Dogpatch Press

5 Responses to “Fursonas documentary out now – one of the top Furry News stories of the year.”

1. Bartolo Polkakitty says:

   May 11, 2016 at 10:26 pm

   (From the Daily Beast article)

   > More shocking, however, is footage of Kage teaching furries at convention panels not to trust the media, giving lessons on how to deflect and even “play dumb” if queried about just about anything by journalists. With a relentlessly menacing magnetism, he comes off as both father figure and punisher to his congregation: the David Miscavige of the furry fandom.

   Yeah, we really must be stupid to do anything as obviously unjustified as distrusting these people, huh?

   In all seriousness, if this movie is representative of Video’s sincere feelings about being furry, and if he feels it’s been a success (by whatever criteria he might use,) then I’m happy for him. But I’m really starting to get worried about the number of furries who’ve apparently decided lately that nobody will ever look down on them or try to hurt them because of their weird interests and kinks, and that Fursonas in particular is going to be some sort of watershed event that will change our reputation forever, usually trying to support those assertions with vague platitudes to the effect that every culture in the world is always on a permanent trend towards more and more tolerance and rationality, and that this is simply too obvious to bear explaining (reality check: in which year was it more popular and socially acceptable to endorse mass movements that believe a specific gender or race is the singular source of all the evils in the world and that the only wrongdoing anyone else is even theoretically capable of is not hating those people enough, 1996 or 2016?)

   I mean, it’s true that the average dude on the street isn’t exactly going around chanting #KillAllFurries, and that only a paranoid fool would think that he was. But if you look at what the mainstream public really thinks about furries (on those rare occasions when they say anything at all about furries – I think it’s easy for us to forget that the rest of the world doesn’t spend as much time thinking about furry fandom as we do, or have such strong feelings about it,) their opinion is invariably something along the lines of “well, even though the very idea of grown men putting on silly costumes and *urk!* drawing pictures of cute fuzzy animals makes my skin crawl, I guess it’s not like there’s anything objectively morally wrong with that…. provided, of course, that absolutely none of them are getting anything sexual out of it.” Not overtly hateful, but I don’t think most of us would consider that particularly supportive or understanding either.

   And it’s not just some Junior Anti-Sex League on Tumblr that’s saying that; that’s what I’ve regularly heard for well over a decade now, even from genuinely intelligent and creative people that, in many ways, I’d like to be able to look up to. People who, in all other respects, very much want to show how open-minded they are and how they’re accepting of all different sexualities and kinks; probably about half of the people I’ve seen say that are actively involved in the BDSM community. There’s a very explicit double standard that’s simply been taken for granted the entire time I’ve used the internet, to the extent that, from time to time, I’ve seen it explicitly pointed out by people like Randall Munroe who aren’t furry and who, by all evidence, don’t even really care about furries one way or the other. (That’s a comic from 8 years ago, just to put it in perspective.)

   And perhaps the people who say they’re okay with furries just as long as there isn’t any sexual dimension to their furriness would, in fact, be able to get on quite well with the minority of all furries who don’t have any sexual interest in the idea (and yes, it is a minority; don’t make me link to the Anthropomorphic Research Project.) But that doesn’t exactly help me, as someone whose sexuality is as invested in furries as it could ever possibly be, to the extent that, before I found the fandom, I literally never thought of having sex with another person as a thing that I might ever do.

   Of course, I do know that most furries aren’t actually that far into it sexually. But what you have to realize is that the public at large is simply not interested in making distinctions like that. As much as they may be disgusted and horrified by furry porn, that’s the only thing that engages them to the degree that they have any real response to it. And if you think Fursonas is a great movie in and of itself, that’s all well and good, but to expect it to bring our story to the world, or make the public reevaluate what they think about us, is only setting oneself up for disappointment, because the public doesn’t have the same kind of personal investment in the things it’s talking about that we, as furries, do, and they aren’t going to respond to it in the same way.

