Hey guys, thanks for some more considered response; while I have been posting everything that comes through to my blog, it's the comments I've been reading on other boards where I've been resposted that has been causing me some considerable psychic stress. Everything from being called "stupid" and "vapid" to saying that my whole problem with FC was that I didn't get laid. That's night entirely true, actually, as the bf and I did have some fun on Saturday night to ourselves, but that's something else. I'm afraid that, in trying make it clear that some of what I had to say was certainly influenced by my own experiences, many people have assumed that my experiences were, in fact, what the entirety of my critique was based upon. But, as I pointed out, I've been going to FC for four years, and what I wrote was based on those four years worth of experience as well as my experience in being involved with other sorts of events. This year I felt that I saw a lot of things going on that really disturbed me, and which, frankly, have me inclined to not go again. I perhaps did not express myself very well in my initial post, but, in my world in SF, where I'm very involved with many people who put on events at all scales of the spectrum, mostly in underground venues, "amateur" is a commonly used term to describe people who don't have the ability to handle themselves well in situations where societal constraints are relaxed. This is something that really bothered me at FC, because I saw a lot of amateur behavior; not just in terms of people drinking too much, but, in general, an almost explosive release of energy, mainly on Saturday night, that seemed driven both by sexual desperation and the sense that people were now in an environment where they could do anything they wanted. It reminded me of Saturday night at Burning Man, when I usually go back and hide in my tent to get away from the frightening energy that comes up after the burning of the Man.
My main point in the second post is to say that, in my experience, alternative communities have ways of creating themselves as communities, and Burning Man is an example of that. They have a set of values and infrastructure practices that are designed to get people to behave in certain ways, and to come together as a community. I use this only as an example that most people can easily reference - every community has its own set of regulatory mechanisms, because every community is ultimately a system that regulates itself. In my opinion, if we're going to talk about furries as a community, and as FC as a gathering of that community, then FC is an opportunity to get everyone together, and to guide their interactions with each other, in a postive way for three days. I have been involved with furries for long enough to have seen that the main mechanism for social regulation is the internet and boards like this, which leads to real difficulties, in my opinion, in the way people interact with one another in face-to-face situations. I am aware that there are many people in the fandom who have real social issues, and I frankly think that's a problem; in fact, rather than helping these people with their issues, I think the current furry social system only exacerbates those problems, and, in some ways, rewards them. People say things on internet boards, for example, that they would never say to a person's face, and then are rewarded with societal standing for saying those things. At the con I saw two guys wearing the same t-shirt; it was black with white printing, and had a cartoon wolf in front of a monitor saying "On Noez, Drama!" For me that summed up the furry social system, and that's exactly what I saw in action at FC and am now being drawn into as a result of my post; the furry social system is founded on drama, which is about creating divisions and animosities between people. I also saw this going on with the planning of FC, as I am friends with the people who were involved in organizing the social track. Drama is the result of what I would call an amateurish mind-set; it's about building things up to a point of frenzy, with a lot of shouting and posturing, and leads to situations in which the loudest, most aggressive person ultimately wins - it all becomes about dominance and submission, which, if you think about it, does make a kind of perverse sense when your social system is made up of people who are into animal role-playing.
Drama, in whatever way it is expressed - drinking too much at Con, getting into difficult sexual situations, playing the most aggressive music you can, being provocative on the Net - might make a kind of community, but it's going to be a dysfunctional community, because of the way rewards and demerits are handed out as a result. The kid smashing the laptop on Friday night was about creating drama, and my issue with the way that was handled was that, ultimately, that kid won - he created drama that then went on to affect people like me; I didn't get to do something I had been looking forward to because he created drama, and the Con organizers rewarded that by making his drama have real effect. I compared this to Paul Addis burning the Man early at Burning Man because that was an attempt to create drama that failed, because everyone just went on afterwards and did what they were going to do anyway. He was, in my opinion (which you can read more about on my blog), a narcissistic asshole who wanted the event to revolve around him, and in the end he was insignificant. That is an example of a community responding to dysfunctional behavior in a way that nullifies it, rather than rewarding it.
My whole point is that FC is now in a place where it could begin to affect people in the furry community in a real way, simply by saying that, during these three days, we are going to try and think of ourselves as a community, and we are going to try and give people who might otherwise resort to drama as their mode of social interaction a new set of actionable values that they can try to use in their social interactions. For example, I like the principle of gifting at Burning Man because I used to be a big candy raver, and I thought it was really neat how giving somebody a cheap plastic beaded bracelet could be used as the means for forming a relationship with that person, and how everybody, no matter who they are or what they look like, is worthy of being given a gift. I like the principle of "leave no trace" because it means taking responsibility for the environment you're in and not just trashing everything.
It may be, as some have said, that I'm asking FC to be something it's not, and never intended to be. But my main thought throughout the con this year was "I'm getting too old for this;" I thought that not just because of my chronological age, but because I'm no longer interested in dealing with the drama that seems to be at the center of most furry social scenes. At one point when the boyfriend was expressing some frustration with his own dealings I said "Forget it Jake, it's just FurCon." That's how I feel about the whole scene at this point; I just need to shrug it off and move on. I would like to be able to go to FC, meet some interesting people, relax, and have a good time, but I have gradually become very aware, over the course of four years, of what is moving under the surface of what I thought was so cute and fun my first time there. And if I've reached the point of saying "no more," then I'm sure others have as well. If furries want to be taken seriously as a community, then they need to become more conscious of themselves as one, and FC provides an opportunity to put mechanisms in place that can help with that.
