Frank explanation of what "Furry" refers to

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I hope this is in the right Forum, if not, I apologize, and please move it.

From the Dolphin porn joke thread I just necroposted, I found this quote:

How could you possibly be a regular internet surfer and have missed out on this?

Furry, as a paraphilia, is used as an umbrella term for many things. Furry in general refers to entertainment involving anthromorphic animals (Dinsey’s Robin Hood, or Sonic the Hedgehog, but NOT Lion King). With the internet, a whole “furry scene” grew, which seems to mostly revolve around creating an escapist identity as a anthromorph that you make art about, roleplay as in chatrooms, etc (known as a “fursona”). Whole shared fantasy/sci-fi universes were created about the persecution of anthromorphs by ordinary humans. It was a fad like Punk, Goth, etc. They even have conventions. The porn is only one aspect of this.

However, like anything in human experience, it gradually branched out into other things; furry often includes centaur-like anthromorphs, bizarre hybrids of anthromorphic animals, etc. Furry began to move further and further away from strict humans-with-fur-tails-and-animal-heads anthromorphism, but that’s still the key aspect.

Furry porn is often of characters from series like Sonic or the various Warner Brothers properties (Looney Tunes, Tiny Toons, Animaniacs), etc., where there are female characters intentionally drawn to be sexy (Rouge the Bat in Sonic, Lola Bunny from Space Jam, Minerva Mink from Animaniacs, etc.). This is a WAG, but I think it has to do with these being many guys first experiences finding something sexy as they grew up, and then, since there were other people on the 'net to share the experience with, they get stuck on it because there’s actually something to it. However, I should note that Furry seems to predate some of this, and there are many female furries (as enthusiasts are nicknamed)

Beastiality and Plush (aka “fursuit,” a fetish in which people have sex while dressed like animals or teddy bears)share some spillover with Furry enthusiasts, but they are NOT the same, and should not be confused. Most furries don’t like Beastiality or Plush, nor do all furries enjoy furry porn.

Phew, didn’t mean to rant, sorry.

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Nice rant. What’s it like being a furry :wink: ?

Just to pick a bit of a nit with your penultimate paragraph - Plushies and Fursuiters are two separate beasts again. Fursuiters like to root in the suit, but ultimately are having sex with real human beings. Plushies (plushphiles) often will “modify” their stuffed toys to have sex with them. There’s also another offshoot of plushies, who have a fetish for inflatable toys such as pool toys. And so on.

Not all plushies are furries, not all furries are plushies.

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Good fortune? Grace of Og?

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Good to know. Fighting ignorance in whole new ways. :rolleyes: :smiley:

Anywho, yeah, the pool toy thing is part of the balloon fetish, which seems to be mostly a sensation/feel thing. They like the latex, and the springy resistance.

I’ve also seen weird transformation stories about people being turned into living balloons, but that’s more about being made into a helpless object that exists to be subservient (and often is explicitly a sextoy).

For the record, I wouldn’t really consider myself a furry. I can enjoy furry porn, but I don’t actively seek it out, and while I went through a phase reading horrible angsty furry stories when I was 13-15, that was more about wanting to read terrible angst-fests at that age. Even then, I was never into the “Scene” as it were. I was like the kids who listen to goth music, and yeah they like the (awful) poetry, but they’re not going to dress all weird or start practicing wicca.

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Actually yeah, I should just have titled this thread the above. I like some weird stuff, and in checking things out, have learned about and observed a hell of a lot more. Anyone who has questions about various things like this could ask, and I’ll try to answer. If it’s something I honestly haven’t heard of, I’ll refer to Wikipedia or something like that (which can be surprisingly informative).

I know a lot of you “norms” can be curious to know about this stuff even if you find it gross, and I kinda enjoy explaining these things to people. Believe me, a lot of the more bizarre stuff I know is because of the same kind of car-wreck curiosity. :wink:

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Except then it should be in GQ, right?

God I can’t stop posting! :smack:

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Naaah. You’re cool. There’s plenty of “ask the” threads that end up in MPSIMS, Cafe Societ, etc.

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Thanks, I wasn’t sure.

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I used to be into the fandom, enough to identify as part of it. I’m better now and I feel obligated to peel off some of the whitewash. So…

Well… yes… but I think there’s a lower bound on how small that “one aspect” can be, considering that one convention (C-ACE, wasn’t it?) decided to set itself apart specifically by declaring itself PG-13. You can practically hear the polite coughing when they say “Some attendees may be used to a different culture found at some genre-specific conventions, but we ask everyone to respect this rule.”

The female contingent has put up a fair-sized showing, but their numbers really drop off the seedier and/or more-serious you go. In my experience they tend to poke around the edges and pretty much stay there (though there are notable exceptions).

I’ve been out for a couple years now; things might have changed, but I doubt it.

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I wasn’t aware I was white-washing anything. Furry is bizarre, I make no claims about that. And the porn aspect is definitely one of the weirder paraphilias. Hell, when you start to consider that furry seems to have had a large part to do with the growth of the fursuit, vore, unbirthing, and macro (normal person/giant sex, for example), it certainly does get pretty seedy sometimes. Oh, and the rampant presence of literal hermaphrodites (both sexes, not intersexed or a shemale).

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But then again, compared to things like Hentai’s creation (tentacle rape), extreme body modification (people fetishising things like amputation, male and female castration, and even more bizarre things like guys getting a “bifurcation”), and snuff, furry seems pretty decent.

Bifurcation explanation in spoilers because it’s disgusting, and painful to think of

Bifurcation is when a guy has his penis split down the middle lengthwise

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Sorry, I didn’t mean you specifically. Generally when the “not all furries like furporn” line comes out, so do all the semi-mainstream cartoon-animal examples, the Disney and Warner Brothers and so on, trying to do the furries-are-just-like-everyone-else sort of thing. It’s a pretty workable definition of the genre, but a bad one of the fandom, in my experience. Fandom tends towards fan-produced work, and fan-produced work… cough Hence the whitewash.

blink
You do realize that furry has tarballed each and every one of those bits of weirdness, right? Furry is interesting that way. No matter how bizarre or downright unhealthy your fetish is, someone in furry will take it and furrify it. Hell, I could probably remember people who collected each of them (or artists who did them) if I sat down and thought about it for an hour.

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First off, no prob.

Secondly, yes I realise furryporn adopts that stuff, but in that it is no different than hentai, or other over-arching forms of porn. My point is that furryporn in-and-of-itself, is less weird or unsettling than these things, all of which developed independently of it.