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...and now for something completely different: Lemurs and the True Human Form,
in which a Zizian uncovers the biological basis of furrydom, which actually everyone has and is in denial about.
I actually find this somewhat plausible. While a good bit of the bodymap is propably learned as well, we should expect remnants like this. The culturewar-relevant part is how moral conclusions are drawn from it - that this is what youre supposed to be like, your True Form. The analogy between gender and species transition is hardly new, but it always gives a bit of a distorted impression, the latter is always a bit of a cardboard figure. Here, we have someone filling in part of the discourse a transspecies movement that laid similar claim to seriousness as transgenderism would produce.
Doesn't pass the sniff test.
I expect the largest and most significant divergence between human cortical homunculi and that of other mammals (animalculi?) would have occurred when we began speccing into bipedal locomotion. That is much later than the period suggested here. Look at that damn thing and tell me that it has much relevance to proto-lemurs.
Furries are rare enough, in absolute terms, that they're far more likely a culture-bound idiosyncratic misfiring rather than some kind of primitive atavism brought to life. Somewhere between 4 to 11% of furries have formal diagnoses of ASD. About 1% of the wider population are autistic.
Not to mention that in many cultures, furries are nigh-unheard of. I can't imagine most Indians, Africans or Chinese people would know what the hell a furry is, and there's no seething undercurrent of furry-desire that gets liberated when they move to the West. Even within the West, Americans probably have the highest furry-per-capita. Within America, cities that are liberal enclaves.
I agree with Duplex below that autism and its concommitant body dysphoria and facial agnosia are far more likely to be relevant explanations. And I think connecting the dots between human and canine co-evolution is genius. It may or may not be correct, but it's better than this.
If you squint really hard, then you can connect some dots. Connecting to the spirit of animals is common across oceans and time. Among all sorts of different traditions, shamanism, and animists. Many pantheons contain anthropomorphic gods. The Japanese have kitsune. Greco-Roman, Norse, and Indian cultures all contain some amount of shapeshifting either in myths or the gods themselves. If the Chinese don't have anything I'd be surprised.
Man has sought meaning through his connection with animals or, at least, used his understanding of his relation to animals to express feeling, tell stories, and develop culture. Plus a million other things unrelated to a universal experience of desire-- in this case a desire to embody the soul of a super sexy fox.
I am also partial to the idea that this is
autismfurry apologia. I love its flavor, though.The counterpoint is that humans have closely observed animals for millennia and therefore have created stories, myths and practices around their observations of animals in nature.
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