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Weekly Discussion: How should the furry fandom react to "puritan" reformists? Are these reformists too aggressive and hateful? Do they have a point? (yiffit.net)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm happy to open our second weekly discussion topic:

This week we're going to cover a phenomenon that's been around in the fandom forever but which has resurfaced these last few years in the form of typically younger furs (13-21), often called "puriteens".

This new manifestation of reformists tend to be very vocal in their opposition of certain NSFW traits in furry characters such as anatomically correct genitalia (knots, sheaths, etc) as well as feral yiff / feral NSFW artwork.

Typically active on twitter, but progressively also on other platforms, people holding these beliefs are controversial due to their tendency of conflating and accusing people who enjoy this type of NSFW depicts of animal molestation.

I'm trying to be mostly neutral in this description, so please accept my apologies if the vocabulary is a bit too formal. Anyways, here's a few key questions:

How should the furry fandom react? Embrace it? Reject it? And if so, how to deal with the risk of being "called out"?
Is their point valid but are they simply to loud and aggressive?
Or are their methods correct and it's time that the fandom received a wake-up call?

Please feel free to share any opinions that you have. As always this thread will stay up for at least a week and will then be locked. So make sure to voice your opinion in time!

Also, by leaving a comment you can, if you want, in the same comment propose a new topic for next week's discussion!

Note: this topic is not marked as NSFW as it is educational, thus please don't be too explicit in your wording or use spoilers to hide any potential explicit text or images that you might want to use.

Edit: This went a bit out of hand, but it's very very late here and I might not be around until later tomorrow so I'm locking this thread and have removed any comments that went down a tangent while I figure things out. Tomorrow (technically today) I'll try to reply to any DMs that you have sent and will try to see if we can reopen the topic and how.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was going to just leave a few bullet points and then leave, because this kind of thing kinda makes me feel uncomfortable and frustrated. But then I started thinking and there are two related things I kinda... Wanna get off my chest, I guess?

Firstly, my thoughts on the matter:

IMO, platforms (Twitter, Mastodon instances, Subreddits, etc.) should be able to limit what they deem acceptable. I may not like it when they do so (Especially if they have a monopoly e.g. Paypal and Patreon), but ultimately it's their right to do so.
I define whether something is morally "right or wrong" based on consent. If all parties involved fully understand what is going on and consent to it, then IMO there is no moral issue. This does imply that platforms should gain your consent before showing you certain things (although not in an obnoxious data gathery way...).
Anyone who claims to act upon some objective moral standard other than that, and goes on crusades to try to "purify" people or groups deserve a spot in hell. Especially if they make up some nonsense about it being tied to pedophilia or bestiality. If you don't like NSFW furry stuff, just don't engage. Hell, put "SFW Furry" or something in your bio if you want to raise awareness that it's not all NSFW.
Bestiality is not furry. It doesn't meet the definition, isn't moral and we should try to kick people like that out.

Also, yes I know you can probably poke some holes in my stance. It's the best I can do, and most people's moral codes have holes in them.

Anyway, onto things I want to get off my chest. When I was younger, I only really consumed NSFW furry stuff (which is probably still what I do nowadays), and that filled me with a lot of guilt. I knew the fandom had this reputation of being NSFW, and I felt that me being into it in that way was making me somehow complicit? I didn't go on any crusades or anything, but I did annoyingly point out "btw it's not just a sex thing" when furry came up. I hope that nowadays either that reputation has died down or people are becoming more accepting that everything has a sex element. But yeah, I can kinda see where they are coming from, I guess. They love this stuff and don't want it to have the "bad" reputation.

Another thing I want to bring up about me is... Feral makes me uncomfortable. I understand the Harkness test, and that they can talk and consent and all that, but it feels a little too close to bestiality for my tastes. I even blacklist it in the communities I run even though I know most people there are probably fine with it. I saw a post a while back which to me just looked like an (animal) cheetah with his bits out, and I'm just wondering why that is "furry". I can kinda see why places ban human x feral because it's super unclear to me where the line is.

So a question to feral furry peeps, if you don't mind me asking, where do you draw the line between "feral" and "animal"?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I understand the Harkness test, and that they can talk and consent and all that, but it feels a little too close to bestiality for my taste

the Harkness test is some arbitrary made-up shit from Doctor Who. I don't understand why anyone thinks it's worth a damn.
Fictional content should not be subjected to ANY morality test in the first place. Drawings can't hurt anyone.
Do you think that furry porn featuring humans and anthro furries is also close to bestiality?

So a question to feral furry peeps, if you don’t mind me asking, where do you draw the line between “feral” and “animal”?

I don't draw such a line in the first place. Humans are animals. Nonhuman animals are animals. Anthropomorphization of nonhuman animals to give them traits of human animals is still just animals all the way down.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a useful tool to give a quick guideline on how consent works; if something passes the harkness test, it's a good sign that there won't be moral issues with having (hypothetical) sex acts with them.
Agreed. Although it still makes me feel greatly unconfortable.
No, anthros (and ferals) have the ability to give consent. Anthros also generally appear very human like, and so there is the implicit understanding that they have human-like society and language.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s a useful tool to give a quick guideline on how consent works; if something passes the harkness test, it’s a good sign that there won’t be moral issues with having (hypothetical) sex acts with them.

I disagree. It's a useless tool for accomplishing a useless goal - to give a moral green light to fictional depictions of hypothetical sex acts with fictional characters.

Agreed. Although it still makes me feel greatly unconfortable.

That's fine as long as you don't push others to an unreasonable degree.

No, anthros (and ferals) have the ability to give consent. Anthros also generally appear very human like, and so there is the implicit understanding that they have human-like society and language.

I didn't ask about consent, I asked if you think human/anthro approaches bestiality as human/feral does. Leave the topic of consent out of it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd define bestiality as "having sex with a living creature which does cannot consent to sexual acts in the same way that humans can".

Human/anthro and human/feral don't fit those criteria, because anthros and ferals can understand and consent to human norms (Well, I assume ferals can. Don't really know much about them). What I'm concerned about is what the difference between "man having sex with an animal dog" and "man having sex with a furry feral dog" is.

More generally, if I drew a picture of an animal dog, what separates it from a picture of a realistic feral?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I’d define bestiality as “having sex with a living creature which does cannot consent to sexual acts in the same way that humans can”.

That's not what that word actually means, though.

More generally, if I drew a picture of an animal dog, what separates it from a picture of a realistic feral?

That would be up to you as the artist. You could decide to include a description that details the degree of anthropomorphization, or lack thereof. You could include some speech bubbles. Or you could leave it completely unspecified, in which case the difference would appear to be absolutely nothing - and that's okay, it's a drawing.