Those People
2006-06-05 22:39![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chipotleI’ve referred more than once to Ted Sturgeon’s original “Revelation,” the one where the famous “ninety percent of everything is crud” maxim came from. Sturgeon wrote at the time that the revelation “was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition.”
Furry Fandom is twenty years old now (at least), and my involvement in it runs nearly two decades. I, sir, am no Ted Sturgeon, but I sure am weary of the attacks. I am tired of being told that furry fandom sucks now and that it’s at least indirectly my fault. And, yes, even though that’s never the way it’s put, when the argument follows the basic framework of the fandom is full of problems and nobody in the fandom will lift a finger to solve them, I take it a little personally. That’s framed as an indictment of everyone.
Those People
The problems the critics rattle off vary, but only on the surface. Perhaps the argument is that some things at furry cons (or on web sites or in fanzines) just aren’t furry and have no business being there at all. Or that those things are okay, but they should be kept behind closed doors where only people who already know they exist can find them. In all variants, the case is essentially being made that the visible presence of some things in furry fandom taints everyone associated with it.
A wretched hive of scum and villainy
Imagine that fifty people visit Cabo San Lucas, the Baja resort town. Some of them have great times; most have good times; some aren’t too impressed. One of them, though, comes back with horror stories. The hotel lost his reservation and he ended up in a roach-infested dump. Somebody stole his credit card. A drunk threw up on his $200 shoes. And nobody who should have taken responsibility for helping him would.
Suppose now our tourist is a guy who’s more suited to a weekend in Branson, Missouri than a week partying in the tequila clubs with Sammy Hagar groupies. Everything may go absolutely “right” for him and his time will still be terrible. If anything, he’ll be more inclined to tell people how terrible Cabo was for him, because it’s not just a string of bad luck combined with rude people—it’s a moral failing.
That fiftieth guy isn’t going to be interested in hearing from the other forty-nine, and he sure doesn’t want to hear from people who’ve been there a dozen times and each time it got more and more fantastic. Even if everybody else thought it was a virtual paradise, for him it was Mos Eisley without the cool band.
Furry conventions are not Cabo San Lucas. For starters, they’re much lighter on both the Sammy Hagar groupies and the margaritas. But while we don’t know what the proportions are, it’s safe to say that every furry con has its share of Mister Fifties there. They had a terrible time, they want you to know about it—and they’re not wrong. They did have a terrible time.
So let’s talk about furry cons.
Furry fan and furry con-goer are two separate and distinct ideas, but most of the arguments I’ve seen about furry fandom’s presumed wretchedness stem from the cons. Here’s some common charges:
- Individual acts of rudeness at conventions
- Open advertising for fetish-focused room parties at cons
- “Furry” has gathered a lot of undesirable, non-furry baggage
Let’s start with the last one.
Furry is as furry does
You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
— Col. Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now
This has a simple and true premise at its base: to be meaningful, definitions require boundaries. As long as both you and I can distinguish full-spectrum light, we can tell whether one thing is orange and one thing is blue. We may disagree on just where orange ends and yellow and red begin, but there’s a wide swath of colors we should both agree are in the “not orange” category; if we can’t do that, we can’t talk effectively about color at all. Likewise, not everyone in furrydom needs to agree on precise boundaries for “furry,” but most need to be able to fairly easily say what isn’t furry, or the term becomes meaningless. Disney’s “Robin Hood” is generally accepted to be a furry movie; “Shrek” may or may not be depending on how many points you give for the talking donkey. Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” is definitively not.
But if everyone in “Annie Hall” had been anthropomorphic animals—a romance between a neurotic comedian squirrel, perhaps, and a spaced-out gray cat—and everything else remained the same, from story to location to dialogue delivery, it’d be furry, fully in the same “slice of life” vein as some of the seminal furry comics like Omaha and Hepcats.¹
This is the shoal upon which the “furry purity” argument always runs aground. Simply put, furry is an adjective, and none of us get to dictate what nouns are and are not appropriate for modification.
I happen to like giants; I always have. I’m also a furry fan. Not too surprisingly, I’ve come up with anthropomorphic animal characters who are also giants. It would be ridiculous for me to suggest that to be a furry fan you also have to like giants. It would be no less ridiculous, though, to suggest that I need to keep my connection of the two absolutely hidden because to not do so would be to somehow force my concept of what furry is on an unwilling fannish populace.
It’s natural for people to make these combinations, to do pop culture hybrids. Electric guitars and delta blues. Space travel and westerns. Your chocolate is in my peanut butter pretty routinely. Nobody seriously worries that these are “contaminations” that leave one or both originals impure. What’s different about furry? Well, if I went out on a limb, I might guess it’s the difference between these two posters:
|
ROOM PARTY Furry Ham Radio 9:00, Room 315 |
ROOM PARTY Furry Diaper 9:00, Room 315 |
I’m going to bet that despite the fact that neither of those things have anything canonically “furry” about them, the one on the left wouldn’t be cause for this discussion.
It becomes clear the argument doesn’t rest on any property of “furry” at all. It rests on the proposition that if what comes after furry is sufficiently disturbing, it somehow magically reverses the role of adjective and noun. By not actively stopping diaper fetishists from making us aware that they’re among us, all furry fans will be tainted.
It’s an argument which has a nice emotional ring to it, but there’s very little evidence that it holds water. If you ask most people what a “furry” is, if they have an answer at all, it’s going to involve people who get together and dress up as animals. Maybe they’ll think sex is involved, maybe they won’t, but they’re not much more likely to think about diapers than they are about ham radio operators. The internal foibles of furry fandom by and large remain internal.
