Interesting
Although can you explain the fetish? Are the animals necessarily have to be furry? Ants are animals yet I don’t see anything written about them. Must the creature be furry and already be regarded as cute? Or could someone like hyenas or crocodiles or snakes?
One sex is involved, does it become a fetish? If so, do you think yours stemmed from childhood? Like imagining bugs bunny having sex with lola rabbit?
It’s not quite what you think.
But it’s not quite what you think in the way you might think it’s not quite what you think. I think.
Many geeky conventions tend (in my experience) to be something more like big auction houses, where the focus is on buying or selling things. APE in San Francisco comes to mind — a panel room tucked out in the corner, and then rows and rows of booths for artists. Conventions are big business for people selling in niche markets. Alternatively, they’re places for people with an established canon to hang out with their stars. Who wouldn’t want to get Jewel Staite’s autograph?
A couple of things set furry fandom apart from other science fiction fandoms. The first is that furry doesn’t really have stars. There’s also no canonical furry artwork. If you’re a Star Wars fan, you can debate the validity of the prequels; if you like Star Trek you can argue over the best captain or the strongest two-part episode. Nothing like that really exists in furry. I would venture to say that a majority of furries have not read Cordwainer Smith or Larry Niven or Clifford Simak.
The second thing, which goes hand-in-hand, is that because there is no top-down universe to work with, furry is all co-created. Broadly speaking, if you want to see a piece of artwork or read a particular storyline, the impulse is there to create it yourself. As it happens, I run the single largest survey of self-described furries, ever. As part of this, I ask people how often they do something creative within the context of the fandom — write, draw, dress up, roleplay, whatever.
Only 4% of people say they “never” do any of those things. Ninety-six percent of people who self-associate with the fandom are engaged with it creatively, at some time and in some fashion. I don’t know of any other science fiction fandom like this; I don’t know what you could get 96% of trekkies to agree on (“to hell with Voyager” maybe), but I don’t think it would be looking at Star Trek and saying: “You know what? I could do better.”
Furry conventions do involve selling things (there’s a lot of money to be made there. One of the more recent stories has been a fundraising drive that, in four days, put together more than $20,000 to help out a Pittsburgh café whose owner was a supporter of the Anthrocon convention when most other local businesses were hiding behind their shutters), and they do involve some autographing.
Mostly, however, they’re just about people hanging out. The guests of honor tend to be furry artists, who are famous enough to get some polite applause and not too famous to be unapproachable. They run a lot of panels on various creative subjects (I run writing panels at a couple conventions and those tend to be well-attended). There’s a lot of board- and video-gaming. A lot of pizza is eaten. A fair degree of alcohol is consumed. In scope, it’s mostly like a college dorm room with a couple thousand people in it.
That’s probably not terribly surprising.
Here’s one explanation, from the website of the world’s largest furry convention, Anthrocon. Just what IS “Furry” fandom?
I can’t speak for furries, but I have seen (via an ex-boyfriend with peculiar tastes in pron) LOTS of artwork and sexual stories featuring bug-people, or people getting turned into bugs, or… yeah.
From a totally different person, I found out that there’s also a distinct sub-population of snake pron. So, non-furry creatures are out there. :eek:
PS - the closest I come to furry is being more than half in love with Disney’s hot sexy foxy Robin Hood.
When I said furry is extremely inclusive, I meant it. You’ll find fetishes for reptile people, people that think they’re dragons, sexy anthropomorphic versions of inanimate objects. It’s all out there.
What, you’ve never heard of Pedobear? 
You may be using the term “style” in a more limited sense – and perhaps in a more technically correct sense – than I am. I see “anthropmorphic animals” as a “style.” Would a more correct term, perhaps, be “motif?”
There actually is a subset of “scaly” fandom and “chitinous” fandom. Most furry characters are mammalian, simply because of our familiarity with dogs, cats, horses, etc. Hyenas, actually, are very highly favored in some circles. (I hesitate to mention why…)
There are technical definitions of “fetishism” which mostly involve dependence, and total substitution. A foot fetishist can’t have sex with any part of a partner other than the foot. A more subtle form of fixation is “partialism.” A foot partialist really likes feet, but isn’t wholly limited to them.
