An in depth look at The Furry.

What is a Furry?
Revision 10/April/2010
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According to Tyra Banks' short explanation for people with limited attention span, a furry is someone who has sex while dressed up in a fur suit. Consequently, her short explanation of what a furry is has lead to much anger and flame wars. I pity those who took part in this. Wait a minute, I'm taking part in this war by stating this fact. Shit. Oh well, I might as well try and defend Tyra, she was there to showcase a furry who had sex in a fur suit, that was mainly why this person was a furry and she stated the fact. It was a case of petrol sprayed over a flame.
Please read on and forget about this...

NOTE: Text in this colour is sourced from ED and not my own work. But I wish I was the one who wrote it!

Chapter 1: What defines a furry fan?
There are almost as many opinions and theories about what defines a furry fan as there are furries themselves. It's a never-ending debate among many people who know of or who are part of the furry fandom, usually furries themselves tying to find the line between being an ordinary person and being a furry.

The problem is the broad range of different types of furry fans out there who all share the furry label. It's increasingly difficult for others to know what makes someone a furry.

In my opinion, using the word furry to describe a cartoon character has become obsolete. In my experience as a furry, I have never once seen a cartoon character being referred to as a furry. That label is almost always reserved for the people who worship fictional animals with human characteristics. This includes the following:

Cartoon animals
Probably the most common interest in the furry fandom. Examples include Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and almost anything that is too far from being based on any real animal, a totally unique look in regard to what they are. Others may also include Birds, Reptiles, Fish and even insects. Anything that has features of a human; expression, speech and emotion, its under this category.

Realistic animals
with human like intelligence such as the rabbits in the novel Watership Down.

Humanoid animals.
Examples include Disney's Robin Hood, and the bioengineered animals in the novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Animal-like aliens.
The best known examples are Wookies and Ewoks, but there are many, many others in science fiction,
such as the Kzin (Larry Niven's Man-Kzin Wars), the Quozl (Alan Dean Foster's Quozl), and the Sholan (Lisanne Norman's Sholan Alliance).

Mythological creatures.
For instance, centaurs (half horse, half man) and satyrs (half goat, half man).

Anime cat-girls.
A common feature in Japanese animation, basically normal humans with animal ears and a tail,
most often feline, and usually possessing no other animal qualities.

Chapter 2: The furry stereotype.
Furries are fictional-zoophiles who like to masturbate to fictional-animal pornography. The majority of the internet hates them because they won't stay in FChan and Fur Affinity and continue to annoy the rest of the internet with their persecution complex and disgusting fetishes. They are incapable of understanding how stupid the concept of their fandom is, and as such only take offence to the claims of it being a sexual fetish, as if without the sexual aspect, being obsessed with cartoon animals would be perfectly fine.

Normal people keep their fetishes and developmental oddities to themselves, they don't try to make their fetishes into anything else, furries believe their fetish is a lifestyle and must announce it to everybody on the internet through their icon or signature. Society might actually hate fur-fags less if they didn't wish to justify their perversions so strongly in every normal place and spew their crap. Every pervert must first accept that they are fucked up and either roll with it or kill themselves. Furries refuse to accept they are fucked up, thus making them easy targets for trolls and lulz.

In this chapter will I show you how furries hide the ugly truth by misinformation, because the reality is that by now everyone knows that being a furry really is what everyone thinks it is. These days, no one will ever try to use the label on themselves if they weren't a deviant in some way. The following is utter bullshit, but very compelling and it works on most people.

Like any group of people, be it religion, television reporters (the media), and especially homosexuals in general, there are stereotypes the follow each one independently. Reporters are sharks who will stop at nothing to get the news, religious people want to convert the whole world and own your soul, homosexuals are feminine, prancing, pink shiny plastic men who sweat glitter. All of the above are one or more stereotype that follow each group, they are false in the fact that they represent ALL of the people in the selected group, but they do represent a PORTION of people in the relevant group.

