I've been a part of the furry community for a number of years now, and I can say with confidence that a lot of us, myself included, are autistic. That's probably not surprising - the subculture is centered around cute, stylized animal characters, after all, and it's well-known for appealing to people who aren't comfortable in normal society.
I also had the misfortunate of spending a fair amount of time in communities that were rabidly anti-furry (mostly Something Awful), and this created a lot of self-hatred in me. For years before I came to accept that part of myself, I joined in on the anti-furry hate not out of any real conviction, but just because I wanted to be one of the "good" people and not one of the "bad" ones. It's not something I'm proud of, but it left me with a lot of insight into what motivates and drives anti-furries.
It's ableism. Homophobia, too, but also ableism.
Specifically, it's disgust and contempt toward autistic people. Show me an anti-furry community, and I will show you one where "sperg" and "autist" are common and accepted insults. They'll make a lot of noise about protecting children or protecting animals, as homophobes do, and they'll often cherry-pick examples of one furry doing something terrible and act as if every member of the community is responsible and supports it - again, as homophobes do. But it always, always comes back to ableism. When they aren't pretending to care about that, they're going the cringe culture route and mocking examples of furries being socially inept or standing out in unusual ways - in other words, traits strongly associated with autism.
If you ask them what they actually want from furries, if the answer isn't a grisly murder fantasy, it's always the same: they want us to be "normal." To give up the things we enjoy and conform to how an "average person" behaves. They believe that we have a moral and social obligation to never make them uncomfortable, regardless of the toll it takes on us, and they see fit to punish us to any extent for failing to do so.
Those of you who are autistic, or who keep up with autism news, might see where I'm going with this. Applied Behavioral Analysis is a form of training given to autistic children with the goal of making their behavior conform to neurotypical standards. The child's unique needs and comfort are considered irrelevant; all that matters is to make them conform.
An autistic person with enough life experience can eventually conform to neurotypical social norms with some degree of success. This is called masking, in which we try to suppress our symptoms and present ourselves as neurotypical. There are two problems with expecting autistic people to do this. The first is that it's simply beyond our capabilities to act neurotypical all day, every day, because we simply don't have the faculties to do so. A person with impaired vision, if they don't wear glasses, will fail to see some things. A person with a bad leg will not always be able to walk and run like a healthy person can. And an autistic person can't mask all the time. Even when we're successful, though, it takes a toll. Masking in autistic people has been linked to anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. This is the price that ableist people demand we pay for their comfort and our own reduced (but of course, never completely relieved) mistreatment. These issues aren't just matters of hurt feelings, either. This shit actually kills people: autism can cut up to 30 years off your life expectancy.
I've seen a number of people claim that harassing and ostracizing furries isn't a big deal, and that furries are just "coopting social justice issues." As someone who's dealt with both anti-furry and anti-autistic sentiment, though, the former is very often just the latter behind a fig leaf.
I completely agree.
There was an absolutely excellent post by one of the founders of the SRA on the topic of "cringe", they're no longer involved with the org to my knowledge but the post itself is notable because it's often a term weaponised against furries and others that take part in fringe cultural groups outside the norm. Link I think the main takeaway is that people attacking furries (among ohters) are doing so by saying “This is an inferior form of cultural expression.” which gets the point across quite well how reactionary this behaviour is.
I will post it below because it might one day disappear from the subreddit, particularly with all the anti-tankie shit I see over there.
Apparently I have to do one of these posts once a quarter to flush out the reactionaries, so here we go again.
A trans person recently drew a picture of the character Alunya from Political Ideology Catgirls, which was a short lived leftist webcomic back around 2016, and drew her with an SRA logo and the caption "Join the Socialist Rifle Association!" It was immediately responded to with a bunch of very serious gun enthusiasts complaining that it was cringy. The same thing happened several months ago when someone took a piece of artwork drawn by a fascist furry and re-appropriated it into propaganda for the SRA, encouraging leftist furries to join the organization. Again, the very serious gun enthusiasts responded by complaining about cringe and "optics".
