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

[cheetah-spotty.livejournal.com]

Since the whole concept Furry Fandom revolves around is nothing primarily sexual, you don't have to worry about who or what you'd like to sleep with :)

The relationship between sex and furries is like between sex and everything else: It's a fundamental human desire, so you can find it everywhere, but actually very little really depends on it.

Additionally, being a "furry" is not much more than a label. If you share a strong appreciation for anthropomorphic animal characters with other, you could be a furry. If you want to call yourself that, is another thing. That would depend on wether you would like to be recognized as being part of the community or not.

About that you can argue. However, there is not really something like "THE" community. The fandom is a heterogenous cloud. Like the universe itself, it's denser around some points, and less dense around others. You might feel comfortable on one planet, but not on another, and still it's in the same galaxy.

The problem why you read so much about the stuff you wrote on the internet is, that we're living in a "attention society". The things you read most about are not really always the most prominent. They're just what everyone's attention is being drawn to, and that depends on the current dynamics, and not really on what would deserve one's attention.

For example, your posting here, has once more drawn the attention to the overstressed fursuit sex/zoophilia/plushophilia thing. And so does this comment. But it's really not what the furry fandom is primarily about. And i'm not just saying this because I think it SHOULD not be ... it really is not. I've been runing the biggest european furry convention for almost 10 years, I think I know pretty well what is going on :)

If you enter "woman" in google image search with the family filter turned off, it will primarily show you porn. About whom does you tell that something? Women, or non-women?

Now, if you do the same with "furry" ... you get my idea?

[cheetah-spotty.livejournal.com]

Oh, and talking about definitions and labels ... the german/french public TV station "arte" once asked be to give them a definition of "furry" in less than 2000 characters. That's what I came up with:

The Furry Fandom is a world wide community of people who share an extraordinary appreciation for anthropomorphic animal characters. The concept of creating charaters that share both human and animal characteristics has always been part of human culture, from early cave paintings to Walt Disney's 'The Lion King'. The community as it exists today started as an american science fiction and comic fandom spin-off in the mid 1980s, when a couple of fans decided to go against the notion that "Funny Animals" are just for kids. Furry Fandom is "Funny Animals taken seriously". With the arrival of the internet in the early 90s, the phenomenon spread over the globe like a wildfire. Furries (short for "Furry Fans") share the fantasy of worlds inhabited by creatures that combine the best traits from both worlds, sentient animals who can walk, talk, think, hate and love, just like us. How would it feel to have a cat's whiskers and claws? What lives would we live if we could strip our cumbersone human bodies, and run like cheetahs, fly like eagles, or hunt like wolves? Unlike other fan communities, the Furry Fandom is not about things that come from the outside, like a product, a gerne or a person. It's about things that come from deep within us: Creativity, fantasy, sprirituality, sensuality, the urge to question our identity and see the world from a different angle. The ways to express your "furryness" are countless. Artwork, literature, puppetry, costuming, theatre and music are both created within the community and gladly absorbed from today's pop culture. The Furry Fandom is a thriving and ever-expanding community of a few thousand individuals in Europe, and tens of thousands world wide.

Does the sex fit in there? Certainly. Did I need to draw attention to it in order to give a definition that fits the largest number of people considereing themselves a furry? I say no.

(Sorry for bombing you with so much text :) I'm just very bored today, and I feel strongly about the subject.)

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Actually, entering "woman" in Google image search with filters off, as I did just now, gets mostly women in swimsuits, snow-women, and the Bionic Woman. Only one of the first twenty actually shows genitalia. But, yes, some porn.

Entering "furry" produces almost entirely sexually charged images, but, again, mostly not actual porn. Some of the images are from articles about furry sex, and some of them are from articles about furry fandom not, in fact, being all about sex

Also, the second image in the second search (http://rofl.wheresthebeef.co.uk/Furry%20Family.jpg) is funny.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Try girl (http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=girl) [NSFW].

Man, that actually creeps me out somewhat.

[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Gah.