S4E16 - The Fandom (Furries & Fur Science)

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Courtney Plante: The underlying psychology, the reason why you're a fan of these things, is the same. Right? You're in it for a recreation. You do it because it's fun. You do it because the community is fun. You do it for a little bit of escapism. You do it to flex some of those self expression or creativity muscles. Those same underlying psychological motivations are there. So the differences are quite literally skin deep here, right? They're small, superficial aesthetic differences. We have a lot more in common than you might think. And when you. When you keep that in mind, it's a lot easier, especially if you're a fan of anything, right. If you're a fan of something, I feel like you can understand a furry.

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Kayla: Hey, Chris.

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Chris: Hey, Kayla.

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Kayla: I have a question for you.

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Chris: You always have a question for me.

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Kayla: I do often have a question for.

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Chris: You, but on this show, it's always not often.

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Kayla: I guess that's true. Yeah.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Kayla: So my question for you today is, what do you know about furries?

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Chris: Furries? Are we doing furries? We're doing furries.

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Kayla: What do you know about furries? And actually, okay, I know they existed. Let me stop you there.

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Chris: You said you can ask me a question.

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Kayla: I want you to really think about it.

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Chris: You want me to really think about furries?

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Kayla: Must be, what do you really, actually know about furries and the furry community?

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Chris: You know? Okay, now that you're putting it that way, very little.

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Kayla: Same.

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Chris: When you say the word actually that way. When I think about it, I'm like, I know what other people have said about furries. I know what, I know what, like, has leaked into the sort of discourse about, like, oh, some furry convention had nazis at it. And I know that, like, they are. Furries are just, like, have, like, a big target on their backs for making fun of a lot of the time. But in terms of, like, from the horse's mouth. From the horses mouth. I didn't even mean that. But for. Yeah, from that perspective, I guess I don't really actually know that much firsthand, primary source wise.

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Kayla: So for those of us listening who may not know, a furry is essentially a fan of anthropomorphic animals.

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Chris: So isn't it in, like, a sexual sense, though?

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Kayla: We will get to that. Oh, maybe you've seen pictures of people dressed up in mascot like suits depicting themselves as cats or cows or horses. And if cat cows, cat dogs. If you've lived on the Internet for any amount of time, you may have come across this community and formed some opinions, much like you or I have, like, what you just said about how things have leaked out to you, or that's your knowledge of the furry community is just kind of. Is just kind of what you've heard, what people have told you, what people who aren't in the community have told you. Right?

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Chris: Yeah. I mean, that's. Yeah, exactly. Like, I have lots of secondhand knowledge, but not anything firsthand. I do have two questions for you, though.

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Kayla: Yes.

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Chris: First question. Didn't we. Didn't you say in an episode, I think it was actually the Tulpa episode, maybe, that we talked. Didn't we talk about bronies once? Like, not as a topic?

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Kayla: We've definitely mentioned bronies on the show.

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Chris: From the furry community, you know? Or was it tulpas came from the brony community?

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Kayla: I think it was something like tulpas, as we, like, the tulpa practice that we know of, like, unreadden and whatnot, grew out of the brony community.

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Chris: Okay. Okay. So then I just. The connection to furries is not there, just in my own stupid brain.

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Kayla: Not necessarily.

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Chris: Oh, okay.

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Kayla: I will say that there is maybe a connection between furries and bronies.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: But again, we will get to that.

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Chris: Okay, so second question.

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Kayla: Yes.

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Chris: Is this your Halloween themed episode because it's people dressing up as something else?

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Kayla: Cause it's people dressing up. Yes. That is a tangential reason why this is the Halloween episode. It's got nothing to do with Halloween.

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Chris: I love season. Oh.

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Kayla: But there are. Some people dress. Some percentage of the population dresses up for Halloween. Some percentage of the furry population dresses up. There's your overlap.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: For some reason, there is a tendency for. And you've experienced this. I've experienced this. There's a tendency for outsider information and opinions on furries to not be super complimentary.

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Chris: Yeah. Yeah.

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Kayla: Like, we, you and I, who are not furries, like, the motivations of the people who participate in this community. Not super well understood. There are sometimes sexual connotations involved that could make some people uncomfortable. And it's just. It's just something that's kind of out of the realm of, like, mainstream everyday experience.

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Chris: Yeah, you know what it kind of feels like? It kind of. It kind of feels like furries are, like, fair game. You know what I mean? It kind of feels like.

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Kayla: Why does it feel like.

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Chris: I don't know why it feels like that. And now that I'm saying that's the feeling that. That makes me feel like it's kind of mean because it's like, do you.

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Kayla: Want to make you feel even worse?

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Chris: Why are they fair game. Like, there's lots of weirdos out there. We've talked about weirder stuff on this show.

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Kayla: There are? Yeah.

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Chris: So what is it about furries that just kind of makes it be like, oh, yeah, everybody can make fun of them. Like that. Kind of, yeah.

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Kayla: Do you want me to make you feel even worse?

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Chris: No.

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Kayla: We will get into this, but people who participate in people who are furries have a much higher. A much higher percentage of having experienced bullying as.

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Chris: Oh, cool, great. Awesome.

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Kayla: Much, much higher than non furries, and it is a largely queer community.

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Courtney Plante: Okay, good.

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Chris: This is getting better.

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Kayla: And high representation of autistic people.

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Chris: Okay, nailed it.

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Kayla: Trifecta. I think that sucks. Explains in some ways why there is this feeling of quote unquote fair game. You and I aren't consciously sitting there going, well, it's a bunch of, like, neurodivergent, queer people who were bullied, so they're fair game. But perhaps the reason why that fair game feeling persists is because of these, like, kind of insidious, systemic issues.

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Chris: Right, right. Like, it's all. It definitely feels all related to that. Back to the, like, the things you were just saying. Even though I didn't know those facts though.

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Courtney Plante: Right?

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Chris: Like, I didn't know that it was primarily queer, neurodivergent history of bullying. It does make sense that those things would somehow be tied into, like, why that community kind of feels that way. But, yes, now I feel worse. Thank you.

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Kayla: Sorry. Yeah, I mean, it's a good reminder that anytime there is some sort of, like, mainstream bashing of a group, like, yeah, it's probably likely that there's some, like, marginalization going on there. Yeah. Okay. Covering topics on this show has helped me think differently about some communities that I know little about and maybe have had, like, opinions that were colored in by less than friendly sources. I'm thinking about tulpas here. We already talked about tulpas. Like, when I initially found about tulpas, I definitely had a stigmatized view and had my mind changed and realized how wrong I was.

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Chris: Right. The view prior to doing that research was just kind of like, look at this weird thing. Are they giving themselves? Did.

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Courtney Plante: What's going on here?

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Kayla: Yeah. And just a reminder, tulpas are imaginary, adult, imaginary friends. It also kind of reminded me a little bit of empty spaces. I remember that loosely knit group of queer and dramatized writers on Twitter.

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Chris: That was more. I was just confused until I came to the epiphany that I was supposed to be confused, but it's okay.

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Kayla: These groups are beautiful things. Like, we are very pro these groups on this show.

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Chris: Oh, hell yeah.

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Kayla: And we've been.

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Chris: Do you think, like, half our audience is tulpas?

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Kayla: I hope so. I love the tulpas.

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Chris: Like, literally, they listen to our show.

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Kayla: I know, it's amazing.

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Chris: Non physical, non corporeal beings listen to our podcast.

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Kayla: It's the best. We are really lucky that we got to learn about these things and have our opinions kind of more our opinions rounded out about these various groups.

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Chris: Yeah. Or like when we did QAnon and now I really like Qanoners, you know?

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Kayla: Nope. No, no.

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Chris: What about Jatar? He was cool.

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Kayla: Are you trying to q on her anymore? He's one of the ones that got away.

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Chris: He was an escapee.

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Kayla: So because of these experiences, I wanted to get to know the furry community and see if there were some similarities there between other groups that we've gotten to know and love.

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Chris: Did you have to infiltrate by, like, dressing up like a. Like a hawk cat or something?

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Kayla: Not yet.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: But spoiler alert, of course those similarities are there.

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Chris: Okay.

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Kayla: I love this group. I had a tremendously interesting and informative conversation with someone who both participates in and researches the furry community. And I want you to dive into this journey with me to learn more about the wonderful world of furries.

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Chris: So you got a primary source?

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Kayla: Yes.

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Chris: Hell yeah.

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Courtney Plante: Yes.

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Chris: Oh, thank God. I finally get to, like, actually know what's going on with this. This is Kayla and this is Chris.

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Kayla: And this is cult or just weird. Awesome. Then I will start with the first question. So, first of all, can you introduce yourself to our listeners? We like to do names, pronouns, and whatever else you'd like to share about your job or your life or whatever. What's going on?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah, sure thing. So I am doctor Courtney Plont. I am a social psychologist and professor at Bishops University in Sherbrooke, Canada. I am the co founder and lead data analyst of Fur Science, a team of interdisciplinary scientists who study the furry fandom. And I am a furry myself, so I can speak both as a person who studies this stuff and as an insider in the fandom, I suppose.

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Kayla: I'm not sure how much I'm going to, how much preamble I'm going to do before we play the interview, but for our listeners, what is a furry and what is the preferred terminology in the community?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So there's. We often joke in the fandom that there's, if you ask ten different furries, you get eleven different answers for what a furry is. The mostly kind of agreed upon answer is that furries are people who are fans of furry content. Which sounds a little circular, but if you imagine science fiction fans are fans of science fiction, football fans are fans of football, furries are fans of any media that has anthropomorphic animal characters. And so it's a big $20 word that just means animals that walk and talk and do human things. So if you grew up with bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse or watch that film Zootopia, it's got animals that walk and talk and do human things. That's what furries are a fan of.

