The fandom should absolutely reject any “purification” or sanitization of furry culture. This is thinly veiled puritanical culture that stems from Christofascist ideology and influence. This group of ravenous teenagers, some of which have barely experienced what it’s like to be an adult, are not recognizing the harm they’re pushing onto a mostly queer community that has had to fight for the right to be themselves for longer than they’ve been a twinkle in their parents’ eyes. They need to learn from their LGBTQ+ elders and sit down. We have a clear distinction between regular and adult panels at conventions for a reason.

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.

@Wander

I’m Ace, so a ton of the stuff involved in this, I don’t have much of a frame of reference because it’s alien to me, but I grew up in a puritanical Christian environment and actively watched people be stigmatized for consensual adult behavior.

The only thing I ask is people use CWs so folks like me can properly filter out what I don’t want to see. Otherwise, yinz keep being weird and keeping the fandom unmarketable. Puriteens need to mind their business.

@Wander Slap it down. Slap it down hard and without mercy

@Wander With the derision and shunnning they deserve. If they want to act as muck-rakers, leave them to wallow in their muck and eject them from all venues where they continue to cause problems.

Until they come to the realization that *their* behaviors are the problem, and not the things which they decry, they will continue to thrive off of the moralistic circle-jerk they’ve been indoctrinated into.

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As a fan of more… controversial kinks even in the furry community, the last thing that is needed is more hate/misunderstanding around

It’s just the Burned Furs all over again. The same sort of puritanical anti-NSFW movement. You might also notice that the puriteens in the furry fandom are often the same people being anti-pride as well and complaining about NSFW events in the LGBT community at large.

Puriteens should be opposed at any and every opportunity. We don’t want or support that religious fundamentalism look-alike behavior. Get over it or get out of the fandom and the LGBT community. They’re working their way to being as bad as the Log Cabin Republicans.

• How should the furry fandom react? Embrace it? Reject it? And if so, how to deal with the risk of being “called out”?

Personally I do believe we as a community need to reject the puritan idea in all it’s forms.

If anyone is being called out, it could be viewed as online harassment and it should be documented and reported to website administration (if on central network social media like Facebook, deaddit, and dead bird site.)

If you are on any decentralized social media and they are calling you out on your instance, document their attacks and report them to the instance administrator. If that instance administrator will not do anything, leave that instance for a better instance like Yiffit.net if on Lemmy or packmates.org if on Mastodon.

• Is their point valid but are they simply to loud and aggressive?

What they propose over the community is censorship. It is not a valid reason. It is a means of control. If we give in to their demands on this, they will demand another thing be censored and we will have to give in to appease them. Then another, and another, and another till the fandom itself is either dead or a husk of it’s former self because it censored everything out of it on the clean web and drove everyone that was a part of it either into seclusion and never talking about furry fandom or really limiting it down to encrypted matrix chatrooms and onion links on the dark web because puritans destroyed what we had on the clear web.

We should be allowed to freely think and have our own ideas and depict what we want in media we either make ourselves or commission from artists. We shouldn’t be limited by other peoples narrow ideas, views, and beliefs. Whether they are children or adults.

• Or are their methods correct and it’s time that the fandom received a wake-up call?

Their methods are not correct. Again what they are proposing and forcing on us is censorship. The only wake-up call the fandom needs is to realize that these puriteens are fascists trying to shove their fascist ideas down our throats or make our lives miserable if we don’t comply.

And we need to stand up to that. It should be made fully clear that they are not welcomed within the fandom if they want to force us to cowtow to their demands of censorship.

They need to accept the fandom for what it is. Otherwise they need to leave the fandom.

@Wander I haven’t taken the time to figure out wtf a Lemmy is, but hoooooooo boy do I have a harsh take on this.

(Especially knowing how many of these fuckers are otherwise abusive themselves and/or actively in bed with the alt-reich)

Simple: Don’t like it? Don’t search it and don’t look at it. I’m not going to tell someone to stop drawing something just because I personally find it uncomfortable. Heck, I’d feel shame if I ever was in such situation. I can just block the person drawing the art and I never have to see any of their art again (outside of re-sharing).

Enjoy your artistic freedom, keep the fandom unmarketable, and if something makes you uncomfortable, filter it out. It’s not on others to cater to your needs all the time. Sometimes you need to be the one to take initiative.

I haven’t encountered any of these “puriteens” yet anywhere thankfully, I don’t really spend any time on twitter though. My opinion boils down to pretty much what everyone else has said here so far. We don’t need a bunch of kids running around trying to tell us what to do and acting like morality police, don’t force religious beliefs onto us, etc. As for the risk of being “Called out”, just ignore it. Even if they get loud about it. Its just a group of teens on Twitter and in the grand scheme of things their opinion about you means fuck all. They will forget about you and move on to the next thing/person to be mad at in less than a week. As for the fandom as a whole being “called out”, I don’t think there is much to “call out”. Furries have not been well received on the internet for a long time and the go to thing to accuse us of is bestiality so they’ve already lost the main thing to “call us out” for. I’ve noticed a shift recently in a more positive direction of the internet’s opinions on furries and I don’t think a loud group of teens on Twitter is going to sway it back the other direction again.

I get that a lot of furry stuff isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Yeah, I’ve seen some pretty weird fetishes over the years that I don’t really understand the appeal of. But I’m actually kind of surprised this is even an issue that people are worried about, at least to a degree that is worth mentioning. This stuff seems quite tame in comparison to some of the early internet forums of old. And at the end of the day, this is all fictional. If the ones viewing it are mature adults, it hurts literally no one. The drawings don’t have feelings.

@Wander not me writing a paragraph on this post because i have opinions

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”?