Like I mentioned before, it’s easy to forget how “deviant” my everyday life is, when it seems so natural to me.
“I want to make a new friend tonight. I’m gonna make that a goal,” I told Skyspook.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. And if I tell you, I’ll actually do it. I mean, I want to talk to some new people, be friendly, introduce myself, say hello.”
One of the nice things about going to the dungeon is that I have so many friends on the scene that I feel terribly comfortable there; it’s like a second home. The one drawback to that is that I imagine for a newcomer that things would seem clique-y and unwelcoming because we have shared history, private jokes, preexisting connections.
At the next play party we went to, there were a couple of furries being given the grand tour. They were looking around in all directions with wide eyes and seemed sweet but totally overwhelmed. Skyspook and I greeted them as they passed by us, introduced ourselves.
For the uninitiated, a “furry” is a particular kind of fetishist who primarily focuses on playing the role of an animal during sexual play. Often, this is accompanied by wearing animal costumes and emulating the behavior of a wild animal or a house pet. The play of furries is importantly distinguished from that of bestiality in that all participants are humans who are essentially play acting as animals. I had heard about furry culture before moving out here on internet forums, encountered furry porn (often cartoons of sexy creatures that blend that line between animal and human) on Deviant Art, but until I worked a vendor table at Penguicon last year, I’d never met a furry in the flesh. Or the fur, for that matter. Ex-Husband in particular had a great disdain for furries, citing the glorification of objectification as his chief trouble with the subculture.
My first impression of furry culture (albeit drawn from a small sample size) is that it is a bit quirky but that furries for the most part are a sweet lot . I subsequently went on to make a very good friend who just happens to be, among other things, a furry.
In the general public, furries are the butt of a lot of jokes, but personally they fascinate me.
Later on in the night, the young furry couple came to visit us in the social area. The girl pointed to my collar and asked me a question, but it was phrased so oddly that it took me 3 repetitions to understand what she was asking me, which was “Is you furry?”
“Oh!” I said, once I realized what it was she was saying. “My collar! No, I’m a slave in training,” I replied, smiling.
Her face instantly fell at the word “slave,” her face went a bit pale, and she scampered away.
It dawned on me then that I had just managed to squick another pervert with that intense, triggery word “slave.”