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Kayla: Gotcha. Okay, I feel like I need to revisit the Zootopia question because I've definitely seen that talked about in regards to the community. So I know I didn't put that in our questions, but I might. I'll try to revisit that. So that begs the question. You talked about your job. You talked about what a furry is. So what is fur science like? What exactly is the work that you and your colleagues do there?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah, so there's a couple ways I could answer that. The best way is that we started off as fandom researchers. So let me back up. So we're a team of interdisciplinary social scientists. We've got a social psychologist on the team. We've got sociologists, clinicians, anthrozoologists. But we all have this sort of converging point of being interested in furries for various reasons. So myself and my colleague, doctor Steven Raison, we are fan researchers. A lot of the research that's out there in psychology, if you want to study fans, you have to study sports fans. That's kind of the default fan. And we're like, well, hey, there's like, literally everything else you can be a fan of besides just sports fans. And we think that maybe you're missing something by comparing everyone to a sport fan.

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Courtney Plante: And so we go out of our way to try to study other fan interests that maybe are less studied. So anime fans, my little pony fans, and furries fall into that list. So that's sort of our interest. But my anthrozoology colleague, doctor Kathleen Gravassi, she studies human animal interactions, things like pets or service animals, or people's ethics, how they feel ethically about the use of animals for product testing. She's interested in. Wow. These furries have a novel way of relating to animals that's very different from how the average person does. What's that all about? My colleague, doctor Sharon Roberts, studies identity formation, adolescents and teenagers as they make the path into adulthood. How do they answer these big questions about who am I and how do I belong in the world and what communities do I belong to?

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Courtney Plante: And so for her, she's fascinated by some of the more unusual roads people take to sort of figuring out who they are and how that despite being a little unusual in superficial appearance, these communities are nevertheless beneficial. So we all answer different kinds of questions coming into it, but we have in common this shared interest in the using the furry fandom as a vehicle to answer some really interesting questions about human nature.

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Kayla: So what did you study in school to be able to follow this path as your career?

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Courtney Plante: So myself, I'm a social psychologist. So I went to, I got a bachelor of science with an honor specialization in psychology. I went to graduate school for five years to be a social psychologist, and then I did a two year postdoc, continuing on in media and social psychology. So social psychology is a field for those who don't know. It is a bit of a field that a lot of folks don't know about. This is the study of how the situation or the environment and the people in it affect the way we think, feel and behave. So whereas a clinician might study mental illness or a cognitive psychologist might study how pathways in the brain make you think a certain way, I study how the environment affects us and how people in that environment change the way we think and understand ourselves.

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Kayla: How do you study something like that? A question that I'm really interested in is how does fer science carry out scientific research into this community? Like, I don't know much about these various sciences. So, yeah, how do you like, what do you do? What is your methodology?

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Courtney Plante: So what does research look like in this field? Yeah, that's a really good question that we don't actually get asked very much. Surprisingly, no one asks to see the paperwork or the receipts.

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Kayla: Oh, interesting.

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Courtney Plante: So it's a combination. So one of the things you recognize if you take a research methods course is that there's no one right way to do a study. There's no one perfect way to study something because every approach you take is necessarily flawed. There will always be, there are no perfect studies, as I would tell my students. So what we instead do is we try to take a number of different approaches to answering a question, so that even though each approach has its own limitation, they all have their own strengths as well. So some of our data is collected through surveys. Sometimes we'll go to a furry convention and pass out 2000 surveys to furries there. Other times we'll do online questionnaires and say, hey, you know, furries who can't make it to a furry convention, do our survey.

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Courtney Plante: But there are some things surveys can't do. So sometimes we'll do longitudinal studies where we'll track the same furries over 12345 years even, and see, hey, how have you changed in five years? How has the fandom changed you? Other times, we'll do experiments. We'll actually do, like, reaction time experiments. We've actually gone to conventions before and set up, like, an on site computer lab with reaction time experiments and say, okay, we're going to show a picture on the screen in a split second. You know, you have to make a decision, one or the other. And so we can measure things like, how does your mind work on the order of milliseconds? So there's no one.

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Courtney Plante: You know, we've done studies where we've taken scans of people's hands, like, you know, put their hands on a photocopier to measure things like digit ratios, which is kind of a proxy for things like prenatal testosterone exposure. Like, there's. There's a ton of different things that you can measure when you use different methodologies. We've done focus groups, one one interviews, just casual observations, so you name it. And we've done that difference type of methodology because, again, no one research methodology can answer all of the questions we have.

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Kayla: Okay, so this is the coolest job.

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Courtney Plante: It's up there with being a mythbuster, I think, in terms of how cool it is.

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Kayla: Yeah, yeah, that's. Oh, man, that sounds like you have just something really cool to look forward to every day kind of thing.

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Courtney Plante: There are very few jobs where you get to, like, go to a furry convention and call it part of your job.

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Kayla: Right, right. You know, I have a question. We. Earlier this season, we did an entire episode about suicidality and suicide awareness. And not that we're gonna go heavy on that right now, but we did speak to. We had an interview with another professor, somebody who works in academia, and she said the phrase research is me search. And so I just. What is. What does that mean to you? If somebody who is part of this fandom, who studies it just feels like research is me search is real here.

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Courtney Plante: I think there's something to that idea, although in a very literal sense, I guess that's true, insofar as when I got to graduate school, they said, okay, what are you going to study? You have to do your master's thesis on something. And because I was very lazy, I kind of looked to my surroundings. I said, well, I play a lot of video games and I go to furry conventions. So I would like to study video games and furries. And no one stopped me, which was pretty cool. So I did my thesis in video games and I published papers on furry conventions. But I guess it didn't necessarily stem from, I know there's that belief, for example, if you go into clinical psychology, that you're trying to. The stereotype is that you're trying to understand your own hurts, your own pains, I think more.

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Courtney Plante: So it was just because maybe it was a bit of low hanging fruit. It's just this is what I did for a hobby. And so I felt like, well, if I'm going to go to furry conventions anyways, I might as well bring a box of surveys to the table and be able to do that. But it wasn't, at least for myself. I don't see it as being a super deep dive into understanding myself. I see it as a hobby. And even if I wasn't a furry, I would be doing this. And I know that because in addition to my furry research, I also study anime fans and Star wars fans. And my little pony fans really consider myself to be a big Star wars fan or a big anime fan, so.

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Kayla: Gotcha.

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. Fan research is fan research. If you do it long enough, eventually you'll hit a thing that you're a fan of and you study that as well.

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Kayla: Well, it's just so interesting for you to say that the research into fandom so far is somewhat limited to sports fans. When I think of fandom, sports fans is not the first thing that I think of. Obviously, that's a huge fandom and it's very mainstream. But when I think of fandom, yeah, I'm thinking of more like the genre fandom. So it's interesting to me that this is understudied and just seems like a lot like that seems like fertile ground then, for this research to flourish, I.

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Courtney Plante: Suppose I need to back up a teensy bit there. I might have misspoke a little bit. It's specifically in social psychology.

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Kayla: Gotcha.

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Courtney Plante: Research focused predominantly, specifically on fan hooliganism. I don't know what it was, but for whatever reason, fan psychologists in like, the nineties were obsessed with why football fans in Europe rioted. That was the big question. But if you went into other fields, so if you went into communications or, you know, media studies, for sure, you know, people like Henry Jenkins have been studying Star Trek fans for decades. But specifically in my field, I should say that they were focused too much on sports fans and not enough on anything else. And that's changed now since the late two thousands has changed. I don't want to throw anyone under the bus or pretend that it hasn't gotten better, but certainly when we first started, that was definitely a need for some change.

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Kayla: So can we talk a little bit about the history of. Since we talked about little history of the fandom in social psychology, can we talk about the history of the fur fandom itself? I know that's probably difficult to pinpoint. I'm sure there's been interest in anthropomorphic animals throughout all of human history. But when did fur fandom start? How long has it been around? Where did it start? How has it grown? Anything you can give me on that? I'm really interested.

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So what's interesting is there've actually been a number of different documentaries and people who've attempted to nail down where did it start? And again, depending on how far you want to go back, you know, some will say, well, it started when the first cave people painted pictures on the walls of, you know, animal like deities.

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Kayla: Right.

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Courtney Plante: More contemporarily, where a lot of furries tends to put the start of it is in the late 1970s, where it was actually an offshoot of the science fiction fandom. Oh, safari makes a lot more sense when you understand that's where it came from. So a lot of the norms, a lot of the customs. What would happen is you would go to these science fiction conventions, and somewhere within the bowels of these science fiction conventions, you would find a room specifically for people who wanted to go to a panel about stories where you crash land on a planet full of walking, talking cat people. That's a trope in science fiction. There would always be something like that at a science fiction convention.

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Courtney Plante: And eventually, you know, enough of these folks would be sort of gathered together that they started to do room parties at these science fiction conventions, and they would pass around art. They would start these little zines, or zines, however you pronounce it, this independent publications where they'd pass around stories and artwork. And eventually there was sort of a critical mass of them where they said, hey, you know, we're doing one or two panels or these little room parties that sounded science fiction conventions. Why don't we just do our own convention? And so in the late seventies, that's exactly what they did. They kind of had their first small convention at a hotel, and it sort of grew legs from there. Throughout the eighties. They were small, but kind of scattered. The convention really didn't get too much traction.

