Reaction to an Anthropology Thesis on Furries

For those of you who know me and my proclivities. I promise there's wholesomeness to be found in the parts of my brain that make me compulsively post furry ketchup fetish porn in [designated] school group chats.

This is a first attempt at explaining it.

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Creature comfort: anthropomorphism, sexuality and revitalization in the furry fandom, Matt Morgan, 2008.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/11668/15186

This was the masters thesis sent to me by a classmate which has been rattling around in my brain for the past week.

If you can't be bothered to read the abstract, the TL;DR argument is that furries are intently undergoing a process of reworking sexual culture — through the inaccessibility of traditional sexual development due to social osctracization, furries have developed their own signifiers of comfort, lust, and intimacy through furry iconography. This is all explained through the lens of "cultural revitalization"

Sure is a spicy topic for a paper, but it's interesting to me beyond that. It fits in a much broader context: Being from 2008, this is a picture of the fandom before Uncle Kage's "sanitizing" influence. Culturally, new[er] furries (like me! I started calling myself one around 2013/2014) may as well be a completely different generation compared to furs back then. This thesis provides a convenient foil to contrast differences against. And ofc, I can't help but wonder how much of the author's linear view of furry ascention as culminating in a sexual renaissance is just an artifact of the author's... nonfurriness (or alternatively, a result of the demographic homogeneity of the 2000's fandom that facilitates this narrow conceptualization?). But hey, I wasn't there. Ultimately though, my questions stumble towards a peak in the blizzard: what is furry?

While I have a lot of questions along those lines, I am unequipped (as of now...) to make meaningful progress on them.

But the whole reason I want to know about furry is because I want to know, where exactly do I stand? Out of percieving some sort of internal fuzziness, I use this vague label to group myself with others. As I've kinda found going to local furmeets though, I'm weird, even for furries. Furries (now) are diverse; I don't exist in some pool of people just like me. Surprisingly (to me), lots of people are here for the social scene and take the rules of the furry scene as just the way things go around here. Offline, furries appear much more segmented and consisting of more small niches than I had previously thought. [additional question: is it the case that the direction of "furry" is being pushed by any distinct minority?] The stance advocated by many popular furry figures (and one I used to promote), at least in the response to the, "should I come out as a furry?" question is, "well, it's just a hobby. Being a furry is like liking basketball or something, you wouldn't be ashamed of being a basketball fan, would you?" But I've always seen furry as more than that. Previously, this was just a lens or focus for expression. Now context has expanded my view a bit more.

So. I may not be prepared to categorize everyone, or draw grand causal tracks (hence this being relegated to a journal entry). But I do feel I can dig at, who am I? As a person. As a furry. And what am I doing here? Participation, mindset, interpretation, consumption, creation...

How does furry let humanity pierce into my shuttered heart?

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The nice thing about the cultural revitalization framework is that it can be explanatory even on an individual basis — after all, a culture is only formed by the individual contributions within a collective. As for the link to the individual basis, furries are painfully self-aware of their outsider status (this is something also noted by the thesis author). In equal opposition to the strength of their perception as pariahs, a recognition of inclusion within furry arises (disclaimer: nowadays it is becoming "cool" to be a furry in some larger social circles. hence the recent politicization of furries... never thought I'd see the day when republicans were trying to ban furries from school as a stand-in for gender politics.) Hence, with the adoption of the furry status comes a painful awareness of culture you've been excluded from and how you're trying to substitute it.

Stealing quotes from the thesis, a cultural revitalization movement is defined as, "a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of society to create a more satisfying culture." This is spurred on when someone experiences stressors which they feel unable to cope or adapt to, so the individual is prompted to seek a transformative perspective shift to alleviate this stress, to both squirm and imagine away the boulders pinning them. What differentiates a ordinary culture shift from revitalization is, from a functionalist perspective, that the shifting perceptions and reshaped needs of an individual begin to support an altered social system. It's the difference between, for someone going through a midlife crisis, a career change versus seeking new-age spirituality. This individual divergence of allegiance is revitalization, and when this occurs among people "in communion with one another ... to achieve a common end," this is a "revitalization movement".

There are also three categories of revitalization movements: "revivalist movements, ... return[ing] to traditional ways of life, importation movements (introduc[ing] foreign ideas), and utopia movements (establish[ment] of a non-native, non-foreign ideal way of life.)"
Or to summarize them: revival, importation, and synthesis.
Furry is one of synthesis. To reimagine your self-image, modes of connection, aesthetic ideals...

