I’ve found that a good way to check for actual tolerance in a group is how they treat their furries.
Also, the furries make the internet work. plz. I need the furry hacking power in the world.
I think one of the hardest things to overcome for me is that I don’t have to “get it”. As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, who cares? Even if it “makes you uncomfortable”, there are so many situations that might have made you uncomfortable the first time you experienced them - did all of those uncomfortable situations result in something terrible? If not, then we should embrace being uncomfortable as a transitional period that could end in something really cool!
I don’t understand a lot about human physiology and just accepting that other people are different than I am has allowed me to live and let live.
Intolerant of intolerance though, speaking up used to make me uncomfortable but now I almost revel in it. I encourage any future ally to just start speaking up, baby steps at first. “Hey, that’s not cool.” “Well, my relative is gay and they are a great person.”
It’s amazing how often a soft-handed approach like “hey that was a mean thing to say” will make fuckers INSTANTLY back down and do that weak ass “oh i was just joking” backpedal.
And even reconsider long held viewpoints. I work with a classic conservative but in the past 6 years he’s started to come around a little. Me, another genx standard construction worker, having a trans kid and just talking has softened his crusty ass quite a bit. Doubt it’s changed his vote but he wouldn’t openly disrespect my kid now
Specifically being a furry doesn’t hurt anyone, but furry cons are banned from numerous hotels for… Reasons. And that fuels negative stereotypes.
People get built different. We don’t have to figure it out, we just have to respect it.
One of my favorite Adventure Time lines
Everyone has a problem with furries because “it’s sexual” and the usual rebuttal is that not all of it is about sex, but I think this misses the point.
Basically every adult fandom has a sexual element, weebs are the fucking same and no one goes around calling all anime fans perverts. Sexuality is a natural human thing and they have a goddamn right to explore that through their medium. Get to know a furry, they’re just normal fucking people (pun not intended, I’m just Australian).
Beastiality is not a furry thing and should not be lumped into it. Fuck zoophiles.
There’s also a lot of people who will use the abstraction available in furry art/fandom to explore their identity and sexuality, it’s honestly a good space for helping people grow and understand themselves. I’ve known plenty of trans people who’ve only been able to find and accept their being trans through their fursonas. They’re valid as hell and I’ll defend them until I die.
no one goes around calling all anime fans perverts
My buddy. Have you heard of the years 2000 - 2020?
My point is that weebs are considered more acceptable than furries in almost every space, it’s not literal.
“It’s porn!”
“It’s not, but lets talk about your disrespect for porn.”
I’ve found that a good way to check for actual tolerance in a group is how they treat their furries.
Isn’t there a very similar Gandhi quote?
Ghandi was racist and classist despite still being better than the ruling brits.
If there’s a well known Ghandi quote on furries, I need to crossstitch it and frame it.
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
– Mahatma Gandhi
I hope it’s close enough
So I wrote a rant about a month ago (November 18th) about my observations regarding furries as a controversy. Curiously, we got some responses from people who were ready to dismiss furries with language akin to dismissing gays (or dismissing blacks).
Hopefully this link works correctly.
Someone even requested Please don’t compare your love for cartoon animals to being lgbt which smacked to me of please don’t compare your desire to be a girl with my desire to love a man even though the mainstream is uncomfortable with all of these groups and is willing to let the white power movement throw rocks at them, or stuff them into
concentration campsdetention centers. That is why LGBT+ all the other groups united, not because they all like the same stuff, but because they’re all systemically oppressed by the identity politics sects.Anyway, some of the points:\
- Most fur enthusiasts are not furverts (people who like furry and also like kink, but not necessarily together) and yiffers (people who deeply and intensely mix the fur stuff and the sex stuff). And yet, when we think of the furry community, we expect them all be in the yiffing pit rutting like bunnies, when most of them just liked Looney Tunes and Tiny Toon Adventures.
