23 January 2008, the magazine
Good Times Santa Cruz ran this article titled "Day of the Animals".
Due to downtime appearing that week hey now
it's back up. The article is unfortunately an edited version of
this article from The Register by the same author, but it's making its rounds again and deserves another look. So let's kick off our interpretation of the work with a genius quote:
“I love cuddly fuzzies, drawing cuddle fuzzies, and cuddling fuzzies while drawing,” writes a furry named Kalu in a meet-up site.
Quote from
Meetup, and here we may be thankful they didn't pull personals from Pounced. Tom Geller seems to be involved in a lot of stories involving the Bay Area and FC as of late; he contributed to the FC party discussion in a triple post wherin he briefly considered furry as a religion and offered development uggestions to the furry rave substance abuse bible. Seems to enjoy the metaphysics, or maybe the humor.
“It’s a way for people who are normally in their heads to connect with their bodies,” says Tom “Howling” Geller, a San Francisco-based wolf, fox and sometimes mouse.
According to Howling, the furry scene is inextricably married to technology culture. “I got into the furry scene when I started working in high tech, and wasn’t getting out much,” he says. “The furry community suffered after the dot-com crash, but it’s coming back.”
[...] While not all furries experiment with their identity, this process of personalizing an animal is thematic, says Howling. “Furries are reconciling the discrepancy between the animal self inside and the physical body they were born with,” he says.
Now it's true that a number of furries, maybe a hundred or so, were part of the dot com boom. During those rare years of investor stupidity quite a number of furries I know moved down to the bay to room with other furries. Some of them even had jobs in the tech sector. Some of them even had jobs. And when the sector crashed, the drug addictions collapsed, rent far outstripped income, the bay area furries sorta died down. The unskilled and untalented became really pathetic in their slow scrabble for cheap room and board. Across the rest of the country, though? Not so much change. The supermarket stockers and Kinko's desk jockeys didn't see much difference in their living standards. Furry is only married to technology in that without a running computer there isn't much furry one can participate in. And of course we aren't all moonbat lifestylers. Anyway, on to the obligatory references:
Furry blogs refute Vanity Fair’s famous March 2001 article, which reportedly confused furries for plushies—or people with a sexual attraction to stuffed animals. Furries were similarly misrepresented as orgiastic on “Fur and Loathing,” a 2003 episode of the CBS television show Crime Scene Investigators, and MTV’s 2002 documentary Sex2K included a segment on furries, for which filmmaker Rick Castro has been accused of deceiving convention organizers and falsely depicting the fandom as kinky.
“These portrayals are unrealistic and blown out of proportion,” says John. “I haven’t seen this aspect of the community. Most of the people I’ve met are good hearted, dorky, science fiction junkies.”
[...] Yet reports of questionable activities do sometimes surface. “I’ve had a lot of sex at furry conventions,” admits Howling, “but I’m a slut, and I arranged the party.” Howling emphasizes that he doesn’t represent the larger furry population, and that said activities were not part of the convention schedule.
Furry blogs and furries don't seem to really agree there -- certainly they don't precisely mesh with everyone's convention experiences. I've had to shuffle accomodations at a whim due to unscheduled sexual activity taking up beds I'd intended on using that night. The oversexed portrayals are only inaccurate in that they don't show each wild and unashamed furry convention night has four or five completely mundane lights out at 9PM nights to go with it. Geller might not be honest with himself but does at least share a little of the other side, without letting it overshadow the cleaner and friendlier part to the culture.
