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We just can’t have nice things. I might eventually wrangle this column about Being a Furry back toward actual comics criticism, but journalists continue to report on furries to you, the humans of the species, as if you are all idiots. A mission of this column is to talk to you, the elusive normal-human-reading-this-who-has-no-unsavory-sex-hangups-about-Scar-from-the-Lion King, as if you are an adult. So I have to drag my Furry Scold cap out of its hatbox in the attic and once again scurry to countermand whatever half-baked copy some under-paid keyboard jockey hastily scooped under their deadline like litter under the bed. This week’s furry-punching detritus comes from Gawker Media, under the subheading Weird Internet. The headline reads “Tony the Tiger Can’t Tweet Without Furries Begging Him for Sex.”
Kellogg’s introduced a new social media campaign to promote their cereal Frosted Flakes and they gave their cartoon Tiger brand ambassador, Tony, a Twitter account. Tony treats us to a bunch of mock cartoon Instagram photos with candid moments of him just living his best life in various states of undress, all thanks to the energizing boost of a balanced breakfast. It is impossible to calculate exactly what is going on in the fevered, unbalanced minds of the advertising executives behind this campaign, but the implicit message in these images is “let’s make him a hunky dad. let’s make him conspicuously hot.”
Furries naturally took notice. Some even wondered if this giant corporation had even identified us as a demographic. Reading through Tony’s feed is a truly bewildering experience. But tons of us have responded to Tony’s new public platform with variations on *ahem* “I wouldn’t mind a little of that tiger in MY tank.” Twitter user @crucifalex picked up a few of these mentions and their tweet mentioning the “hidden gems of Twitter: the replies to Tony the Tiger’s tweets from furries” took off. The Gawker article basically attempted to alley-oop off of its popularity.
So considering that headline, I’m going to raise my paws flat to either side of my face to get your attention, and I am going to look you in the eye. We all know, of course, that Tony the Tiger is not a real entity that can tweet. “The Social Media Intern Who Tweets Under the Guise of Tony the Tiger Can’t Tweet Without Furries Begging Him or Her for Sex.” is far too long. Tony the Tiger, as a fictional brand mascot, has no agency or inner life and cannot tweet. We’ve gotten that far. But can you follow me further through this conceptual bramble bush? You know that we’re fucking joking, right?
Most of the replies highlighted are clearly jokes, antagonistically arch jokes at that. The author gets a giggle out of the term “cummies” which is used in furry slang that represents a satirical tone when joking about sexuality. The post isn’t openly hostile to furries, however the whole endeavor approaches furry twitter with a very self-conscious credulity. If readers are in on the joke, then no harm done. If they have a prejudice against us as deviant freaks, they can have a nice reassuring chuckle at our expense. The tittering is in part a balm for the readers’ normalcy (heterosexuality), as the coded imagery in the Tony tweets are clearly homosexual, and the jeering horny furry tweets come mostly from homosexuals. Furry culture is often coded as gay, and is as a result a safe outlet for coded anti-gay prejudice. “It sure is not a normal thing to engage with a brand in a way that the brand didn’t anticipate! How naughty! I engage with brands in a healthy way, which is not what these folk are doing.”
I mean of course we would fuck Tony, right? Maybe until we remember he’s a brand mascot, and as such is REAAAAALLY high maintenance. But a part of some of this engagement in an aggressively sexual way is a response to that style of marketing. By making uncomfortable overtures we are registering our discomfort with a cereal for children flirting with us. To see the eyes of clever marketers sizing us up as a potential demographic, possibly maybe. “Nerd” “culture” is a giantic tchotske factory (blocks my Captain Benjamin Sisko Xmas ornament from your view, wildly gesticulating). There’s a transgender beer for heaven’s sake. Many of us don’t want our culture chewed up and spit back out and sold to us when we have enough trouble maintaining an internal community economy. Inappropriate flattery is our sincerest form of mockery.