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Courtney Plante: It was like if you didn't know someone, if you didn't have an entry point into it was really hard to stumble onto it. But it really took off in the nineties with the advent of the Internet. And suddenly you can stumble upon furry artwork, furry stories, and discover, oh, there's these meetups of people just like me that I didn't even know there was a name for. And so you saw the rapid growth and proliferation of furry story and art sharing websites and the mass growth of furry conventions into what it is today.

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Kayla: Where does, where does the community live on the Internet these days? Like, if I wanted to get started in the community, like, am I going to read it? Like, where am I going?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So you'll find furries kicking around wherever you'll find most tech culture. So furries, there's the sort of online joke that furries make the Internet go, because furries are like, if you go with the idea that furries stemmed from science fiction fans, well, science fiction fans are very tech savvy. They were some of the first to adopt to the Internet for things like Mux, multi user dungeons and chat rooms and chatbots and stuff. So very early on, furries were very immersed internet culture. So pretty much wherever you find Internet culture, you'll find furries. There are furry reddits, there are four. Chan infamously has a quote unquote furry infestation that will never go away. Nice. Furries have been on image boards like Deviantart. Eventually furries kind of made their own image boards like fur affinity. They're furry chat groups.

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Courtney Plante: VR right now is absolutely popular for furries. So pretty much wherever you find Internet culture, you'll find some flavor of furry taking up a spot somewhere in the corner of it.

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Kayla: Why do you think there is such overlap with the furry community, with other communities like you've had, you obviously walked us through why there's overlap with, like, Sci-Fi you know, fan convention going. But like, you also talked about my little pony and anime fans, and if they're everywhere on the Internet, like, why do you think this overlap is so prominent?

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Courtney Plante: So I think the overlap is there because furries are first and foremost geeks, nerds. And you'll notice with any aspect of nerd culture, there's a tremendous overlap. Right. So if you're anime fan, there's also a fairly good chance you're a fan of fantasy or science fiction or, you know, something along those lines. Right? If you're a science fiction fan, you probably also dabble a little bit in some of these other genres. So I think furry kind of gets rolled up in that. Insofar as you're a nerd, you like the things that nerds like, which tend to be a lot of these different media based fandoms. Right? So the big ones for furries are science fiction because that's kind of where furries originated from, but also anime.

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Courtney Plante: My little pony, because there's conceptually overlapped between, if you're a fan of walking, talking animal characters, well, a show about walking, talking horses kind of falls into that category. Yeah. But also, you know, anytime you see writing science fiction, fantasy, that sort of thing, furries really glom onto that gaming culture. There have rather famously been some top tier, world class gamers who are also furries.

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Kayla: So that's so interesting. I love that. I mean, it makes sense. You know, you mentioned, we've mentioned, we've talked about my little pony a couple times. We have not covered the, you know, quote unquote brony phenomenon on the show yet. We have talked about it. Is there overlap with those specific communities, or are brony, quote unquote fans separate from the furry community?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So that was actually a question that were asking ourself because we studied bronies and furries, and when it first came out, furries and bronies had a really mixed sort of feeling towards one another. Interesting, because you had furries who would get really pissed off, and they would say, look at all, you know, when it first came out, I think about 20% of furries considered themselves to be bronies. And so furries who weren't my little pony fans would get pissed off because they would say, look at this. I'm trying to look at furry art. I'm trying to read furry stories. And everything is just my little pony crap right now. I don't want to see, you know, I'm not a brony. I don't want to see any of this. So furries had this perception that my little pony was invading the fandom.

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Courtney Plante: And likewise, if you were a brony, there was not so flattering media at the time about furries. And so, you know, some bronies were like, hey, don't lump us in with those weirdos, the furries. So it was kind of like throwing furries under the bus and trying to avoid the stink and the stigma of furries, in part because bronies themselves were being stigmatized as being a little bit too weird. So nowadays, they, I'm happy to say they get along pretty well. With the ending of the most recent generation of the show, my little pony. A lot of bronies have found that brony conventions are starting to close up. The big one, bronycon, is now sort of gone. So a lot of bronies are slowly kind of walking over to brony conventions. To be among like minded people. So there's. They're on good terms today.

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Kayla: Gotcha. You know, that's really nice to hear. It's really nice to hear. It's like, yeah, there's obviously a lot. Or there has historically been stigma. Towards both the groups on the Internet. So at least I'm glad that they can get along.

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Courtney Plante: Yeah.

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Kayla: So then I kind of have the same question about Zootopia. Like, obviously, when Zootopia came out. I feel like there was a lot of, you know, amongst a certain set of the Internet. There was a lot of humor about like, oh, this is something that appeals to furries. And then also, it does seem like there has been appeal to furries with Zootopia. Is.

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Courtney Plante: Oh, absolutely.

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Kayla: Yeah. What's going on there? How should we be feeling about Zootopia?

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Courtney Plante: So, one of the things that furries often struggle with. Is trying to explain to people what they're a fan of, right? So you ask a furry and it's like, well, what is it that you're a fan of? And a lot of furries, like trying to explain anthropomorphic animals to people. And how you can be a fan of that. The go to was often like, well, okay, you know, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny. Those are the go tos. But for a lot of people that, you know, oh, I watched Bugs Bunny when I was like six years old or whatever. Zootopia was like one of the. They absolutely nailed it. It was like, if you were to take a cross section of furry culture. And like, what. What, you know, a furry story or a furry fantasy.

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Courtney Plante: Might look like this idea of a completely realized world. Where, like, animals walk and talk and do human things. They go work animal jobs. They. You know, they deal with some of the stereotypes. That have to do with one particular species over another. Like, that's all perfectly enmeshed and realized in this world of Zootopia. So for many furries, it was like this beautiful. Like, that's it. Now we have something that we can point to and say. That's. That's the thing we've been talking about, right? The thing that we try to capture in our fan fiction. Or in our artwork. Or in our. Our virtual chats or whatever. That's the thing that we want. Right.

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Courtney Plante: Like, what would it be like to live in a world where, like, a walking, talking fox can sit on the bus next to a rabbit and they can, you know, talk or whatever, right. This certainly wasn't the only touchstone. So if you go back historically, this is sort of running joke that you can tell when a furry got into the fandom, depending on sort of what. What Disney movie was responsible for them getting into furry. So initially it was like Disney's Robin Hood with the Foxes.

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Kayla: Oh, absolutely.

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Courtney Plante: Then it was, you know, that was fast forward a few decades, and it was the lion kingdom sort of grew up in the nineties. Then it was if you. Sonic the hedgehog was mixed in there, Pokemon was mixed in there a bit. But Zootopia was kind of like the. The most recent touchstone for that, the Disney's Robin Hood.

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Kayla: Like, I know so many people. Yeah. I mean, I know so many people who aren't furries that are like, oh, yeah, that. I love those characters. Like, I'm in love with Robin Hood. Like, I love these guys. And, you know, would never in a million years make a connection to. Maybe that's why some people are interested in. Or, like, maybe that's what being a furry is about, or at least is a gateway to it. I just think that making that connection. That's a good one. People will get that one for sure.

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Courtney Plante: Well, and that's just it, too, is we grew up with these things. Like, most of us have fond memories of, like, Saturday morning cartoons. Most of us can think of, you know, whether it's Tony the tiger on your cereal box or playing Sonic the Hedgehog. For me, it was Star Fox. I love the game Star Fox. Like, man, this is cool. Of spaceships shooting lasers and also being a fox, that's kind of cool. But we have these fond memories and, you know, some of us, some people grow up and grow out of these interests, whereas other people continue to very unironically embrace them. And I think it's a really important thing that often gets lost is we live in a very cynical, very ironic time right now where people like, will. Will spite, watch television.

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Courtney Plante: And it's kind of nice you saw this with my little pony. It's kind of nice to have a show that's just kind of a nice, pleasant show to watch, right? Or to have a little fantasy that you can go to that's not tainted by the cynicism and general shittiness of the world around us. Right. Let's go back to those Saturday morning cartoons. And that's been a nice trend we've seen in recent years where you see adults more openly embracing that. Yeah, I can. Superhero movies. Yeah, I can like Star wars and be 40 years old, and that's okay.

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Kayla: Have you watched Wee Bears?

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Courtney Plante: I have not.

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Kayla: Weep for me is really hitting that sweet spot of just like, this is a nice, pleasant show where nice, pleasant things happen and the characters are. I love watching them, and they're just friends with each other. And highly recommend if you ever get a chance to watch wee Bear fairs.

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Courtney Plante: It's nice. Yeah, it's just nice.

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Kayla: It's just nice. So I guess I haven't asked you yet what brought you to the fandom. You mentioned Star Fox. Is that where it started for you, or is there something else?

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Courtney Plante: It's really hard to pin. I mean, when you ask furries again, every furry has a different entry point, a different thing that did it for them. I don't think there was any one particular moment. I just, I grew up liking cartoons and liking games like Star Fox. I think if I had to point to one thing, Pokemon would probably be the closest. There was a, for those who listen, there's a Pokemon called mewtwo, and it was basically anthropomorphic cat. And I didn't know what Furry was. I was like, 13. I'm like, whatever reason that cat looking thing that walks and talks in is really badass looking. That looks really cool. So I started drawing fan art of him and putting pictures of him on my locker and looking for, like, pictures online of people who drew this.

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Courtney Plante: And it wasn't until years later that a friend was like, oh, that's furry art. You're a furry. I'm like, what is a furry? And I discovered, oh, my gosh, there's an entire community that I've just been oblivious to that likes this stuff.