   I’ve seen furries that have had positive reactions to Fursonas, and I’ve seen furries that have had negative reactions to it, but they are at least in agreement that it talks about some things that matter to them, and that have relevance beyond just shock value. But to the rest of the world, anything that suggests furries are spending their time having a lot of kinky sex or having entertaining rage-fueled meltdowns on the internet is to be be held up with a supercilious grin as proof that they were right about us all along, and anything else is just to be dismissed as a boring and inconsequential bit of trivia. The public doesn’t want to hear about the personal history and philosophy that went into Divine’s stage performances, or how he recorded music albums. They’re only here to see him eat dog shit. (I’ve often said before that there’s a kind of darkly hilarious irony in the fact that, for all that furries get accused of only ever thinking about sex, in actuality, it’s the mainstream public’s interest in furry fandom that’s always been limited exclusively to the sexual side of it, and ours isn’t….)

   Incidentally, I think it’s interesting to note that, despite how popular text-based sexual roleplaying is among furries, I seriously don’t think it’s been mentioned once in all the articles the media has ever put out about us. However, almost every such article brings up plushophiles, something that in the actual furry fandom is an extreme minority interest at best. And these articles strongly imply that, even if plushophilia isn’t something that *quite* all furries are into (wink wink nudge nudge,) it’s at least the most commonly seen fetish interest within the fandom. (The media also has an ongoing obsession with trying to redefine the word “plushies” to mean “people who have sex with plushies”, despite the fact that it’s the only bit of jargon that’s ever come out of furry fandom that is commonly recognized and used in the rest of the world, Neopets being probably the most prominent example there. Or, simply put, the people writing these articles must already know that “plushies” does not mean “people who have sex with plushies”, yet they try to use it that way anyway.)

   We’ve often been quick to jump on furries who have been willing to talk to the media, and to accuse them of selling us out, but if the media really was honestly representing furries who had come to them to tell the world everything about their sexual kinks, they’d have a hell of a lot more to say about text-based RPs than they did about anyone humping their plushies or having sex in a fursuit. And the statements the media attributes to us aren’t the words of someone who was ever involved enough in fandom to be able to sell us out. They’re consistently the words of someone who knows nothing about the fandom besides that it’s a competing form of entertainment, and so it must be stopped. (If there’s any bright spot in all this, it’s that media outlets *other* than the Daily Beast have generally refrained from going all in with grandiose conspiracy theories about how furries are a cult that’s right now plotting to kidnap your children and sacrifice them to the devil, as they’re so fond of accusing roleplaying gamers of doing.)

   And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the smoking gun that proves that whenever the media creates an article about us, they decide everything it’s going to say before they even start looking for any actual furries to talk to, and anything we try to say to them that doesn’t fall into line with the predetermined narrative simply will never be shown. The pessimistic way of interpreting what people like Chewfox do is that they just uncritically go along with any script they’re given, because hey, this is their big chance to be on TV, and that’s all that matters in life. The optimistic interpretation is that the broadcast footage of those people isn’t representative of what they actually said about the fandom, because it was carefully edited to always support the predetermined narrative. I actually think the optimistic scenario is probably much closer to the truth, but considering that both scenarios lead to exactly the same show being made, I’m not sure it even matters.

   I know a lot of people complain about the way Uncle Kage runs Anthrocon, and honestly, I’m sympathetic to a lot of those complaints. (Of course, if people have serious grievances about Anthrocon, the only logical response is for them to spend their time and money at other conventions, which is something they don’t exactly seem to be doing en masse….) But for the entire time this fandom has existed, we’ve only learned again and again and again, through hard experience, that Kage’s approach to dealing with the media, assuming that they are always working in bad faith, is the only approach that can ever work, because the media is always working in bad faith, and is always just trying to get you to say something they can use against you. (Why? Well, let me remind you again that furry fandom is a form of entertainment that is in competition with talk shows and tabloids. The media has very clear financial and political incentives to want people to believe that DIY cultures like furry fandom are just fronts for dangerous deviants, just as they have incentives to want people to believe that video games brainwash kids and make them shoot their teachers.) If this wasn’t the case, then nobody in the media would feel any need to try to equate Kage with the leader of a murderous cult. The only reason the statements Kage makes about how the media operates would ever hit such a nerve is because there are people working in the media who know that those statements are true.

   The bottom line is, if you go to talk to the media, it’s not the fandom’s reputation that’s at stake. It’s your reputation. There can be no dishonor in being unwilling to divulge every detail of your private life to people you know just want you to give them weapons they can use against you (indeed, to avoid being manipulated into giving people those weapons is one of the most important life skills that most of us will ever learn, and without it we couldn’t hope to acquire a home of our own or move forward in a career.) And even though I see a lot of people on the internet saying they don’t give a fuck what anyone else thinks about them because they’ll always be true to themselves, willingly supporting someone who just wants to spread FUD about you is not honesty, and people who truly are confident enough in who they are that they won’t compromise themselves for anyone don’t feel any need to go on TV in hopes that others will give them validation that they don’t give a fuck about receiving validation from anyone else.