Who would feel the need undergo this metamorphosis? The thesis extracts the following themes from the many interviews the author performed. Furries are engaged in the process of terraforming a razed adolescece marred by bullying, finding and constructing shelter within a hostile conception of "normal" society. Through fursonas, furries are reimagining aesthetic norms dictating social desirability to eschew their body image issues, their lack of self-confidence, and the paralyzing labels (gay, fat, homo, neckbeard) they shoulder in the mainstream enviromnemt. The fursuit, a physical manifestation of the fursona, is heralded as the ultimate sign of this transformation's completeness: a complete revision of your given body, an act stealing back full control over your self-concept and image. The author argues clearly enough (with a decent attempt at refraining from moralizing) for their conception — furries are losers of society.

This isn't the first time I've come across the vague idea that furry may be associated with negativity. Back in 2023, Furscience dropped their 700+ page summary of psychological research on the fandom (it's free to download!) (and no, I haven't finished it yet). One of the distinctions examined is measures of fanship (personal identity) vs fandom (group identity). I.e. fanship (how much do you ID as a furry) is meant to measure connection to the object of interest, while fandom (how much do you ID with other furries) measures, well, connection to the fandom. Fanship measures are more associated with consumption of furry media and identity disclosure, while fandom measures associate more with interacting with other furries online, at furmeets, and con attendance. While fandom mesures are also broadly associated with many positive emotional and social traits, fanship is associated with more negative measures such as lack of emotional stability, lack of identity formation, pathological personality, shyness, and more (see Chapter 6 of Furscience's book for details). My experience as a furry for all but the past year of my life has been intense, yet also mostly solitary. Given that, even knowing that these are just general statistics, it still gave me some pause.

So, ignoring the logical fallacy I invoke here, if this mold of the average furry is to say anything about me, where is my loser arc?

Yes, I did have my, like the thesis author alludes to, period of loneliness and desolation. Yes, my recall of early childhood is pleasant yet strangely absent of friends (I can only think of one peer who I really enjoyed company with — we had essentially grown up together since I was born. then separated by different cities after age 6). Yeah, I had my crisis era when I was suddenly acutely aware of peer rejection and struggled with self hatred towards my actions and personality.

But the way I coped wasn't furry. It was throwing myself fully into science. Science was something I loved — plus, I was already primed since elementary school to think of myself as sort of a budding scientist, so I was better off anyway. I found my social niche through the school Science Olympiad team, where there was no ceiling to academic excellence. Without mentorship (my SciOly program was... not great), I soaked Wikipedia into my brain, sorting and absorbing article after article. I read while walking from class to class, during lunch, at home during dinner until my parents yelled at me to put my phone away, and then into the late night when I had to sleep. My social circle was organizing study materials off of the internet and writing our own tests to skip years of chemistry classes, spending 40+ hours a week at school after class doing robotics during build season (we founded the school's first team), colluding together to diverge upwards from preconceived academic paths offered by our well-off-but-nondescript middle and high school.

(one wonders if this early and long pattern of academic success through such a self-reliant path, entirely absent of any mentoring, with the sole input of adults being basically, "huh, wow, congrats on doing 'the thing'", was really good for me in the long-term)

I was valued for my niche of achievements, even if most people didn't really know what it took to get there. Science became not just my societal identity, but personal. My little circle had made a culture of "knowing lots of cool shit and being adept with your stuff". I was so immersed that I can't remember a single movie I might have watched in high school (except zootopia. and that one time I was forced to watch inception in intro psych class, though I can hardly recall anything about it) I didn't have a single birthday party, no weekend hangouts, no "chill at my place" moments from anyone in my school or neighborhood.

I didn't feel the lack of it. I had this other thing that I was constantly busy with, and it was utterly fulfilling to disappear into words, systems, and formulas. I lost myself in stories of ecological succession, mysteries of protein folding dynamics, and accounts of microbe types. I lived and breathed science; it was my escape. I was a competent geek, and that made accessible to me a positive reputation, in-group identifiation, a motive for group cohesiveness, and casual chatter. My circle of peers plowed through our school experiences together, clinging to each other as a unit. We were trailblazers, attempting to leave behind self-perpetuating structures in the form of club infrastructures. We dispensed our infectious passions through mentorship to students to come. And, at the same time, we were just fooling around and trying to exist. Through the lens of cultural propogation, our various extracurriculars converge at perpetuating a certain academic culture. This was my revitalization.