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Kayla: I love that. So it's like you came to it organically, like you created it for yourself before you even knew that there was a community, and then discovered the community.

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Courtney Plante: And a remarkable number of furries. Not so much these days, but certainly if you grew up in the nineties for a lot of furries, they describe their induction into the fandom as a complete accident. Right. They're looking for fan arts or stories about one thing, and only by accident do they stumble into the fact that the fandom exists. Nowadays, it's a little easier for kids who grow up always online to find the stuff. It's more talked about.

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Kayla: So do you think there's some sort of, like, do you think there's something inherent about the human condition and, like, furry fandom? Like, I think a lot about how there are, like, if I think about dreams or sleep paralysis, I know. Stay with me. This does connect. There are shared tropes, like, throughout various cultures, throughout time. There are shared tropes in nightmares and sleep paralysis, like, of the cat sitting on your chest, of shadow, people of those kinds of things. And so it makes me think, okay, there's some part of the shared human condition that is giving rise to these tropes being prevalent for people.

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Kayla: So I'm wondering, do you think that there's something like that with, if people are coming to this organically, if it is sparking something in people before they even know it's a thing, do you think there's just something inherent in the human condition that can give rise to being a furry?

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Courtney Plante: I think so. If I could try a little experiment with you, we'll see if there's some truth to this idea. I'm eager to try this.

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Kayla: Ooh, yes, please.

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Chris: Okay.

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Courtney Plante: I want you to try to guess. Knowing absolutely nothing about or very little about the fandom, I would say if you had to guess what the most common fursona species, a fursona is a character that you identify with. If you had to guess, what are the most common species? Take a guess of. Throw out a couple species that you think are the most common among furries.

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Kayla: I would think fox or cat.

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Courtney Plante: So you just guessed, like, the second and fourth most common species in the fandom.

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Kayla: Really?

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Courtney Plante: Just intuitively.

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Kayla: Okay.

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Courtney Plante: Yeah, throw out a few more. Throw out a few more.

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Kayla: It's hard to not be. It's hard to, it is hard to not be biased here because I did know somebody back in college who, their fursono was an orca whale, and I always thought that was really fascinating. I don't think that's one of them. I'm gonna say dog.

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Courtney Plante: Dog is like, number three. Yeah. Or actually number, sorry, dog's number one.

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Kayla: Dog's number one. Depends.

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Courtney Plante: If you lump them in with wolves. If you lump them in with wolves slash dogs are number one.

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Kayla: Okay. Wolf was gonna be my next guess.

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Courtney Plante: Yeah.

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Kayla: Okay. Wolf dog. And then after that, I don't even know. I mean, are we then getting into, like, our birds fur? Like, can you be a furry bird?

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Courtney Plante: Avians are in the top 15 or so. I guess the point of the demonstration is to suggest that, yeah, there's, when you look across cultures, there are certain animal species that resonate with us, right. So that they imbue our language. We describe people as being catty, right? Describing cats or bitchy, which is a term for dogs, right. We talk about, you know, monkeying around. We understand ourselves. We use, you know, sometimes cringely. We use, like, oh, alpha. Alpha wolf and alpha male. You know, we describe large gay men as bears. We, you know, it permeates our language. It permeates how we understand ourselves. We keep small animals in our houses with us. Right. We communicate with them, or some of us communicate with them, or, you know, try to talk to our cats or our dogs.

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Courtney Plante: Look, look historically around the world at stories, and whether you're looking at east asian culture or european culture, you'll see the same, you know, dragons and foxes and kitsune. You'll see this in the deities that we had over here among the indigenous tribes, right? Bears were very common, the tricksters of foxes. And so I don't think it's a coincidence that no matter where you go, the same handful of species and the same sorts of tropes and ideas and stories sort of permeates. So I think this is just part of being a human, is to look outside of us, at the species near us, and try to understand the world and understand ourselves by understanding them. Right. They're literally the only other thing on this planet that we can point to that's alive like we are.

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Kayla: Right, right. And just. Yeah, it is. It is fascinating. I think about this a lot because I am a pet person. Like, I have three cats. I think a lot about how some of my most profound relationships have been with the animals that live in my house that I cannot communicate with. But, like, the. The love that a. Like a pet can give you is so unconditional. It is so different than other kinds of relationships, and it is, you're able to achieve that bond without even, you know, having the luxury of communication you can have with another person. So that. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me, for sure.

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Courtney Plante: I would say, in the average person, the framework, the raw resources are there to be a furry. It's just whether or not you have the intrinsic interest to go out and actively pursue a fan interest in it, in the same way that a lot of people like chocolate, but not everyone likes chocolate enough to go pursue some course in chocolate taste testing or to learn how to cook 100 meals that use dark chocolate. You can, like coffee, or you can be, like, a coffee snob who spends way too many hours getting a french press. So you can brew just the perfect cup of coffee. Right. And again, you can either just like this stuff or you can like it enough that it becomes a part of your identity. But I think to the average person, the thing that furries like is there.

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Courtney Plante: It's just they don't go that extra step to making it a part of their identity. But, you know, I can like hockey and not be a hockey fan.

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Kayla: Sure. Sure. So then who does make up the furry community? Like, what is. What is the demographic?

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Courtney Plante: So the fandom tends to lean rather young, again, usually where you find a lot of nerd culture. So fairly young, we tend to find it's. It tends to lean a little bit more male than female. One of the most defining features of the furry fandom, though, is it's incredibly lgbtQ. So we find, for example, trans people are represented in the fandom about 20 times more commonly than they are in the general public.

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Kayla: Wow. Okay.

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Courtney Plante: The fandom is more bisexual and gay than it is straight. So it's this tremendous LGBTQ space. This is nothing. Not to say, of course, that there aren't obviously, like, 30% straight people in the fandom, but it does have this very strong LGBTQ flavor to it. And again, part of this, I would say, is its origins in the science fiction fandom, which has been historically very progressive on these sorts of issues. I mean, Star Trek was fairly pioneering in a lot of these more progressive issues culturally, but also in the cities where it popped up. Cities like San Francisco, cities like Toronto were some of the first major hubs where you found furry conventions and furry get togethers.

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Courtney Plante: And so, you know, it's not a coincidence that from baked into the crust right from the beginning of the furry fandom was this notion of, like, hey, you know, you don't. We're open and accepting. We're all weirdos here. We're all geeks and nerds, and we come from different walks of life. You know, if I'm. I'm going to be a cartoon cat and you're going to be a cartoon dragon, why would we make fun of each other for being gay or being trans? Right. You know?

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Kayla: Right. You know, it's interesting. We just did. A couple episodes ago, we did an episode on a community that largely lives on Twitter called empty Spaces. And it is a like, a loose knit community of flash fiction. Writers who are largely queer, largely trans, largely have some sort of trauma and have bonded over shared tropes in their writing. And that was actually one of the first places that I turned to when we started researching this episode. I wanted to ask them, like, is there overlap between the furry community and your community because of that shared demographic of largely being queer, largely being trans? And I know for empty spaces, kind of just touching on what you were saying for empty spaces. A lot of why the fans of that community have flocked together is because of that baseline level of acceptance.

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Kayla: You're already engaging in something that is outside of the mainstream, that is in some ways diametrically opposed to the mainstream or unaccepted by the mainstream. And so it becomes a safe space is. I know that phrase has kind of been demonized in certain parts of our culture. I still very much love it. Do you think the first community or fur fandom is a safe space for.

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Courtney Plante: People who need it 100%? I would say that, like, when you were just what you were describing there, I'm like that you could have taken that exact description and put it onto the furry fandom and been 100% accurate.

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Kayla: Oh, interesting.

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Courtney Plante: Okay. Yeah. One of the things I tell people when I'm talking about this is that, you know, a lot of. A lot of furries were people who came from. From being bullied. Right? You were the ostracized kid and class, you were the kid who was a little bit too weird. You liked cartoons just a little bit too late. You liked Pokemon when it wasn't cool to like Pokemon anymore. Right? You drew. You drew unicorns when that was like, something that five year olds did. So you had this history of being bullied or ostracized or not quite fitting in, and for whatever reason. And here you find the fandom, which is a come as you are. Right? So when you're here, you're family. Be yourself here, and that's okay. And so for many of them, this is the first place where they've been accepted.

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Kayla: Right? Right. Yeah. That's why I'm glad that these communities exist. Like, it is so easy to not be accepted by mainstream society. Like, we've got to make these pockets where, like, that kind of bullshit doesn't creep in.

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Courtney Plante: Well, and what's worse, and my colleague, Doctor Sharon Roberts, could speak more to this, but we live in a time right now where it's where people really struggle to find identity. Right? And part of the reason why we see people, it's almost like adolescence lasts longer and longer. We see people going into their mid twenties, even in their late twenties, and feeling like they're not ready to adults, so to speak. And I think it's because they're still struggling with these fundamental questions of where do I fit into this big, weird, constantly changing world that's just getting harder and harder to nail down your place in. And the fandom for a lot of folks is scaffolding. It provides that stability. It gives you a label.

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Courtney Plante: It gives you a community to belong to and a place to start experimenting with facets of yourself and trying on different identities, trying on different parts of yourself. Maybe you're questioning, I don't know if I'm gay. I don't know if I'm trans. But now here's a space where I can try on a different set of pronouns for a while. I can try on, you know, maybe I'm more of a humorous person. Maybe I'm a bit of a goof, or maybe I'm an artist, and you can try these things out and see, does this work? Does this jive? No. Well, maybe I'll go back to the drawing board. But I'm in a safe space. I'm in a place where there's this sort of fantasy theme. So everything can be tried in sort of a jokey, light hearted way to test the water.