When you say something is cringy, what you're basically saying is, "This is an inferior form of cultural expression." It's lame or embarrassing and you don't like it and you don't want to be associated with it, because then you would be lame or embarrassing.
Honestly? I totally get that feeling, because there are a ton of people on this subreddit that are cringy as hell, from my perspective. Buying old Soviet gear at inflated prices while talking about revolution? Cringe. Posting EDCs? Cringe. Posting excerpts from tactical manuals while eating chips in your bedroom? Cringe as hell. Hell, there are other people who find the concept of the SRA as a whole cringy. Using a logo derived from the Great Seal of the USSR? How embarrassing!!!
Consider the fact that many of the people you might view as cringy are exactly the people who the SRA was set up to help -- people who are not welcome in right wing gun culture. If a 20 year old trans woman a year into her transition goes to a mainstream range or gun shop on her own she's probably going to have a bad time. If she turns to us for help, and finds people making fun of things that she likes, talking about cringe, replicating right wing gun culture, then she's probably not going to feel comfortable coming to us either. And that's a fucking failure on the part of everyone who contributes to that culture.
When you call something cringe, you're calling it inferior. Think about why you find the things in question cringy. When a bunch of transgender women identify with a feminine Anarcho-Communist character with cute cat ears, and you feel offended, embarrassed, or angry about that, where is that feeling coming from? Is it possible that you're replicating the reactionary culture of mainstream, conservative gun culture which views anything feminine or queer to be gross and untouchable? Are you really following socialist principles of supporting the whole working class, or are you just fetishizing the "white working class"? Which is itself a bourgeois fiction, a set of cultural values promoted and maintained by middle and upper class capitalists to divide the working class against itself by holding the cultural products of women, queer, Black, Latino, and Asian people to be inferior and valueless.
Also, have you ever noticed how every single internet nazi and groyper is a massive fan of cringe humor? Ever wondered about that correlation? That Alunya post was responded to pretty quickly by a so-called leftist (who is apparently a regular poster on this sub) complaining about "sexual removed", aka that idea the Nazis were big into, what with the burning of the library and patient records of the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft and all. Cringe is used as an acceptable outlet for bigoted and discriminatory social views, just like how irony was used by the alt right to express fascist ideas with plausible deniability. The difference is that irony can be used to express almost any political idea; but viewing something as cringy inherently means viewing another person's culture as inferior to your own.
As long as that shadow of inferiority is cast on other working class people instead of the ruling class "cringe" will always be reactionary. If you view trans people or anime or furries or Insane Clown Posse as cringy and not welcome in the SRA, but some beardy white guy wearing $2000 worth of plates and tactical gear and carrying a $3000 gucci gun is "cool", then really you're just another Consoomer and you should go back to /r/firearms. Because honestly? cringe
PS: The Socialist Rifle Association's current President and Vice President are both trans women, the org was co-founded by a trans woman, over 8% of our membership is trans, and being a bigot toward LGBTQ+ people is grounds for expulsion from the org. If you have a problem with that, don't fuckin' join or we'll kick your ass back to 4chan and you won't get your $25 back.
Anarcho cat girls? Cringe. We only post ba'athist cat girls in my house.
Yes I'm quite unsure of who runs the subreddit and what the ML/other split in the org is these days. I know MLs had a major role founding it, I also know that MLs got pushed out of leadership a while back, not sure whether that changed though I haven't followed it in some time but just to be safe since I've always come back to that post in particular for phrasing.
Yeah, for a long time I thought there was something wrong with me for liking furry stuff
Repressed Christian guilt is a hell of a drug, that combined with the whole "Purge the Yiff(slurs)" shit that was oh so funny in the aughts really did a number on me
And I'm still getting over it, almost two full decades after I renounced my faith and came out
I also had the misfortune of spending a fair amount of time in communities that were rabidly anti-furry (mostly Something Awful),
I think you mean mostly all of the 1990-2010 internet, and still most of it today?
