A drawing I made of some furries
My friend could have been on MTV. Please hold my hand, reader, and feel the current of my palpable relief when I heard that they had graciously declined their offer to follow my friend around with cameras and broadcast selected footage under the banner of (x) reality program. For we are furries. We get cozy with the media at our imminent peril. Whether we approach the wild journalist in the spirit of being either coy or candid, it’s always something like “FURRING: Furring involves wearing animal costumes to have sex. The most popular is Sylvester the Cat,” that ends up getting circulated. That particular example came to me from tumblr by way of Channel 4. Passing it along to me, my furry acquaintance Van Weasel editorializes “That’s news to me. I think they just pulled this out of their ass.” They definitely did!
The straight media can’t help themselves. On a slow news day, they relish popping off the head of a plush sexy purple feline mascot costume to reveal not-conventionally-attractive character actor Willie Garson vaguely perv-ing and sweating beneath the sultry cartoon veneer. And don’t we furrs wish it were even Willie Garson half of the time. HE WAS ON SEX AND THE CITY. I get it. Let me just say this though, straight media. Cut it out with the “yiff” already. Anyone saying “yiff” unironically in 2013 will be outed as a fucking NARC and dis-invited to all future secret furpiles, never to be skritched again. Don’t let it happen to you!
I’m thinking about hack media coverage of furries because I am old. I am not old, I am 26. In the world of human beings, a 26-year old moaning about being old is grotesquely gauche and annoying, but a 26-year-old furry is four years away from being a greymuzzle. Quick! Add that one to your “furry glossary.” This distinction is a technicality. I’m already feeling irrelevant and alienated by the furry teens who are supplanting me just as I was allowing myself to feel cutting edge. I’m thinking about hack media coverage of furries because I’m feeling nostalgic and sorry for myself, and it’s hack media coverage of furries that got me into this pickle into the first place.
Imagine me, a misshapen weird teen (you are very good at imagining), reading “Pleasures of the Fur” in my mom’s copy of Vanity Fair. The subtitle to George Gurley’s article from March of 2001 reads “It’s sex; it’s religion; it’s a whole new way of life.” The brief anthro(pomorphic)pological trip to Midwest Furfest just outside Chicago that followed rang with that kind of grandiosity to me at weird lonely14. “TELL ME MORE ABOUT THESE PEOPLE” I implored my dial-up connection, afterword. “You are one of them, no duh,” replied the internet, clacking its mechanical pincers rhythmically.
I revisited Pleasures of the Fur in preparation for this article and no duh it is really bad. Like the lion’s share of ostensibly sympathetic explorations, it reeks of condescension, like isn’t it nice how these grown people have found their own never never land we can spend the duration of the piece pathologizing. Kathy Gerbasi, an “anthrozoologist,” in a BBC News UK article from 2009, describes the old chestnut, “being in a fur suit(sic) allows you to do things you might not otherwise do, like dance in public, clown around, give people a hug.” It’s shy nerd therapy! No mention of also getting to have sex in them. A not-zero number of people like to do this. You don’t have to get it! I haven’t done this thing, but one time I flirted with a coyote person and didn’t really know or care who was underneath the costume. Even if it were Willie Garson!
This is me, using this opportunity to be extraordinarily exuberant.
I just don’t think you can navigate ethically participating in one of the most sexually adventurous and open-minded subcultures on the planet by pretending it isn’t just that. Though I understand the urge to downplay this aspect. It comes from not wanting to be treated like a zoo animal. But one of the enduring pleasures of being a furry is that I know that I’m not the only person on earth whose brain is specially attuned to the secretly perverted frequencies emitted by the Tom and Jerry cartoons Fred Quimby directed. If you want a show, some furrs will give you one (I’m labeling that link NSFW unless you have an inventive explanation or a cool and fun boss).
The people skritching in public in paragraph 2 of like every article about furries ever are most likely close friends. Furry has not transcended basic boundaries and not every fur is Down To Skritch with every other fur. On the litany of things journos get way wrong, put this near the top.