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Courtney Plante: It's like dipping your foot.

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Kayla: It's reminding me of a conversation I was having with somebody from the empty spaces community of just, like, respectability and how freeing it is when you can kind of embrace the fact that you don't need to pursue respectability. In some ways, it's just as a given. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess I should ask, how does someone engage or participate in the community? Like, we've talked about conventions. We've kind of talked about fan art and things like that, but if somebody is a furry, what are they doing to be a furry?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So that one really throws people off, because for the same reason, if I ask you to picture a Star wars fan, you know, what's the first thing you picture in your mind? Close your eyes. What does a Star wars fan look like? What are you picturing?

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Kayla: I mean, I'm picturing. I'm picturing a. Honestly, I'm picturing my. He's gonna be upset that I'm saying this. I'm picturing my partner. I'm picturing my co host, Chris, when he was sitting in line with his friends for the first one of the prequels, just, like, holding up a sign that was. I don't even remember what the sign said, but holding up a nerdy sign, sitting in line for hours and hours with his, you know, similar nerdy friends waiting for the prequels.

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Courtney Plante: And I bet in that picture, you're picturing lightsabers. You're picturing stormtrooper outfits. You're picturing Jedi outfit. Yeah. Right?

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Kayla: Yes.

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Courtney Plante: If I. If I say Star Trek fan, you're picturing Starfleet uniforms? If I sit, yeah. So one of the big misconceptions people have is they conflate the trappings of the fan interest with the fan interest itself. Right. So when I say furry, the first place people go is fur suits. That's the most visually iconic part of it, these full body mascot style suits. And that's wrong. That's not what most furries do. That would be like saying, defining sport fans as people who wear jerseys. Certainly some sports fans have jerseys, but your interest in sports can manifest as you watching the game with your friends every Sunday. So we find that statistically, only about a quarter to one third of furries owns a fursuit. So most furries, by definition, do not.

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Courtney Plante: So I immediately know how much research an organization has done if they define furries as people who wear fur suits, because again, when I hear that, I hear people say anime fans are people who cosplay, which is not the same thing.

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Kayla: Right, right.

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Courtney Plante: Which. Okay, so what is furry then? Or what do furries do? They basically do the same things that any other fan group does. So if you picture what a science fiction fan or anime fan does, they watch shows, right, that feature their favorite content. They do fan art, fan stories, fan fiction. They buy merchandise of their favorite shows and characters. They go on forums to argue about these things. They go to conventions to hang out with other fans. Some of them cosplay, some of them do not. But, yeah, it's no different than what any other fandom does. If there's one thing that might make them kind of distinct, it's the creation of a Persona. That's one of the most universal things we find in the fandom, which is the creation of a character or an avatar to represent yourself.

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Courtney Plante: And part of the reason for this is, again, the fandom started off as an online space. If it's in a muck or a chat room, you need a name, you need an avatar, a handle. And so Fury is like, okay, well, what's my name? What's my species? Let's draw a little picture for myself. So most Freyde furries will have a little character, a name, a species, a little backstory or something. And that's a little unique to the furry fandom. Not totally unique. You see this in the brony fandom, you see this in some other fandoms. But that may be one of the things that most furries do first is they come into the fandom and they immediately see everyone else has these characters. And so they say, well, I should get one too. And so they make themselves a little fursona.

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Courtney Plante: And from there it's, you know, do you go watch shows with other furries? Do you hang out with the artists? Do you hang out with the gamers? Because it's this big subculture with lots of little cultures inside of it, right? So you can be furry and only hang out with the furry gamers or the furry artists or the furry writers or the, you know, the fans of a particular show. So there's lots of little communities within this one big community.

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Kayla: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm definitely somebody that, you know, in the past before I totally conflated somebody having a fursona with somebody, at least having the end goal of getting into a fursuit or creating a fursuit or having a fursuit that represented their fursona. And part of why I'm having this conversation is because I don't know that much about the furry community, but I do feel like I have learned that, like, it is more than just this, like, the most identifiable signifier of the fur fandom. Like, fur suits are cool. But, yeah, it makes sense that wouldn't be necessarily the be all and end all.

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Courtney Plante: And to be sure, a lot of furries want them. Like, you know, they don't necessarily have the $3,000 you need to get one, but a lot of furries would like them again. Other furries don't, though. Some people want a jersey. Some people think they look stupid. Some furries really want a fur suit. Others are like, they creep me out. Get them away from me.

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Kayla: Right? Where does one get a fursuit?

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Courtney Plante: Typically, if you want to go for a fursuit, you either learn to make it yourself. If you're thrifty and have some kind of artistic ability, more often than not you go to a builder. So there are people who make very good money doing as a job building fur suits for a living. Right. So you'll typically, you'll find a builder you like, you'll typically get in a queue, and six months, a year, two years later, you got yourself a fursuit.

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Kayla: Just kind of thinking about the fursuits and what they represent in maybe mainstream society. I want to get into the question of what do you think some of the stigmas or what do you know, actually some of the stigmas or biases against furries are out there. I think you definitely used the word stigma. You definitely used the word unflattering opinions, like, what are some of those things? Why do those perceptions exist?

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Courtney Plante: Funnily enough, I just published a paper on this recently, so it's fresh in my mind right now. Two of the main sources of misconceptions are the assumption that it's a weird sex fetish kink thing or the assumption that these are people who've lost touch with reality. And so part of the reason is we have a tendency to try to explain behavior. We're all little natural psychologists, right? Even if you've never stepped foot in a psychology class, you are doing psychology. Anytime you see behavior, you need an explanation for it. And so when we see extreme or weird behavior, we feel like we need an extreme or weird explanation for it. So you see a person in a fursuit, and you go, well, that. That's really different. You don't see that every day.

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Courtney Plante: And so an explanation like, oh, they must just, like dogs or something doesn't seem sufficient, right. So you seem, like, to go bigger in my explanation. And so we go to, like, two extreme places of deviance. Well, maybe it's a weird sex thing. Maybe they're putting that thing on to have sex with it or with people in it, or they go to the other extreme and say, man, that's a person who's lost touch with reality. They actually think they're a dog, and they don't realize they're not. And that's very creepy and weird. So that's the sort of two places that people go when trying to explain what the heck it is. That because of that, a lot of the misconceptions people have, you see this perpetuated in the media right now.

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Courtney Plante: The phones keep ringing off the hook for us to talk to the media about this persistent rumor that's been going on now that, oh, apparently furries in schools asking for litter boxes.

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Kayla: Oh, God, I'm sorry. You're getting those phone calls.

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Courtney Plante: And it's.

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Kayla: It's.

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Courtney Plante: It's. I mean, no one. No one can ever point to this. No one can ever find the. Show me where this kiddish. Show me where this parent is. Presumably, if this is happening everywhere, we should be able to put at least one parent or one kid in front of a video camera and get them to talk. And yet it's always a friend of a friend, a teacher at a school over there that I've never talked to, but they mentioned it. And so, again, that's this idea of dysfunction, this belief that, well, this is a person who's barking in class because they don't realize they're not a human. This is a person who demands or insists to use a litter box. And it's so believable to people because, again, they need an extreme explanation for what they see as extreme behavior.

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Kayla: Right?

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Courtney Plante: And on the flip side, that sex explanation, we saw this especially in the early two thousands. A lot of the media stories about furries was, look at these weirdos. Let's see if we can find if any of them have sex in those suits. So they run around. There was the infamous CSI episode. Furries will always refer to it as the infamous CSI episode fur and loathing, which is a clever furry pun. But basically they portrayed a furry convention in the show. And when the characters walk in, it's just a bunch of people lying on top of each other in fur suits in this big orgyistic pile. And that was the portrayal of a furry convention.

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Kayla: Right.

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Courtney Plante: The media certainly didn't help in perpetuating, latching onto these very believable misconceptions about the group.

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Kayla: That's something that definitely, like, you know, when I was in high school or whatever, that was absolutely my. The perception that I was presented with or the perception that I gleaned from society of, like, this is. This is solely a sex thing. Like, you know, there would be people passing around like, oh, have you heard these terms that furries use for, like, their sexual whatever? And it took me a while, as somebody who is outside the community, it took me a while to realize that was just something that was being keyed on and such a small part of it. I think that your explanation of, like, this is one of the only ways that outsiders can internally explain this to themselves makes a lot of sense.

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Kayla: Why do you think there then is, like, why do you think there's a lack of true curiosity about it from outside communities trying to explain it rather than just asking like, hey, what is this about?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah, that's a really good question, too. And I actually covered it in that. That same paper that I got published. It makes us uncomfortable. So when you see people who are deviant from us, people who are really, or we perceive as being very different, we have negative emotional responses to it. Typically, we either feel very uncomfortable, like, I don't want that near me, or we feel, like, almost grossed out by it. It's gross, or, you know, or you morally condemn it, right? So you're either indignant towards it if you think it's something negative or you're grossed out and uncomfortable about it. So the emotions you tend to feel when you see this sort of thing are not usually good ones. They're not usually emotions that inspire you to go over and say, excuse me, old chap, what is this all about?

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Courtney Plante: It's, oh, get the hell away from me. I don't want you sitting near me or my kid on the bus. Right. I don't know what you're doing in that thing, but it can't be good.

