Furry's Sexual Schizophrenia
Sep. 26th, 2011 10:18 amI 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."
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."
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