Other things are just different now. Anthrocon has moved from Philidelphia to appropriately weird Pittsburgh. Attendance at the largest conventions in Chicago, San Jose, Atlanta, etc. is measured in the thousands. The subset of “plushies,” furries especially fixated on stuffed animals, that so charmed the gawking public has notably faded. It might just be me, but I don’t see as many centaur fetishists as I used to, either (A SHAME). As the general demographic has shifted younger and younger and America’s cultural concepts and expectations of nerdery have warped beyond recognition from just even a decade ago, Furry is less of a hive-mind built around the individual fascination and nostalgia for funny animal animation. Furry is fragmented, with subsets absorbing and reflecting back influence from DIY zine culture, hip hop and EDM, “weird twitter” surrealism, seapunk, anime, queer consciousness, feminism and general internet. Furry-targeted art and social websites like the briefly-monolithic furaffinity are losing their power as roots of the community. Many furrs best connect and express themselves on twitter and tumblr, where their furriness can casually intersect with whatever else they’re into.
I am of a piece with all of these things, but privately I can feel my cache turning to ash in my mouth as I remember the raw HUNGER of wanting to read Associated Student Bodies but not being old enough to go to a convention and buy any of the copies. When I refer to copies, I mean serialized editions of a comic book printed on paper, which is made from trees. Sometimes I compose melancholic treatises in my head about femininity in naturalistic vs supernatural settings in Studio Ghibli films. Not congruently, last night my partner and I watched An Extremely Goofy Movie and I wondered if someone felt privately tickled to get to animate Max Goof’s armpits (I remove my sexy cat face to reveal that I AM WILLIE GARSON).
Better journos like Amy Letter at the Rumpus and Katie Notopoulos at Buzzfeed are hip to the concept that furry is less about “we are” than “we can.” The best way to summarize furry is to ask a furry and the only way to “get it” is to actually participate, like when the latter actually commissioned a sexy raccoon fursona for herself from a furry artist (to the glossary!). I’m glad I can see straight media growing up, just moments before I am summarily rolled into an open grave by a mushing team of teen sparkle-dogs. Before I expire, I am heard to cryptically mutter “elfwoooooooooooood.”
Sooo…I just wanted to say that this is hysterical.
There’s something profound about having nostalgia for your subculture by pining for the (loathing you felt at the) mainstream media misrepresentations of yore.
As somebody who only started using the label furry in the post-furaffinity era, this post fascinates me. I can still recall hearing the term for the first time from a cousin when I was 11, when it referred to an uncertain amalgamation of people who either A. classmates who went to school wearing tails and wanted to become wolves, or B. fifty year olds who had sex in animal suits. What always seems to be lost on mainstream media is that the furry “community” is ultimately a fandom, a gathering of fans and nerds engaging in their own semiotic productions, and like all fandoms, its changed.
You make mention of the shift of furry identity from “are” to “can”, and I think this can be applied to fandom production in general. In a quaint pre-web 2.0 time people my age no longer remember (90s nostalgie notwithstanding), to engage in fandom was a commitment, an act that meant signing up for mailing lists and conventions, seeking out specific websites and forums, IRC channels and chatrooms, and generally involved a certain degree of commitment (especially when you consider the fandoms that pre-date furries, like trekkies and rocky horror picture show enthusiasts). Today, the process has been streamlined; to engage in fandom productivity, I simply need to hit the reblog button on tumblr, shoot out 140-character quips about my favorite shows and characters on twitter, let images and words pass me by in an endless blur of information. Even the act of self-discovery, that there are other weirdos just like you, seems to be fading away; certain fandoms, especially those relating to popular shows and media, are so ubiquitous that chances are you’ve interacted with multiple people who count themselves as part of one BBC fandom or another. Perhaps the furry fandom has not reached this level of overexposure, I don’t see the day when I can mention offline that I’m a big gross furry with a real life fursona as being very far off.
