriously because people think of spaceships and aliens. He sees speculative fiction everywhere, where just a few outliers get arbitrarily tossed into the disrespected sci-fi bucket. He thinks it’s time to stop using such reductive categories.

Ellison is tilting at windmills, as I guess grumpy old men are prone to do. Nobody is enforcing the sci-fi category: it’s a reductive term, but also a useful one. To argue that all speculative fiction should be treated with equal respect is to argue that furry should be paying equal attention to My Little Pony and King Crow. It’s not going to happen.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/King-Crow-Michael-Stewart/dp/0956687601