This is an exchange I had a few weeks back with an anti-furry in the comments of this video. It’s quite long so get ready for a wall of text.
Me: Is this the “evidence like a sledgehammer” you spoke of?
Them: No. https://youtu.be/6lfJYtmZYpA. And https://youtu.be/-6h3slvF0MM and https://youtu.be/Kq4pvm5LNiA and https://youtu.be/TukG7FhYOGU. And. https://youtu.be/1--Y8ki4fcE and. https://youtu.be/B7Qcf5td6KY and. https://youtu.be/TvalEWMoQmU and. https://youtu.be/0xAuOYjB_-k AND https://youtu.be/cOAKaAHwvis AND https://youtu.be/ceb37ghlwkM AND. https://youtu.be/pQcTs3P4Dyg. A N D https://youtu.be/5vZPZ4MYg7U?si=tjlY7JmBYPSmdSGE. And https://youtu.be/ut22bYG9nmQ?si=8sQGS5IaHPveiK7y. A N D. https://youtu.be/7zqRofZOnWA?si=sbgEMA1Bj_EVqn4S. Plus. This (the links for some reason dont work on my channel specifically) And. A large majority of our sample reported non-heterosexual identities (84%) and some degree of sexual motivation for being furries (99%). Male furries also tended to report a pattern of sexual interests consistent with an ETII involving anthropomorphic animals Google itself. Need more? have you ever heard about E621? one of the biggest furry websites, pornographic website, with 3 500 000 results (not views, 3,5 milion pieces of pornography with antropomorphic animals) with less than 3 000 000 furries on the world (including kids) and this is only one website, on other websites there is even more of this. does it look like a job of minority? only difference between furry pornography and zoophília, is that no animals are hurt in process, but this is still attraction to animals, even if these are antropomorphic. so people watching it, are zoophíles, otherwise they will look for a pornography without animal characteristics. I got this /\ one from another anti furry. now the phrase. Every fandom has a sexual side. Is normall agreeable. And yet. The furry fandom is the exception. The ratio of it is a good example. Also SOMETHING of note. When you type i. Furry (nothing more nothing less. ) It takes scrolling through 8 pictures to get to something nsfw. I take something sandbox like say. The Scp foundation. (i looked up Scp). The first nsfw item i found. Was about a furry. (Scp 1471 to be exact). It took 34 pictures before something nsfw (that wasnt also a furry)(it was a picture of Scp 173 with its secretion a bit on it (i count that )). How about say roblox. 150 pictures before you come across something suggestive. Need more proof. Fine. Country balls. Major blood or SOMETHING that could count. At 51 pictures its a joke that Israël and palistine are murdering each other on a map that it isn’t easy to spot. So to say it the very least. The furry fandom is bad Because the nsfw is so common. My very own. Made by seeing shit you wouldnt want to see. if you hated zoos one thing. Why wont you or any other furry do that themselves. Because that has become the norm. If the furrys were against zoos. They would have taken eniciatif. They would have stopped the zoos before they thought of making the majority. Instead you. Yes you. The curry idiot that thinks he got me beat. If you hated zoos. YOU. Would have stopped it. YOU would have made a difference. But instead im now for de to clean your mess and be assualted for it. The anti furs Arent to blame here. You are Also anti zoophiles is just common sense. And lastly. Using dem common sense. Sorry if it is a bit much
Me: I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and respond assuming you’re speaking from a place of genuine lack of knowledge, not willful malice.
Those YouTube links you posted are full of anecdotes, memes, and vague allusions to some problems anti-furries think are widespread in the furry fandom, but no actual data to back up these ideas. If some politician presented videos like this as evidence for some policy decision everyone would think that’s ridiculous, right? We need proper data and evidence to make an informed decision, not nitpicked anecdotes, memes, and fearmongering.
I and most other people also apply this belief when it comes to generalizing entire groups of people, which is why furries are becoming more accepted as time goes on. Most people don’t hate a whole group based on anecdotes, so they aren’t going to be convinced into hating furries based on nitpicking and memes.
Also consider that your rhetoric is very similar to that of white supremacists - they’ll often link to anecdotes about black-on-white crime, screenshot a handful of black people on Twitter saying something racist, or nitpick a handful of studies sponsored by far-right organizations in order to justify their beliefs. This is not enough to convince me and most other people that racism and segregation are justified however, because we’re not swayed by anecdotes and fearmongering. I hope that you’re also not convinced by the disingenuous rhetoric of white supremacists, and I also hope that you’ll apply this same level of scrutiny and skepticism when it comes to generalizing furries.
