The furry fandom v the women
Oh lord, what’s that I was just saying about how childish it all is? Jo Bartosch on Furries vs Feminists:
Why are men who identify as cartoon animals planning to protest against a women’s rights rally?
Because they’re pathetic risible losers.
Next month, followers of what is known as the ‘furry fandom’ will descend on Glasgow for the ‘ScotiaCon’ convention, Scotland’s leading get-together for furries. Furries are people who identify with and often dress as anthropomorphised cartoon animals.
Is it kink or just infantile?
The word is now out that some attendees are planning to take a break from the main convention to do what maladjusted young men have done for millennia: get angry and shout at outspoken women.
The final day of the Glasgow furry conference coincides with an event organised by Kellie-Jay Keen’s Standing for Women (SfW) group. SfW is planning to demonstrate against Nicola Sturgeon’s recently stalled gender-recognition reforms, which would ride roughshod over women’s rights, and furious furverts have planned a counter-demo.
Makes sense. Grown men who think they can be women, grown men who think they can be cartoon animals. Not good company either way.
So who are the furries? And why might they want to join in the transgender crusade against women’s rights? FurScience, a dedicated academic research body into the fandom (yes really), suggests that furries are about 20 times more likely than the broader UK population to identify as transgender. And just as with extremist trans activists, the furry fandom is an overwhelmingly young, nerdy and majority-male community. Ultimately, both identities are clearly appealing to those who prefer fantasy to reality.
Just what I’ve been saying.
And, you know, if they were content to just do that – prefer fantasy to reality, and act accordingly in their own heads and in private – I wouldn’t quarrel with them. But of course they’re not; they’re hell-bent on punishing women who think their fantasies are destructive of women’s rights.
While some claim that underneath the furry’s oversized anthropomorphised beast head is a person who just wants to innocently express themselves, others say it is a fetish. And research supports the view that there is a sexual driver. In a survey of the men at the ‘Furry Fiesta’ convention in Dallas in 2013, 96 per cent admitted that they consume furry-themed pornography.
Furry porn. There isn’t room in my skull to roll my eyes enough.
The optics of these furverts protesting against women’s rights could hardly be worse for the trans lobby. Surely, even the goggle-eyed gender loons in the SNP must have enough nous to see that adult men who get a kick from dressing up as animals are not the ideal spokespeople for their self-ID bill.
But the gender lunacy itself is just as deranged. They’re both ludicrous.
That’s some bigoted TERF talk there. In fact, furries aren’t people; they actually are anthropomorphic cartoon animals!
As contemptible as I generally find furries it’s not really fair to lump in the non-Furries-of-Gender (FoGs) with the gender goblins. It’s weird nerdy (often kink) shit and normies ought not concern themselves with it.
It’s like complaining about goths or war reenactors…
BKiSA, it becomes fair when they start screaming misogyny at women standing up for their own rights.
I’ve always found the furry/anime avatars used by trans activists on twitter rather creepifying, an interest or hobby taken just a bit toooo seriously.
It really isn’t fair, get mad at the ones that do to be sure, but none of the furries I’ve known over the years are out there doing that. Don’t even know if my nerd elder fox furry in college was into the kink half of it.
Blame people like me for that misogynist asshole running over people in Canada while you’re at it or January 6th. It sure smells like conservative puritanism in service of feminism. Transwomen aren’t women.
I’ll be there! Should be interesting, if nothing else. Apparently there are supposed to be some of the adult baby men there, too. With any luck, it will get some media attention. People in animal (and child) costumes trying to drown out women’s voices will hopefully not be the great look they’re hoping for.
Blood Knight, I know what you mean. I have nothing against cosplay. But it my (limited) experience, furries tend to take it way too seriously for comfort. Ones I’ve spoken to are absolutely serious about ‘identifying as’ animals in some sense. Nerdy fandom is one thing, but furries are encouraging each other to become more and more serious and dedicated to it as a lifestyle. From my (again, limited) perspective, it all looks a bit culty and groomy.
A case in point is that every furry I’ve ever interacted with is absolutely convinced that they are a genuine, marginalised minority, routinely discriminated against and hugely oppressed. They blame any problem life throws at them on this imagined oppression. One told me a few days ago that the reason he’s never worked in his life is that there’s no point even bothering to send in an application. He says he knows he won’t even be considered, because he’s a furry. I mean, if he turned up at the interview in costume, he might have a point, but I do not believe employers are systematically discriminating against people who wear threadbare, mangy fox outfits in their spare time.
I find them impossible to take seriously, not because of the costumes (well, obviously partly because of that, it is genuinely hilarious that they take themselves so seriously) but because what they’re really cosplaying at is oppression.