Furthermore, what’s the responsibility a con is supposed to have for unofficial activities there? Anthrocon has been known to request party hosters to alter posters to not make the focus of kinks obvious, but that’s about the farthest I’ve heard a con go in that direction, and the parties are still advertised. On the flip side, I’ve rarely heard of an advertised party actually participating in anything that would embarass the con. It may be a group of people who enjoy fantasizing about latex-covered rabbit hermaphrodites in handcuffs, but they’re still just sitting around a hotel room drinking soda and eating Doritos. They may be passing around eyebrow-singing artwork, but that’s about it. (I’ve heard of private parties at cons in which a lot more happens, but they are, indeed, private parties.)
Outrage via outlier
The “individual acts of rudeness” I mentioned before are a less subjective argument. Anyone who’s been in the fandom for a while has heard stories of unpleasant things happening, and sometimes first-hand from friends. Of course, we also tend to hear of much more significant nastiness than anyone we actually know has experienced. People just know it happened. You’ve heard these stories, too, right? They end with:
- “…and there was semen all over the elevator walls!”
- “…and there were dirty diapers in the con suite!”
- “…and when he came to, ‘Welcome to AIDS’ was written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror!”
Even if we grant the veracity of these stories, their value is predicated on accepting those cases as representative of the normal experience, rather than a worst case experience. But what reason do we really have to think they are representative?
We routinely hear about outrageous lawsuit verdicts; these stories have been used to fashion a narrative: lawsuits are out of control! But you’ll notice that the stories don’t tell you how many lawsuits of their kind are brought annually in the country; how many ever go to trial; how many end in any awarded damages; what the median damage award is; how many have punitive damages associated with them rather than merely compensatory; how the rate of lawsuits per capita now compares to the rate fifty years ago, or two hundred years ago; and even whether the outrage of the moment, if it’s a real case at all (many of the most popular ones circulating on the internet are not), was eventually dismissed.
Why do we assume these stories are about lawsuits that represent the median? There are tens of thousands of product liability lawsuits filed annually; we’re not hearing about 99.99% of them because they aren’t outrageous. As Barbara Mikkelson of the Urban Legends Reference Pages commented, “One has to wonder why someone is so busy trying to stir up outrage and who or what that outrage would ultimately benefit.”
This is what’s known as outlying data, and it’s what Ted Sturgeon was complaining about when he talked about critics using the “worst examples of the field for ammunition.” While we can’t pretend that all science fiction is Childhood’s End, we shouldn’t stand for anyone telling us that it’s all Battlefield Earth, either.
In a furry convention of a thousand people or more, there’s going to be dozens of people who probably had a bad time. It’s not going to be too difficult to find other people who had bad experiences, particularly if you post yours and open it up for comments. (Everybody likes the opportunity to complain.) Furthermore, when it comes to things we don’t like that are more subjective, our friends (and friendly acquaintances) are not a random sample of unbiased observers—they’re people who, more often than not, share likes and dislikes with us.
But the con cannot realistically be blamed for the person who propositions your seeing-eye dog, or dry-humps your leg in the hallway. They can tell people not to do it again, but that’s about it. The problem with people like that is not that they’re furries, it’s that they’re morons, and morons cannot be addressed proactively.
When you hear about these stories, there’s a couple things to keep in mind. Unless they have names, locations and dates attached with them, they’re by definition unverifiable data. And any con that was really routinely that much of a horror show would not be a con that could sustain itself. (Assuming that it’s merely everyone you’ve talked to who finds that horrifying and everyone you haven’t talked to would find it just hunky-dory doesn’t make much sense.)
“Guy goes to furry con and has reasonably good time” is not a very interesting story. It’s not going to be told and retold; it won’t be used as proof of anything; it certainly won’t be the basis of an article in your local alternative weekly. It is, however, by far the most common story.
Just wear this scarlet “F,” please
Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling going on in here!
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Renault: Thank you very much.
— From “Casablanca” (1942)
Okay. We know what the real problem here is. The problem is Those People.
Those People won’t keep their kinks in the closet. Those People are attracting the negative media attention to furry. Those People are scaring away newcomers by making them think they have to accept weird kinks in order to be furry. Those People are ruining the fandom, and if you don’t see that, you’re ruining it, too.
Well, let’s break that down. For this to really hold much water, Those People must be a relatively new phenonemon in the fandom. There are certain logical assumptions that stem from that: fans who entered furry fandom in the late ’80s and early ’90s had gentle, non-explicit introductions. Nobody entering the fandom early on ever complained about feeling pressure to draw, like or roleplay erotica. There was neither perception nor promotion of furry fans as being considerably more “sexually open” than other fandoms.
If you did, in fact, enter furry fandom during that time frame, please stop laughing. Take a few deep breaths. I’ll wait.
Ready to go on? Okay.
Look. Furry fandom owes its existence in no small part to “Omaha the Cat-Dancer,” the exotic dancer who first appeared in an underground comic book called Bizarre Sex. Furry fandom has a reputation for a fixation on erotic cartoon animal art because, well, it’s true.² Our first fanzine was called FurVersion, and the name was chosen to play off the reputation the fandom already had in 1987. We’ve been making people within the fandom and without feel uncomfortable for two decades, and any argument which fails to account for that is on rather thin ice. Don’t associate me with all that latex and handcuff stuff—just explicit sex between animal people for me, thank you very much!