Moving on, I’ll just say that I don’t care about porn. Yeah, furry porn exists. So what? Most people don’t have a problem with what kind of porn other people like as long as it’s consensual, so again you’ll have a hard time convincing people to hate furries based on this. If furry porn bothers you that much that’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it, but much like the ~15%-20% of furries who don’t like yiff do, you should probably just avoid the porn if you don’t like it. (I also have no idea where you got that 3M furries number. I know that in a furry survey furries themselves guessed that about 1% of Americans are furries, which would be about 3M people, but I’m not sure if that’s what you’re referring to.)
Furthermore, most fandoms dabble in porn to one way or another. Not only are there multiple websites specifically dedicated to hentai, in a poll on MyAnimeList 72.8% of participants said they look at hentai: https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=483869&pollresults=1 And in a 2018 survey only ~20% of anime fans strongly disagreed with the statement “I often view anime related pornographic material”, suggesting that a majority do look at hentai to some extent: https://sites.google.com/site/animeresearch/past-results/2018-results These results are similar to that of furries (see the research on sexuality and porn on the FurScience website, for example: https://furscience.com/research-findings/), but I don’t see people decrying that the anime fandom is sexual anywhere near as often as I see it happen with furries. My point, of course, is not that you should bash anime more often, but rather that it’s fine for anime fans to like hentai. Hentai really shouldn’t be a big deal, and yiff also shouldn’t be a big deal.
As for Google results: Once again these are anecdotes, and not very useful for making any informed conclusion about anything. It’s worth noting that the search results you get are a reflection of your own search history. If you look up a lot of NSFW furry images out of “outrage” (as I’ve heard anti-furries often do), you’ll get furry porn in your results because that’s what Google thinks you want. By contrast, I looked up “furry” in an incognito tab and didn’t get any NSFW images: https://imgur.com/BIWuBzC I did get some horny/mild NSFW images, but some of them were from media outlets talking about sex in the fandom. Furries often criticize the media for focusing on the sexual aspects of the fandom too much.
Similarly, if you look up “woman” in an incognito tab you’ll get SFW results, along with a handful of images of women in bikinis and skimpy clothing.
Also I don’t really get what SCP, Roblox or “country balls” have to do with furries, but again, the search results that you personally get are not really evidence of some problem with the fandom.
As for why furries don’t kick zoophiles out of the fandom… We do actually. When someone is outed as a zoophile they are usually shunned out of the fandom. You can see examples of this with Kero The Wolf/Radiance Wolf and Hypnotist Sappho. The former lost nearly all his supporters, was publicly humiliated, had the cops called on him, and despite trying to come back to YouTube he basically got no views and a ton of hate, so he hasn’t uploaded in several months. After revealing that she’s a zoophile, Hypnotist Sappho was shamed and harassed to the point where she was hospitalized due to high risk of her killing herself. We haven’t heard from her since.
Most furries make it abundantly clear that zoophiles are not welcome in the fandom, and when we find out that someone is a zoophile they’re usually shamed and shunned. Some zoophiles themselves seem to think that the fandom is “toxic” towards them. From a now suspended zoophile account: https://web.archive.org/web/20220907231754/https://twitter.com/wolfjlupus/status/1291251964597030912
Still, there’s a limit to what we can do because nobody owns the furry fandom, so whether they’re good or bad, anyone could be part of it. If some zoophile is never outed and uses alts to engage with zoophilic content there isn’t really much we can do beyond just reporting their accounts as we come across them. At the end of the day while furries don’t welcome zoophiles and shun them when they’re outed, there isn’t much else that can be done because of the anonymity provided by the internet.
Finally I’d like to address the study that you mentioned. I’m familiar with it, and it’s a 2019 study by Kevin Hsu and Michael Bailey titled “The “Furry” Phenomenon: Characterizing Sexual Orientation, Sexual Motivation, and Erotic Target Identity Inversions in Male Furries”.
Despite this being an actual academic study generalizing from it would be rather shortsighted and a major case of nitpicking. I actually compiled a list of all the studies that estimated the prevalence of zoophilia in the fandom, along with dozens of studies of its prevalence in the general population: https://en.wikifur.com/w/index.php?title=Zoophilia&oldid=535240#Prevalence
If I pointed to the study that found that 31.6% of controls subjects had committed bestiality and said that this represents all people that would be nitpicking. That study sampled specifically rural men seeking medical attention, so it’s by no means going to be representative of the general population. Similarly, as I explain the wiki, the 2019 study included only furries who identified as male, and because it was a study specifically advertised as being about sexuality, they clearly oversampled furries with a sexual interest in the fandom compared to other surveys. They also used an 11-point scale to measure sexual interest which is very different from other surveys of the fandom - hence why their results were so different from other surveys of furries.