- The most telling moment was conservatives on the news talking about schools having litter boxes in the bathrooms for kids who identify as feline. That’s essentially blood libel for furries, a vicious rumor meant to sow hatred for the group while simultaneously sowing fear of schools that are aware of trans kids and want them to grow up with less trauma. But this indicates that yes, Furries are an at risk minority that the white power movement has on their short-list of enemies-within.
- It’s been observed by reviewers and curators of porn (those who look at a variety of flavors of porn) that furry porn is restricted more than other kinds. VISA (yes, the financial and payment service provider) will not process transactions with porn featuring non-human genitals, which is… strangely specific and an odd threshold delineator for indecency / obscenity. A lot of porn providers won’t consider furry porn content at all, even though in the 1990s there were some pretty famous adult dramas featuring porn that were about anthros.
- The Freefall webcomic (still active since 1998) is a science fiction comic about space culture, robots and science, and features ONE (1) anthro, a genetically engineered wolf, and is regarded as a furry comic, and has been excluded from Wikipedia due to lack of notoriety (It has a very large if nerdy following.) I guess because we sometimes like to label things based on first impressions?
TIL Star Trek Lower Decks is a furry show. It’s still my favourite of the new stuff.
porn featuring non-human genitals
That’s where you lost me. It’s not strangely specific but about animal and bestiality (to differentiate the act from the zoophile preference). Pretty sure they have other restrictions as well (violence, minors, …)
Furries on the other hand are – at the end of the day – humans (with human genitals). To be clear: I’m explicitly not equating furry with bestiality. I’m not even equating zoophilia with bestiality because I don’t think everyone acts on these feelings. I’m just confused why you are offended that porn including animals is prohibited when furries are humans. I’m not sure what anthros are tho.
Anthros are characters that are somewhere between a given animal and human.
But to me this raises an interesting supposition:
Narnia features animals with human intellects, such as Phillip, the horse or Mr. and Mrs. Beaver who were part of the underground railroad and contacts for the resistance. And there was Mr. Fox who they wouldn’t fully trust because he was related too closely to the White Witch’s wolves.
Now imagine someone were to write a Narnia fanfic about a romance between a beaver and a fox. It’s quite dramatic, since the Beaver clan is social conservative as it is, and think folk should keep to their species, and foxes wily like coyotes and can’t be trusted. But the beaver girl loves her foxy beau and he seems to reciprocate despite any dispositions otherwise, and the couple considers eloping.
Is that bestiality, or rather is it wrong the way bestiality is wrong?
If not, then its not the genitalia that are the problem, its the capacity to give informed consent.
(Not that US society believes in informed consent regarding anything non-sexual such as large purchases, leases or political decisions, but that’s a different rant.)
I can answer you on more than one level so why wouldn’t I.
First let me apprecheate how fleshed out your example is! You could have kept it simple but you did a great job.
In universe, this wouldn’t be anything like beastiality but more like mixed race or same sex couples. Totally fine and none of their business.
Out of universe it is a bit more complicated. Sure, giving consent is important, but there are things that are in real life beyond consent and you would normalize them by creating a universe where consent is possible if that makes sense. You can always say “he killed her but she will be reborn and they had a safe word” or “she has the body of a child but the mind of an old woman so she could give consent”. Iirc this normalizing effect is the reason, even in drawn or written form, depicting sex with minors is illegal.
So is your fanfic about the romance of a beaver and a fox normalizing sex between humans and animals? Is it an allegory for mixed race or enemy families? Is it a furry fantasy? I would say in most cases, it’s one of the latter and therefore not a problem. If the genitalias are too explicitly non human, maybe it’s the first.
About anthros: If they are between humans and animals, I assume they have human genitalia and therefore not part of the rule. You could argue they aren’t fully human and therefore do not have human genitalia even tho they look the same, but than this applies to elves, vulcans, (olympic) gods, …
If the rule is interpreted arbitarrily in this unnecessarily strict sense, I would give you “not actively discriminated against but forgotten” which is bad enough and reading the rule that way is active discrimination, but not on the side of the people who wrote the rule but by those you enact it. I hope I’m making sense. I donated halve a liter of blood today so I blame anything on that.