But actually the ice is even thinner than that: our own collective experience suggests that, in fact, the vast majority of fans do know how to draw the very distinctions being argued that they can’t. I may love “Usagi Yojimbo” and you may despise all comics; I may love Kyoht’s artwork and hate Michele Light pinups and you may think I have it exactly backwards. And, I may love giants and you may love inflatable unicorns. Yet, nearly all of us seem to be able to love what we do without assigning them a universal mandate: none of us says you must love Kyoht or Michele Light or giants or balloon critters to be a furry.
Clearly, newcomers are not being scared away from the fandom. By any numerical measure, the fandom is bigger and stronger than it ever has been. Are there people driven away because they really do find the kinks a little too in-your-face? Undoubtedly. Is that new? No, absolutely not.
While responding to the histrionic cries of the perverts have taken over with an acerbic the perverts have always been here is tempting, the part that the histrionics never quite address is the part that really disturbs me: if we granted all those points, what exactly is being proposed as a solution? Because there’s no action I can see other than letting some people decide what is and isn’t “properly” furry, and taking steps to purge the fandom of everything that isn’t deemed to qualify.
And if you think that’s a good idea, you’d better think long and hard on whether you’re Those People to someone else.
If it weren’t for you meddling kids
Accept certain inalienable truths. Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.
— Mary Schmich
In the final analysis, furry has always been—and I think must be—self-selecting. There are big name fans, there are convention organizers, there are popular artists, but ultimately there are neither arbiters nor gatekeepers. There has never been a Furry Handbook, defining what is and isn’t Fannishly Correct. Regardless of what the general consensus among everyone we know might be about “what furry is,” what makes somebody a furry fan is the act of them declaring they’re a furry fan.
Yet if self-definition is necessary, change is unavoidable. And the major force of change in the fandom is this discussion’s (anthropomorphic) elephant in the room. Furry is not, repeat, not being harmed by the gays, or the macrophiles, or the plushies. And it isn’t remotely threatened by news coverage, Something Awful, or even Jerry Bruckheimer.
But furry fandom is now old enough to have a generation gap.
About five years back, David Rust did a study that suggested most furry fans were aged 18-26 and had been in the fandom for five or six years. Based on my more anecdotal observations over the last few years, if he did that study again now, the median age—roughly 22—wouldn’t change. If you are in your late thirties or older, there are people in the fandom now who are young enough to be your children but old enough to get into a convention’s adult art show.
Trendwise, they’re politically a little more conservative, and socially a little more liberal. They grew up online. They don’t really remember Archie or Gopher, let alone CompuServe. Pen and paper roleplaying is an anachronism. And when they found furry fandom, it wasn’t via underground comics and novels and stories, but rather the great unmediated data hose of the World Wide Web: art archives and story pages and newsgroups and mailing lists. For that matter, from Vanity Fair and MTV and CSI. I’ve heard of more than one furry fan who was introduced to the fandom by Something Awful.
If you actually look at the shifts in the fandom over the past decade or so, you’ll see these trends:
- An order of magnitude (at least!) of new fans
- Many more conventions
- A much higher emphasis on costuming
- A shift in art away from pinups toward quasi-realism
- Cross-pollination with therianthrope spiritualists
- More “by fans for fans” creation
- A better market for furry-focused art and publishing
Not everyone will agree whether each of those trends is good, bad or indifferent. For my part, I have little interest in costuming; I’ve always liked magic realism and urban fantasy, so the shift in the art and the interest in Native American spirituality is fascinating; and while the better market is a direct result of having so many self-identified furries that it’s become a viable market, I’m concerned about how that’s led toward an insularity in the art and writing. But I think it’s hard not to conclude that all the trends show a pretty vibrant community.
But I meant “skunkf––ker” in an affectionate way
I’ve been reading “fandom has gone to hell in a handbasket” articles for many years now, so I’ve tried not to write this in a way which responds to specific details. It’s very easy for a critic to generate a list of little horrors at a con, for instance, that would make somebody not want to attend. One con I went to had drunken assaults by the con suite, damage from paintball guns on one floor, and reports of sexual harrassment.
It was not, mind you, a furry con.
Nearly all of my genuinely bad experiences at science fiction conventions, in fact, were at non-furry happenings. Is that reason not to go to cons at all? Not for me, but others might make that choice, and I wouldn’t blame them. Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with choosing not to go to furry cons if you did have a bad time, or even if you’re just worried that you will. Maybe you’re making the right decision for you, and maybe you’re being hypersensitive, but either way it’s your business. Nobody else has any grounds for harrassing you over it.
On the other hand, if you insist that it’s your obligation, your duty, to explain in no uncertain terms that you’re leaving because furry fandom has been absolutely ruined by Those People, it is not unreasonable to expect dissenting responses. Whether you should expect flames depends less on content than on phrasing.
I’m not offended by someone telling me they’re Leaving The Fandom Forever, even if I may not agree with their rationale. If, however, they’re hurling epithets at Those People and—either by proxy or direct aim—at the vast majority of fans who just don’t get too worked up about the presence of Those People, they’re going to create much more heat than light.
At times, there seems to be a misperception that speaking stridently and being openly contemptuous of one’s adversaries is an effective way to add emphasis to an argument; in practice, it just makes people who don’t agree with the argument before they start reading to come away with the impression the author is being a jerk for no good reason.
And, of course, the downward spiral from there is eminently predictable. It takes only one person to response with oh yeah? I can see your ‘to hell with you all’ and raise you a ‘fuck you and the horse you rode in on’ for things to get much, much uglier very fast.
It ain’t rural anymore, but maybe suburbia ain’t so bad
Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.
— Tom Lehrer
Furry fandom is not the same as it was twenty years ago. There are people I miss, publications I miss, and the small family feeling that once existed is long gone. The convention sketchbook has changed from a free exchange between fans to a side business for artists. Art show quality—and prices—have skyrocketed.
