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:
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How should the furry fandom react? Embrace it? Reject it? And if so, how to deal with the risk of being "called out"?
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Is their point valid but are they simply to loud and aggressive?
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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.
They can all sit on a cactus and spin, wholeheartedly. The solution to seeing something you don't like is to NOT WATCH THE CONTENT YOU DON'T LIKE. Some of the more niche kinks that I enjoy frequently intersect with fetishes that I find personally unattractive and trigger some long-standing body image issues, but I don't go around telling people what they can and cannot enjoy, I just move on and filter out the keywords.
I've personally seen this bullying in action, when a dear friend of mine posted a relatively innocent picture they drew depicting balloon fetish (which wasn't even NSFW, BTW) and was harassed to the point they had to abandon the handle they'd used for over a decade (along with the name recognition and customer base they'd built up), and rebrand under a different handle.
It also really doesn't help that sometimes puriteen discourse itself is driven by an adult grooming children for abuse. There was a reddit post a while back where someone's daughter was suspended for bullying another student over a "problematic" (non-furry) ship--up to the point where she was actively encouraging the victim to harm themself. It turned out that the daughter was a member of a discord server where the admin was sending tons of porn to these children and telling them "this is what these sickos all want, you can't trust anyone but me, you need to fight against this and force them to give up these shameful urges," etc. It was honestly disturbing.
As others have said, the puriteen movement comes from christofascist origins, and originates from the same mindset as the current epidemic of anti-trans sentiments washing over the country: that the mere existence of any people who do not conform to heteronormative sexuality should be excluded from society.