Furry's Sexual Schizophrenia

[elfs]

I went to Rainfurrest this weekend, the annual Furry convention in Seattle. I haven't been to a Furry convention in over a decade, not since the kids were born, and haven't really had much contact with the furries.

I like furries, in the abstract. They're exuberant, for one thing, gleefully exploring a weirdly transhuman idea about the shape of both the body and mind. They're willing to play with all sorts of ideas about how people would interract if we could know more, and less, about each other.

And oftentimes I like them in the real world, too. They're fun to be around, and the fursuiting part of Furry fandom is actually getting good enough to be interesting.

Rainfurrest emphasized a curious schizophrenia about Furry's past, and the sex lives of Furries, in a way that tells me the Burned Furs managed to do a lot of lasting damage before the failure of their doomed campaign. In talking with a number of furries at the convention, I got a dual impression: that furrydom remains, in general, a highly sexual community, and that furrydom is, in general, deeply ashamed of this fact.

I wanted to know how much young furries knew about Furry Fandom from 1992 through 2001: From the start of Confurence through the collapse of the Burned Furs. It turned out the answer was "Nothing, except that it was all run by a bunch of gay guys. Furry's not like that now. It's not about that." (That was a quote from one young man in the hallway.)

Except Rainfurrest had an awful lot of outness to it. Cross-gendered heavily sexualized fursuits, outright drag queens, and a popular t-shirt reading "FUR FAG" were everywhere. Leaving aside the way Furry fandom has co-opted gay language, with panels about "How to come out as a Furry to your parents and co-workers," and t-shirts that read "Furry. Deal With It." (Furries should also probably stop wearing "Furries Ruin Everything" t-shirts. Tongue-in-cheek only works when the audience understands ironic mockery.)

Furry fandom wants more respect. It wants to be something other than the bizarre, unloved step-child of SF fandom. It wants to forget that it was ever dissed by Something Awful, 4Chan, and Cruel Site, and it wants to be somewhere other than the very bottom of the geek hierarchy.

Yet it has no narrative on which to hang itself, no story predominates the Furry mindset, no striving, acheiving characters and situations. All that distances Furries from mere humans is differences in the body, and the most straightforward way to make that difference known is through sex. That's why the dealer's room is dominated by nude pin-ups, the fiction is dominated by erotica, and the one company that makes the most money off Furries sells "fantasy creature sex toys."

I don't expect this schizophrenia to ever work itself out. There will always be too much sex in Furry to mainstream the whole genre; there will always be just enough non-sexual content for the whole of Furrydom to think, "Someday, someday, we'll be legit. But I still want Bad Dragon [NSFW!] in the dealer's room."

Comments

[statreed.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is that there is no person or organization which really acts as a true "historian of furrydom". Personally, I've been around since 2003 or so, and I think that's probably considered a long memory, though I don't really know. And though I would probably find such a history fascinating, the only real, tangible impression of what things were in fact like in the 90s that I can ever recall coming across is actually the infamous Vanity Fair article. I am passingly familiar with the Burned Furs, and old enough to remember the tail end of when we were still the SomethingAwful target du jour, before half of 4chan were closet furries, but that's it; really, other than the vague narrative of every "what is a furry" article out there, I really don't know how the fandom came to be or what the goals of the original cohort were. And I think most of the ersatz leaders now - the guys who run websites, or who are "furry celebrities" as it were - weren't around in the period you're talking about either, which only further serves to remove that period from the collective consciousness.

So that's one aspect of it. We young furs don't know what the furry ethos was back then because there's either no one around to tell us or no one who is around is interested in doing so. I take it from your tone that it was altogether less self-loathing, though. That would be nice.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Furry didn't have much self-loathing until SomethingAwful made a big deal of pointing and laughing. (And let's not pile onto SA; Cruel Site, Fark, and the Great Floating Homosexuality Flamewar (a phenomenon before your time) all contributed.) Furry was just a weird little corner of fandom, much like anime. Anime took a huge hit in the 90's with Urotsukidoji ("Legend of the Overfiend") but managed to dig itself out and establish something vaguely like legitimacy by emphasizing its less kinky mainstream material like Snow Fairy, Totoro, Macross and Naruto. Furry didn't have a similar commercial interest backing a public relations operation, and it did itself no favors by continuing to emphasize sexy pin-ups as a cornerstone of its fandom.

I, personally, cared little for what people thought of my writing. I just liked writing furry erotica.

But others disagreed. It's one of life's ironies that the Burned Furs put out "sarcastic," "parody" material to claim that there are something even furries couldn't fetishize. Today, that material is nothing more than the whole "sexy wasp" and "balloon animal" subgenres. Even the BFs failed to understand the power of Rule 34 and Quantum Fetish Mechanics. One even had a super-hung gender-crossed femtaur as his icon, claiming "nobody would want to fuck hir." I suspect Bad Dragon gives him nightmares of regret.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Part of the reason for SA, etc. poking fun at furries was that they *knew* they could depend on the fandom to take it all out of proportion and generate entertaining drama. As you'd noted in your earlier post, the beginnings of the fandom were folks who, aside from their interest in anthropomorphic characters, weren't far removed, socially and emotionally, from their past getting picked on in high school. The combination of "we're a community now" and the anonymity of the internet went until it had largely burned itself out.

In part, recognition that Somebody Is Wrong On the Internet (http://xkcd.com/386/) isn't something that *must* be responded to has toned it down. In another sense, furries *used* to be one of the more strange corners of the internet, now they're practically passe`.

For some reason, when i attend conventions, my appearance is normal/approchable enough that the mundanes will nudge me and ask "just what the heck is going on here?" It happens often enough that i've got a selection of fairly concise, understandable answers to choose from, and 98% of the time, the recipient goes "oh, okay." and goes on with their day.