I don’t think the same can be said of goths. There’s often a bit of oppression talk there, but it seems mostly to be about group identification and affiliation. Some of the more extreme fandom people are scary, though. I spoke to a woman who transitioned because she was totally sucked in by the fandom scene. She never even believed in anything like gender identity, it was all a sort of romantic craving for a fictitious lifestyle, fuelled by fandom membership. She said it was common and likened it to the people in Fight Club who are addicted to support groups for problems they don’t have.
Don’t get me wrong, furries are extremely weird and I can’t take them at all seriously, but like LARPers, faculty club sponsors that write gross erotic fanfiction, and autists every where, they’re my people, for better or worse.
All these disparate subcultures got captured by the (generally much younger) people that stole feminism and leftist activism and remade it in their own image. The older generation that wasn’t particularly visible to normie eyes hasn’t had much of a say in it. I know y’all generally have about 15-20 years on me, but I’m coming up on forty here pretty soon and things have changed a lot and I don’t like it much.
Blood Knight, did you miss the bit where I said “And, you know, if they were content to just do that – prefer fantasy to reality, and act accordingly in their own heads and in private – I wouldn’t quarrel with them.”? I said that because I meant it. As I’ve mentioned probably too often, fantasy was a big part of my childhood, so I get why people value it. (By “in private” I didn’t mean in solitude, I meant…I guess not as a form of politics.)
It may “smell like” conservative puritanism to you, but I reject that label.
I think we mostly agree. There are some bits of ‘kink’ and ‘roleplay’ and fandom that make them not harmless. I don’t like those bits. The rest, knock yourselves out, people, have fun. The boundaries are fuzzy, of course, and they’re worth paying attention to, but I think you’re right that we can all be a bit too puritanical at times.
Maybe the word we need here is “censorious.” I’ll cop to being censorious about adults who take this stuff seriously. I was silently secretly censorious about it, but now…………………………………this whole idea that fantasy is deadly serious and definitely something people should do in public and enforce on everyone else has infiltrated people’s thinking, and we’re seeing how that’s working out.
There’s also a lot of kiddie-diddlers and puppy-rapers among furries.
Think I’ve mentioned this before, but a few years ago I read Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and it’s turned out to be one of those books I regularly think about, especially when prompted by recent events. His basic premise is that America was uniquely connected to zealotry, wishful thinking, and fantasy right from the start with the motivations of the first people who came over from Europe — and this only changed for the worse. “I have the RIGHT to BELIEVE whatever I WANT” is a motto without any obvious rational brakes built into it. The lines between reality and illusion tend to blur.
As I recall he ended the book by applying his thesis to Trump and his supporters, but I can’t help but apply it to the whole Gender fiasco. He also has a chapter in there on the rise of fandom and fantasy-role-play, which he thinks both grew out of the national character of magical wish fulfillment and contributed to it. It’s a very readable book.
I do know someone who used to write for ScienceBlogs and has written books on paleontology. He seemed to be deeply unhappy, writing many posts on how his university was making his life difficult. I lost touch for a while, but on Instagram he posted that he is a furry and lost touch again until he announced that he was getting divorced and that he’s trans. I stopped following him when he was posting pictures of his transition, and I just found it distasteful, but occasionally I do see him writing articles about the “challenges of being trans” in the world of science communication, or see that he’s been featured on a podcast for same.
There seems to be a progression from Furry to trans, and I honestly never had heard until recently that it is a sexual thing. I also find that a bit distasteful and infantilizing, and if my former acquaintance went through that I don’t want to know. I have some of his works still, under his “deadname.” The forced-teaming of trans into the LGB scope of activism seems to me to have lead to a rapid increase in demands for acceptance of public kink and just plain McPoyle-style wierdness, and progressives are just going along with it to be kind because they don’t want to be seen as unaccepting. It’s all hip and cool, like the cross-dressers in the library.
It doesn’t matter if women and children are in the way of their need to be accepted. Thats just collateral damage.
I must read the Kurt Andersen book.
Mike that’s…interesting and depressing, both.
I’m thinking that furries are trying to follow the path to mainstream acceptability* pioneered by AGP TiMs. Maybe they think the world is ready to affirm and validate non-human identities. Of course TiMs only got as far as they did with backroom deals and institutional capture. I don’t think lightning is going to strike twice to smooth the way for furry “rights.” Of course the real question is, will they demand access to zoos, game parks and wildlife reserves?
*For certain values of “mainstream” and “acceptability.”
I wonder what (non-human) animals would think of ‘furries’, were they able to entertain the concept. I am not so nice and tolerant as to suppose that one’s sexual or otherwise ‘identity’ is so hugely important as to outweigh all else in the world – it strikes me as a corrupted infantility run wild.
It would likely depend on whether the animal in question was an herbivore or a carnivore….