One time, my friend and I were in a craft store in San Francisco called Mendel’s. We discovered we were both furry apologists and think they are grossly misrepresented and mistreated in our culture.
Immediately after I said the word “furry,” a staff member from an upstairs office peeked out their window, carefully tiptoed down the stairs and asked in a discreet manner — like we were trying to buy hard drugs or tell the password to some backdoor speakeasy — “Do you need help finding anything specific?”
Later, when randomly scrolling through the Google reviews of this place, I realized that basically 75 percent of them were from fursuit makers. Did we accidentally almost tap into the underground world of fursuit manufacturing? Are furries actually everywhere, and have they just been condemned so far underground that they have to be covert in their identities?
Furries emerged in the 1970s, growing out of a broader fascination with anthropomorphic animals in science fiction media. Over time, this niche interest has evolved into a subculture with hundreds of thousands to millions of people nationwide. Furries create and inhabit an alternate identity, a fursona. The desire to become a part of something larger than oneself and the pursuit of escapism have long been common themes across all subcultures. As phrased by Reddit user and furry Environmental-Day778, “There are no set rules, lore, world building … There are no points to win. Nobody is in charge and nobody will tell you that you are doing the right thing the right way.”
Though this culture was largely defined by furry conventions — starting with the 1989 ConFurence, the first-ever annual furry convention — communities have become increasingly online-oriented. As furries have become more widespread, people have expressed their fursonas through self-insert art, online forums and, perhaps more notoriously, sexual expression.
Furries have always been maligned as a cultural taboo and it is largely because they’ve become associated solely with sexual practices. They’ve been outwardly criticized because certain people or groups in this community purvey particularly vulgar pornographic, fetishistic or otherwise sexual content.
As is the case with many communities that reject what is “normal,” it’s probably questionable to people outside the community why this kind of content is accepted within the community. Is it not reductive, however, to shame other people for their sexual preferences if it’s not actually harming others?
I’d go as far to say that condemnation of furries — even distinctly as a fetish practice — reinforces tenets of purity culture, sexual shame and sex-negativity, opening discourse toward the outward condemnation of the kink and fetish culture that was foundational to the establishment of self-expression concepts — mainly LGBTQ+ self-expression — in American society.
People treat furries with a hush-hush, it’s-OK-but-don’t-do-it-in-front-of-me attitude: They are tolerated as long as their presence doesn’t stray too far into mainstream spaces. Those in more progressive circles, like the 5Cs, claim they support self-expression yet are uncomfortable when authentic individuals actually express themselves. Self-expression is only clearly celebrated when it fits within socially acceptable boundaries.
White, cisgender, heterosexual celebrities like Benson Boone can be on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing vaguely androgynous clothing. Religious fetishism is acceptable — as long as it’s post-ironically embodied by Addison Rae in a “Praying” bikini. Vague amalgams of androgyny and almost-subversions of sexuality can be expressed as long as they don’t go too far.
It’s easy to superficially defend the right thing at the moment but avoid the risks inherent in effecting real change. People like to say they’re activists for self-expression, but when they’re actually confronted with something they’d be expected to defend — furries, an entirely authentic form of self-expression — they inadvertently stigmatize them by rejecting them. In the words of Joan Didion, “It is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level.”
Furries are truly subversive because their self-expression doesn’t align with current trends and expectations of expression. Unlike Addison Rae and her Father, Son and Holy Spirit bikini, furries aren’t seeking cultural validation through their acts of subversion.
It’s just interesting to observe how, in our collective progressive social consciousness, we think we’ve shed more traditionalist ideas than we actually have.
Our treatment of furries is a microcosm of structural violence against unconventional identities. The vast majority of furries — online at least — are constantly maligned, either for being associated with a sexual taboo that people deem unacceptable or for originality that people also deem unacceptable. At a more basic level, they’re condemned for authentic acts of self-expression, regardless of how they manifest.
Maybe we should reconsider what values are held in this regard: Is it not more meaningful to embrace actual authenticity, regardless of optics, rather than curate ourselves in an effort to fit within the limits of what our identities are allowed to be?
Xavier Callan PO ’28 wants you to know that he’s really excited for the package he ordered.
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