Ultimately, it leaves me with mixed feelings; I love the way various fandoms and fan communities have begun engaging with various critical discourses, feminism and queerness and postmodern internet shenanigans, and I see a lot of interesting and important media emerging from these new intersections. And yet, even if I was never really much a part of the furaffinity or pre-furaffinity scene, it feels as if something is being lost, my proud “weirdo” badge meaning little and less and the things that once made me different become normalized and homogenized. Maybe I’m the only one to notice it, but one of the most striking things about the “new” generation of furs is the lack of fursonas: in the pre-twitter and tumblr era, developing a fursona was like a rite of passage, whereas most of the furries I know today (some as young as 14 and 15! I feel ancient!) simply don’t care about them. They watch the furry media, they get crushes on the characters, they share and reblog art and comics from furaffinity and pixiv, but there interest in the fandom is casual, and their “investment” nonexistent. I don’t think this shift is a good or a bad thing, just a change. But I’m sure nostalgia will get the better of me sooner or later and I’ll start whining about much better things were when yiffstar and FA were around.
Oh dear, I’m a pretty recent (and post-adolescent to boot) convert and not one that engages in much other than media consumption and socializing and as such maybe one of the new breed of furries. But you’re still making me scared of a future where there are those old weird fursona havers that are too invested, too occupied with making up stuff and throngs of passive youngsters. The uniqueness of Furry as a fandom of itself, as Michael has mentioned, getting lost.
On the other hand, assuming it’s not just selection bias, I’ve been noticing furry themes popping up more frequently in mainstream media or art and among real life acquaintances and that does give me a sort of evangelical thrill.
I have a bit of a strange perspective on this, as I’m quite young by most standards (19) but as a child of the internet, I was able to discover my interest in furry at quite an early age (around 2003 or so–age 10). Actually, it probably started with Sonic the Hedgehog, and I always had an affinity *cough* for Robin Hood, Hobbes, etc.–the usual suspects… Anyway, I have a very distinct memory of browsing VCL on my parents’ laptop at the beach in the summer of 2004, during a family vacation. At that point I had never heard of any of the “bad press” around furries, I don’t think I actually discovered that until ’05 or ’06.
Of course as I got older my hormones kicked in harder, and while I was a casual browser of fchan by age 13, it wasn’t until 2007 when I joined FA (original username now retired). That probably marks the point when I really got into it, especially porn-wise. At that point, the anti-furry furor was sky-high, both in the mainstream media and on various online communities–SomethingAwful, 4chan, etc–that I occasionally visited. (Actually I was a big SomethingAwful fan, and when I found out Shmorky “used to be” a furry, I was giddy. Especially because I had visited him in his Animal Crossing town before!)
Anyway, I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s fun to trace the past. I don’t have too much nostalgia for anything other than my browsing and perusing habits, as I didn’t really “join” the fandom proper until last year. (Actually, your article in January helped me feel excited and included!)
Also: I totally agree with Ormur regarding that particular “evangelical thrill”. In the past year or so, instances of my furry senses tingling out in the wild have increased exponentially. And oh does it feel better every time.
Also there was another website I browsed that same summer, but I can’t remember the name. Some sort of fantasy-focused art site, though I would always skip over the fairies and elves until I found werewolves and centaurs :3 I doubt it’s around anymore though.
As the general demographic has shifted younger and younger and America’s cultural concepts and expectations of nerdery have warped beyond recognition from just even a decade ago, Furry is less of a hive-mind built around the individual fascination and nostalgia for funny animal animation. Furry is fragmented, with subsets absorbing and reflecting back influence from DIY zine culture, hip hop and EDM, “weird twitter” surrealism, seapunk, anime, queer consciousness, feminism and general internet. Furry-targeted art and social websites like the briefly-monolithic furaffinity are losing their power as roots of the community. Many furrs best connect and express themselves on twitter and tumblr, where their furriness can casually intersect with whatever else they’re into.
brb, framing this paragraph and hanging it on the wall. It’s really startling how much furry does resemble every other fandom in this respect.
(Also, great article!)