Part of the focus on sex comes from the fact that 'furry' characters have been around for ages, from WB toons thru folktales to religions. All of these are for public (Family safe) consumption, and for folks who are interested in adult aspects of same, nobody else is/was making it. The porn wouldn't sell if nobody wanted to buy it, after all. Still, there's legitimate art and stories that come out of it. The Nordguard book by SofaWolf is gorgeously done. I shared it with the owner of our local chain of comic shops, he said it was easily comparable to "Blacksad" in both story and quality of art.

Damn, i've gone rambly again. On a slightly tangential note, a friend of mine was noting, of some of the larger furry cons, that we're getting cross-pollination from other groups. Several "The Doctor" costumes were at AC this year, as well as a selection of other SF/F characters/costumes that had nothing to do with furry directly. We throw a fun party, and are generally cool to hang out with, and word gets around.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

I'm always bemused by people who think there's some sort of limit to what will turn on us horny monkeys. You'd think they'd never been to a frat party.

The interesting thing you said was this:

Furry didn't have a similar commercial interest backing a public relations operation, and it did itself no favors by continuing to emphasize sexy pin-ups as a cornerstone of its fandom.

That's because until the fandom really coalesced in the 80's, the only vision the world HAD for anthropomorphic animals was sources like Disney and Warner Brothers. Not only did furry not have a commercial interest backing it, the ones that could have been associated with it in no way wanted their products and properties brought out of the childhood mindset that they'd spent decades and dollars building in the first place. C'est la vie.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I was on FurryMuck in the early 90s, and the thing about the fandom was that it was *fun*. There was a lot of sexuality, definitely, a lot of sexual roleplaying, but also a lot of just hanging out and chatting in and out of persona. It was very playful, and oddly innocent. You'd adopt an animal persona, describe yourself briefly, and away you'd go. I met a lot of nice people there, and they weren't creepy when I met them later in RL.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

before half of 4chan were closet furries

*snerk*

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

As broad and wide as the spectrum of people in Furry are, I don't think you can point to any single disorder or opinion and say it covers everyone.

The two biggest camps in furry are the young turks with the Free Love attitudes, and the slightly older crowd with a Don't Squick the Squares attitude. The former don't give a rats ass what anyone else thinks and they'll swing naked from the chandeliers if they want to. The latter wants to be certain the hotel won't throw the con out for bad behavior. Both sides have good intentions, but go way overboard in their pursuit of their belief system -- the wild things don't care what anyone thinks while the older folks worry too much about what other people think.

And really, you give the Burned Furs too much credit for this. As proof, ask 20 furries if they know what Burned Furs was. I'll be surprised if you get more than 4 people saying that they do. Furthermore you can see the same argument in every fandom, not just furry. The battle royal between the FIAWOL and FIJAGDH crowds has been roaring since that literary con in Chicago in the 30s where the "costumed nuts" were told to leave, and they established an impromptu con across the street and most of the crowd went with them. No, the argument of "how much sexual freedom is too much" won't be hammered out in furry, just like it won't be hammered out in society overall. You will always have the free love crowd at loggerheads with the prude squads, be it in furry, americana, steampunk, or HO scale model trains.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

or HO scale model trains.

Not going to check Google... Not going to check Google.. NOT GOING TO CHECK GOOGLE...

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to look, but I expect to be able to find Thomas the Tank Engine slashfic and Rule 34 pictures if I went digging...

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Would you like to hear something amusing?

The most intelligent description of furry that I have ever read came from Lore Sjöberg. Yes, the same guy who wrote that Geek Hierarchy. He describes us crazies as something very unique. An aspect fandom. We're not focused on any medium, genre, or specific creation. We're just interested in one aspect of it. It's like being a fan of the color blue. Under those circumstances, it's a hell of a lot harder to find something to hang that narrative from that can unite people. Not impossible, but it's going to take something special and unique to make it happen.

I've long since stopped worrying about such things, as the young are wont to do. That's always the rub: fandoms can't grow without an influx of new, young folks with new ideas, but those new people bring along the usual adolescent dramas that maturity would reduce, to there's always going to be a lot of tension among people still trying to find themselves.

Meanwhile, I have one thing I can always do to any detractors I find among the mainstream. I can look 'em straight in the eye and say "My people have never, ever, EVER, called for the death of an uninsured man on national TV, to the applause of their fellows. Nor have we booed a soldier of this country on national TV because of their gender preferences. So I'm a HELL of a lot better than a good chuck of this country."

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Hear hear.

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

Been here since 1996, and it's been a wild and crazy ride. I've seen it all, from the Burned Furs to the Diaper Furs to the Vanity Fair article, to the SA Trolls to ChewFox and up to the present.

I remember you from when you were posting on Alt.Fan.Furry.

Also: It wants to forget that it was ever dissed by Something Awful, 4Chan, and Cruel Site...

Mmmmm, yessss. Furries have an exceptionally long memory? It's very, very hard for those of us who've been around since the early years to forget how some of our-supposedly-very own sold us out to those websites, trying to gain popularity for themselves.

I suppose it's appropriate that Karma has pretty much FUBARd the lives of 90% of those trolls. Most of the people in my banlist haven't posted in years, or are totally gone from the fandom, if not humanity entirely. Ah well, no love lost there. I've kept an eye on a few and watched how Karma continues to pay them back for their fucknuttery, even to this day.

I've also watched one person get their load of Karma in one large lump, making them homeless for a year. They paid their dues, fought their way back and are now doing pretty well, all things considered? Karma even cut them a break-if you can call it that-when their life-long stalker ended up being murdered.

So yeah, I've been around a while and seen a lot.