Stereotypes are generally formed in a negative basis, as demonstrated by my example above. The stereotype will represent the whole group of people even though just a portion of them are true to the label. Furries are not immune from the stereotype label. There are a portion of furries out there who are very sexually deviant individuals, they are part of the fandom and their interests, art and all the other things he follow are easily accessible through the internet along with all the other furry content that is from the rest of the the fandom that is not deviant.

The type of furry vary vastly and the differences are very significant, as much so as the difference between a butch homosexual male and a feminine homosexual male. These two men are completely different in every way, but still homosexuals. In the same regard to furries, there are ones who are sexually attracted to cartoon characters, and some who like to dress up as their favourite character and role-play with others. These two people are totally different from one another in every way and are of separate parts of the fandom, but they are BOTH furries. The negative aspect of the fandom is the one the is most prominent, most known by the outsiders. This is the sexual deviants, that is the stereotype the furries of all kinds are labelled as. Just like not every homosexual man wants to dress up in drag and be someone's bitch, not every furry want to dress up in a character suit and have a fur-pile orgy.

Just like reporters, religious people and homosexuals alike, you will not know what type each one is until you know them, many of them are good people who contribute to society, but there are a portion of each who are not. So please from now on, think before you slap the "DIRTY" label on someone just because they're furry, even if the odds are that he or she actually is.

Chapter 3: An in-depth look into the sexual aspect of the fandom:
Where do furries come from? This is what happens when kids are raised on a diet of Disney cartoons that depict animals with love interests. This is what happens when children are constantly told to play with talking teddy bears, watch Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and such animal cartoon movies like Robin Hood to severe excess.

Despite opinion that it's the internet that creates furries, furries existed, and still exist, even without the internet. Through movies, cartoons, Halloween costumes, toys, games, and other things that parents innocently expose their children to, children develop an interest in fur. Although furries tend to develop before being exposed to the internet, once they are exposed to the internet they realize to their uttermost joy that there are others like them who accept them into their world. Thus the furry becomes stronger and more bold to the point they may even expose themselves to others about it, something they would never have thought of doing before realising others existed.

I believe that the sexual attraction to cartoons is similar to homosexuality in the fact that its not consciously chosen by the individual, I'm pretty sure people don't choose to be straight, nor did these furries or fags decided they were going to do what they now do. Somewhere in young life it is written, to this day its only speculation to explain sexual interests.

Furries can be either strait or gay, but from what I've seen most furries are male and gay. Some are female and a mixture of many sexual orientations. A number of theories exist about male homosexuals who are furries, such as the confusion of being gay resulting in the sexual attraction to cartoon characters as a way to cope. There are just too many things that can contribute to what causes a person to become sexually attracted to cartoons, so I cannot explain them all, I can only state this fact.

I believe there are two types of furry who have sexual relations with cartoon characters.

The first type is more of a sexual deviant who's mainly interested in the fetish of cartoon characters and how they resemble animals. It's comparable to a paedophile who only likes pictures of naked cartoon children instead of real ones. This furry will most likely be a producer of furry porn or/and a prolific consumer. He or she will have no emotionally binding relationship to any particular cartoon character, just a common fetish and sexual interest in multiple characters or species. There are other furries who may fall under this and other categories, one notable type is the baby-fur. The Baby-fur is a furry who is also an adult baby, and thus pretends to be an infant. They often have many other related fetishes that even normal furries hate them. Furries recognise that paedophilia is wrong and like anyone, is very much against it. To furries, the prospect of someone thinking that they're into kiddie porn is too much. Essentially it's a case of "You got your fake-paedophilia in my fake-bestiality!"

The second, less common type of furry is someone who takes the lust towards a character a few steps further by becoming emotionally attached, as if the character were real. To understand this, remember back, to when you last had a burning lustful crush on someone, feel the love that you felt. Imagine having that same feeling towards a particular cartoon character and never towards any human or living thing for that matter. There are furries out there who have this feeling towards certain characters, me being one of them.

