Bright Eyes

Anthropomorphic animals are all around us. Talking bunnies, turtles with guns, bears wearing bow ties are familiars of commercial culture. Chances are you've seen one today, a cartoon trying to sell you something, or a mascot on a sports field. They've been around at least since Aesop, of course, but I've been noticing them a lot lately because I've been spending way too much time exploring the world of the furries: people who love anthropomorphised animals above all else, live for them and, not infrequently, live as them.

In Canada, a married couple sit around the house in enormous plush bear costumes. A pre-op transsexual in Australia is convinced he is a snow leopard. A computer programmer in the American Southwest writes story after story detailing erotic encounters with foxes. They all have their own web pages: YIFFLE - 'Your Index For Furry Links Everywhere' (www.argonet.co.uk/users/lyndale/lotcaf/yiffle), a hierarchically-organised on-line guide, currently lists almost 600 sites. Inhabitants of the furry world often favour Latinate words to describe their species preferences and identifications: weasel fans have an affection for 'mustelids', a teddy bear lover is an 'arctophile'. They study Japanese fox-spirit mythology and greet each other - in person and on-line - with the yiffs, arfs and meeps of stylised animal noises. There is a craft of animal costumes ('fursuits') and long debates about what is and is not furry. In April, conFURence (www.confurence.com), the largest convention of furry enthusiasts will celebrate its tenth anniversary, with thousands of furs converging on the Town & Country Hotel in San Diego and frolicking in their fursuited glory.

The furry world has its origins in comic book fandom of the 70s. Beginning with Robert Crumb's Fritz the Cat in 1968, a handful of artists tried to revitalise the genre of 'funny animal' books, writing adult stories, placing their characters in sexually explicit, and often violent, situations. A culture of amateur and semi-professional art and fiction grew up around these comics - privately-printed fanzines and portfolios of animal pin-up babes. In the early 80s, funny animal fans started becoming a noticeable presence at American science fiction conventions.

And then they arrived on the internet. The newsgroup alt.fan.furry started some time in 1990, and provided a forum for discussions of artwork and fiction. The same year saw the birth of FurryMUCK, one of many MUDs - net-based role-playing environments - in which invented characters can interact. An ongoing improvisation, it allowed fans to develop their own furry personae and create their own virtual lairs and caves. Once you have your own lair, of course, you can invite others in, and what happens then is up to you. FurryMUCK resembles that world of childhood fantasy where, as Angela Carter once noted, 'extraordinary miscegenations take place. An owl can marry a pussycat, for example. A mouse, a bird, and a sausage set up a ménage à trois'. By 1996, there were more than 2000 users worldwide, with up to 300 log-ons per evening.

But sometime in the early 90s things began to get a little odd. The fanboys and computer nerds of the furry world were joined by some rather more earnest sorts. A certain kind of New Age spirituality began to make an appearance: it's a short step from projecting a furry version of yourself on the net, to having a totem animal in some muzzy Native American kind of way. Some people thought they truly were animals, trapped in human bodies by a cruel twist of fate. Some people thought they were werewolves.

And then there was sex. The erotic side of furry culture had been present since the early days of underground comics, but there was much hand-wringing as to whether people were now going overboard with their fixations, whether hard-core animal porn was taking over. It's hard to imagine how anthropomorphic animals can not be sexualised: once a dog is wearing pants, it can get undressed. Eventually all erotica seems to veer towards the animal (Venus in Furs), all animal stories start sounding kinky (Puss in Boots).

For a lot of the fans, it was the plushophiles that finally broke the camel's back. A vocal subgroup, the 'plushies' love stuffed animals - you know, really, really love them - inventing a jargon of winking, infantilised sexuality: you 'boink' your plushies, and if you do it often enough they get all 'spoogey'. Some plushies fashion SPAs - 'strategically placed appendages' - and SPHs - 'strategically placed holes'. A conveniently splayed soft toy is 'talented'.

In the summer of 1996, as a direct result of flamewars between the furry animal fans and those who took anthropomorphism more to heart, a new newsgroup was created: alt.lifestyle.furry. Chartered with a carefully written statement celebrating furry diversity, it attempts to forge a utopian virtual community of individuals for whom 'furry' is a way of being. Many posts have the sound of confessions by gay teens, and, in many cases, that's precisely what they are: 'Until I came on the net and discovered that there were others who shared my feelings, I felt abnormal to the rest of the world'; 'To have a group of people openly embrace us is something many of us have dreamed of but never expected to see'.

Some posters discuss activities that are not just 'abnormal' but, in many countries, illegal: furry love does sometimes extend to actual bestiality. ('Zoophilia' is the preferred term for - as one practitioner puts it - 'consensual, loving relationships between two life forms who care for each other, even if it's for only a few minutes'.) Didactic material is available on-line: you can find detailed instructions on how to give a goose a good blowjob ('Nothing is more glorious then hearing the trumpet of a goose when he orgasms!'). This is, admittedly, a minority faction, and a controversial one. The furry lifestyle newsgroup accepts 'zoos' openly, but with caution: 'We understand that it is asking quite a lot to some people to cope with the idea that furry zoos are welcome on alt.lifestyle.furry, but when we formed this newsgroup we decided that it was up to each individual to decide what is and isn't part of their furry lifestyle'.

Furry love is, among other things, a kind of love, one whose pathos is more than a little familiar. The central difficulty of loving anthropomorphic animals is that they simply don't exist. There are no talking foxes; mice don't wear gloves; cats don't dance. So one has to make do, settle for approximations (don't we all?). The various strands that comprise the furry world are perhaps best seen as resourceful attempts at an impossible affection; solutions, in different ways, to the problem of a libidinous relationship to a representation. Unable to find satisfaction with a talking dog in a leather miniskirt, you become one by dressing up as one, or creating your own dog persona on-line. Perhaps you simply collect dog images or toys, and talk about them a lot. Or if you're really ambitious, you sneak moments of intimacy with the family pet.

Deriving its energy from the continual redrawing of lines between human and animal, between childhood innocence and adult sexuality, between technology and nature, furriness is a model fin de siècle phenomenon, a particular manifestation of a more global miscegenation. If it looks silly - and of course it does - that's because it is so determinedly literal in its working out of these issues. But the result of spending time with it is the insight gained by seeing the world as furry. Both Mickey Mouse and Mike Kelley seem a lot more complicated. New 'cute' hardware - the iMac and new Volkswagen - seems part of an inexorable evolution towards Winnie-the-Pooh.

I get confused about where the furry world stops and the rest of us begin. Maybe the profligate democracy of the internet has made it impossible to write po-faced ethnographies of 'subcultures'. (The likelihood that more people are impersonating otters than reading this magazine does take the wind out of one's sails.) Conversations about Japanese anime, Javascript and The X-Files are just as likely to take place at art openings as science fiction conventions. Bondage techniques can be downloaded at the local library. We're all geeks now, all perverts. And if some of us are dressed as animals, who's going to object?