i really liked that patricia taxxon video where she tries to make sense of what "furry fandom" is, taxonomically and experientially. i'm not sure if i agree with some of the video's claims --
(the video argues that what makes media Furry is that it starts with the a priori premise that Anthropomorphic Animal People Exist, and doesn't try to justify that existence in its diegesis; this is a little specious. foundational furry media like Albedo: Erma Felna, for example, was extremely interested in the in-universe mechanics that produced a star system full of anthropomorphic animals. if one of the three pillars of your argument is the comorbidity of furry fandom and autism, then don't overlook the sprawling, daring and largely inconsequential efforts of the Scifi Systems Autist who needs to explain exactly when, why, and how his original setting genetically engineered Leopard Taurs*. i'm giving this digression its own paragraph break because it has very little to do with the rest of this post. okay moving on)
*259 Cosmic Thermidor; to operate spacecraft with four arrays of foot-pedals, and stimulate the denim jeans industry; very carefully. okay really moving on
--but its core thesis, that "furry" can be qualified on the three axes of aesthetic/tactile/autistic, really spoke to me, more than most definitions i've seen over the years, most of which came from furries themselves.
when i was a small child i had an almost single-minded fixation on reptiles, dinosaurs, dragons etc. and most play i engaged in, things i drew, media i sought out involved them. either being one or observing one like my imaginary was a nature doc. my media diet was a mixture of the Discovery Channel, Godzilla movies, anything animated that had a big reptile (i loved The Hobbit & Hercules but only for one scene in each of them), and a few Haha Uh Oh formative pieces of media like that one episode of Magic Schoolbus where they all turn into herps. that impulse was a Childish Thing i put away for decades, but then pulled back out of the trunk in my 20s when i stopped posting on SA and got over myself.
i think there is such a thing as a "mind's hand," the tactile sibling to the "mind's eye" people normally talk about. mine is feeling the ridged scales/scutes/spikes of an archosaur whenever it has the spare time & bandwidth. the way these rigid elements are set in skin that's still soft & pliable? chef's kiss. or i'll imagine a pair of jaws set with rows of uniform, conical teeth, snapping shut on a watermelon or a salmon. or a long sinewy tail, tracing sinusoidal arcs through the water. rotating this shit in my head like the puppy world pupy village post. you know?
for me drawing is the process of sharing these texture-feelings. it's why i'm drawn to patterns of ridged, keratinous segments like these as subject matter, and why hearing people describe my work as "tactile" is my favorite sort of praise. this is stimming to me! sometimes when i finish these pieces i'll just sit there looking at them, running my mind's hand over those details. i think about what it would be like to have a big spiky tail like that and smile. this is why learning how to 3D sculpt & print these last few years has been so exciting. i can make those textures real! i can hand someone a physical approximation of an object i have been rotating in my brain for months.
however: the other thing about autistic tactile preferences is that they are exactingly, annoyingly specific -- and the same goes for the aversions that almost always accompany them. i don't like fur. human hair or a fluffy synthetic blanket? great. the physical warmth of a fellow endotherm? love it. and soft fur feels nice, like what cats & rabbits have.
but even then, my brain goes straight to a bunch of negative associations-- bad smells, shedding, allergens, dander, fleas, and the Anticipated Texture Problem of "what if it got wet augh god what if it got wet, i can't enjoy petting this cat without some part of my brain imagining how much it would suck if this cat's fur was wet." same goes for feathers, but at least birds have sharp beaks & scaly, clawed legs. again: specific, arbitrary.
and that extends to mammalian traits on an aesthetic level. the only part of a canine/feline muzzle i feel any warmer than "neutral" on is the teeth. lips are flabby & extraneous. i like drawing hair and feathers mostly because getting them Right is a fun formal challenge; i can barely stand drawing fur. i remember watching talking-animal cartoons as a kid and constantly being disappointed that they were overwhelmingly mammals. even when a reptile showed up, it would be rendered like a mammal -- soft, scaleless, lipped.
could not give a shit about Balto because it was some dogs and a goose or something. Lola Bunny sailed right over my head. only reaction i had to Swat Kats was "oh sweet one of the cats has a lizard tail kinda." the Tyger, Tyger episode of BTAS made me feel real funny but only because of the time i spent imagining an alternate version of it where i selina kyle got abducted by a mad scientist and shot full of Lizard Mutagen and kept in a big terrarium. some Dreamworks artist decided the dragon from Shrek should have a horse-muzzle and lips. that guy is my enemy. activated the Freak Sleeper Gene in one cohort of impressionable kids, but left me in the cold.
again, i want to be clear -- i love the actual animals these traits are drawn from, i've kept cockatiels & cats as beloved pets for decades. but i feel no aesthetic draw to these features and that's been true since before i could read. so through the aughts, when i started seeing Furry Fandom Art and it was overwhelmingly canine/feline -- with those Balto/sports mascot/Disney aesthetic hallmarks i found so unctuous -- i was immediately put off. i saw "scalie" stuff too, but my aesthetic specifications were so annoyingly specific that i couldn't get into that either. a lot of attempts to graft reptilian and human features/proportions that landed squarely in my uncanny valley; a lot of concessions to mammalian models of "expressiveness" that just made the subjects look like one of the puppets from the Dinosaurs sitcom or Franklin from the dang turtle cartoon; a lot of scale patterns that might as well have been colored zentai suits; a lot of lips--
--i don't know what it is with me and lips, i love them on humanoid faces but on anything else, nope, sorry--
around the same time i was trying to gauge whether or not i was attracted to men, and my only frame of reference was the buff, oiled-up, zero-percent-body-fat, jesus-why-are-you-shading-this-using-the-airbrush-tool illustrations of the male body you saw in gay porn comics of the aughts-- usually posted as shock value jokes on message boards. and again, it did nothing for me, to the point of complete alienation from the possiblity (the overwhelming social pressure to not be a furry/gay, both on- and offline, certainly didn't help.)
eventually i course-corrected and saw what i was missing, but it didn't happen until the tumblr years, where there was a proliferation of different aesthetic approaches to both "the male body as an object of sexual desire" and "the furry body as an object of sexual desire." the normal distribution got wider by a few standard deviations; eventually, i stopped feeling like an outlier.
now i'm a bi woman who regularly daydreams about being a big languid archosaur basking on a hot rock by a lake. but the reason why it took as long as it did was because all this shit was inseparable from my tactile autism -- picky, exacting, exhausting, arbitrary, but oh-so-rewarding to turn over in my hands when i'm able to meet (or relax) all the preconditions.
so hearing that Patricia Taxxon video talk about all these mammalian/canine signifiers that were so offputting to me, but in the same tactile, autistic terms that have always framed my preferences? this is language that makes complete and immediate sense to me. it's a relief, and makes me feel like less of a finnicky weirdo, to share this common framework; even if the hyperfixations we place within that framework are different.
