So, am I furry or not?

[elfs]

I have no desire to put on a fursuit and have sex. I imagine awkward moments through obscuring eye-holes interspersed with moments of heat exhaustion, and the payoff seems absolutely absurd.

I have no desire to bang any stuffed animals. At least not until they come with the complete friendly AI package, automatic maintenance, and a decent personality. Until then, they're just furniture. I don't do furniture. I do living bodies bent over furniture, sometimes tied to it. (Hmmm....)

I have no desire to have sex with anything living short of homo sapiens. I don't imagine any other species really having the capacity, the oomph, that a living, breathing man or woman brings to the bedroom.

I actually have no objection to people who want to do any of the above. But I am not one of those people.

And yet, when I read about furries on the Internet, I get the impression that I must be one of the above, or I'm not a furry. I'm something else; I have the same relationship to furrydom that Margaret Atwood has with science fiction, or tofurkey has with Thanksgiving dinner, or Brittney Spears with adulthood: it's not quite there. The descriptions don't match. I have the oddest sensation of looking into a mirror and not seeing myself.

I think furries make great metaphors. I think they're wonderful in literature, shorthands for all kinds of human foibles, premade slates onto which one may impress overblown human characteristics. I'll even admit to thinking the artwork is hot, and collecting some it strictly because the artwork manages to stay on the far side of the uncanny valley while still poking hard at my pineal gland. I can't help but look at Dr. Comet's[NSFW!] or Jeremy Bernal's[NSFW!] or any number of furry artists' work and think, "Yeah, I'd sleep with him/her/it."

But apparently, that's not enough to "a furry." A furry some combination of fursuit fetishist, plushfucker, or zoophile, and I'm not any of those.

Pity, that. My experiment to get back to my porny roots last year was rather successful with Sterlings. I was thinking about trying to recover my furry roots as well, but apparently I'm not a furry anymore.

Comments

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

Sure, I'll volunteer to walk into the bear trap here: according to *who*? Granted that I haven't been as tightly coupled to the fandom as I used to be, but I'm pretty sure there's still no SMOFF gathering holding arbitration panels on who is and isn't. Sure, there are individual twits who'll claim that 'you must be this' or 'you must be that'. I'm pretty sure their parents were the ones claiming that Twilight Zone wasn't real SF because it was on TV...