But you know, most of what brought me to furrydom in the late 1980s is still here, too. There’s still good art and good writing, and there are still good people to talk to online and at conventions. I’ve lost friends over the years, but I’ve gained others.
And really, I don’t think my experience is so unusual that other people couldn’t have it, too, if they chose to. This does require them to be willing to look the other way when they see things they don’t enjoy, and to be willing to simply say, “No, that’s nothing I’m interested in” if by chance the question comes up.
It is not, in the final analysis, that onerous a burden. If you put even modest effort into doing what you like, after all, you’ll likely find you just don’t have that much time for things you don’t.
1. There would, of course, be pedants pointing out that a furry Annie Hall wouldn’t be exploiting furry concepts very much, but you get the idea.
2. This is not an argument that furry fandom doesn’t have a lot more to it; I’ve been trying to push the “furry can be literature” meme for years, after all, and I firmly believe it to be true.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 06:15 (UTC)I learned about furry fandom from a salacious article in Wired. I got here in 1994 and the "it was better five years ago" thing was all over the place then too. The consensus wisdom was CF4 was as good as it got and when people started putting their MUCK names on con badges it was all downhill from there.
Same as it ever was. The only difference I can detect now is that there's other topics for artwork beyond big breasted husky and fox girls with accurately rendered assault weapons and Soviet military uniforms on, which was pretty much all anyone drew when I got here.
If I may append...
Date: 2006-06-06 08:17 (UTC)*shrug*
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 09:04 (UTC)I think that remembering the past is important, and it's sad that some things, like fanzines, are going away. But there's no use dwelling on the glorious achievements of yore if that causes you to neglect the pleasures of the present, or prevents you from looking forward to the marvels of the future.
For example, nowadays any skilled artist can upload to Yerf, SheezyArt or the VCL and immediately gain a fan audience - no waiting months or years for an open slot in Rowrbrazzle (http://furry.wikia.com/wiki/Rowrbrazzle). Ten years ago, you might have to travel halfway across the continent to meet significant numbers of fellow fans for the first time - now you can just drop into your local convention (although there's still a way to go on that front, particularly overseas). Today there is a focus on costuming in part because there can be. How many dedicated fursuit-makers were there twenty years ago - or ten, or even five? In another twenty years, will we be wagging our very own tails? I can't wait to see.
As Gene says, all communities have had their mythical golden age where things were perfect, or at least close to it. As young* as I am, I've seen this cycle run several times elsewhere, and I'm firmly convinced that the best thing to do is to make today a golden age for those that are here now, and for those who join us every day. Then, when our golden age has passed, at least we can say "Yes, I was there . . ."
* Only just above the median!
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 09:37 (UTC)Like many other fans I've been puzzled by many years by the problems you have covered very well in the essay. But now I get the impression that all this silly harassing is a product of internet culture more than it has to do with reality. To understand what I mean I'd mention this thread on a forum which is renowned for actively promoting a bad view of the fandom:
http://www.crushyiffdestroy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1974
In short, in such thread it emerges that most people in the forum are actually furry themselves, and many into several fetishes as well. In fact, some of the people who belived more sincerely in the bashing of furry fandom's "dark" side (like M. Estrugo) left the forum after this thread. For those who do not know CYD, most of the people there claim exactly that the fandom is in ruin because of Those People. Some people actually become furry fans thanks to sites like CYD or SA, and this is the other side of the same coin.
The essential explaination from the thread:
"The difference, as I see it, is that I don't define myself by the fact that I'm a Poképerv. That's just one thing about me that I'm only going to admit among people who wouldn't mind knowing, and either with relative anonymity or to close friends only. What furries do is that they define themselves by their weird fetishes and stuff, and they go around telling everyone who doesn't want to know."
Now I don't think this nonsense is a matter of hypocrisy or stupidity of such people. The point is that in life it is normal to mock and get mocked. Few people have never been mocked by friends for doing something silly or wishing something unusual. It's a normal mechanic of human sociality, and it leads to some "natural selection" of people who have a true motivation I'd say. It is the very origin of comedy and satyre.
But on internet, communication is very different. Written things, unlike words, remain. And thus IMHO this kind of mocking, in all the forms it has, from angry con reports to laughing at bad taste artwork, is blown out of proportion by both sides, without either side realizing it. Fans feel persecuted whereas the mocking is all nonsense born out of boredom; critics feel they hit the spot because a few immature people react badly to their mocking. Since such reactions are visible, written, permanent and easily spread for others to read, they lead more fans to feel persecuted as if the mocking was directed at them personally. Which in turn leads to more mocking, in a vicious circle.
But it's all nothing being built over nothing. The result: people feel that an episode of a fiction show is making their quality of life worse. I hope I'm not the only one to think it is silly. Are people afraid of fiction which falls so short on ideas that they have to draw ideas from internet trolling? Afraid of articles in magazines which gather on purpose the silliest sides of the net?
I am sure that ten years from now some fans will be thinking back at it and hardly belive they could feel bad for such inconsistent reasons. I just hope that not too many of them will be former artists thinking that they could have done much better art wouldn't they waste time over that - but indeed I fear many of them will be. I just hope that younger artists and some of the old guard will have learned to ignore the quagmire of furry fandom's image and just work to get better.
I don't write this to detract from your essay's purpose. I fully agree in fact. But the words I'd also like to read somewhere are "it's time to put the fandom image issue aside and focus on making better art". Ultimately it is the only thing which has a chance of giving the fandom a new image; flames and mocking, being fed by boredom, will rage on forever. Counter-arguments are actually the best way to feed them, this is what people really need to realize IMHO.