We see you.
I think you need to lighten up, Mouse. Any who read that Gawker piece will immediately see that the writer is in on the joke.
mouse says the gawker piece is in on the joke. But you can be in on the joke and still playing to prejudices. Happens all the time.
I don’t think that’s the case here, though. And anyway,what’s the big deal? Furries need to stop being defensive.
Furries are pretty thoroughly stigmatized and marginalized. In part that’s because (as mouse says) many members of the community are gay, in part it’s because any alternative sexuality gets stigmatized. In either case, mouse is defending the community because it’s frequently under attack.
@Baldanders
But being defensive is the whole point. In a society where being oppressed and talking about it is the moral ideal, you invent new identities so that you can be oppressed for having them (which doesn’t make the oppression any less real – mouse is of course telling the truth when he says he doesn’t want his culture chewed up – but at the same time, he does want to be somebody whose culture has been chewed up).
Ah, the brave contrarianism of anti-identity politics. They’re so oppressed, those contrarian anti-identitarians, in their splendid marginalization. It’s like they’ve attained some moral ideal.
But I’m not claiming to be oppressed.
I think you are. Otherwise, why the hand-wringing about some monolithic culture against which you position yourself?
Gee, it’s almost like I might care about something besides myself.
(Here, I’ll write your reply for you: “Oh, you’re so kind to be so concerned for all our sakes!” No, just maybe somewhat less contemptible than somebody who isn’t.)
On the face of it, Graham, you are saying that mouse became (or identified as, or whatever is the appropriate term) a furry in order to have the experience of being oppressed. But surely that’s not what you mean to say?
Replace “the experience of being oppressed” with “the status of being oppressed,” and that is what I mean to say.
There’s more to it, of course, but that’s the essential point.
“There’s more to it”? You seem to be saying, pretty directly, that mouse identifies as a furry primarily because s/he wants the social cache of being consistently marginalized. So, are you saying that mouse’s identity is not an authentic one, and that it’s a just a show? Because that sounds like an incredibly insulting thing to say.
Yes.
No. (I already said that when mouse says he feels oppressed by something that’s oppresses furries, that’s true – which precludes me saying his identity isn’t “authentic.”)
God forbid.
Do you think this is the motivation for every furry, Graham, or only for some — is there something distinctive about what mouse has written here that allows you to identify their motivation?
“In a society where being oppressed and talking about it is the moral ideal, you invent new identities so that you can be oppressed for having them…”
I forgot to mention, I also don’t think this is true. The moral ideal in American society is being a savior, not being a victim. The missionary complex in American society couldn’t be any stronger if we were a Mormon theocracy.
“he does want to be somebody whose culture has been chewed up”
“mouse is of course telling the truth when he says he doesn’t want his culture chewed up”
I do not understand how these statements coexist. If mouse doesn’t want to be stepped on, explicitly, then that precludes him wanting to have been stepped on. Your two statements sound really clever next to each other, but they fundamentally contradict each other.
If I understand Graham correctly, he’s arguing that there’s a difference between felling, or even being oppressed and being recognized by society as oppressed and afforded the corresponding status. I think this is a worthwhile distinction, since there are plenty of groups that are oppressed or marginalized, but who are not recognized as being oppressed an marginalized. I’d cite teenagers and ex-cons as examples.
However, I think Graham is being terrible when he claims that the call for recognition is a form of moral status seeking. This claim rejects the possibility that the person calling for recognition actually wants to see social change, or to have their lot in life improved. To my mind this view is empirically false. If taken at face value, it would mean that the NAACP would be supporting voter ID laws. If interpreted charitably, it would mean that Black Lives Matter is more interested in occupying a particular subject position than in effecting political change.
I’m willing to believe I’m misinterpreting Graham here… I actually hope that I am. If I’m not, then I really hope this is the worst thing I’ve read all day.
