Everyone is a Furry

Mythologizing the self, sometimes, also means mythologizing the animal.

Art by @toshoneko on Twitter.

What’s your “spirit animal?”

(For now, let’s ignore the problematic nature of the question. I know better. But I ask it this way because I know it’s a question you’ve heard—and answered—before.)

The what isn’t as important as the why. Take a moment or two to think it over: why this animal in particular? Explain it to yourself as if you were explaining it to me. Are you a bear because you sleep long and are grumpy when hungry? Are you a dog because you’re outgoing? A hyena because you have an infectious laugh?

Congratulations! You’ve just practiced the verb “Being A Furry.” In fact, you’ve done so your entire life: we all often take concepts associated with animals (bears hibernate, dogs socialize, hyenas laugh) and internalize them (your nightly hibernation, your socializing, your laugh.)

Animal concepts are all around us, but they’re most obvious when they’re used to anthropomorphize: imagine, for example, a cartoon wolf. Our cultural understanding of the animal, the conscious idea of Wolf, implies pack loyalty, carnivorous aggression, undomesticated canine habits; the anthropomorphized wolf, then, will do all the things humans do, but will also at some level be recognizably Dog. He may have a proclivity to eating red meat—tear into his burger, possibly growling as he does so, pickles and ketchup flying—or feel a strong sense of canine loyalty toward his friends, or may sniff the seat of someone’s pants for a gag once or twice. Is that you? Don’t you eat messily? Don’t you feel strongly about the people who love you, or maybe use some version of puppy-dog eyes to get what you want?

This is the most basic act of being a furry: to look at an animal as if into a mirror. (Once, a couple of years ago, I had a dream that I was someone’s pet raccoon, being carried around a city in a little papoose, holding a paper cappuccino cup between my tiny black claws.)

Furry subculture is, of course, more expansive than a “What Animal Are You?” Buzzfeed quiz. I don’t expect to see anyone’s mother in fursuit at a convention anytime soon. But the point here is to consider how closely we hold anthropomorphism to our everyday lives. Anthropomorphism is your car having a name. It’s the Bible calling God “he.” It’s describing your stomach as “unhappy” because it’s reacting to something you’ve eaten.

(A friend of mine noted once, brainstorming an essay not dissimilar to this one, that if we define “anthropomorphosis” to mean “imbuing something with human-level intelligence/culture/social organization,” then by this measure, 10,000 years ago, corn anthropomorphized the Americas. Pre-Columbian America gathered cities and economies around the exciting new culinary and agricultural developments of nixtamalization. More on this in a sec, but by some measure, we, too, have been anthropomorphized. We may never be finished doing so.)

Our personal mythologies are also ways of anthropomorphizing ourselves, furry or not—my older brother, for example, tells me he likes to think of himself as a gorilla. It’s apt: he’s always been the more masculine family member, an obsessive gym-goer who taught me how to hold a gun, throw a football, and drink hard liquors; on the day of his wedding, his groomsmen brought him a pair of dumbbells so he could get in a pump or two before going up on the altar. My sister, also not a furry, says the same thing one day when I describe a therian to her: she’s not a furry, she says, but she’s always liked to think of herself as a fox.

Mythologizing the self, like this, also means mythologizing the animal. I’m a raccoon because I like to think of myself as toeing some line between scrappy and cutesy—though also known to be a dumpster-diver, the raccoon is cute enough that he can be led on a leash somewhere, put in a sweater on social media, rolled around in a stroller like a baby, and doesn’t look out of place. My raccoon-ness is this aesthetic dual-citizenship; my badger-ness is my eating habits, my masculinity, my my off-color jokes. My brother is a gorilla because he defines his life by his relentless pursuit of strength, my sister a fox because she defines hers by her intelligence, a little serene, a little energetic, a little witchy.

At the end of the day, we aren’t just furries—we are all still animals. Corn anthropomorphized the Americas, sure, but does the buck stop? Haraway wrote that modern technology has rendered us cyborg; is this a departure from humanity, or is it a further development, an anthropomorphosis, into some iteration of humanness we have yet to see? Crows, according to some researchers, have begun to enter the Stone Age, developing complex tools and currency, and isn’t that anthropomorphizing in real time? Anthropomorphosis is so called because it is not a fixed point, but an ongoing process, in much the same way the present is never a fixed point, either; the suffix -osis, after all, denotes an action, a state, a process. My brother was a gorilla the first time he did a push-up, and he is still a gorilla now that he benches 350, just more so; my sister was a fox the first time she fell in love with a book, and is even more fox now that she has her master’s degree from Yale. We are all animals, which means that we are all anthros. Everyone is a furry.

All of this is to say that animals are central to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, often more than we give them credit for. I find the torturous editing process is more fun when there’s a limber, spectacled raccoon doing so in my place; cooking food and joyfully tasting my creations is more fulfilling when, holding the spoon I am holding, is a badger.

(Another friend muses to me, once, that her mom describes her dad as a Saint Bernard. “He’s loyal, he’s protective, he’s sweet, a little stubborn.” Thinking on these standards, she pauses. “I think I’m a Saint Bernard, too.”)