>Furry fandom is not the same as it was twenty years ago. There are people I miss, publications I miss, and the small family feeling that once existed is long gone.<
In spite of having seen the fandom only through the internet, I do understand. I swear that still ten years ago such a feeling could be felt through the internet as well...
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 12:55 (UTC)Anime conventions flaunt their sexuality. The terms "hentai" and "yaoi" appear all over their programming schedules. You can hardly go to an anime site without finding some tentacles somewhere. Yet, Anime Fandom doesn't seem to have any stigma about that. There are no CSI episodes or Vanity Fair articles that draw attention to the more visceral side. The media covers their conventions and never once makes mention of the hairy men in sailor costumes.
Yet, if a person makes an offhand comment at a furry convention about his closed-door activities in fursuit, the media swarms all over the convention and starts sniffing around for any dirt they can dig up.
Why? What are we doing wrong?
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 13:52 (UTC)It also doesn't hurt to have people as cool as John Lassiter come out and say how much the stuff rocks. =};-3
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 14:17 (UTC)I think what makes the oddities in furry fandom so easy to react to is the firm base in OUR culture.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 14:20 (UTC)Also, when it comes to anime, they have something furry fans don't: money, which is a story most American journalists readily understand. This is something I kept trying to get across, with no success, to somebody on the "Dignified Furry" mailing list who was accusing furry fandom of being a failure compared to anime because, in the last 20 years, anime has become mainstream and furry hasn't. True, but it has nothing to do with furry being perceived as perverted and a lot to do with anime being a multi-million dollar business. I'm being only partly facetious by suggesting the real solution to furry fandom's image problem is a successful feature film based on "Xanadu" or "Albedo."
Something to Point To
Date: 2006-06-06 14:40 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 14:51 (UTC)Most people won't get it... Especially those that need to.
But, we get it and it was a delightful read. I don't think I have ever seen you use the sardonic, lightly comedic style before. I'll have to admit that my focus on the content was a little distracted by my enjoyment of the style.
I'll throw two thoughts into the mix:
1) It is no fun at all poking a tiger with a stick if he looks at you, sighs, and lays back down. Gets boring really fast. The furry fandom is, in part, so much fun to rile up because we GET riled up -- in far greater numbers than most fannish groups. This is in part because of the great strength AND failing that is the "We are all furries and we stick together." mindset which many benighted souls ascribe to.
2) Most of the verified "bad experience" stories I have heard about furry cons have had nothing really furry about them. (And in recent years, thanks to the responsible attitude most cons have adopted, happen either off-site or in areas of the hotel impossible to police properly.) They are, as you point out, about people behaving in a way that would be bad regardless of their fandom affiliation.
Some of this comes from having taken the solidarity I noted in #1 a bit too far for too many years and extending it to situations it doesn't belong. It is okay (and wonderful) to stick up for a fellow fan when he/she is being attacked for something they believe. But, it should also be okay to, with sensitivity, point out to a person when they are crossing a line you don't want crossed -- whatever that line may be. (And this is true about all of society, really...)
The fandom is, to a certain extent, a wonderfully supportive and welcoming club that invites newcomers and maybe even expands their horizons a little. (I know it did with me.) It allows a lot of people to get together, share some common things, and seek out those who share less-than-common things as well. (Does furry fandom need a hanky code?) At the same time, to interact with any large group of people, there has to be some give from both sides. As a very personal-space-and-privacy sensitive New Englander I have had to make some adjustments. At the same time, I have a right to ask for a certain level of respect for my nature in return -- the same level I ask of co-workers and people sitting next to me on airplanes.
And finally...
It may be a group of people who enjoy fantasizing about latex-covered rabbit hermaphrodites in handcuffs, but they’re still just sitting around a hotel room drinking soda and eating Doritos.
This is brilliant! :P
Not the internet
Date: 2006-06-06 15:34 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 16:14 (UTC)And there was an unexpectedly high amount of military and pseudo-military stuff in furry art, wasn't there? There's probably a fannish history article in that somewhere. (Or a psychology article.)
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 16:20 (UTC)One of the results, which fuels the downward spiral, is that it turns into a giant game of telephone: each person who nexts happens upon a piece of e-mockery and who is further removed from the original moment of inspiration and context, distorts it further, belabors it with their own assumptions and bias, and then in a lot of cases shoots it off again, now mutated into an increasingly monsterous form.
Thus, one person says a bad thing about someone else one time, in one place.
And it's entirely possible, and even likely, that 2 years later, that one statement has become the basis of a 5,000 entry blogline by hundreds or thousands of people who don't know or care about the original context. It doesn't help that in recent years, a virulent online culture has developed which is based around the concept that the Internet is "one big joke" for bored IT geeks and cyberjocks to kill time with. These people are the furthest away from realizing the problems that result from thoughtless e-mockery, because if they did stop to considere that, it might present the danger of ruining the game and their own passtime.
A lot of people "overreact" to such mockery, it's undoubtably true. They do contribute to the viscious cycle of blowing it out of proportion - but the root of the problem is damnably symboitic. How could a lot of people not be expected to overreact when face with such outrageous circumstances that they usually don't have to deal with in real life, unless they're one of a handful of celebrities. In ordinary life, most people never have to learn how to deal with insanity like this - so they're open and vunerable to being manipulated by such forces when they get on the Internet.
Even the people on the "aggressive" side, those who are the bored wannabe critics that fling flames and insults to see what gets a reaction, don't know how to deal with it either - as one expert troller said when giving advice on how to counter-troll: those guys have skin just as thin. Find out some sensitive detail about themselves and rip into it, and they'll run around screaming bloody murder.