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Kayla: Right, right. Yeah. It's just so interesting to me. Like, I don't know, that lack of curiosity and that fear really can make our lives so much smaller. Like, can make our lives so much less colorful and have fewer outlets when we're so closed off from even the possibility that this is just, like, a cool thing that exists. I don't know. That reaction's a bummer, but it does make me want to ask. And you, this is in the questions that I sent you, even though there is this misconception, like, this mainstream misconception, that furry, or being a furry, is largely a sexual fetish, even though that is actually a small draw or maybe an almost non existent draw to the community. Can we talk about that aspect of this again?

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Kayla: When I was talking to some of the contacts I made through our empty spaces episode, that was something that was brought up like, oh, yeah. The overlap is, you know, because empty spaces is a very. That's part of. That's part of the community. It is largely about exploring sexuality and sex and that world. And somebody that I was talking to said, yeah, the overlap exists, you know, in this discord that I'm in, there is a lot of, like, furry fan art and furry, like, very sexual furry fan art. So, absolutely talking about that with that community, like, how has the furry community become a safe space in some ways for sexual expression for some people?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So one thing to clarify. This is one thing that people. People, including furries, will often get this one wrong. There's this tendency to sort of shoot too far in either direction. Right? This is belief that either it is entirely a kink fetish thing, or on the flip side of thing, to say, no, furry is absolutely chaste and pure, and there's absolutely no sex to be found here, which is an equally ridiculous claim. So the reality, from some of our own data, 98% of furries look at furry themed porn. Okay? It is there. So pornography is there. It's not hard to find. And people say, oh, well, how is that not a fetish, then? To which my response is, if you were to look into the gamer fandom. So video gamers, right?

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Courtney Plante: The character Lara Croft is, has for many people been a pinup character, right? This character that gets sexualized and put on posters. And it would be ridiculous for me to say, man, you've got a Lara Croft poster in your office. You must have a video game fetish. That would be a very weird thing to say. Or to a football fan to say, man, you sure like those Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. I guess you have some kind of a football fetish. Or you like those car magazines with the supermodel draped across the hood. I guess you've got a car fetish. The reality is humans are sexual creatures. We combine our naturally existing sex drive with our hobbies, whatever they are. The reason I would distinguish furry from being a fetish would be to say that sex isn't the major driver.

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Courtney Plante: So furries do look at erotic content. But when you ask furries, hey, is that the reason why you're here? Is that what got you into it in the first place? And, you know, depending on the sample you're using, 60% to 80% of furries will say, no, I'm here for the community. I'm here for the costuming. I'm here for the contents itself. I'm here for all these other things. The porn is there too, but that's not why I'm here. To a gamer who has a pinup, or for anime fan who looks at Hentai, the porn is there, and they like that part. But, you know, anime fan would be offended to say, well, you're just a person with anime fetish. No, they like anime. And also, you know, they have a healthy sex drive, so they combine the two.

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Courtney Plante: I would say it's probably correct to say that ten to 15% of furries are primarily motivated by sexual interest. For ten to 15% of furries, I think it would be accurate to say it is a fetish for them. And this is not a kink shaming. That's, you know, if no one's getting hurt, you like what you like, right? But I just think factually, it would be inaccurate to assume that most furries are here first and foremost for the sex. Right. You could take the sex out of furry entirely, and most furries would still be furries.

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Kayla: That makes a lot of sense. And it's almost kind of making me think about, like, the knee jerk reaction, the knee jerk inability to understand, you know, from non furry people what's going on here, to come up with the idea or to cling to the perception that this is largely a sex thing almost makes it easier to understand. Maybe in some ways if you say, no, it's actually not that. That might be harder for, it just goes back to your explanation of why it goes, yeah, maybe it's harder to wrap your mind around this if you don't understand it. And then also here, it's not actually a sex thing.

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Courtney Plante: Well, that's why I think it's so useful to constantly be making comparisons to other fan groups that people do understand.

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Kayla: Right.

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Courtney Plante: I can say some of the original Star Trek fan fiction back in the 1960s and seventies was gay fan fiction written by female fans of Kirk and Spock. Slash fiction, baby, that's where slash fiction was born. And yet we don't say, well, because this exists. Because if I go into the Star Trek fan fiction boards, I find this slash fiction. We don't say, well, Star Trek fans are all tremendous perverts who have a Star Trek fetish. We don't do that for any other fan group. But furries are just weird enough. They cross that threshold that we go, oh, except for them, they're the weird sex freaks. We do the same thing for bronies. So my little pony fans, oh, you're an adult who likes this weird kid show. Well, this must be some weird sex thing too, right? Is there porn of it? Yes.

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Courtney Plante: Well, that's probably why you're there then. It's let's ignore all the other content and all the other reasons why. Let's just focus on the porn. That has to be the reason you're there.

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Kayla: That's a really good point. And that honestly, like, as somebody who, you know, again, has a very mainstream, my introduction to bronies was from a very mainstream perspective. Like, that even helps me think about that a little differently. Like, it doesn't. Yeah, that helps me think about it differently. I appreciate that. And it's also making me think about, like, and this is maybe related to the sex conversation or just the conversation around furries in general. Is there, is there some sort of spectrum here? Like, I know that there was. So there was a meme going around a while ago where it was like showing the spectrum of, like, furry to not furry in terms of like, what.

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Courtney Plante: You might find dangerously furry, recklessly furry.

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Kayla: Yeah, it was, it might have been that one or it might have been another one. Like the one that specifically thinks thinking of was. It was showing the like, progression of a, depicting someone as a cat girl. So it was like, here's a cat girl, catgirl on this end. Just cat ears. That's okay. And then progression, progression until it was just a cat with like, eyelashes.

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Courtney Plante: Yeah.

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Kayla: What do you think about that spectrum? Like, is there a spec? Like, if somebody goes like, oh, I really like myself in cat ears. Is that person on the quote unquote furry spectrum?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So there's sort of two ideas that are conflated here. The one idea is the content itself. How anthral or feral is the content. That's the terms you would use. So the more it looks like a human with just a couple of animal traits we see, that's a much more anthro character. If it's literally a dog, then that would be feral. Furries interest in content runs the whole gamut. For some furries, their aesthetic preferences. For very werewolf, that's very realistic looking. Whereas for other people, like myself included, like very tuny art, like very cartoony, very Disney style. Right. Like, it's not at all realistic. The research tends to suggest that furries have a much stronger aesthetic preference for the much more toony style. Which again makes sense. If it's anthropomorphic animals you're a fan of and not just animals, then that.

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Courtney Plante: That would make a certain amount of sense. That's not to say there aren't furries who are very much a fan of the more feral style of art. It just tends to be less popular. So that's. That's one dimension. So what kind of aesthetic preference do you have? But then the. The second one you're talking about, right. Is a person who wears cat ears. A furry? Is a person who watches Zootopia considered a furry. And to that I would say that at least as a social psychologist, the only way I answer that is, well, do you engage in the content enough that it becomes a part of who you are? At the end of the day, only you get to decide whether this label applies to you. I can watch a few hockey games, but I don't consider myself to be a hockey fan.

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Courtney Plante: But if I watch it enough that I think you get a better understanding of me. If I use the label hockey fan to describe myself, then I'll use it. But where that line is for everyone is different. You can absolutely love my little pony and Zootopia and draw little animal characters. But just say yeah. Something about furry just doesn't jive with me, though. The label doesn't fit me, right. I like these things, but I'm not a furry.

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Kayla: So for somebody who might be on that spectrum, asking themselves that question, can we talk about what and we've touched on some things, but I want to get into it more. What are some of the benefits to people who engage in the furry community? I know that there, obviously, first science has done a ton of research into this and has published a ton of research, and I think that this is something that has come up in your research. So I'd love to get into it.

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So right out of the gate, it's worth mentioning a distinction between two ideas. So there's what we call fanship and fandom. So fanship is how big of a fan are you? Right. So if I'm high in fanship for Pokemon, if I'm high in Pokemon fanship, I buy all the games. I have posters and Pokemon cards all over my room. That would be very high in fanship. Right. I watched every episode of the show. Fandom, on the other hand, is your involvement with the community itself. Right. And you can be high or low in either one of these. I can watch the show religiously. I can have all the merchandise. But if I think Pokemon fans are cringe, then I would be low in fandom, but high in fanship likewise.

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Courtney Plante: I can love hanging out with Pokemon fans, but not be super into the show. I just kind of like being around the fans. So I would be high in fandom and low in fanship. They tend to be correlated, but, you know, they're different concepts. And I point this difference out because our research shows that fanship by itself doesn't. Isn't really tied to well being one way or another. Right. How big of a fan you are of something doesn't really have an impact on your well being. Fandom, on the other hand, is tremendously predictive of well being. So it's that community part of it, and part of the reason why this is the case. We often take it for granted that we have social support networks.

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Courtney Plante: One of the best predictors of well being in a person's life is, do you have people who are there in your corner when the chips are down and life gets really, do you have a couch to sleep on if your house burns down? Do you have a person who you can call if you get sick and have to go to the hospital? Can you borrow $100 from someone? Right. That's social support. And for many people, they get that social support from their families, from their church groups, from their work friends, their school friends. But if you don't have that, life is a really bleak, dismal, scary place. And for a lot of people who were bullied and picked on and ostracized they don't have that. And so they're fan groups. They're fandoms for many of them. That's where they get that social support from.

