Bizarre thought...
Sep. 16th, 2011 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn the early-to-mid 1990s, a group of men— mostly men— came of age. They had all the classic symptoms of their group— they were slightly neuroatypical, driven to find others of their own kind, and this new thing call the Internet facilitated that drive, and they formed a new on-line community.
They had one common characteristic— they were so poorly socialized, perhaps by nature so incapable of understanding most of humanity, that they latched onto archetypes and adopted them, using these archetypes as shorthand for understanding various aspects of humanity— their own humanity as well as the humanity of others.
They were, like other men in their late teens through early 30's, still driven by their hormones. They sought out, could not find, and ultimately ended up writing and drawing their own pornography.
Here's the thing I find so bizarre. The early Furry community, so distant from the mainstream, so separated from acceptability, so uniquely unaware of what was expected from mainstream sexual interaction...
... ended up creating an astonishingly egalitarian and playful body of work. The people in furry porn, more than in the porn of any other subculture, like each other. Tops and bottoms, male and female, all seemed to be having fun. Artists experimented with all sorts of dynamics— sex, race, size— with an eye towards pleasure and not toward controversy or concern. Even when the material was of dubious consent, such as one artist's notorious (and notoriously well-drawn) macrophile anthropophagic romps, it was still wildly out of the mainstream in terms of presentation; it fetishized monster movie kitsch rather than made sexual points with deliberate inversions of traditional sexual power dynamics.
For the first decade of its existence, the Furry community was blissfully, wonderfully uninfested with rape culture. They were completely unfamiliar with the traditional dynamics of top/bottom, seme/uke, male/female. They were making it up as they went along. Rejects— both in being rejected by the mainstream and rejecting the mainstream in turn— fur fans created an erotica of desperation. They were desperate for joy, and they wrote and painted that joy.
Sadly, even Furry Fandom must be cast out of Eden. Too many fur-fans these days are aware of what ordinary people expect out of sex, and market to those expectations.
They had one common characteristic— they were so poorly socialized, perhaps by nature so incapable of understanding most of humanity, that they latched onto archetypes and adopted them, using these archetypes as shorthand for understanding various aspects of humanity— their own humanity as well as the humanity of others.
They were, like other men in their late teens through early 30's, still driven by their hormones. They sought out, could not find, and ultimately ended up writing and drawing their own pornography.
Here's the thing I find so bizarre. The early Furry community, so distant from the mainstream, so separated from acceptability, so uniquely unaware of what was expected from mainstream sexual interaction...
... ended up creating an astonishingly egalitarian and playful body of work. The people in furry porn, more than in the porn of any other subculture, like each other. Tops and bottoms, male and female, all seemed to be having fun. Artists experimented with all sorts of dynamics— sex, race, size— with an eye towards pleasure and not toward controversy or concern. Even when the material was of dubious consent, such as one artist's notorious (and notoriously well-drawn) macrophile anthropophagic romps, it was still wildly out of the mainstream in terms of presentation; it fetishized monster movie kitsch rather than made sexual points with deliberate inversions of traditional sexual power dynamics.
For the first decade of its existence, the Furry community was blissfully, wonderfully uninfested with rape culture. They were completely unfamiliar with the traditional dynamics of top/bottom, seme/uke, male/female. They were making it up as they went along. Rejects— both in being rejected by the mainstream and rejecting the mainstream in turn— fur fans created an erotica of desperation. They were desperate for joy, and they wrote and painted that joy.
Sadly, even Furry Fandom must be cast out of Eden. Too many fur-fans these days are aware of what ordinary people expect out of sex, and market to those expectations.