"It's time to put the fandom image aside and focus on making better art."
And at the end of the day, yes, this is true. One truth of the world isn't just that someone is always going to mock you. It's that somewhere, not just one, but a lot of people are going to dislike you no matter what you do. They likely will even hate you. Many of them may want to kill you. It doesn't matter why, really; be it for your associations, your nation of origin, your beliefs, your politics. Right now, a significant number of people, somewhere in the world, most likely want to hurt you and make you dead for whatever reason.
This is a valuable lesson in perspective that perhaps more people need to learn. Maybe it sucks, maybe it's part of what's still "wrong" with the human race and planet Earth. But ultimately you have two choices. Crawl into a hole and hide. Or just get on with things.
A bonus point, however: crawling into a hole and hiding is, pretty much, what any and everyone who hates you desires. Getting on with things in spite of their best efforts to psionically murder you with Bad Brainwaves is exactly what drives them up the wall.
Put another way, as someone once said relating to furry fandom: the best thing about being a furry fan is that you don't have to do a single damn thing to get to stupid people who hate you for ignorant and stupid reasons. Just do your own thing, and they'll keep jumping up and down and foaming. And making themselves look increasingly idiotic in the process.
Living well is, indeed, the best revenge.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 16:30 (UTC)As for focusing on making better art, that's an argument I've made at various points for a while, yes. We can't, as a practical matter, really muzzle people we personally find "embarrassing," and we can't control how either the mainstream media reports on furrydom, or what people with axes to grind like the CYD crew say and do. The one thing we *can* do is create stories, art and comics that are worthy of showing off.
A question of scale
Date: 2006-06-06 16:46 (UTC)The first and perhaps the hardest to swallow is the fact that at least from what I can tell, by and large the anime fandom embraces its outliers, and we castigate ours. I am admittedly speaking as an outsider here, but anime generally just says "yes we're all weird here" and goes about its business, and anyone sniffing around for a sensationalist story is going to have a hard time getting a good reaction out of folks who are positive and upbeat about their weirdness. Furries, however, seem much more willing to push their ideas away in the closets and thus give the media a reason and motive to poking around for dirty laundry. It's a bit like the conundrum of transition, to steal from an element of my own life. As long as I acted nervous and ashamed of my presentation in public, people noticed and paid undue attention to me. When I quit caring what other people thought and just went about my business, so did they. I quit being newsworthy when I quit thinking of myself as newsworthy.
Beyond that, I think the reason we're so sensitive to our adult content is what I can only call the Disney motive: "talking animals are for kids". Remember Black Cauldron? Disney tries to pretend it doesn't either. Why did it fail? Because they marketed an adult cartoon to people who were expecting something that was kid-friendly, on the grounds that Disney wouldn't release a cartoon if it weren't for kids. Likewise, the general public's impression of furries seems to be "something for small children to watch" and they're horrified to discover that people are drawing foxes with cocks in crocs' boxes. This seems to be a catch-22 situation. We're not going to be able to overcome the "for-children" label until... we've overcome it. Anime, on the other hand, is "for adults" or at least it was for so long that people got used to thinking of the anime fandom as something adult-oriented, and thus the weird parts of the fandom don't really register because it's all "consenting adults".
This isn't to say that anime is immune to the Disney effect. Ask Jaded some time about the family bringing their four-year-old son to Princess Mononoke in the theater. "It's a cartoon," they said. "It's got to be kid-safe." They were in the hall demanding refunds from the managers ten minutes later. This, however, seems to be the exception, not the rule.
So what are we doing wrong? If there's anything we're doing that's "wrong" or that we can "fix", I would think it'd be our perpetuation of a misguided stereotype: the idea of furry as kid-safe. The real problem seems to be that there's a line drawn in society between "kid-safe" and "kid-unsafe", and nothing may exist on both sides of the line. If it's something kids can like, then it has to be G-rated. If it's something for adults, then be as explicit as you want but by Dobbs don't appeal to kids. Furries are aimed at kids. Anime is aimed at adults. When anime crosses into the kid-safe arena by letting Disney market it, it gets burned.
Really, I think we're caught in a trap of a previous generation's accidental creation. People think furries are for kids. If we create furries that aren't for kids, people insist they should be and then complain when they're not. Anime's grounding is in adult or older teen markets, and if it produces something kid-safe it's a happy accident.
Kristy
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 17:30 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 19:13 (UTC)Cultural context and deniability
Date: 2006-06-06 19:17 (UTC)(a) It's Japanese. An avowedly "foreign" culture, that has its own history and assumptions. American culture had been primed for dealing with these variances based on the management revolutions of the 1980s, when all sorts of social conventions were overturned by Japanese managers and managerial styles. So when anime made its mainstream incursion beginnin in the early- to mid-90s, there was an _expected_ "foreignness" that was a blanket "get out of vilification free" card, more or less. "Wait, there's a whole genre of this that involves women being violated by tentacles?" "Yeah, but... well, it's Japanese." "Oh. *changes subject*"
(b) The incredible mainstreaming of anime at the behest of large media conglomerates, crossed with the merchandising empires. You come down with the marketing empires of Disney, Bandai, WotC/Hasbro, etc., and you're going to create not only a market, but acceptibility. There is a certain respectable patina that is granted in the minds of the average American consumer that comes with the Disney logo. Then give broad appeal across multiple age groups and demographics, and you have something that has pretty rapid penetration into the mainstream.