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Courtney Plante: So when furries say it's the community, and that's why I do it, well, that's what they're talking about. They're saying, yeah, like, we used to get together to watch these shows or draw art together, but after a while, after I've gotten to know these people for a few years, like, we can hang out and furries, not even the reason we're hanging out anymore. Like, my roommates are furries, right? And, you know, we don't talk about all furry stuff all the time, but they're people who are furries. We hung out together a bunch, and now we're just like, they're like my found family. So that community becomes that social support for us. And again, if you already have that social support in other contexts, it can seem very silly.

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Courtney Plante: Like, how would you get something so significant from the people you watch my little pony with or the people you go to a furry convention with? But unless you're in that community, unless these people are the people you lean on to get you through the day, you really can't appreciate what it means to be a part of that community.

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Kayla: Do you think then, and this is obviously a leading question, but do you think then that being a furry or being in the community is protective against things like suicide, mental illness, depression, the other, you know, pitfalls of the human experience?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah, we've actually published a paper on that, too, in the social work journal, where we talked about how this is actually something that came up, because we would have these furries who would go to clinical psychologists. They would go to therapy, because, you know, everyone goes to therapy for something, right? Or anyone can become depressed. Anyone can have anxiety disorder, right? That's not unique to furries or anyone else. So we'd have these furries who would go to a psychologist because they have depression or they have anxiety disorder, and the clinician would hear about them and say, well, tell me about my. About yourself. And they would say, well, I'm a furry. And the clinician would say, okay, forget the depression stuff.

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Courtney Plante: Let's fix the furry thing, whatever this furry thing is, which is a real problem, because if that's your social support network, if that's the people who are, like your family, if those are the people who become your social resource, someone telling you that you have to get rid of this in your life because they don't know what it's about is a really quick way to ensure that you don't go back to therapy. And this is what a lot of furries had happening. So we ended up publishing a journal to tell social workers and clinicians and practitioners, hey, this furry thing is actually really good for these folks, right? We have quotes from furries, from interviews and focus groups saying, like, hey, this literally saved my life. Like, I was going down a really dark road. I felt alone, I felt bullied.

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Courtney Plante: I felt like I didn't fit anywhere in the world. And here's this community that took me in under its shoulder, and, you know, now I've got friends, now I've got. I've got hopes for the future. I've got a place where I belong. These things that so many other people take for granted, they finally have that. So, yeah, I think it's tremendously helpful for well being, and it's a testament to just how good it is for well being. One of the things I like to point out is that we did a study looking at life satisfaction, self esteem, well being, comparing furries to non furries. And we know from other research that bullying is one of the most wretched things you can do to a person.

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Courtney Plante: If you want to destroy a person's self esteem and destroy their well being, bully them for a few years. So furries who have this history of being bullied, about 50% more than the average person, by all accounts, they should be screwed up. You should be seeing all sorts of problems with them, and yet we don't see those. They were no different from our control groups in terms of life satisfaction and well being. And we think it's precisely because the fandom provides this insulating, protective factor for them.

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Kayla: Yeah. That I feel like we could all use a little bit of that in just. In life today. It's just community is something that is so hard to find. Like, even when you're. Even when you have that, you know, you have a family of origin, you have these things. Like, community is something that is really slipping away. So it makes sense that community here is protective.

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Courtney Plante: Well, and the research is abysmal right now. Sorry, not. The research is not abysmal. The findings are abysmal and terrifying. When you see how many young adults today say they don't have a single friend. Right? Or they, you know, that they don't. You know, they can go an entire day without speaking to a single person, and that's just becoming more and more common. Right. I think there's a bigger need, if anything, for people today to find those communities however you find it, right? Whether it's the people you go to church with or the people you watch a tv show with. Just, we are a social species. We need to be in little tribes with other people, and if we don't have that, it's bad for our well being.

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Kayla: Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's. I just feel like that's getting more and more apparent every day, which just makes me appreciate these communities more so than ever. Do you think that the widespread perception or opinion either amongst, you know, amongst therapists or just amongst mainstream society is changing in response to your work or, you know, how do you see that widespread perception shifting, if at all?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So I think you can actually trace in the media from like the late 1990s and two thousands today, there's been an evolution in the way we talk about furries. Initially it was like, hey, look at these freaks. Like, let's put these freaks on display and let's show just how weird and deep that rabbit hole goes, right? Let's. I'm gonna sneak into a furry convention. I'm gonna run around in all the back corridors and try to find someone doing something insidious in a fursuit. That's sort of how it started off. And then sort of throughout the mid two thousand ten s, the story shifted to, hey, look at these freaks and these weirdos. But that's okay, right? So. But it still became the sensationalizing of, man, these guys are really real freaks and weirdos.

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Courtney Plante: But I, the good, intrepid reporter, I'm going to say they're weird, but that's okay, they're not so different from us. More recently now, I'm happy to see that the story is slowly changing into a recognition that they're not so different from anyone else. Like, if there's a story to be had with the furry fandom, it's that the differences between a furry and a science fiction fan and a football fan are purely aesthetic. It's the difference between liking chocolate and liking vanilla. One group likes to watch stories that feature walking, talking animals. One group like to inflate a pigskin and smash into each other at high speeds. Right? It's that they're both equally arbitrary things to want to do for fun. It's just, you know, one of them has gained mainstream appeal.

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Courtney Plante: But I think as we start to understand that, hey, people can like atypical things and that's okay. As we're starting to see more and more people being like 40 and 50 year old Star wars fans and doctor who fans. And as we see marvelous becoming multi billion dollar mainstream enterprises, I think it's becoming more acceptable for people to let their fan freak flag fly a bit. And we're starting to say, well, okay, it's a little strange, but it's not that strange in the scheme of things.

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Kayla: I mean, maybe it's like, where I would like to see it go is with furries, with anything we've talked about on the show that we've decided is like, this is a good thing. I want to see it go towards. It's not that. It's like, it's not so bad. It's. This is good. Like, we should be able to. We should be more open to exploring the, like, various. Just the creative ways to be a human in this world. Like, it should not be that you just exist in exactly the prescribed way. Like, that is so boring. And I really do think it is detrimental to our existence in a lot of ways. So, like, I just wish that people could be more presented with these options of, like, you could be a.

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Kayla: Like, it's not just about, you know, you can be a marvel fan because the movies are big now. It's like, you can be a furry. You can be in empty spaces. You can be like, the tulpas. One of. It was one of our really big episodes that we love, and I think about that all the time, because what we learned was that, you know, adults with, quote unquote imaginary friends or kids that had imaginary friends, it has so much benefit. Like, it has benefits on creativity. It has benefits on all of the things that you and I have talked about. Yes. Yes. Like, I would like to see it move beyond, like, well, it's okay that we have these weirdos around to, like, let's encourage people to be the weirdos. Like, it's not that. It's okay. It's like, let's do.

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Courtney Plante: I like to see the day where a kid can come home and say, well, I discovered today, mom and dad. I discovered today that I'm a furry. And have them go, oh, cool. As opposed to, like, oh, well, okay, well, we'll learn to live with this, but, oh, that's awesome. Right, right. Have that be a thing that you're excited that your kid has found out about themselves.

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Kayla: Right. And just, like, makes life a little bit more interesting and a little bit less dull and hard. This might be a very off topic question, but can you talk a little bit about why it seems like the, you know, there in this day and age. And I'm sure in always there is a continual problem that pops up in fandoms of a tendency towards fascism. And it seems like the furry community, from things that I've heard, things that I've read, that the furry community has been largely successful in rejecting fascism from its community. Like why, how and why, and how do we do it?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. So I think it's, I mean, you'll, politics will enter into any fan space eventually, right? This is certainly not unique to the furry fandom. Again, studying the my little pony fandom, there's an original character who is a nazi character, right. Who was a tremendous controversy nazi ponies in the my little pony fandom, right? So you can't get away with this. You can't get away from this no matter where you go, right. I feel like a big part of it is the norms that are in place. So again, I'm speaking as a social psychologist, that a community's norms are hugely influential on how the average person responds and reacts. So insofar as I see myself as a furry, whatever the furries norms are seen as being, I generally tend to endorse those.

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Courtney Plante: And so one of the big norms of the furry fandom is global citizenship, inclusion, right? Everyone from different walks of life. Diversity is important. And so that's a really important central theme to the furry fandom now, because there's no governing body that decides who gets to count as a furry or not. You'll have people who say, well, I'm a furry because I liked a particular show or I liked the know this particular thing. So they identify as furries, but they don't necessarily identify with those norms of the fandom, right? So maybe your politics are decidedly alt right and you happen to like a particular furry show. Maybe you grew up liking video games, but, you know, you don't get behind any of the rest of the furry stuff in that regard.

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Courtney Plante: It's possible to consider yourself a furry, but sort of be at odds with the politics of the general furry community. One of the things that's been really nice to see in the furry fandom is they're not shy about espousing those norms and making it very loud and clear that, hey, this is the norm of the fandom, right? If you're going to start spreading that fascist shit here, it's really not welcome. And because so much of the fandom takes place in online spaces, right. If you're ostracized or kicked out of the online community, that doesn't have leave you with a lot of places to go. So, yeah, we've seen that happen. Right. There have been some small discussions in the fandom about what is to be done about these groups. And I think the overwhelming response from the fandom has been, there's zero tolerance policy.

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Courtney Plante: Right. If furries are not shy about saying, we'll boycott organizations, that's accept this, we will not. We will leave artists who espouse these kinds of views. So there's a big push to try to make this space a space where fascism really doesn't even get a chance to take roots, really. And you've seen that this incredibly strong backlash. So don't even get a chance to take roots and become something that is seen as even remotely viable. And again, it doesn't make. In some ways, it always kind of makes me laugh that a person with fascist views would even want to be in the free shadow in the first place. My dude, this is an LGBTQ space like you are.

