HERE'S MY FURRY FANDOM POST

i saw a post a little while back about "coming out as furry" and about the furry fandom in general and i wanted to talk about that. the gist of the post was about furry being a lifestyle and how it is incompatible with some people hence why "coming out" as a furry seems like a Thing you do. or don't do. i don't remember. but i want to talk about this because it's a conversation i've been seeing for like... a decade. how long have i been in the furry fandom? 14 years? jesus christ. anyway let's talk terms

LIFESTYLE:

what's a lifestyle? well, when I think of a "lifestyle", i tend to think of people whose entire life more or less orbits around some sort of interest, or focus. an interest becomes a lifestyle once it touches on and/or has an effect upon essentially every aspect of your life. when i think of various lifestyles i think of... farmers! people who are very physically active! people who always ride motorcycles! sports team families! shit like that. now, something key about all these lifestyles i mentioned (and more) is that they are, more or less, positively acceptable by our society. people might think these lifestyle people are odd but nobody sees them as a problem. these kinds of lifestyles exist within the system of our culture and do not seek to change it, per se. the system supports them, and they, more or less, support the system. this isn't particularly a bad thing. it's just a thing. it's just part of it.

Generally speaking, nobody "comes out" as a farmer

I don't think that something is a lifestyle when you have to "come out" as it. At that point, we've entered a new terminology: counterculture. You want to know what other broad lifestyle interests felt the need to "come out" to their friends, family, etc? Here's a few: hippies moving to a commune! Fulltime BDSM polycules! Professional criminals, maybe? People who have just joined a cult! And furries. These are not just lifestyles; they are countercultural lifestyles. They go against what society values. Some in a way that I think is good (furries! 👍), and some in a way that I think kinda sucks (cults 👎)

Furry is a counterculture

When you come out as furry, you aren't just saying you like animal people. That's just an interest or a hobby. You are saying that you fundamentally believe something different than the people you are coming out to. It's not dissimilar to leaving a family's religion; you've decided that you no longer believe what they believe, and you're informing them that these beliefs may make your lives incompatible, if you can't find some common ground or mutual acceptance somewhere. You don't just have different interests, you have different values. You believe the point of being alive is so different compared to what they believe life is about, to the point of seeming alien to them.

And, let's be real: furry definitely fits the bill as a counterculture, right up there with any other countercultural social group! Furries have completely upturned their idea of what it means to be physically attractive, what it means to express yourself, what it means to find solidarity and family with people around you. It's no coincidence that it is saturated with queer folks; queer people have long had to define their own idea of identity and relationships and family, because what our society defines for those things has long been incompatible with being a queer person. Being a furry makes it more fun.

I think our society is fundamentally dehumanizing. It stratifies people by assigning them value based on attractiveness and other aspects determined by birth circumstances. It commodifies people by telling them they are unattractive, and then sells them a product in order to fix it. It isolates people by directly and indirectly coercing them to fit into a few predetermined states (gendered or not, able-bodied or not, neurotypical or not, etc), and if you don't fit in, well, you can just die I guess. It's fucked up! But the furry fandom is a way of escaping these structures, these hierarchies and dichotomies, and provides an affirming way of allowing anyone to truly be themselves. And, funny enough, pretending to be an animal person to escape society's limitations puts people way more in touch with their human nature. It freely provides intrinsic human needs, which the structure of capitalist society wants to control or deny. A lot of people are happier as furries because, for the first time, they feel more human! Their needs are met! They can be themselves without judgement! That's cool as hell to me. They don't even realize that their intrinsic human needs are being met for the first time, they're just like "woo animals!" and they're happier! And that's totally fine.

so, anyway, I just think it's really important for people to understand that the reason they feel pressure to come out as a furry, it's not because furry is a lifestyle; it's because being a furry is being part of a counterculture. Furry challenges a lot of society's "rules", the least of which is whether or not you wanna fuck an elk or become a balloon or whatever. that's just details. what's important is what you're saying life is all about.

anyway as always, be sure to comment your thoughts or questions or disagreements below. thank you. i love you

I'm not sure if it's a generational thing as I've mainly noticed this happening with people around my age, but god damn, so many of my friends have just become so open, unchained and unashamed when it comes to their furriness recently. More and more it feels like that innate anxiety of being openly furry has eroded in so many of us, myself included, to the point where it's practically nonexistent. You know how we used to be all like, "Yeah, I'm a furry, pretty cringe huh? Haha! Yeah..." Granted, we're still like that to an extent, but I feel like the degree to which we try to restrain that side of us has diminished significantly. Like yeah, we still acknowledge our weirdness, but in a much much more positive way I feel.

There's still a lot of us who look to the approval of normies like we'd literally die without it, and I certainly used to be one of those people, but I feel like quite a lot of us are finally saying "Fuck that noise." We don't need their approval; never have, never will. The opinions of queerphobic cishets are about as important to us as the approval of fucking mosquitoes sucking the blood from our veins. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

I could be just projecting here, or maybe I'm looking at too small of a sample size to be able to accurately gauge whether or not this is a trend within the fandom itself or merely a trend amongst my friends and acquaintances, but nevertheless, I can't help but comment on what I see unfolding before my very eyes. More furries, myself included, are going to furmeets. Wearing furry-made attire in public. Saturating their social media feeds with more furry content than ever before. We just feel much more present, both as a community and as individuals.

We are everywhere. Some people like to think of the fandom as a white-collar hobby for STEM majors but there are furries from all walks of life, and it's so, so much more than a "hobby" for us. I won't harp on too much about the kind of community we've built; others have done a much more eloquent job of that. I will say this, though; there's something that we're starting to admit now that I feel like we were all just a little bit too scared to say before. Maybe it was because we thought that it's cringe, childish, embarassing or just plain foolish, but whatever inhibition was preventing us from talking about this openly seems to finally be going away. Hell, if you're too scared to say it, I'll just do it for you; cuz you're probably thinking it right now:

We don't want to be human.

I love being a fucking creature!!!

I personally see furry as inextricably linked to queerness because Fursonas are an implicit declaration of radical autonomy over one's own identity and how other people see you.

It's impossible to separate queerness from furry as long as that's the center of it.

Furry has ever been a space where you can make yourself a rainbow-haired hermaphrodite sparklevixen and not only will everyone accept that as your identity, some people are going to be into that, and you'll find them.

Furry also introduced me to the idea of non-binary pronouns, and we all accepted them without question. That's always been why I'm so confused to see transphobic furries.

You're existing in a space where people have been using five different sets of custom pronouns for hermaphrodite characters since the 80s, and you're complaining about someone deciding they're a girl? Make it make sense.

I don't understand the anti-trans transhumanist techbros out there either.

My dudes, the entire point of transhumanism is radical bodily autonomy.

If you're hung up on what someone's original meatsack was, you're gonna have a bad time in the transhumanist future you're after.