(c) Sheer numbers. Anime cons held in many major cities now run attendance figures somewhere in the 5 digits, on average, and some popular con-weekends will see anime cons in multiple cities in the US. Couple the marketing dollars provided by the parent companies, and this stops being a subculture you can point at and laugh, and becomes just another herd response. Star Trek cons used to be a laughinstock, until they got enough people together to convince Paramount there was still money to be had in that hulk, and while people still laugh at die-hard trekkies, they don't laugh at everyone who likes the series(s) and movie(s) and book(s) and so forth. It's become the science fiction equivalent of collecting stamps or coins.
(d) Anime is self-contained, with only a little bleedover into established American cultural elements, while furrydom, especially in the earlier days, purposefully blurred the line because, frankly, it had to. "Legend of the Overfiend" is less threatening to some observers because it exists in its own cultural mileu, while yet ANOTHER explicit Nala and Simba pic is threatening, and was defintiely threatenign at the time, because it came off as befouling something that was fairly dominant in the culture at the time. It was like driving to a favorite strip-mall restaurant and finding that an adult bookstore had gone in down the street - jarring and disturbing for the change of associative context it caused, though there is nothing inherently wrong about the presence of the adult bookstore in general.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 19:43 (UTC)Several years ago a particular video was making the rounds of general scifi cons. People were talking about how cool it was that finally sci fi fans had received some positive press. I was told numerous times that I absolutely had to see it, because it was so wonderful that scifi fans were finally being accepted.
I did see it. It was a bit on the Tonight show where Jay Leno to a camera crew over to a Star Trek convention, interviewed people, and so on. There were several issues I had with it. One, it wasn't press, it was the Tonight Show. Two, it wasn't positive. It was very clear that Jay thought these guys were weird. I admit, it seemed clear he thought there were goofy weird instead, Oh My God, These People Must Be Locked Up! weird, but it was still hardly positive, and still mocking in tone.
But I had to agree that it was less negative and derogatory than many things I had seen over the decades before it. But it was no less negative or mocking than stuff that had been aired less than five years previously. I think the scifi fans who gushed over it did so for a variety of reasons, one of them being that fandom is well-known to attract a disproportiionate number of people on the autism spectrum. I believe a number of the fans literally could not read Jay Leno's facial expressions or correctly interpret his tone of voice. So they didn't recognize the (admittedly gently) mocking. They also were comparing it to the worst experiences they had had before, and not just the worst, but the worst bits of the worst.
But the other lesson I took from it was that trekkies had moved from, "These guys are sick, creepy, losers!" to "This guys are really weird, huh?" and I think the reason why was not the money that the star trek films make, but that by that time there were enough fans of star trek that almost everyone knows at least one fan. "My cousin is really into that" or "This guy I work with is really into that."
The other significant different, IMHO, between yaoi and furry erotica is that 99% of yaoi (and 99% of Star Trek slash, Stargate slash, Buffy slash, etc) is written by straight women.
Far more than 1 percent of furry "gay" material is created by guys. I think the slash-phenom, while slightly confusing to outsiders, is easy to map to a stereotype every is familiar with: every sit com out there has milked the "straight guys all fantasize about watching two women do it" meme. That's been around long enough that folks accept it as expected behaviour. And I think they can map the slash-fic phenomenon to the same idea. If guys like to fantasize about two girls, why can't the gals fantasize about two guys?
But these are just a few of the components that go into the difference.
Re: If I may append...
Date: 2006-06-06 20:17 (UTC)Pleasantville capitalizes on it.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 20:36 (UTC)Related to the 'furry as pervert' there's always the inevitable connection to additionally perverting the 'memory/essence' of childhood cartoons. (Never mind the fact that most WB shorts of the 40s and 50s weren't written "for" children).
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 20:47 (UTC)I had a hard time making friends. I can't draw worth a damn, and even though I went to some local furmeets the area in which I was tended to be very closed in certain ways. I wanted to find some of "those people" and "those parties" and see what went on for myself.
But when I tried asking my "friends" who I knew before my first con at my first AC about it I would get looks of horror and "Oh you don't want to be anywhere near those disgusting old men blah blah blah hey we're having a room party after we get another 50 gallons of booze come along!" I found this quite upsetting (it was probably acerbated by the fact that I can't drink for health reasons). I also found it to be pretty hypocritical to think that consentual sex between more than 2 people is evil and disgusting, but having 15 year olds so drunk they're puking in your room all night is ok, just as long as their clothes are on.
I've also found the attempts of certain "prominent" furs to whitewash the appearance of the fandom to be somewhat disturbing. Ok fine we don't want TMI oozing out the walls, but trying to represent a major con as a "family friendly" event is laughable. Yes those who are underaged need notarized consent forms or whatever, but it's alot easier for them to get that from unsuspecting parents if they show them a con website that makes it look like a room full of disney fans having a singalong, as "what goes on in private rooms isn't part of the con." I think this is somewhat irresponsible, but I can't really think of a solution. Do we exclude underaged furs from the con? What age? 18? 16? The age of consent in the state where it's held? (usually 16 BTW), 21? 25? Major credit cards only? What about furs who want to bring their kids? These are questions that need to be adressed but people seem to be trying to ignore them as much as possible. I don't claim to have the answers, but I don't think most people are even looking. Putting stickers over the naughty bits in the dealers' room is as much a metaphorical bandaid as it is a literal one.
Something every one should keep in mind
Date: 2006-06-06 21:24 (UTC)This line made me laugh out loud because it is so very true.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 22:13 (UTC)Having said that, I think furry cons can be family-friendly, as long as you're not expecting them to be able to provide child care services. Anthrocon's GoH a couple years ago, Stan Sakai, said AC was one of the first cons he was comfortable letting his daughter wander around.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-07 03:28 (UTC)I just... can't... resist...
