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What makes someone attracted to anthros?


deconstructed furry
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12 minutes ago, Saxon said:

Although I will grant you it is possible that a child who perceives the feel of fur as pleasurable may unwittingly make the association 'Other people must perceive fur as pleasurable too, I can appeal to future mates by embodying this trait'.

Ooh, I'd say there's gold in them thar hills.

I'd say wanting to be pleasurable and lovable to others is a big, big part of all this.

12 minutes ago, Saxon said:

 I'm suspicious about the idea that some people are attracted to fursuiting because they want to hide their flaws, primarily because so many fetishes are centred on deriving pleasure from humiliation.

Well, there's "humiliation," and then there's "humiliation."

Just because you have a rape fetish doesn't mean you actually want some tweaked-out junkie with AIDS to jump you while you're walking home one night.

Most people's fursonas are charming, alluring, and attractive from their creator's point of view.

15 minutes ago, Saxon said:

 I don't think that, when children develop their future erotic fixations, there are unconscious high level thought processes going on that we would associate with adults, like 'I need to compensate for my flaws'. We should be careful not to project adult concepts of sexuality onto the early development of sexual fetishes. Explanations for the developments of fetishes need to focus on unwitting associations made by a subconscious which is trying to figure out how to calibrate the libido. 

I'd argue that many adults can't articulate their discomfort with their flaws, and the attempts they've made to compensate for them!

The discomfort is usually automatic and visceral, and the attempts to compensate for those flaws are largely reflexive and rationalized.

Most children won't tell you that their love of Batman or Superman stems from their feelings of impotence and inadequacy, and their basic desire to feel more powerful and in control, but you don't need to name it to be driven by it.

 

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4 hours ago, Saxon said:

I agree with you that humiliation fetishes centre on simulated humiliations, not real ones. Either way, your idea that people develop fetishes in order to disguise their flaws doesn't look like a particularly good one, does it? Children haven't even developed their adult flaws by the time they become fixated on a future fetish.

I think I was unclear about the part flaws have to play.

Fantasy is about accentuating the positive and de-accentuating the negative. In many cases, the dominant positive themes of a fantasy can tell you a lot about a person's fears and dislikes, even the subconscious ones.

If you often feel ugly, unpopular, and powerless in your every day life, one way of coping with that is to create a fursona that makes you feel sexy, popular, and powerful.

If you feel unattractive or awkward as your everyday self, then entering the headspace of your fursona may help you to feel sexy and in control in the bedroom.

If you often feel alienated and alone, imagining your favorite cartoon characters as your best friends and/or pretending to be something or someone different may help you to cope.

But, I realize this doesn't necessarily explain how or why people develop particular fetishes in the first place, since not everybody goes on to develop fetishes based on their childhood imaginary friends or pretend games.

Almost everyone I've ever spoken to with an odd fetish has either said that they had a critical "aha" or "yowza" moment where they just became fascinated with something unexpected, or that they had their first orgasm or erection in the presence of some stimulus, and they later came to associate that stimulus with being turned on.

Edited by Troj
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Most people will make their fursona attractive or sexy, yes. I'd suggest having a sexy fursona is more powerful or meaningful for people who personally feel unsexy or awkward.

As I'm thinking, I also wonder what role repeat exposure and/or "chaining" have to play in the evolution of fetishes. Meaning, are you more likely to develop a fetish for something the more you encounter it, especially in sexual situations? And/or, are you more likely to develop fetishes for stimulii that run parallel to or regularly complement your first fetish?

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51 minutes ago, Saxon said:

Are you sure people don't make their fursonas sexy, regardless of whether they perceive their real bodies to be ugly? 

I wouldn't say ugly is exactly the right word but maybe they're dissatisfied? 

also I can't exactly prove this (at least not without sifting through hundreds of pictures), but I think part of why fursonas at least look attractive is because they're symmetrical in most cases 

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Kids can certainly feel insecure about being bullied or ostracized, though, and kids may ostracize or bully another kid because they're weird, awkward, funny-looking, ugly, fat, disabled, insecure, shy, or any number of things.

I have a hunch that feeling less connected to or safe around actual humans leads people to feel closer to non-humans. For some, this translates into having a greater affinity for cartoon characters.

As people reach adolescence, these feelings can evolve into sexual or romantic ones.