The only places I remember that weren't weirdly obsessed with hating furries were either furry communities or places nobody had mentioned furries.
I feel like a lot of online places with weird nerds often became obsessed with punching down on somewhat weirder, nerdier people in any form.
Yeah, its crazy how 'tribal' niche interests are. Or even interests; see the :reddit-logo: big brains being super high IQ for not liking rap and pop music.
But groups definitely get nuts over delineating what the group Likes and Doesn't Like (in a declarative sense). Its like this XKCD comic in a way: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/crazy_straws.png
But, having (unfortunatly) grown up on 4chan, I definitely took part in it when my brain was still forming, and still have some brainworms from it. I have that hipster tendency to be hyper critical to media, and have to tell myself its fucking fine to have other people enjoy a thing I don't.
At the same point, I do 'get it' in a sense. I do think furries are weird, and don't like the designs. And, as you note, furries are "easy" punching bags, as there's been little interest in non-furries to defend furries. But I agree with you that people should defend furries. As much as its, in the broad scheme of society, furries are kind of a "low stakes group", I 100% agree that anti-furry sentiment is very much a canary in a coalmine for anti-autistic, and often anti-queer, opinions. Just, general shittiness.
And, of course, as with any group, there are shitty furries. But, that's not unique. The smear to make furries all look like sexual removed is reminiscent of how much conservatives focus on the sexual aspects of, say, being trans. And, generally, being 'weird' about sex is fine, and the actually bad shit (babyfurs and w/e), are condemned by furries as well, so it is basically just a smear.
Good post comrade
I'm ashamed to see the "is being a furry a mental disorder" arguments coming from some people here but hey, everyones got :brainworms: I guess :shrug-outta-hecks:
Trust me when I say that the only reason I'll goof on you is your penchant for wearing dorky ass animal costumes.
Don't think we don't see the humor in it ourselves, we do. We know we're dorky and cringe and we love it.
If everyone is cringe no one is.
Conservatives are always more easily offended than the left, CHUDs love to toss this Chowder bit around, but they operate under the identical logic as a fucking joke on a kid's show with a straight face. This is all of "culturally conservative" politics in a few seconds:
Okay, but can I still hate Gamers even if lots of Autistic people enjoy video games?
As much as I like vidya, I will never forgive these lot for flooding in and thinking it's for just their demographic and no one else, and then claiming gaming to be for conservative white guys only. Then, they will freak out that a game has black people in it even thought "racist white guy" isn't the target audience for the game.
They turned one of my favorite hobbies into the gen z equivalent of golf. Thank fuck they're weebs so they aren't going to turn dark souls into triple A flavorless mush anytime soon.
As much as I like vidya, I will never forgive normies for flooding in and thinking it’s for them,
wtf this is gamergate shit
and then claiming gaming to be for conservative white guys only.
Oh I see, you're turning the gators' arguments around on them
Yeah, in hindsight I did a bad job wording it and should have clarified "it's for them and no one else"
dissociative implications of sincerely, internally self-identifying with that fiction of being this imaginary creature of another species
I'd argue that, as a form of self-identification, it's a way to actually engage with the Self in a more meaningful way than you normally would - not just as a coping mechanism or hiding place, but as a way to collectively cast off expected social norms & explore what you are & what you want to be. Humans have been doing this kind of shit for as long as there have been humans
I mean, yeah, I know a fair few otherkin personally. You talk as though that role is seperate from someone's own body, but that's clearly someone who's found a way to be more comfortable within their own skin. Hell, arguably you could put me in that bucket, furry stuff was how I figured out gender stuff a while back, as the collective fictional ritual we're talkin about allowed me to stop disassociating from from that part of myself, rather than start diassociating. In terms of esoteric beliefs about what one "really is", everyone who's condidered it holds an irrational, unprovable position - whether that's belief in a soul, computational theory of the mind, or whatever else. There is currently no provable scientific model of conciousness, and there probably never will be.