Very, very few furries are formally fetishists. I’ve certainly never met one.
Really, it’s no more than an aesthetic stylistic preference. If you would prefer to look at Josie and the Pussycats, than at Betty and Veronica, or if you think the Playboy Bunny is a nifty image, that’s just a matter of taste, that’s all.
I think there are a lot of things at play, honestly. For one, I’ve heard that animals are easier to draw than people, so sone people get into drawing furry art because its easier, and as others have said, there’s such an echo chamber in the subculture it gets people further and further wrapped up in it.
The other thing is being unwilling to ostrasize the weirdos. This might seem like a good thing, but it tends to build more obsessed, out of touch individuals. Its an escape, sure, but some furry fans seem to have such a profound loathing for their own true selves they have to bury themself in the world of make believe until that becomes their reality.
Furries often like to act like they are some persecuted outgroup but from what I’ve seen they are mostly white guys (with a growing number of women fans too) that as a demographic are pretty privleged in society, but because they feel like some misfit for one reason or another they invent something to be opressed about. My wife, who grew up poor, brown, and the child of immigrants, doesnt think people who whine about being made fun of for being obsessed with My Little Pony have much real opression going on.
Further, theres often a strange degree of obsession in furrys. Any fandom can have this, but it seems like the more ‘geeky’ of fandoms are prone to it. My wife really likes Telenovelas, but she doesnt roleplay as an actress, go to conventions, or write fan fiction. Watching an hour of it every evening is enough for her (and for me, thank god 
)
I never thought of it before his post, but yeah, I agree - it’s not a style at all. Motif, yes.
And I’ll bite…why are hyenas favoured?
Just thought I’d chime in here. I’m not a furry in the sense that I dress up or create any art/stories, etc, but I will openly admit that from time to time I… indulge in sexual furry material for self gratification purposes.
Can’t explain why it’s interesting/alluring/exciting to me, but sometimes regular porn just gets boring I suppose! If you’ve ever been drawn into checking out a type of porn that you normally never liked or were interested in before, but you found out you liked it, and then it was kind of a regular thing, that’s how it was with me.
When I first saw the sexual furry artwork, I was like “wtf is this? this is hillarious!” I thought it was funny and so outrageously inappropriate. Then my curiosity got the better of me and eventually I ended up finding a bit of stuff that was interesting to me, and soon enough, well you get the idea.
It’s not just furry stuff that I like though, I enjoy sexual artwork of human beings just as well. I guess it’s just, if they look hot, it doesn’t matter if they are a person or a wolf or a horse or whatever. It’s all good with me, if the art looks good, and whatever is going on in the artwork is exciting to me.
So, even though I don’t consider myself part of the fandom, I do enjoy it.
Ewww…
Slight hijack…
Back when I was in college (91-95), a hallmate had black and white graphic novels that were of the furry persuasion. From what I can remember the story centered around an anthropomorphic cat and her BFF, an anthropomorphic bird. They… may have been strippers. The cat was in a relationship with another (male) cat, but routinely indulged in happy fun times with her bird BFF. The male cat was… a pilot? An astronaut? Something that involved flight suits.
Does this ring a bell for anyone? I was trying a couple of months ago to describe it to someone, but they refused to believe I was telling the truth, and for the life of me I couldn’t turn it up on google.
This sounds a lot like Omaha the Cat Dancer. Omaha is a cat, her friend JoAnne is a bird. Omaha is a stripper; JoAnne is a prostitute. Omaha is in love with Chuck, but in one issue had a same-sex sex-scene with JoAnne.
The only thing missing is the flight suit, as Chuck is a commercial artist…
The story is a “soap opera” style ongoing series, with a lot of sex mixed in. Very good writing, and very good art. A long time favorite in the genre.
I’ve wondered what it is about furry fandom that gets places like SomethingAwful up in arms. My personal conclusion is that it comes largely from the fact that most furries are quite private about it. The vast majority of people involved, even if they go to cons and do artwork or role-play or what have you, also have a life outside of it. The part of the fandom most outsiders encounter are the truly obsessed, who have organized their entire lives around naked catgirls – and often, as mentioned earlier, these are the ones who have such trouble maintaining any kind of relationship that the naked catgirls (and talking about naked catgirls, and drawing naked catgirls, etc) is the only social outlet they have.