And before I hit send, I’d acknowledge that furries, and every other cultural or political coalition takes pleasure of some kind in oppression. It’s validating, at least insofar as it creates a sense of we, which makes the world a little less lonely. However, to assert that this pleasure is the end, as opposed to an element, of identity politics generally is ridiculous.
mouse prefers “they” as a pronoun.
Yeah; saying that people choose furry (or blackness? or Jewishness?) because they want to be oppressed is, I think, bullshit.
It’s not marginalized people who create persecuted identities. Though of course it’s a lot easier to blame them, because everyone hates marginalized people. It’s the easiest contrarianism there is. “Oh, these people stigmatized as inauthentic and weird and icky are inauthentic and weird and icky. I’m a brave truth teller!”
Marginalized identities are usually formed in response to an experience of marginalization and oppression, not in order to acquire that experience or status. There’s a tactical argument about whether reifying and working within those identities is the best response to oppression. But kicking folks who are already being kicked and saying, hey, you want to be oppressed; that just reiterates and repeats the stigma and policing which created the identities in the first place. If you’re against policing identities, don’t police them. Claiming those policed are responsible for the policing is a much-beloved American tradition, but it should be abandoned.
But,see, furries aren’t oppressed. Some people make fun of them and that’s it.
When you consider truly oppressed groups in the USA such as Muslims or LGBT or undocumented workers, the claim of oppression by furries seems actually offensive.
To get back specifically to that Gawker article, the tone isn’t ”those stupid perverts are horny for a cereal mascot”, but,rather, ”look at the hilarious way they stick it to another bullshit corporate PR ploy”. If anything, it’s admiring.
“But, see, furries aren’t oppressed. Some people make fun of them and that’s it.”
This kind of relativism seems a bit dangerous. You run the risk of ignoring some forms of oppression because they aren’t oppressive enough, which means you end up minimizing and condoning oppression whenever it occurs. Oppression is worth opposing anywhere it occurs, regardless of its severity, and stigmatization is clearly a form of oppression.
“To get back specifically to that Gawker article, the tone isn’t ”those stupid perverts are horny for a cereal mascot”, but,rather, ”look at the hilarious way they stick it to another bullshit corporate PR ploy”. If anything, it’s admiring.”
I think its worth repeating that an author can accidentally participate in oppression if they are not careful. Even if this author really does admire the response of furries to the Tony marketing, that title sure does sound pretty flippant and demeaning. It implies that furries are compulsive and deviant, and that is obvious stigmatization, in my view. Even in the body of the article (which is almost no text and consists mostly of embedded tweets), you have gems like, “Because almost any time Tony tweets, the fawning furries of Twitter lose their shit.” Again, the article seems to say furries are compulsive and deviant. The whole article reeks of misplaced cheek, and the fact that there are so many embeds seems more like exhibitionism than reporting or opining. The author seems to be saying, “look at these weird furries, they’re so brazenly deviant on Twitter.” It seems pretty obvious that the author is laughing at their expense, and not with them.
“When you consider truly oppressed groups in the USA such as Muslims or LGBT”
I think what mouse is saying is that furries are seen as, and treated as, a subset of LGBT. I think that makes sense to me (especially since a lot of furries (including mouse) are in fact LGBT people.
In an effort maybe to talk about something slightly more directly related to the article…I have a friend who talked about how utterly terrifying he found Toucan Sam when he was a kid. There was this uncanny feeling that this character was moving and speaking without there being anything there. You could see that as a comment on animation, on funny animals, on advertising, or on capitalism, I think…
@Petar
You are half of today’s American society, and being a savior isn’t your ideal, it’s your nemesis.
For that matter, victimhood is an ideal for the other half too. The difference is, they want to be both.
Or maybe you’re just minimizing the worst forms of oppression in order to get more attention for certain forms that you’re interested in.
It really doesn’t. You might as well say that wanting to buy something but not wanting to pay what it costs is self contradictory.
