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.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    182·
    3 days ago

    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 camps detention 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?
    • lugal@sopuli.xyz
      71·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        6·
        3 days ago

        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.)

        • lugal@sopuli.xyz
          3·
          3 days ago

          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.

    • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      3 days ago

      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.