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So this was rather strange and timely, I was down in my basement today going through some old boxes and I came across some old papers from grade school.  As I was nostalgically looking through them one caught my eye.  It was a short poem that I had illustrated about a family of foxes who stole a goose.   Based on my illustrations I was very clearly enamored with this family of foxes, in 3rd grade, at age 9.  I'm not sure if I can point to this single grade school project as the origin of my furry fantasies, but maybe this was a seed?  And that's right fuckers, I liked foxes before liking foxes was cool, and I have proof!  LOL 

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I had a crush on Brandy from the show Brandy and Mr. Whiskers when I was a child. It was only recently that I remembered the show existed and then realized that my interest in furries dates back that far.

Edited by Battlechili
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@Saxon, the "lying-on-your-belly-while-watching-toons" theory is interesting, but I don't think it'll bear fruit. Me, I've never watched cartoons in that position.

I just know that as a kid, I adored dogs and other canines, had an obsession with Donald Duck (mostly because I liked the fact that he was a total asshole), watched Scooby Doo every morning religiously, and strongly preferred stories about animals (especially ones that could talk) over stories about humans. As a kid, I could take or leave the Disney princesses, but always loved their animal sidekicks.

I remember being annoyed that Milo and Otis didn't talk.

I spent a lot of time playing outdoors, and loved to take my dog for walks. I also enjoyed writing stories about her. One of my major projects as a little kid involved building us an elaborate mansion out of oversized cardboard boxes.

While I certainly had several friends while growing up, I mostly ignored other children until about 6th grade, finding most of them loud, obnoxious, stupid, and scarily unpredictable. Definitely preferred the company of adults, but also resented the power and authority they had over me at the same time.

As early as Kindergarten, I was obsessed with TF. I liked the idea of people being able to voluntarily transform into animals, but I really liked the idea of people being turned into animals against their will. I loved stories about people being turned into animals as some kind of punishment, and then having to live as that animal while getting to know other animals. Why? Jung only knows.

I liked to imagine my favorite human cartoon characters--usually the (mostly female) ones I had childhood crushes on--being transformed into some animal against their will, and their love interest either never finding out, or finding out and being horrified.

In late elementary school, I went through a major dragon phase that lasted well into high school. (Don't get me wrong--I still like dragons, just not to an obsessive degree anymore.) I'd just decided that I wanted to be/embody a creature that was intelligent, powerful, and the master of all environments. I wrote (and repeatedly re-wrote) a novel about a dragon and his boy that was in the general vein of the stories written by Lawrence Yep, Patricia Wrede, and Anne McCaffrey, except it was from the dragon's point of view.

I made up lots of stories involving animals--mostly dogs, ducks (because Donald), aliens (because my main recurring childhood fantasy was that I was actually the ruler of an alien species from another planet, and had crash-landed on earth), and dragons--and enjoyed telling stories using my various stuffed animals.

As a kid, my favorite shows included Animaniacs, Earthworm Jim, Pinky and the Brain, Freakazoid, the Muppets, Looney Tunes, Batman/Superman Adventures, Gargoyles, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, and Aladdin.

I remember that when something exciting would happen on an action-oriented show like Beast Wars or Beast Machines, I'd run around the basement and act like some kind of predatory animal.

To this day, I love making animal sound effects, like roars, barks, howls, and meows.

As a teenager, I thought about how cool it would be to have a Skeksis costume, or a costume of Transmutate from Beast Wars. I liked the idea of being something tall, lanky, monstrous, and partially inorganic or robotic.

As a college student, on a whim one day, I drew a picture of a terrifying and grotesque intersex cyborg wolf, and titled it, "Self-Portrait." Don't know where the inspiration for that came from. I knew that this was the sort of thing "those furries" did, so I erased/covered the genitals, and filed the picture away.

So, what about sex? When puberty kicked in, and when I finally got the yen to actually start actively browsing porn and erotica, I found that I felt the most comfortable on sites devoted to sci fi, fantasy, TF, and furry erotica and porn, because the layout of these sites didn't just scream "porn porn porn."

My preference has always been for stories over art. Early on, I found I preferred erotic stories that were light, fantastical, or fanciful to more "realistic" stories that had lots of boring adult themes and dialogue, creepier (in my opinion) fetishes, and a level of "realism" that I tended to find unnerving, overwhelming, and "uncanny valley," rather than sexy.  My pornographic art tastes follow a similar pattern.

I'd almost say I browse furry porn and erotica more out of comfort and convenience than anything else, because furry stuff typically has less of the sorts of things I can't stand. I'm perfectly happy to sample other, non-furry types of porn and erotica, provided they do the stuff I like, and don't do the stuff I hate.

Interestingly, canines are practically "invisible" or "default" to me, but other species and other creatures aren't. Some types of creatures are so noticeable or "visible" to me that I have more trouble getting into and enjoying sexy stories or art that involve them.

Don't know if any of this provides helpful grist for the mill or not.

Edited by Troj
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