Thank You Furry Much

Last weekend, my best friend visited me in the city by the bay. It was the first time she had come to see me since I moved her, and it was nice. It's been a long time since we had spent this much time together, just the two of us, and I was looking forward to it. Even though we are nothing alike, we are also so similar that we've been mistaken for sisters before. So don't let anyone ever tell you that girls aren't complicated.

Saturday morning we were at the farmers market looking for ingredients to make a blue cheese tomato cobbler because we're gentrified dickheads who love to recycle and support local businesses, like the good ex-Christians we are. And while we took a break in the shade watching the cool boys on skate boards that we used to think were too old for us and now looked way too young, a literal parade of fucking furries walked past. There were foxes and mice and bunnies and a dragon, there were animals we didn't recognize, and some that we were pretty sure Disney had not given the license to recreate. It was great. Many a tail was being carefully held to avoid it being dragged along the dirty waterfront, and the faces of each character, frozen in a look of joy or blissful eagerness, made me feel like I was in a baseball stadium getting ready for a t shirt cannon.

Obviously, we immediately began speculating about whether *all* of the costumes were present.... i.e., if you fucked a furry would it be a human dick or a animal one? If a deer had a vulva, would it be au natural, and did that mean it bright pink fur? Our jokes immediately went to sex because that's what culture has grasped first and foremost; that furries were just people who wanted to be animals, primarily so they could fuck other animals.

But later that weekend I did a deep dive into the world of furries; visited some chatrooms, stalked some websites. Primarily, to be totally honest, it was out of a sexual curiosity. Out of all the kink and sex parties I've ever been to, I had never seen a single furry. Are furries part of the kink community, or were they something else all on their own? When I started to do my research, I found out they were a community all of their own; that people had been doing this since the 70s (and some even before that) and that it was so much more than just fucking someone in a mascot costume. People in the furry community carefully cultivate 'fursonas' which are animal figures or personas. They often have very specific avatars and personalities, and furries often make very complex and engaged stories surrounding their fursonas, and there's a LOT of furry art online. A LOT. Many furries make their own fursuits/costumes, which was often incredibly detailed and even include moving parts like swishing tails, blinking eyes, or twitching ears. A lot of furries participate in super active online chat rooms and often go to conventions. There are a lot of furry communities all over the world where people can share their interests in safe spaces, and play out being their fursonas without judgement.

When we don't understand something, we feel like we have license to make fun of it. We find ways to other it, to make it more maligned than it needs to be. We shame people for pursuing their interests, because they are not our interests. We often use sex to achieve these means, because sex is already such a shame-filled and taboo topic in our society. So many of us had crushes on characters in the Lion King, or Robinhood, or any other countless Disney movies. We call ourselves brave as lions, hungry as bears, lazy as house cats. We have no problem anthropomorphizing animals by calling them our fur children, and we have no problem acting ourselves like animals. We just have a problem with people who love it more than us, because we feel uncomfortable around things we don't understand, or don't identify with. So here's to the gorgeous furries of San Francisco, the confurence goers who see themselves as foxes or mice or lions or more. Here's to you guys living your best lives; I see you now, and I'm so happy that you've found a passion that makes you feel happy, and that makes you feel like you belong. Our planet may be a small one, but there's enough room at the table for everyone to have a seat.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

I was going to write a quick post about my feminist rage against the double standard that still governs female sexuality and sensuality, but let's save that for a time that isn't right now. I want to do a quick mental health check, because it's alarming how quickly, and how devastatingly we went from things maybe getting better to things being worse than before.

I've been checking in with friends over the last couple of weeks and it seems like we've all collectively hit a second wave of anxiety, depression, and even feelings of despair, but this time we don't have the emotional reserves to deal with it.

Briefly, I think a lot of this has to do with how we felt five months ago, when the news was starting to report about a mysterious virus that was slowly making its way across the globe. We were scared, but we laughed it off and shook our heads at the people hoarding toilet paper. We were told (most of us) that if we sheltered in place, we could collectively make this go away, or at least prevent it from scaling up into a true global disaster.