@Noah
You might as well say absolving marginalized people is easy, because everyone hates the establishment (including the establishment).
You keep sarcastically calling me “brave” when I’ve never claimed to be. I’d interpret that, but I guess the interpretation writes itself.
Exempting folks from kicking because they’re already being kicked is patronizing and obscurantist.
Being a furry isn’t being black – which is maybe the essential point here.
@Nate A.
And we all know that can’t be true.
I vaguely remember that I may have learned at some point that Petar Duric is some nationality other than American – or maybe not – so in case somebody was going to waste their time and mine by saying that this invalidates the beginning of my last reply to him, no, it doesn’t.
@Graham
“You are half of today’s American society,”
You drastically overestimate the size of that portion of American society.
“and being a savior isn’t your ideal, it’s your nemesis.”
Correct.
“Or maybe you’re just minimizing the worst forms of oppression in order to get more attention for certain forms that you’re interested in.”
The load-bearing capacity of the word “maybe” is truly amazing. Also, something you seem to ignore with astonishing ease is the fact that the reasons somebody makes an argument have absolutely nothing to do with the correctness or value of the argument. I will ask again, please stop with the ad hominem bullshit.
@Noah
For some reason, this reminds me of Katherine Cross’s article on Galatea-like mascots. If you’ve seen John Oliver’s long-form segment on tobacco companies, there is a bit to pick apart there as well, with regards to animated mascots. I feel like an idea is swirling around there, but I just can’t reach it yet. Give me a bit on this…
@Petar
– No, you drastically underestimate it, because the alternative is admitting that you’ve been in a de facto power sharing agreement with the conservatives for about 40 years.
– That “maybe” was sarcasm.
– The reason why somebody makes a wrong argument has everything to do with why it’s wrong in the particular way that it is.
Well I’m glad Graham Clark is still around to shit on any attempt to have an interesting conversation, with the most boring white-person projection possible. Tell me more about how, “other people” want the status of being oppressed.
@Asteele
So basically “interesting” means not disagreeing about anything you actually care about.
@Petar
Hey, you want to take on Asteele’s ad hominem now (“boring white-person projection”)? Yeah, didn’t think so. (Not that I’m complaining. Turn around is fair play, even when I’m right and Asteele is wrong.)
Oh, and putting “other people” in quotation marks makes no sense when I didn’t write it, unless of course your conversation is actually with yourself, which of course it is.
Thinking about the OP, there is probably something about how for cartoon anthropomorphic animals “fur” is traditionally read as clothed . We don’t all wonder why Donald duck is constantly flashing us. Tony’s selfies are much more sexually charged if you don’t assume that convention, which I would guess is not always in effect in images in the furry community.
@Graham
“No, you drastically underestimate it, because the alternative is admitting that you’ve been in a de facto power sharing agreement with the conservatives for about 40 years.”
This is bizarre for several reasons:
A) I haven’t even been alive for 40 years (much less than that, actually).
B) Who the hell are “the conservatives”?,
C) What power-sharing agreement? I’m not some parochial European MP. First your argument was infuriating, then it was tedious, now it’s absurd.
D) Crippling denial is clearly the only reason I could disagree with you…
“The reason why somebody makes a wrong argument has everything to do with why it’s wrong in the particular way that it is.”
It doesn’t. The assertion that it does is the literal definition of the ad hominem fallacy.
“That “maybe” was sarcasm”
Which is why it’s load-bearing.
“Hey, you want to take on Asteele’s ad hominem now (“boring white-person projection”)? Yeah, didn’t think so.”