For these people, cartoon characters are the primary sexual attraction; human beings are of no or little interest. Cartoon characters will be looked at the same way a normal man should look at women, assessing how attractive they are, all the usual routine, the only difference being that they're cartoons, not real people. Because cartoons aren't real, there's no flirting, no dating, no messing around. So when he or she finds a carton character attractive, usually it takes a few programmes before a sexual attraction builds, involving finding the character very cute and beginning to loving it.

Next it'll be all about how sexy it is, how great it would be to be able to grab that body one and for all, take it in and taste that first passionate kiss. This is about the point where the character becomes a lust object. Many characters can accumulate as lust objects, ones that are occasionally masturbated over with numerous fantasies, kind of like finding your favourite porn; it's not a love affair.

The final point is when you form an emotional attachment with the character, no longer giving it lust object status. A good example of when a character is fully loved rather then looked at as a lust object, is such when you'd rather look at the characters face, not focusing all the attention so how sexy the body is. When all you want to do it look into the characters eyes, kiss long, gently and passionately, and just hold each other forever and ever. When the point of each Saturday morning is to lie in bed and just be with the character, to just look at, love and cuddle. Basically it all boils down to the relationship not being all about sex, when its wanting to be with, to hold onto, and to be real, more then just the want of sex.

One of the other benefits of having this sort of relationship with a character, is there's no inconvenience of having a partner, not having to work your life around someone else. If you're able to get past being alone, and be able to not feel lonely, there's no real need to have a human companion in your life. Some may say that this is emotional laziness, maybe they're right, but they don't really know that perhaps this is just how this person is, it's something that cannot be controlled easily; like telling a a gay man to be straight, he could force himself to make it with a woman and people would think he's doing the right thing, but he wont be happy with himself or his situation. So furries like me do what we want because we want to be happy, we're not going to change just to make you happy.

If you're still not happy with someone like me being a furry, even after what I've just explained, remember this: Norbert Beaver is no more then nicely arranged, two-dimensional colours on a flat surface. He's not real. When I do my thing with him there's no one other then myself involved, who am I actually hurting? No one. You may argue that some of us create pornographic images and put them ion the internet for anyone to find, thus harming your kids. True this may be, but honestly, furry porn is the least of your worries when it comes to harmful content on the net, be realistic. Besides, a lot of furry art sites like the one I use blocks public access to images marked over R13. If you still disagree, you're an ignorant idiot who refuses to be realistic about the internet.

Chapter 4: The Burned Furs final solution to the negative steriotype.
*Based on information found at www.furrydolphin.net
*The burned furs group are an example of how Rule #19 of the internet always comes into play: The more you hate something, the stronger it gets. They set an unrealistic goal and failed before they even started, failed even more when they were running, and have been laid to rest in the museum of fail here:

The Burned Furs were founded in 1998 by Eric Blumrich and Charla Trotman, also known as Squee Rat. People of this group, in the words of Charla, "are furs who have spoken up against fandom perversion and been 'burned at the stake' for it." The Burned Furs started out on the basis that the anthropomorphic fandom is being overrun by sexually dysfunctional, socially stunted and creatively bankrupt hacks and perverts. There was much controversy over the exact nature of the Burned Furs beliefs, they were often accused of wanting to impose a kind of anti-sexual vision over the fandom. There were even certain members of the group that were intolerant of gays, furry life-stylers and even Christian furries. Burned Furs claimed that none of the above was a problem, as long as it was kept private, within the law and not displayed in an attention getting manner, especially through the media. Many critics considered the Burned Furs to be a hate group, due to the harsh in-your-face tactics, offensive shirts made by the group, and even physical threats made towards other furries. The Burned Furs were opposed by a peace group called the Freezing Furs who believed that the Burned Furs were a hate group. Two more groups; Non-aligned Furs and Furry Peace were formed around the factional conflicts which resulted from the formation of the Burned Furs. By 2001, the Burned Furs had almost completely vanished, having many of the members leaving the fandom. Along with them, the peace groups also faded out, no longer having any need to be around.

I hope reading this has been of benafit to you, no matter what your orientation.