As for other areas... I had no body image issues or physical insecurities due to being a successful athlete. Yes, I had a small social circle among the pole vaulters (pole vaulters as a whole have a reputation for having a screw loose. longevity in the sport kind of requires it, considering the "accidents" that can and do happen flinging yourself upside-down over 13 feet in the air), but I still felt like an outsider among outsiders. (though this perception may be isolated. I was voted MVP once out of a team of >100. I am quite sure the other vaulters colluded to vote for me.)

I think I've laid out explicitly enough what social functions got replaced by science circles, and also what internal drives were fulfilled: Purpose through struggle, exploration and fascination. Cameraderie through success, identification, and (uniquely flavored) banter.

So, about that furry thing... maybe it was obvious foreshadowing that furry did not fulfill an outright "social" function for me, given I mentioned my relationship history with it skews very much towards fanship over fandom. Academics already performed the function of filling many needs left empty; empty cells that I had once felt were collapsing had been buttressed.

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The thing is about science though, it can't make you cry. (well, it can crush you. but imo that's more society's demands than "science" itself). Physics isn't intended to love you back. Neither are isopods or bacteria, as much as I wish they could.

Furry snuck in sideways. I always had a tendency to draw cats as a child, so it was only natural online that I'd run into furry art. My early youtube video diet consisted of poorly-drawn furry animation memes. I plastered cartoon wolves on my elementary school Google+ profile without much awareness of the greater context this art existed within. As I aged and immersed myself in studies, in the void which normally would have been occupied with more normal media, all that was left was the occasional furry animation. And oh, did my brain latch on. I had no appetite for more "typical" media featuring humans.

From my perspective, furry was an odd sort of convergent phenomenon. I grew up in the shadow of the fandom, consuming fandom artwork without really noticing the greater movement that nurtured it. And on the other hand, many of these "furry" animation memes I was watching were made by other kids around my age. You can blame the Warrior Cats book series for spawning a huge interest in anthropomorphism among kids, who had no idea that their scrappy kitty doodles were percieved as part of a greater movement. In this sense, although the fandom runs on fandom-made material, it is as if for many, the culture stopped perpetuating itself in a discontinuity, suddenly absorbing a new foreign yet also ready-made generation that had the label thrust upon them from broader society.

As for me, it was as if I was learning how to feel through furry art. I presented my middle-school girlfriend a video (which I did not make) of a neon red-and-black cat animated at 2 FPS to tinny audio of Aubern's "Perfect Two" and was like, "look, it's us el-oh-el."
(she broke up with me 3 months later.)
(I felt guilty that I didn't feel sad at all over that, so I forced myself to cry to sleep and moped the next day at school, feeling better about myself for doing the expected thing.)
(then she got mad that I suddenly snapped back to being my normal self after such a short period.)

This may sound like a trite experience, but just like the universal middle-school fling, so is everyone's first dip into culture. It started with just silly relatability, but it soon progressed far beyond. Furry comics showed me relationships which struck real, genuine heartache and lust. (weirdly, it's always the queer artists who do this best. something is off with the straights...) More serious animations made by older artists disarmed me and dumped raw sadness, longing, and melancholy — a bitter pill disguised in bright colors. Little animations that I'd obsessed over and looped for hours got me to reintegrate life experiences, giving me a mental shakedown and forcing a repicturing of the past, reprocessing both my conceptual and emotional understanding of various events. It's as if this media instinctively fosters a drive to suck all the possible essence out of it, and then fit it perfectly inside of myself.

It is worth remarking that most of these animations are about nothing in particular (outside possibly the artist's obtuse vision involving their OCs), and these emotional connections are mostly just in my head. But the fact that they were formed at all is important when I search for ways to express myself. Ultimately, what seemed to enable all this was the relatability of the art. haha that pixelated creature just like me frfr. The trivial and fluffy cements the foundation for the deep.

I may have trouble expressing, experiencing, or identifying emotions in typical language, but it's not like I lack a wide range of them. It's just that they're activated unconventionally. Keep in mind how we learn to associate words with emotional states — there's no possibility we could instinctively know what "sadness" is. Sadness is the thing you feel when you like, lose a family member. Or have to be separated from a friend. What if my notion of "friend" differs from yours, and I didn't feel anything when we stopped seeing each other? What if a friend often punched me in the arm and face when mildly annoyed at me, and I just laughed because friends aren't people who are mean to you? (I eventually hit him back while grinning because I thought that's just how we have fun... he got very upset, then quiet, then never hit me again... things sure look different when you're not 13 anymore.) My point being, I think being able to communicate emotions with words are just layers upon layers of coordinated reactions, fitted to a range of common experiences (refering to the paired external environmental and internal mental happenings) with enough leeway that most people can pick up the language easily enough. But enough of a deviancy, and you're left locked in your head.