I read and loved Freefall, and specifically Florence. After I caught up, I went to read what other people had to say, and I saw a comment like “must-read if you’re a furry!”
At first I was like “psh, that’s not a furry comic”. But about an hour later the dominoes started to fall for me.
I legitimately don’t understand this?
Is this about exluding trans people who are also furries from trans spaces/definitions/whatevers simply bc of the fact they are furries?
H- how does that even work? like what mental gymnastics are necessary for that?!
Lotta people think furries are “cringe” and want to assimilate into cis het society by rejecting anything that doesn’t look like traditional roles and presentation.
Its shit. Furries harm no one for being furry.
Spesifically I made this meme due to some commenters not wanting to respect neo-pronouns. I understood the pronouns as somewhat furry, and thought of the case of furry tolerance (a convo I’ve had with some friends.)
the reason for dismissing both furries and the spesific neo-pronouns seem to be the same; that it’s seen as very sexual
Probably some trans people disliking furries. It’s like how some lesbians don’t like trans-women because they’re not “real women”.
hmmm, but isn’t this different even to that?
FARTs (feminism appropriating radical transphobes) use mental gymnastics to deny trans women their “womanhood”.
These mental gymnastics seem (from my pov) pretty “basic” when compared to the hoops you’d have to jump through to deny trans people their “transness” with the goal of excluding them simply bc they are also furries.
And more generally “just” excluding furries from trans (or queer) spaces (f.e. for their supposed “indecency”) makes as much sense as “banning” the kink & BDSM communities from pride, ie. NONE at all
(not comparing the two in terms of nature/“content” but rather significance/impact)Fart = Terf?
a more fitting acronym, yes
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It’s the “othering” that I think is being talked about, not sexual preference. You’re right that being a furry is not a sexual preference (though I know there’s a ton of porn related to it).
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… Okay?
Naw, the true test of tolerance is juggalos.
Oi! Don’t make me put down my Faygo and WHOOP WHOOP your ass!
(/s?)
I believe in Absolute Mutual Sovereignty, which is my own term meaning there is no inherent right to impose ones will on others. I don’t force others to anything and nor do I accept others forcing me to anything.
When someone has a selfimage, who am I to say what it can or can’t be? I view it as inherently immoral to try to coerce other beings to have specific selfimages. It doesn’t even cross my mind that a certain being should view itself with the identity I choose for it; and to then push that identity on it OVER ITS OWN is an obvious violation of what I believe are it’s basic rights over itself.
The violation part is why I am intolerant of intolerant people. I feel I am defending a being’s right to choose their own things about themself from someone(s) who is reaching beyond themself to try to impose their will on someone who does not want it. One is specifically a victim in need of defense and the other is specifically an aggressor doing something immoral.
And so beyond purely ‘not overreaching to force others’, there are levels of good someone may be. If someone identifies with specific pronouns, I can go out of my way to make sure I do them correctly (and remind others). This isn’t just ‘allowing them to be themself without pushback’; it is empowerment; helping them be who they identify as.
Aka forcing others and bending them to ones own perception of reality is the worst and violates their personal freedom. ‘Not trying to push anything on them’ is morally acceptable but niether bad nor good. And then actively empowering the being to be who it wants is a good thing toward them, morally good, and builds up ones environment by raising the entities that make it up.
just my belief system. enjoy :)
im an intolerant person because im not tolerant of intolerant people
I mean that’s just the “paradox of tolarence” solved issue. we ain’t tolerant of intolerance
I read a decent rebuttal to the “paradox” of tolerance. To summarize for those that don’t know, the idea is that tolerance is a social contract. You tolerate everyone that’s behaving according to the contract. Refusing to tolerate someone that has broken the contract isn’t a violation of the contract; it’s required in order to enforce the contract.
You break the rules, you lose the protections. Simple as.
My retort to the tolerance paradox is to say “L, deal with it” to bigots who bring it up as a gotcha.
Single swing batman is unsatisfying.
- Furry Music is really something different.
Lapfoxtrax for example is delicious …