Going to be annoying and answer your question with a question - why catagorically pathologise in the first place? I'd argue your average furry has a relationship with sex & sexuality about as fucked as your average normie, and the actual harmful issues are mostly the same (consent, objectification). You could ask the same quesiton of any sexual behaviour that doesn't directly serve reproduction. Weird sex stuff is, again, a constant in human sexuality. You can find a handful of bizzare animalistic sex dieties across ancient human cultures, far older than notions of pathology in the first place.
Interesting, but I don’t really follow
It's a counter to what seems to be the main issue you have - referring to deep self-identification with furry stuff as inherently disassociative.
You can have whatever religion you like, but let’s not pretend that all attempts at explaining consciousness are equally valid, including the ones that suggest categories of metaphysical substance that have never, ever been even indirectly observed but for some reason interact specifically with a tiny subset of material bodies.
Honestly, as someone who leans towards the Most Scientific explanation of panpsychism, I also understand that to be a product of my worldview & current cultural beliefs, same as every other personal understanding of conciousness. Maybe not equally valid, but I'm hardly in a position to argue that anyone else's isn't valid.
I never once defended “normies” and I think in one of my other comments made it explicit that I think most average people also are super fucked up
Right, but you want to catagorically pathologise furries, which is why I draw these comparisons. My argument is that the main issues arise from hegemony - it feels like you're assuming what issues furries have without actually knowing any? From lots of experience of humanity in & out of the fandom, people's issues and trauma are largely the same & largely come from the same sources (capitalism & patriarchy, which obvs everyone on this website agrees are shit).
Shit, if it was safe and easy to make someone anatomically into an anthropomorphic animal (given their enthusiastic consent), I’d need to seriously reconsider my position, because it kind of stops being dissassociative when you look at your actual face in the mirror and say “this is cool”. You know, so long as they don’t want to keep up a fiction that they were born of a dog with a bunch of dog siblings.
This... feels like some kind of furry transmedicalism? Would appreciate if you could clarify what you mean by this.
And apologies if you feel I've misrepresented you here, but, like, I don't know you? Only got this series of posts to go on, and so I'm taking the points as I see em.
Honestly, the main thing they had in common is that they both had hangups relating to constant sexual frustration on a level of intensity that I have otherwise only seen from straight men
we've entered The Anecdote Zone here but that doesn't line up with what I've experienced. some furries are definitely Like That, some to the point of doing horrible shit. However, not in excess of straight, bi & gay guys, and also hetro & bi women I've known. The lesbians seem to have figured their shit out though, good for them
Point is, I would never claim that it’s some independent “scourge” that needs to be fought against, and I expect the pathological elements to appear less as society eventually improves.
so, again, why specifically pathologise it in the first place? Furries have issues that are also represented in society as a whole, and if society improves those issues would dissipate
explaining what “furry transmedicalism” would be
well, let me write out my interpretation what you said before - you believe people identifying with anthropomorphic animals is harmful as it is inherently disassociative, disassociative behaviour is inherently harmful, and therefore needs to be stopped. However, if new technology allowed them to become those animals you'd reconsider that position. Guess that's why I make the comparison - binary medical transition is Very New but weird gender stuff is Very Old, and the reactionary transmed position is that the Very New version is the only part of the human experience worth keeping.
Okay sorry for necro-ing an oldass thread but I was just linked this by someone, and
a c/bestofhexbear submission for sure.No need to apologize! I'm glad this post was of value to you, and I appreciate you taking the time to comment.
This hit home with me because even long before I found hexbear, I had decided that furries were my comrades always, primarily due to how much reactionaries seem to hate them but also I think autistic people can tell our own sometimes, lol. Seeing all of that laid out next to ABA was a lightbulb moment.
