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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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You can't defend "this person is on the pathway to child abuse because they like anime fox girls with honking hooters" by seguing to "this entirely different person that the first guy hates 'came out' as a dog-fucker".

Uh, wasn't that the whole thing with the Burned Furs? "Just because we like furry art and are furries, we're not yiffers"? Several years back, I was online acquainted for a while with a guy who felt he had been driven out of main furrydom precisely because he wasn't interested in the overtly sexual stuff.

And then there's the babyfurs thing which I don't understand and don't want to get into discussing, because it seems much too convoluted.

The Burned Furs thing is complicated, especially looking with hindsight. The originating manifesto wasn't against porn so much as a grab bag of annoyances (not even all sexual or even really furry-specific: she was frustrated by the vegan annoyances). Its author would go on to be a pretty big name in not-furry monsterfucker porn comics. On the other hand, the guy who drew that flaming paw symbol went on to make some surprisingly good and sympathetic SFW webcomics, and also be really against even the blandest les shipping along other Orson Scott Cardisms. And the actual forums had twice as many standards as actual posters.

There are and remain a lot of conflicts about the appropriate roles and accessibility of adult content, along with a lot of frustrations and contradictions for artists and writers who even weakly brush against that line (eg: Rick Griffin is one of the single most-feted furry artists there is, with well over a decade of a SFW content behind him... and a lot of discomfort when he did decide he wanted to do occasional adult pieces, and conversely a lot of people get frustrated when engagement drops off a cliff when they go from NSFW -> SFW content and, unless they create whole new accounts, have a hell of a time doing any promotion).

But while I'm sure someone in the Burned Furs sphere thought "the guy lusting after big honking boobs must be a child and animal abuser", the median and typical arguments were more about things being bad (or, uh, obnoxious, in the case of the vegans) in themselves, or because of immediate connections to addressable and directly resultant harms (even if not all of them were spelled out). While not all of the Burned Fur objections were well-formed, a number were and some of those were internalized in most of the fandom -- they weren't the only people to push for better segregation of adult content even in explicitly adult-only venues, but it helped reduce repeats of incidents like the Gaylaxicon fiasco (cw: nsfw, The Daily Show).

Again, if this fellow's position were that someone was bad, or that something was bad, there'd be space for discussion, and on some matters I might even agree! But I don't think he's at that stage, or even the level a lot of the trolls in the Burned Furs were.