It’s annoying when someone is such a fan of Star Trek that every conversation you have is immediately related to the time Captain Kirk etc etc, but when everything is somehow brought back to naked catgirls, the sexual aspect can get skeevy. If they keep it up long enough, it starts to feel like a violation, not just of social norms but of personal boundaries. If you violate boundaries long enough, people start to view you as threatening, whether you’ve actually done anything to them or not.
And, as also mentioned, furry fandom prides itself on being accepting of outsiders. I’ve read of a few incidents where they banded together to lay the smackdown on someone who was harming other people in the fandom, but they also make it a point to forgive or overlook a lot of violations of social norms that might drive other people away.
It’s a little like religious fundamentalists, in its way. There may be ten thousand perfectly normal, sane members of the XYZ Cult who go about their business in a perfectly normal, sane way, every single day. But as soon as two of them decide to get themselves on the 11 o’clock news, screaming that the Holy Lizard People are going to eat us all a week from Wednesday unless we cease eating toast for breakfast, that’s the image that sticks.
I’ve heard it said that the multi-species motif in furry comics is a kind of model for multi-culturalism, and that seeing cats and dogs get along is a parable for acceptance of blacks and whites, or gays and straights.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus portrayed the horrors of Nazism in a “cats and mice” format. Steve Gallacci, in Albedo, had an aggressive and racist “Lapine Republic,” where rabbits were a little like Nazis. And, of course, Orwell did “Animal Farm,” where some animals are more equal than others.
By and large, the idea has been used to promote unity and coexistence, both within the medium and within the fandom.
Exactly. A terrible, terrible event marred an early furry convention, when someone reacted to what they thought was a bomb. The way I’ve heard the story, someone had made up a cardboard dummy bomb, labelled “Ceremonial Nuclear Warhead,” to display in the art show, and someone in the hotel saw it and called the cops. Oh joy… It could just as easily have happened at one of the big comic book conventions, San Diego, Atlanta, or Chicago. Bad luck for us, it happened at a furry con.
(“Ceremonial Nuclear Warhead” is, itself, a joke going back to a fannish “Model United Nations.” In that M.U.N. session, weapons were banned, except for ceremonial personal weapons, such as personal honor-knives, etc. Someone asked to bring in a personal honor-assault-rifle, and was told no. So the “ceremonial nuclear warhead” was a riff on that.)
Something Awful just likes to make fun of anything weird. That’s all. (And no offense, but furry stuff is weird)
Furry Fandom isn’t the only thing to be misunderstood and railed against by people that don’t share the enthusiasm. When Fantasy Gaming became big, with the rise of Dungeons and Dragons and suchlike back in the the late 1970s there was much wailing and gnnashing of teeth by people not in the gaming community about how Our Cgildren were immersing themselves in such violent, unreal escapist fantasy for hours on end. There were accusation of satanism and the like from religious fundamentalists, but even people who weren’t could get rapidly upset about the whole thing. It all culminated in Rona HJaffe’s 1981 book Mazes and Monsters, which got turned into a 1982 TV movie starring Tom Hanks, in which he loses all sense of reality playing those damned games.
For that matter, just about every non-mainstream activity or medium that comes along seems to get roundly condemned. Look at comic books in the 1950s (with the Sebnate Hearings, Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, and eventually the Comics Code Authority), or trading cards, or rock music and videogames. Or movies, when they were brand new, and obviously needed that Hays Office. Even today Science Fiction , Star Trek, Comic Book, and Anime conventions and their attendees asre treated as more than a little weird and immature.
I wonder if part of what is so unsettling to people is that you can’t actually see the person in the costume? I know now (largely from reading this thread) that the fully costumed is only part of the larger subculture, but I wonder if that contributes to the widespread reaction?
That’s it! I was likely hallucinating the flight suit thing- it was nearly 20 years ago- because looking at the link, that’s just was I was thinking of. Thanks!