When we aggregate the several surveys of the fandom we get an estimate of around 14.9% being zoophiles, though there’s also good reason to believe that’s an overestimation since self-selected samples (which all surveys of furries rely on) tend to overestimate the prevalence of paraphilias compared to representative samples.
Them: You know what. Ill double down on my statement. Also. Your comment is way to long. You spended days on that argument. When ill break it apart just the same way
Proper data eh. have you ever heard about E621? one of the biggest furry websites, pornographic website, with 3 500 000 results (not views, 3,5 milion pieces of pornography with antropomorphic animals) with less than 3 000 000 furries on the world (including kids) and this is only one website, on other websites there is even more of this. does it look like a job of minority? only difference between furry pornography and zoophília, is that no animals are hurt in process, but this is still attraction to animals, even if these are antropomorphic. so people watching it, are zoophíles, otherwise they will look for a pornography without animal characteristics. Degeneracy is common. Same with their nsfw. Second off. Did you watch the video. The first minute is memes. The second 2 minutes are common sense. And showing of their degeneracy. Like. Why would the furry’s invade a church. Second off. What do you mean i am acting the same way as a white supremacist. Since when is using the tools at hand a bad thing. Now. You SHOULD care on why furry nsfw is bad. Starting off. There are a suspected 3 million FURRY’S in the world if im correct. If not. Im going of the low number and say a total of 10 mil. But lets go of 3 million. Starting of. There is more furrys nsfw than people. That isn’t normal. Second off. The furry"“fandom”" is filled with kids and people saying that its safe for kids. Which isn’t good when nsfw is so easy to see. And you could likely accidentally see that. Third of all. You are hypocritical by saying that anime fans watch nsfw lots of the time. And than say that the same is happening with FURRY’S. Hypocrit eh. Also another thing about nsfw. It ruins your brain. Google itself says that studies have shown that nsfw ruins the reward part of your brain. Wich leads to depression and being. A Snowflake. And makes people more aggressive and stupid. Wich also coincides with kids being lured in. Also. At halfway through the video. You do see that the guy has safe Search on. (the beginner dude). Also you should focus on sexual aspects when that is a major part of something. As for countryballs. Roblox and SCP. Those i looked them up to solidify a point that FURRY’S have way more nsfw than most other fandoms. And mind you. This is County balls. Famous for jokes that are very bad. And some gore. Roblox. Which you should know has gotten itself in hot water many times. And most importantly. SCP wich is known for having a good chance for the SCP to have gore in some capacity. And mind you. The first nsfw when i looked up SCP was literally a furry SCP. Invading normal communitys too.
Also. In terms of when do you guys get rid of zoophiles. When half of them come back around. What do you do. Welp if you wanted to stop zoophiles entirely. Just make it so scary for zoophiles to be a furry that they dont want to. And yet all of a sudden. Cyberbullying them to the point of self harm is ok by you guys. But when we do it. Its very evil. Also if that was the case. Why DIDNT you finish them. It would have set a message on that you would kill them. And yet you dont. They can come back hidden. You should take full measures instead of a half one. Because you would then get in trouble becuase the half measure did half of what was needed. Also. You could go deeper. If you want no zoophiles. Ya gotta work for it. Sorry if this part is me rambling. But no zoo’s want to be in a place where they would be killed. And yet. You guys dont check it past seeing if they posted zoophilery. And once the damage is done. Then you step in action. Maybe prevent it for crying out loud. Because the problems it could cause when you dont . on your last point. I would actually think that the study either was barely to small or barely to big. A good example of that would be. Say you live in Russia. And you dislike Putin. But then some people come and ask. What you think of our leader. And you know that it could cause problems if you told them the truth. So you lie. That seems reasonable. And bring that over to something else dangerous or shameful. Like being a zoophile. Youd likely lie to look like your a stand up guy. So the data gets skewed. Like look up TED ED magic election Riddle. Or here. Sorry if the link looks sketchy. https://www.voicetube.com/videos/159292. People Arent willing to tell people that they are for that candidate. And will tell something else. Skewing results. This isn’t even a rare case. Its likely to happen in anytime sombody asks something shameful for data. So its likely that the data is somewhat wrong.
Also. Can you not make yours 10 minutes long to read. I gotta do other things too.