...like the pages of
Sorry, sorry... -:)
Everyone's Entitled To My Opinion.
I'm just asking because the net effect of probably well-meaning but incredibly misguided efforts to Take Back The Fandom have IMHO caused more harm than good by dragging all the things we wanted to keep discreet into the public spotlight. Much like the attention Satanic Verses got years ago from all the controversy, this wouldn't have been a problem if they didn't make it a problem.
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this. Burned Fur came on the scene with a Mission Statement that claimed "anthropomorphics fandom is being overrun by sexually dysfunctional, socially stunted and creatively bankrupt hacks and pervs" and half a year later AFF become the #1 relevant newsgroup to talk about zoophilia (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.furry.politics/msg/78a85d411ccb9580?dmode=source). People latched on to isolated incidents of bad behavior at furry conventions and made mountains out molehills about them for years, giving outsiders the impression that this was the rule rather than the exception. Heck, the Vanity Fair article happened during Burned Fur's watch (and would've been forgotten and mouldering in a landfill somewhere if Amadeus (http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=811970) hadn't gone and gleefully transcribed it for everyone to see).
To sum up, there were problems in the fandom that could have been handled discreetly instead of people waging a jihad over them. I don't know whether Anime fandom's ever had a similar TBOF backlash, but I thought it'd be a worthwhile data point to bring up nonetheless.
Re: Everyone's Entitled To My Opinion.
Date: 2006-06-07 06:33 (UTC)I think furry fandom is more susceptible to the Take Back the Fandom mentality because it does have one very pronounced difference when compared to other fandoms: nearly all of our media is actually produced by people working within the fandom. Other fandoms tend to form around works which can be found by anyone outside the fandom fairly easily, and it's the work that brings them to the fandom. It's highly unlikely someone's first exposure to manga is going to be fan-produced yaoi tentacle porn when there are shelves of professional publications at Borders, and that makes it much harder for anyone to get traction arguing that yaoi tentacle porn artists have to be suppressed in order for anime fandom to gain mainstream acceptability. TBtF comes in part, I think, from looking at how much more apparently successful anime fandom has been in getting mainstream attention than furry fandom has, and concluding that the problem is because we haven't suppressed our own yaoi tentacle porn artists, without recognizing that anime started from a very different position.
Re: Everyone's Entitled To My Opinion.
Date: 2006-06-07 07:19 (UTC)Given the continuing growth of the fandom and everyone and their dog Flippy starting a furry con, one wonders what the fandom will look like five years from now. I think it'll be huge.
Re: Everyone's Entitled To My Opinion.
Date: 2006-06-07 16:13 (UTC)I suspect the fandom's Fifteen Minutes of Freakshow Fame are actually already up--what attention we get has been trending toward amused rather than horrified, and as a practical matter, that's good enough for me. But "mainstreaming" in the way anime has been mainstreamed involves showing up on "Adult Swim," in art house theatres, and DVDs at Blockbuster, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
Having said that, though, I wouldn't be surprised to see more furry OAV as the tools become more affordable, and it's hard to predict where that may lead.
Wow,
Date: 2006-06-07 22:42 (UTC)Do you think it would do more harm than good to take a survey of artists, big-names, and constaff to determine the most common breaches of etiquette, and create a Furry Manners Guide from the results? Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but with real quotes, ignoring the pettiest complaints to focus on the problems the majority nod about when mentioned.
And hello, by the way. :K)
Re: Wow,
Date: 2006-06-08 03:14 (UTC)...I should note for the record that bit of cynicism is about human nature, mind you, nothing specific to furry fandom. :)
Re: Wow,
Date: 2006-06-08 04:00 (UTC)It'd be a fun project, even if it didn't have the desired effect. Now, how to solicit quotes from people without being a pest... Hmm. ;K)
no subject
Date: 2006-06-08 04:16 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-10 19:24 (UTC)We aren't doing anything wrong. As to the "Why?" part, the answer is that Anime long ago received the imprimature of Corporate America. Anime is big business: media outlets, action figures, games. Many different Anime (Pokemon, Digimon) seem to be little more than one continuous advert to get kids to harrass their 'rents into buying stuff. Even though these various corporations are "competitors", their CEOs and board members all know each other. So you aren't going to see some episode from CBS about the freaky lives of the Otaku. CBS isn't going to piss in Sony's well.
For the same reason, reporters from the MsM are going to become blind to those forty-something beardy old wierdos who shoehorn themselves into Sailor Moon costumes that'd be a tight fit on a teenaged body, or some cosplayer whose costume leaves his hairy ass hanging out for all the world to see.
Furry isn't big business, and so becomes a "legitimate" source of stories about wierd sex and wierd people. That doesn't interfere with corporate marketing.
And let us not forget that Furry, unlike Anime, is deviant per se. Here chipotle hits on this. Furry is one big "fuck you" to the anthropocentrism that's been a part of Western culture for millenia.
Even before Christianity, Western philosophy insisted that man represented an entirely different order of existance above and beyond animal existance. Think of the common insults: "son of a bitch", "bird-brained", "feather-headed", hare-brained" -- all of which imply that the one on the receiving end is less than human. Most people take these insults that compare them to animals as an insult; Furries take them as compliments.
In a culture where many people, even those who should know better, yes, even scientists, insist that there is no difference between little boys and little girls -- despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- simply because the idea that they are born knowing that they are either boys or girls comes too close to animal instinct for comfort.
Deviating from such a persistant cultural norm is, well, deviant.