They've got a warm and fuzzy feeling

[Benjamin]

They've got a warm and fuzzy feeling
 
By REBECCA CALDWELL
Saturday, August 16, 2003 - Page R3
 
 
From the pictures on its Web site, Camp Feral! looks like any other summer camp. You can take archery lessons, launch canoe trips, dabble in art classes, perform at skit nights. But the wildlife lurking in the camp's pine forests in Central Ontario doesn't just consist of chipmunks, raccoons or deer. You'll also find people dressed up like chipmunks, raccoons or deer. Camp Feral! is a camp for furries.

Furries first blipped onto the mainstream culture radar two years ago with a feature article in Vanity Fair. The phenomenon has yet to be written about extensively in Canada despite the fact that the furry fandom is growing (there are more than 60 people registered to shell out $279 to attend Camp Feral! next week for a five-day adventure in animal magnetism).

Being a furry isn't just about putting on that rabbit costume. Into collecting stuffed animals? You're probably a furry. Like cartoons featuring creatures with giant blue eyes and a smile where the snout should be? You're a furry. Spend your evening in on-line chatrooms such as furryMUCK pretending to be a gazelle while you talk to someone pretending to be an ostrich? You're definitely a furry.

Furrydom seems to be a strictly modern territory, owing more to the Flaming Lips' zebra-suited guitarist or even the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz than your run-of-the-mill lycanthropy. One theory holds that this species evolved as a coping mechanism for the "shy and socially awkward archetypes that are undeniably common in Furry Fandom" raised on a steady diet of cartoon animals from the 1970s and 1980s. "Furrydom actually has less to do with animals," argues the anonymous author of an essay on on-line furry reference centre http://www.pressedfur.coolfreepages.com, "and a lot more to do with a deep-seated need to reinvent humanity."

It's hard to say who exactly you'll find under the fur. David Rust is a 35-year-old American who conducted surveys at furry conventions over a two-year period to get a better sense of the culture. He himself has three fursonae: Sylvan, a centaur with a wolf's head; Knight, a giant with a horse's head; and Boomeroo, a half-human, half kangaroo whom he describes as "a cocky, brash, fun-loving, not-very-serious Priest who has mastered all sorts of erotic and sexual magicks."

Rust concluded the typical furry is a college-educated white male, 18 to 35. California, New York and Ontario rank high as hot spots for furry homes, and most often they identify themselves as computer professionals in terms of occupation, agnostic or undecided in terms of religion and bisexual in terms of sexual orientation. And they may soon be switching to the ape diet out of necessity: $10,000 or less was the number one reported annual income.

There are about four major events on the furry calendar a year in Canada, and an active Internet community (try http://www.furry.ca) helps furries connect. At furry conventions, if you're "yiff," or sexy enough, you might engage in some "skritching" -- the greeting ritual that mimics scratching and picking flies out of one another's hair that suddenly makes air-kissing seem not so intolerable.

But watch out for the furverts. There are a few furries whose predilection for having sex with people dressed as plush animals makes bondage look like a quaint way to use up excess rope.

Plushies or fursuiters claim the fetish is not an extension of bestiality, and the assertion seems reasonable. There is, after all, a difference between violating a real tiger and engaging in heavy petting with someone dressed as the Frosted Flakes mascot.

Early, inexplicable attraction to the female fox used to represent Maid Marian in Disney's Robin Hood or suddenly thinking that Bugs Bunny has a great personality are typical "I knew I was a furry when" epiphanies.

On Sex2k, MTV's 2002 hypnotizing car wreck of a documentary exploring modern sexuality that comes off as part Jerry Springer episode, part home porn, college-age Yote (short for Coyote) explains, "Half of the sexual appeal for a fur suit, you know, the fact that you're having sex with somebody who is -- he's all furry. He's got, you know, this furry sort of head, you know, big ears and a muzzle and stuff."

For Yote, having sex with human stuffed animals is not that different than having sex with homo sapiens. "Furry sexuality is just like normal human sexuality, but instead of looking at a spreadsheet from Playboy of a beautiful woman on a bed with big breasts and whatever, you're looking at a picture on your computer of a vixen on a bed with big breasts instead."

Then there's Ken, who looks bland enough to be an insurance salesman except for the fact that he's crouching on a hotel bed in a tiger suit that June Cleaver could have made for the Beaver.

"Anyone who says that furry is not a sexual-based fandom is really kind of fooling themselves," he says, while his mate Stacey, in a matching suit, looks on, either in heat or admiration, it's hard to tell.

It was testimonials such as Yote's and Ken's that really darkened the skies over the furry animal kingdom. Many furries now refuse to speak to the press (a few declined to be interviewed for this piece). Their conventions are now often closed to non-furries; suddenly they seem like packs of animals struggling for survival in the Internet wild.

And furry Nature can be cruel. One on-line cultural humour Web site, the Brunching Shuttlecocks, has a Geek Hierarchy that lists Furries near the bottom of the list, way below science-fiction authors, Trekkies and role-playing gamers.

Still, furries can take comfort that they aren't at the bottom of the food chain: They come out ahead of the plushies or erotic furries and "People who write erotic versions of Star Trek where all the characters are furries, (like, Kirk is an Ocelot or something) and they put a furry version of themselves in the story."

It truly is a plush-dog-eat-plush-dog world.

rcaldwell@globeandmail.ca
 
(http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet....6)

[Perimus]

Not the worst article about furry i've seen.

[Bluegreenman]

Quote (Perimus @ Aug. 17 2003, 12:26 pm)

Not the worst article about furry i've seen.

But not the best.

[grasper]

true true

[RavidWolf]

'>   Hard to respond to that.

[Jadnar]

Oh, course it has to touch base on that part. *looks up at the ceiling* Just can't stay away from it now can they, Oy...

Well... At least this time they hinted that most of us can't stand the yiff-for-the-camera furs.  

[Benjamin]

I've bought myself a copy of the newspaper so that I can have a hard copy of it in it's original and intended form. There are no pics included, of course.
 
Benjamin