I’ll skim through this but literally don’t even bother with these people. They’ll be a repentant furry in 10 years or they’ll find something new to hate later.
Edit: “large majority of our sample reported non-heterosexual identities (84%)” yeah they outed themselves as a homophobe literally immediately. That’s usually what it comes down to with these people. With the style that the original video is made in there is zero chance you’re going to change this person’s mind, and if you could then it would take hours and hours and hours of effort that could be better spent doing anything else.
Edit 2: This person is either 11 or fully delusional. They write like a conspiracy theorist, and do the RANDOM capitalization thing that radicalized boomers do. Gonna go with my original gut feeling and say steer clear of trying to “help” them. If they’re arguing in bad faith they will twist your words and logic until you give up, and they “win”. It’s a common tactic used by these people, who get into “debate winning streaks” because no one can stand to talk to them.
Edit 3: I made a meme to commemorate this event. Please pick it up from the gift shop when you are done at the eye washing station.
Yeah, it’s probably worth it to slightly push back against these people irl, because there is a chance that’s the signal they need to change, but online they can just copy your responses around and use them to further their crap. They probably love getting attention inside furry spaces like this one.
Best option is to ignore them, or if you must interact, troll around so it’s at least fun for you instead of being exhausting.
Actually, on the topic of copying responses you can see another common tactic on display here: they’re just copying a boilerplate response and making any opponents waste a lot of their own time debunking each point. Even if you fully and thoroughly counter each point, you’re probably going to have the goalposts moved or no response, and they’ll move on to sapping someone else’s time.
I’d recommend everyone watch “The Alt-Right Playbook” to be better prepared for these weird strategies that aren’t necessarily based around winning the argument.
I was thinking exactly the same thing as you with that meme lol
Also just a tip, you can embed images into Lemmy comments if you want like this:
Which will appear as:
I can never tell if it’s going to make the image super large on the page so I feel like it’s usually more respectful to just make it a link. You could probably also use a spoiler tag with the embedded image underneath to make it a clickable popup.
Does Lemmy support that thing you can do in Obsidian to set a maximum size?
EDIT: guess not.
(
ftr)
10 years? 3-5 lmao
It’s no use arguing with people when they’re this far gone. Especially because, as others have said, their opinions seem to be driven by thinly veiled homophobia. Best to just block and move on.
If you follow this guy logic then the human community is sick too. I mean, there’s human NSFW, and there are killers, zoophiles, pedophiles, and every other mental illness imaginable. Also, it’s a mistake in your copy/paste or did the guy actually repeat his first 2 paragraphs in his second answer?
Nah they just straight up copied and pasted part of their previous answer.
The worst mistake you made in this argument was choosing to argue in the first place. It doesn’t matter if you’re right, someone like this probably isn’t going to change their mind and, more than likely, they’re just trying to pull your leg. Believe, I’ve tried to argue with a ton of bigots in my past, works just as well as a gazelle in a lions den.
Wait until this guy finds out about the people that like to watch a little girl’s cartoon about colorful equines
if that was the case. Why DIDNT you finish them. It would have set a message on that you would kill them. And yet you dont. They can come back hidden. You should take full measures instead of a half one. Because you would then get in trouble becuase the half measure did half of what was needed. Also. You could go deeper. If you want no zoophiles. Ya gotta work for it
Is this guy seriously saying that zoophiles are our own fault because we aren’t literally trying to hunt them down and murder them?
Third of all. You are hypocritical by saying that anime fans watch nsfw lota of the time. And thhan say thay the same is happening with FURRY’S. Hypocrit eh.
No way is this guy over the age of 12. Hopefully one day he’ll grow a brain.
your response is too long
posts wall of text with a single line break
I ain’t reading all that, good for you, or sorry that happened
Jokes aside, this was mostly wasted on them, but thanks for pushing back anyway. Dude is just homophobic who is either in the closet (about being queer or a furry), down a pipeline, or literally 12.
Me: I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and respond assuming you’re speaking from a place of genuine lack of knowledge, not willful malice.
That was your biggest mistake. I appreciate that when bigots spew their stupidity online it should be responded to, but the response should be aimed more at convincing other people that the argument is wrong rather than convincing the original poster that they are wrong. Provide the counter argument for everyone else and move on.
Them: […] Your comment is way too long […]"
Them: […] You are hypocritical by saying that anime fans watch nsfw lots of the time. And than say that the same is happening with FURRY’S. Hypocrit eh."
Sounds like they’re the hypocrite, since their comment was also very long.
This person’s definitely 12 at max. Sounds about right for an anti-furry.