But american exceptionalism does not like to be told no, and so while some of us worked from home and stopped seeing friends, while some cities became ghost towns and restaurants and bars stood empty, in other places life carried on as it always had, and in some cases with even more stubborn ardor and determination than before. We watched as people ignored the collective good in favor of individual satisfaction, with willful ignorance or a broad refusal to see the potential community consequences of their actions. As other countries suffered and buckled, we had protesters who demanded salons reopen so they could have their haircuts, or their favorite bars once again pour them a cold one, because hey, it's our right as americans.

And then the real protests began. Not ones that whined about having to do the hard thing and stay home, but brave ones that spoke out about the systemic injustice and racial violence that has existed in our country from its inception. In many ways it was painful and horrifying, as we saw peaceful people protesting police violence being met with exaggerated and extreme police violence. The cameras are on, the fingers were on record. For weeks, there were daily protests in nearly every state, and the movement was carried and echoed abroad, where millions protested in what is now being considered the greatest civil rights movement in the history of humankind.

We are here to witness it, we were lucky enough to be here to participate in it, to contribute to it. And we did, in as safe of ways as possible; with many protesters carrying extra masks, hand sanitizer, or anti-bacterial wipes for anyone who needed them. Of course it took a couple of weeks, but as the numbers started rolling in, very few new coronavirus cases were actually a result of participating in the protests. Mainly, frustratingly, the new case loads are overwhelmingly younger people who broke social distancing to see each other at house parties or in newly reopened bars.

And that brings us to where we are now. Like I said before, I wanted to write an article about the double standard of sexual liberation that still plagues women, and I will, a different day. Right now what is important is acknowledging that the exhaustion is really kicking in, that the anxiety we felt in March may not be anything compared to this.

We thought this would take six months to get over. Or we watched other countries that had their shit together reopen and now approach something that seems almost normal. Mental anguish and stress is easier to take when we can envision an end in sight. But now, in July, we are forced to reexamine that belief, and realize that it may not just take months, but it may take years before we see an end to this, least of all because we all think we're the special ones, and that one BBQ can't hurt us all, can it? Many countries have closed their borders to us though, and our president is still rarely seen with a mask on. We haven't hit the second wave yet, because we aren't even done with our first one.

And for many of us, Black Lives Matter is something we could ignore. We could go to brunch, we could go play ball in the park. We could go camping or say "I would love to march but my girlfriend's parents are visiting that weekend." Before, we could choose to look away but we can never again say that we didn't know. We are joining a fight that has been going on for hundreds of years, and we are very, very late to the party.

It is exhausting, to battle two pandemics at once. It is exhausting to realize that the first one will not end as quickly as we thought it would, and to learn what Black people already knew, is that the pandemic they've been fighting their whole lives, well, we're only just getting into the ring.

This is a broad mental adjustment from being comfortable to being uncomfortable. To being scared and exhausted and stretched thin. This is not the time to tap out yet, because we haven't even started fighting. I've hit many breaking points over the last couple of weeks, which is why I stepped away from writing for a little bit. I needed to focus on how to rebuild my mental energy and emotional stores, how to create more sustainable patterns and how to plug in in ways that are long-term.

I sheltered in place until I could feel myself breaking, and then I became vulnerable. I reached out to the people I loved and told them about my fragile bits. I was honest about the space I was in, and the affirmation and care I needed. In doing so, I was also able to reach out to them and give them the care that they needed to. Emergent strategy, and movement building is successful when there is mutual care and accountability, and by taking care of others, I was able to find the care for myself, a symbiotic love that I had forgotten I could lean on.

Do you feel like you have those relationships in your life? Part of the isolation of Covid, at least for me, was realizing that some people I was close to were, at best, only superficial in their care for me. It made me feel worse at the beginning, that I was unloveable or unworthy of care in the moments when I needed it most, but now I feel like my community and network are super strong. When they are made up ONLY of the people I trust with my life, so much worry I was carrying in me disappeared.

Please make sure you are checking in on yourself and on other people. It is not enough to watch their instagram stories or like their tweets or facebook posts. Make sure you are asking meaningful questions, and letting yourself be vulnerable as well. Take note of your feelings, of your energy levels and emotional stability, and do the work to detail what you need to replenish. Take some time to take care of yourself, because this is where the real fight begins.

---

Note: A small correction was made to this post to capitalize the word “black” when referring to Black people.