Ignoring the fact that it was literally impossible for me to answer your question before you decided I didn’t want to, I cannot say your statements are a, “boring white-person projection” because I know basically nothing about you. So Aristeele’s ad hominem attack is fallacious, even though I must admit it gave me immense satisfaction to read it. But I do know that Aristeele is right when he says you have effectively, “shit on any attempt to have an interesting conversation”. Your constant ad hominem attacks, your arrogant, implicit claims that you can attain privileged knowledge of somebody’s motivations and thoughts just by reading their internet commentary, and your insufferable, tedious, contrarian meta-bullshit amount to a complete roadblock on interesting conversation. Whether you intend to or not, the effect of your comments is to shut down interesting debate and conversation, insult and condescend to everyone involved, and to make it impossible to pivot away to any other interesting topic while you are present. I cannot repeat often enough, that despite your megalomaniacal claims to the contrary, you are not telepathic, you cannot read anybody’s mind, you don’t know anything about who they are, what they think, or their motivations, and any claim that you do is an act of aggression, regardless of your intentions. The effect of your constant personal attacks is to assert unearned power over the other participants in the debate and try to claim a privileged position as an arbiter of truth that allows you to direct and dominate the discussion (to effectively make you Noah’s “brave truth-teller”). It is insulting and infuriating, and people react to it so negatively because it is an inherently violent way to argue. For the last time please stop.
From now on, I will ignore you and bite the delicious-looking discursive worm that Noah dangled earlier.
For some reason I changed “Asteele” to “Aristeele”. My bad, Asteele.
@Noah
As I’m continuing to form my idea about tobacco mascots and Galatea, I think that a lot of mascots land in the Uncanny Valley, which is, in itself, uncanny. The whole point of these mascots is that they are adorably not human, and when they try to interact with human beings, even through marketing and advertisement, there is a creep y feeling that you’re being spoken to by a soulless automaton. I can only imagine that this gets even creepier when you perceive this automaton is expressing some kind of constructed sexuality in your direction as mouse discussed.
“there is a creep y feeling that you’re being spoken to by a soulless automaton. I can only imagine that this gets even creepier when you perceive this automaton is expressing some kind of constructed sexuality in your direction as mouse discussed.”
Right…but the interesting thing is that this is what all art does, to some degree. A fictional character by definition isn’t there…and a fictional character appealing to sexuality (which isn’t uncommon) is always going to be a constructed sexuality.
Basically, there’s an authenticity claim happening, but it’s a very visceral one. The uncanny valley reference seems right…
@Petar
What load is it bearing? (Other than you using it as an excuse to dismiss what comes after it.)
That’s simply wrong. The definition of the ad hominem fallacy is that the person is wrong because of the kind of person they are.
And what would an “interesting” conversation look like? Me saying different thing? Or me saying them in a way that’s easier for you ignore?
By the way, the actual ad hominem fallacy isn’t always a fallacy either. Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol really are wrong about Iran because of their record on Iraq.
I think what Petar is saying, Graham (and what others have said) is that a modicum of generosity towards your interlocutors can maybe allow for a conversation which doesn’t degenerate instantly into acusations, counter-accusations, and endless quibbling about what is and is not an ad hominem fallacy (or similar not especially enlightening side-arguments.)
@Noah
“the interesting thing is that this is what all art does, to some degree.”
So I guess the relevant question here is, what about these marketing automatons makes them particularly uncanny? Because I know I don’t have this sort of disturbed reaction to most art, even movies where the characters are badly constructed and transmitted.
“Basically, there’s an authenticity claim happening, but it’s a very visceral one.”
Could it be the marketing element that makes them so disturbing? The fact that there is an obvious artifice in the interaction, or perhaps that it’s the wrong artifice (whatever that might mean) might make it much harder to identify a marketing character as a character with character (so to speak). Would Toucan Sam be less scary if he were a Disney character instead of a mascot?
@Noah
I refer you to your first reply to me in this comment section.
The TCJ messageboard lives on.
Okay, that was mean.
(half a week later) Wow, look at all the interesting conversation that happened without me.
Yikes @ this comment thread.
I just want you to know you’re my favorite HU columnist, mouse.
Thank you so much, Subdee! That means a lot coming from a writer I admire!