User:Spottacus

Why I'm Furry
I am pretty much furry to the core. I was asked why by an anthropologist, and I reproduce my response below, as follows:

On my end, I never felt much of a bond with my fellow humans during childhood. I mean, I like people, but I never shared their interests. I was interested in sewing small animals by fourth grade, and meowing, and crawling on all fours. I look at a “interest cloud” for typical males and it shows baseball, football, tea party, and the like, and I still feel virtually no overlap. So, I focused on school, being nerdy, and lots of sex (yep, there it is) in high school, but even there my interests remained quite different than what those around me felt. I focused instead on school even more, graduated top of my class in multiple fields, lots of ivy degrees, traveled the world, know lots of Nobel laureates and quirky scientists where I could discuss intellectual science to find a safe, common ground. By becoming an entrepreneur, I found I could play up the “difference” part of me as a role, which helped make me successful. Still, I always maintained the animal fascination, and before there was an organized furry movement I made my own anthro clothes and held such fantasies. I always had stuffed animals on my desk (even when the companies I started went public or were in merger talks), and pics of wild cats on my walls.

So… part of the attraction for me is that furries are NOT mainstream (ordinary = uninteresting to me). Many embrace nontraditional thinking (and mating). I like this a lot. Furs (and latex and lycra anthros) were the first group that explained large parts of my life that I could not well explain otherwise. I feel more at home in the anthro world than anywhere else, despite the drama (which is outsized and legendary, in part because so many furries are so, well, young and socially inexperienced).

When I’m purring when snuggling, or walking through San Francisco streets and having food at Mel’s with ears and a tail on with a fellow fur (as I was a few days before this summary was written), and people ask me about furs, I take the time to tell them. I explain what it means to me, and WHY it is important. It is NOT something I feel one should hide, or to be embarrassed about, regardless of what some furs do or say. I DON’T expect that the average person will understand, but that’s OK… I don’t get my sense of self worth from the average person (well, of course I do get this from furries though, and for Westerners at least, happiness is often context-derived). By the same token, I also don’t expect most humans to understand global warming’s thermodynamic details, or quantum mechanics either. I’m OK with that too, as I maintain a rich intellectual life with lots of scientists AND some furs who can discuss this stuff (and discuss yiffing in the same paragraph). But it is SO nice to have a group that I do identify with, it is probably the only group I feel emotionally close to of all the groups I belong to.

Last, one paragraph on yet another effort to define "furriness"... the Fandom is sufficiently large and diverse that it defies a sound-bite-sized comprehensive definition. So, really, why argue whether yiff is a valid term, or if sex and furry are synonymous in the public’s eye. Agruing what defines furry is kind of like saying you are a “republican.” That term for some is indistinguishable from Judeo-Muslo-Christian fundamentalist religions, for others it is merely a fiscal and anti-federal conservatism, and for others it is that they were silver-spoon fed and don't want to share with others who are less deserving.

I am happy here