The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: What About the Plushies?

One of the cool things about being a jack-of-all-trades sex educator is encountering fetishes and turn-ons that are very much not my own. While sometimes I am utterly squicked by other peoples’ sexual proclivities, often I encounter things that I love for various non-sexual reasons.

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.

Even in sexually um, esoteric circles, these two related but oh-so-different phenomena get mixed up a bit. Y’all reading this may be far enough beyond “esoteric” that this is like See Dick Run here, but in her or his purest form a “furrie” is someone who for whatever reason digs dressing up in, you know, fur, that is to say the kind of furry suit worn by a mascot at a sports game or an out-of-work actor at Disneyland, and, uh . . .interacting with other people either in fursuits or not. If said interaction is of the G, PG or even maybe PG-13 variety, whether in person or online, that’s one thing; the “furvert” is someone whose interactions whethher dressed or virtual are more of the R-rated, NC-17 or triple-X variety: “fursex,” sometimes called “yiffing” or being a “yiffy fur,” “yiff” being a term derived from the sound an arctic fox makes while mating . . . supposedly. There are related subcategories of “furry fandom” that don’t involve fur — those folks are occasionally called “scalies” (reptiles), “avians” (birds) or “aquatics” (dolphins, fish, sea serpents).

Way to go furverts, and rock on with your bad bad selves. But what about the Plushies?

Some years ago I edited an article about plushophiles, sometimes erroneously called plushies. Plushophiles are adults with very special relationships with their stuffed animals. (The “plushie,” in fact, is the stuffed animal itself, not the loving human.) Again, while some plushophiles love their stuffed animals in sublime ways, others modify their friends to be sexually functional; sleeves might come in handy for many plushophiles, as might just the right dildo or other penetrative toy.

Plushies can be of any size, but the physical side of the love might be easier for all you non-plushophiles out there to imagine if you think about a giant stuffed animal of the FAO Schwarz variety, rather than the two-inch bear dangling from your car mirror. (I’d say “life-sized,” but what exactly is life sized when it comes to a furry, sexually-receptive dragon, eh?) Though a popular Plushie FAQ states that “Many, probably most, plushophiles are also furries,” that assertion is in fact contradicted by a number of other sources, not least David J. Rust’s “The Sociology of Furry Fandom,” a subculture study of 360 furry fans, of whom only 1% expressed an interest in plushophilia. A larger study at the University of California, Davis indicates a predominance of bisexuality and other non-furversion-related queer and kinky interests among furverts, but again, no correlative link to plushie lovin’.

The Plushie FAQ also says: “It is never safe to assume that particular plushophiles are sexually active with plushies, nor that they are inactive with people because of their plushophilia. Each individual is different,” with which I agree, and so the squooshing of furries and plushies together should probably not bother me. Still, that conflation seems to come both from the furry community and the mainstream, where a 2001 Vanity Fair article kinda mixed the two up a bit, pissing off giant rabbits and anthropomorphic cuddlebears nationwide.

So what about the Plushies? In the eight years since I was first introduced to the subcultures, the furries have been going strong, showing up, according to Wikipedia, in such bastions of sex-positive thought as “ER,” “CSI,” “The Drew Carey Show,” and HBO’s “Entourage.” The furries even have the amazingly awesome Wikifur — so amazingly awesome, in fact, that it boggles my mind. But is an erotic subculture really thriving if TV cop shows don’t regularly equate them with some kind of grievous sexual crime? What about the plushies?

Over at Wikifur, the the entry on Plushophilia is strongly positive — no stuffed poop being flung in these communities! — and indicates that a “significant” number of furries may also be plushophiles. Those of us who remember Webrings may be excited to note that there are a number of references to plushophile webrings, which is awesome if you love getting 404 errors. Similarly, the term “Plushie” on Wikipedia redirects to “Stuffed Animal,” though there is indeed a plushophile entry — all 154 words of it.

Which brings me, I suppose, to my overall frustration with the greater visibility of the furvert community over plushophiles. While I’m far from a nudist, I’m not really stoked about clothes at the best of times, and the idea of climbing into a giant fursuit to get yiffy is actually enough to make me itch all over.

Plushies are admittedly more appealing to me, which makes sense to me. Hey, who doesn’t like a giant St. Bernard with a permanent smile on her face? But it goes further than that — that article I edited an octet of years ago had me fact checking stuff on various plushophile sites (and reading probably more of it than was justified on my timesheet). Much of the writing by plushophiles was positively bewitching in its sexual liberation. I say that not because plushophiles’ sexual interactions were outré, but precisely because they were strikingly vanilla. At least as I encountered it, the plushophile community did not reference the kind of (for most of us) extreme, non-everyday sexual activity — spanking, spitting, howling, yowling, buttfucking, face-slapping, double penetration, — that was then fairly rare in porn and is now fairly common (at times, to me, disturbingly common). Most of the sex I encountered in the plushophile community, while eagerly erotic, was also cuddly, cute, sweet, innocent and absolutely loving. That is not to say that plushophiles don’t savagely spank their panda bears (or get spanked by them), but I didn’t hear about it.

Which maybe is why the media loves furries more than plushophiles — what’s so shocking about a good cuddle, with or without a slow comfortable screw? Sometimes nowadays when I pop open a screener box and find Max Hardcore’s leering mug staring at me, I think maybe I’ll drop by those kind of places on the wrong side of the net, find myself a nice eligible six-foot blue Alsatian and maybe buy her a drink.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 4 December 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. 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.