Contrast: I was sent this video by a friend a recent while ago.

If you haven't watched it, seriously, give it a chance.
Preferably in full-screen.
The visual storytelling is on-point.

When I first saw it, the opening scene had me entranced. Then I was bristling. And finally I was crying. And then the video ended. That video hit me like a truck and left me fragmented at first watch. And then I watched it for several more hours as I picked up my own pieces and fit them back together. And I still haven't gotten around to looking at the English lyrics...

Like, hello, clearly I am in-tune with the expressions and emotions. The visual metaphor of the hollowed yet lush chest, yielding a lone, fleeting moth. The bugs and childhood. Splitting yourself, diverging from your inner self to adapt to a hostile and sterilized society. All the entrenched dissonance and hatred, finally cracking and yielding to deliberation. The sudden determination to push oneself through agony in a golden quest to make yourself whole and reborn once again... This shit is so powerful to me that just thinking about it hard while typing makes me sniffle.

There's obvious meanings conveyed through the visual storytelling, but how much did it hit you? Did this run you over and wring you out? Did you see yourself and feel stomped on, torn apart, and scraped back together?

I barely had a chance at accumulating any amount of mainstream culture. On the other hand, I grew up in the shadow of the fandom, uploaded to the internet by old and young furries alike. I understood it. And I chose to learn how to speak it. Fluff escapes my mouth through art: The art that will never be posted under my name because it processes the unspeakable and incoherent. The art that soothes me and puts me back together. And now, the art that deepens my understanding of various stylistic importations and movements within furry, seeking centers to land my voice upon... For me, furry is not any sort of revitalization. It's not a novel synthesis of new ideas, using childhood iconography as its vessel. This is just my native culture. The one that I was steeped in growing up, the one that I understand easiest, the one that hits the hardest with its language and symbols.

Sigh. Ok. I have to explain the furry ketchup porn opener.

I think it's always worth reflecting, who are you? What do you see in yourself and your communities? Why do you feel misunderstood, and where is it coming from...

Even at Caltech, among my peer groups, my social issues continued. When I'm seeking the sensation of "being myself", I often look inwards and find nothing available. I'm part of a great and welcoming community at my school, surrounded with cool and friendly people, and yet I still feel somehow on the outskirts, simultaneously included and excluded. And the more I've introspected, the more I've realized that the nothingness in me is really a wall I've made around how I express myself as a furry. Even though my school circles are totally accepting of it and even find it interesting, they can never really understand. I have always struggled with the words to communicate how my thoughts come out through furry symbology and art, how only furry culture has awakened a sensitivity for feeling, connection, and life in me. Through the lens that they see furry through, a fragment of my humanity is reduced to a quirk or spectacle.

I lean into that angle because we all find it funny. It's refreshing to be reminded of the incomprehensible ways people let their sexuality come through. But at the end of the day, it's all an act of making a caricature of the fandom. Unfortunately, if I want to be genuine, to share an experience that may step beyond comedy, I find myself grasping at rungs that do not exist.

My early involvement with furry may have been characterized as being mostly solitary, yet I did gain a couple close furry friends. These were the friendships that taught me how to cry, how to be thankful, and how to be vulnerable. How to be insecure and seek cover from my own unstable and shifting perceptions of the world. Furry iconography, aesthetics, emic signifiers and [digital] social norms, none of these were ever foreign to me. From the moment I was able to, this has been the manner in which I have tried to socially engage, and I was shunted down this path to an exclusion of others for nonfurry reasons. Furry, to me, despite my forward movements around it and thirst for connection, is not a movement of de-novo cultural synthesis.

I never chose furry as an escape from anything, nor used it to plow and reap from any vast landscape of unmet needs, nor to recover some lost adolescence. There was no personal revitalization of anything — I just grew into it and didn't know any better, nor anything else. Rather than serving a purpose of reinvention and retooling, furry happened to be the media through which I underwent maturation and growth.

Furry simply absorbed me.
I bloomed where I was planted.