Caught in the Net: One Fur All
I became a father a few days ago (our son was born on November 8th, and he’s already clearly a wonderful kid), and as a result I haven’t exactly been actively trolling the internet for sex links lately. Nevertheless, the show must go on, and as I gazed, sleep-deprived and glazed of brain, around the hospital room, I happened to spy my son’s enormous stuffed panda (a gift from Blowfishie James, actually), and I thought, “Huh, a big stuffed animal. Don’t I have a lot of furry links I haven’t written up? That’s a column right there.” So here we go: Furry time.
I’m assuming a certain widespread familiarity with the subculture, as it’s been mentioned and mocked on mainstream TV shows and such in recent years, but if not, the overly generalized form is: people who like or anthropomorphic animals, often to the point of dressing up like such creatures, sometimes but not always for purposes of fur-suited sex (or “yiffing”). I could spend a long time rounding up online stuff about this fandom — there are countless art galleries, fiction sites, and so on, but I’m not an encyclopedist, I’m a collector of bright baubles, so here are some odd glimpses into this world, as seen from inside and out:
Online world Second Life has been a wonderful playground for furries, who can create avatars that are mixtures of human and animal, and also create interactive toys that allow users to . . . well . . . fuck dogs and horses, mostly. This column from Second Life Herald hypothesizes that such activities might at some point run afoul of the clause forbidding “broadly offensive” behavior in the world. If so, it would be a sad day for fur folk everywhere, because if you can’t be an anthropomorphic vixen fucking an anthropomorphic porcupine in Second Life, where can you?
Furry fandom is a widely ridiculed subculture, but sometimes their imagery gets appropriated for more high-toned purposes, like in this photo spread for W magazine, titled “Into the Woods.” Pictures of women in fur coats in the woods . . . but some of the women frolic and get cradled by guys in bear suits. There’s some kind of subtext there.
Furries in a fashion spread is a lot less weird than this weird commercial for the beverage Orangina, set at what can legitimately be described as a furry strip club. Flamingo pole dancers. An octopus lap dance. A deer-girl shower show. Zebras ejaculating Orangina. (Metaphorically, anyway.) It’s . . . well . . . it’s trippy, man. One almost begins to wonder if certain furry fans have infiltrated the corridors of media to secretly satisfy their personal hot buttons. If so, kudos to them for convincing their clients to go along with it!
It’s worth noting that, some tangential Second Life-related horse fucking aside, furry fandom isn’t zoophilia or bestiality; it’s not about screwing actual animals. Thus, furries would not especially be interested in the underground Tokyo restaurant where customers get to fuck the animal of their choice, which is then butchered, cooked, and fed to them. I’m guessing it’s not a great restaurant for first dates . . . unless you count what you do to your dinner-to-be as a “date.” (Of course, the report of this restaurant turns out to be fake, and the joint doesn’t really exist, but it’s still a pretty good story, don’t you think?)
This entry was posted on Wednesday, 14 November 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Thursday, 6 December 2007 at 10:10 pm OTAKU MAnKO: What About the Plushies? | Blowfish Blog wrote:
[…] Take, for instance, the plushies. This weekend in my teaching gig at San Francisco Sex Information, I was the lucky bastardo who got to fill in and talk about furries and plushies. Coming so soon after the excellent writeup on furries here, this seemed fortuitous, as did the fact that for the purposes of the lecture I conflated two very different things: furries and plushies. […]