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   • Patch O'Furr says:

     May 11, 2016 at 11:49 pm

     Holy rant!

     With the “David Miscavige” comparison: “we really must be stupid to do anything as obviously unjustified as distrusting these people, huh?”

     Haha. I agree that the writer seems to hide cynical intentions and don’t like the exaggeration she does to hype up her own story. It seems to play both sides, with faux-concern while also highlighting raunch (she linked the horrifying Vanity Fair article.) That article rubbed me wrong. But the great majority of other attention seems wonderful.

     That’s pretty much my opinion about the whole thing. The dubious stuff in that article is the exception that proves the rule.

     Just look at the reviews and respect this movie is getting, not from furries, but outside. It’s not just a furry movie, it’s a good movie, and that’s what they’re all saying. It’s impossible to say things aren’t a million times better when this is happening.

     I sense extreme confirmation bias in your feeling about public negativity towards this hobby. My favorite thing is Street Fursuiting and I don’t share that feeling. Actually this kind of resembles a “predetermined narrative” caused by too much dwelling on the past. The worst thing (the Vanity Fair article) is so stale, it’s almost as old as the average furry fan.

     It is a good movie and a good social group. It would be even if nobody else was interested. Outside validation isn’t what a DIY group is for.

     Paranoia about talking to the media made sense when there was like one or two conventions. This stuff is growing and thriving way beyond that despite whatever outside people think about it. I don’t see a problem with this movie being part of a wave of attention. That’s my bottom line.

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     • Troj says:

       May 14, 2016 at 6:54 am

       Just saw the documentary, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

       I have sympathy for Uncle Kage, because he has a very tough job to do, and as one segment of Diezel’s interview suggests, furries aren’t just being paranoid or irrational when they worry about the possible consequences of people having negative stereotypes or images of the fandom.

       It occurred to me that the real “enemy,” so to speak, is society itself, in a way. Kage wouldn’t have to police the fandom so aggressively if American society weren’t so bizarre and conflicted about sex in general, and didn’t tend to insist that, for example, you’re either virginal and pure, or you’re a dirty pervert.

       Furries are also battling human psychology as well, since human beings are pattern-seekers who will readily judge and stereotype an entire group of people or objects based on a few sample cases. When you’re a minority, you have to worry about people basing their opinion on your group on your attitudes and behaviors, because your attitudes and behaviors may be all they have to go on.

       This is why people are embarrassed by people like Boomer. Boomer is a gentle, well-intentioned spirit whose lifestyle hurts no one, but people are understandably worried that if Boomer makes up a large part of people’s “furry schema,” those people will see all furries as Boomers, and furries will have to work twice as hard to combat or correct those stereotypes. This creates an uncomfortable and unfair situation for Boomer and other furries.

       You can’t cover every angle and every point, obviously, but I’m a touch disappointed that the the documentary didn’t touch on the possible negative consequences of unfettered or unrestricted self-expression.

       There are some people in the world (which includes the fandom) whose preferred modes of self-expression *are* generally harmful and intrusive. In those cases, those people “following their bliss” or acting on their beliefs means that the rest of us can’t live our lives as fully. A free society needs to have some boundaries, rules, and restrictions, so that it can be remain free and open. If you let one person “express themselves” by stuffing towels into the jacuzzi pump, that means nobody else can use the jacuzzi.

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   • NAK says:

     May 12, 2016 at 11:27 am

     “Rant” or not, thanks for sharing. To me, one of the coolest things about this documentary is that gotten people talking.

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2. Ermine Notyours says:

   May 12, 2016 at 8:51 pm

   “Exposing the David Miscavige of Furries” compares Kage to a leader of Scientology. I think that’s grossly exaggerated by that writer. Furries aren’t a cult, nobody is forced to be here, and there’s little exploitation without real ranks.

   As anyone who has been to a semi-organized furry meetup like a zoo meet would know, organizing furies is like herding cats–sometimes literally. If only furies were so easily swayed, we might still have Rainfurrest today.

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