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Courtney Plante: If, you know, if you hate gay people or think trans people are degenerate or something, I hate to break it to you, but you are in a numerical minority from the get go. This is not a place where you're going to find a lot of people who think like you. They often get stamped out pretty quickly.

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Kayla: I just. I have a lot of respect for that because it's such a. It is such a problem in communities in general. But it's been heartening to see over the last few years. Like, I feel like that those are more of the news stories that I've been exposed to, at least, you know, via Twitter is just, hey, this, you know, this furry convention, like, kicked out this, you know, guy in a nazi fur suit, and I'm like, yes, please, more of that.

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Courtney Plante: Well, it's funny, too, because, I mean, there's always. To argue that there won't be any drama in any fandom is silly, right? Furry has just as much drama as any other fandom does. But what's interesting is that, like, the. The things that make it to. To the point of drama or high drama in the furry fandom are relatively small when you compare to other fandoms, right? So in the furry fandom, we might say we have a problem with Nazis because a nazi furry came to a convention, right? Or, you know, a couple of people made some. Some fascist art, right?

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Courtney Plante: We go, we have a problem with Nazis in this fandom when you compare it to other fandoms, where it is a much more significant, much more deeply rooted problem so it's, you know, you always hate to see any sign of this in a fandom, but the fact that it's the fact that the fandom can get very upset and very passionate over what is, relatively speaking, a very small number of people. Right. Is encouraging. Right. It doesn't get a chance to take root.

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Kayla: Right, right. Yeah. Again, more of that. Take notes, everybody from other fandoms that is listening right now. Maybe we've hit on everything, but I just feel like I need to ask, like, what do you want mainstream society to know about furries? Like, if you could pick, you know, top three things, like what do you want people who don't know anything to know about this group?

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Courtney Plante: I don't even know about necessarily three things. I would say if there's one thing to take away, it's that, like, furries are just like you. We have a campaign that we kind of jokingly say is they're just like you, but with more fur. At the end of the day, the difference between a furry, anime fan, a brony, a football fan, it's just an aesthetic preference. Right. The underlying psychology, the reason why you're a fan of these things is the same. Right. You're in it for a recreation. You do it because it's fun. You do it because the community is fun. You do it for a little bit of escapism. You do it to flex some of those self expression or create creativity muscles. You know, those same underlying psychological motivations are there. So the differences are quite literally skin deep here. Right there.

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Courtney Plante: They're small, superficial aesthetic differences. We have a lot more in common than you might think. And when you keep that in mind, it's a lot easier, especially if you're a fan of anything. Right. If you're a fan of something, I feel like you can understand a furry.

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Kayla: Yeah. If you can understand anything. Yeah, that's, I'm thinking about that one for a while. So this is the question that I have to ask everybody that we talk to. From an outsider's perspective, the furry community may seem unusual. Unfamiliar beliefs, strange rituals. We are a cult podcast. We are cult are just weird. So I have to ask, is the first fandom a cult or is it just weird? And to clarify on our show, weird is. Yeah, it's a wonderful term of endearment.

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Courtney Plante: Yeah. Phrase are absolutely weird. It's funny. Anticipating this question, I actually, nerdy psychologist that I am, I actually went and looked up Lifton's criteria for, like, what makes a cult.

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Kayla: Sure.

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Courtney Plante: Just to make sure and I feel like furries only have like one of the defining features of a cult out of like eight. So the one feature was like, they have their own language and jargon, right? Which I think most fandoms do. So furries are like maybe like one 8th of the way there to occult. So much more likely to be weird than any sort of cult.

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Kayla: What kind of jargon? Like, I know we've talked about, we've said furry a number of times, but like, what other jargon is there? You did say anthro versus feral, which was new for me, but anthro versus.

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Courtney Plante: Feral fursonas are a big deal. Furries love their puns, which I think a lot of people underestimate. So someone will be like, they think they'll be very clever and they'll be like, oh, does that make you ferocious? Aren't I clever? And like when you look at how we name our conventions, like further confusion, fernal equinox. Furthermore, like, you're not going to beat furries at this. This is kind of our thing. So, yeah, so, yeah, tons of language. Fur suits. Right? There's a lot of jargon when you get into it. Of course, now all of it is escaping.

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Kayla: Gotcha. No, that's a lot. And yeah, that does not a cult make. So obviously Chris and I will talk about it as well, but it does not seem like a cult. Seems just wonderfully weird. Is there anything that we didn't cover today that you would like our listeners to know or that you'd like to say?

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Courtney Plante: No, I think I love the questions you asked. You ask questions that I think were very. They show that you've done some research. Again, it's always frustrating to do interviews where the questions themselves are very ignorant and come from a place of like, your confirmation bias. You're digging for the thing you already think to be true. And nothing I say is going to change your belief that furries are sexual, degenerative.

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Kayla: I'm sorry.

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Courtney Plante: It was nice to see.

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Kayla: I'm sorry. You've had that experience interviews. That's a bummer. That is a bummer.

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Courtney Plante: It comes with the territory.

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Kayla: Sure. So where can our listeners find you? Where can they find your work, your research? What resources would you like to point them towards?

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Courtney Plante: Yeah, so I think the easiest, best place to find us is just firstscience.com. So f u r science.com. We make all of our findings available there. So we run and maintain repository of all of our past findings. We have a book. It's now out of date there. It's like six years out of dates. We are currently writing a new book, which we hope will be out sometime in the spring. But it's going to be everything we've learned. Learned. But the fandom condensed into, like, one book, what we call the numbers, data, statistics, and we make it available for free. We don't think that this information should be kept behind a paywall, so it's very important to us to get it out there. So if you want to win Internet arguments about furries, check out fur science.

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Courtney Plante: You can follow us on Twitter erscience or Facebook. I think we're also on Facebook as well as furscience.

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Kayla: That is a good motivation to get people to check out their research, win Internet arguments. That automatically made me go like, oh, yeah, let's go. Let's go. Doctor plont, thank you so much for talking with me today, for being on our show. I feel like I learned a lot and just have a much more well rounded education about the furry fandom.

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Courtney Plante: The pleasure is all mine, Kayla. Thank you very much for having me.

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Chris: Kayla, seriously, you had to. You had to give. Give up the. The goods on my. My waiting in line for the prequels back in 1999 when, like, half of our audience probably wasn't even born.

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Kayla: Very sorry.

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Chris: And here's the thing.

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Kayla: I said, what's a Star wars fan? And I went, that's a Star wars fan?

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Chris: Yeah. You didn't have to go into detail about it. Everybody thought I was cool, and now people are gonna think that I'm a big dork.

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Kayla: Nobody thought you were cool.

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Chris: Yeah, no, I know. And actually, I wouldn't even be upset about it, except it's the prequel. But see, the thing is, people today can't understand what the mentality was like back then. Okay? Today we are just inundated with Star wars content. We are being force fed Star wars content like a fucking goose that they're trying to make foie gras out of.

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Kayla: We do have fatty livers.

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Chris: We have fatty Star wars livers. In 1999, it was like, I can't believe there's gonna be another Star wars.

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Kayla: Yeah, I know.

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Chris: Like, especially, like, I wasn't born Star wars, right? And then, like, that's it. And the holiday special.

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Kayla: Holiday special, which you.

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Chris: No one could have Star tours at Disney.

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Kayla: Like, star tours at Disney. There were the indoor movies that.

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Chris: There were a bunch of things that, like, nobody really. Yeah.

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Kayla: And they were. None of them were like, quote unquote quality.

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Chris: There was fanship stuff, to use the word that I just learned.

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Kayla: There you go.

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Chris: Right? People could buy, like, action figures and stuff, but in terms of, like, actual, like, main storytelling, mainstream storytelling, content media, there was, like, a drought. And, like, for me, who was born in 1981, like, two of the Star wars movies came out already. Like, for me, it was like, oh, my God, there's an original Star wars, like, a piece of the canon that's going to be put into my eyeballs. It was unbelievable. And then the movie sucked. So, you know, I don't know. I don't know.

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Kayla: Sorry.

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Chris: I mean. Okay. Like.

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Courtney Plante: I don't want to.

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Kayla: We're here to talk about Star wars.

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Chris: Okay. We're not here to talk about Star wars. It didn't entirely suck. Duel the fates was cool. It was just. It was a different time, and were all obsessed. And I watched the movie nine times in theaters, and then I realized that it was bad. And then now I'm embarrassed by it. But thank you for putting it out there in the world. I appreciate that.

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Kayla: You're welcome.

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Chris: Aside from that. Okay. Lots to unpack there.

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Kayla: Mm.

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Chris: I think my big takeaway was something that was sort of, like, dawning on me as there's. Okay, there's a lot of takeaways, but if I had to boil it down, if I had to stack rank, my biggest one is, like, we're all furries. Like, how ubiquitous this thing is. Like, and that was kind of dawning on me at the beginning of the interview, before you guys even, like, explicitly talked about it. It was kind of dawning on me about the, like, oh, yeah, there's bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. Every single Disney movie.

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Kayla: Anthropomorphic animals, right?

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Chris: Anthropomorphized animals are, like, every. It's everywhere. And, like, he put later with other cultures, too, right? So many deities are anthropomorphized humans. Like, shapeshifting, like, werewolves.

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Kayla: Right?

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Chris: I mean, like, I I don't want to sit here and just, like, name stuff, but, like, it's, like, half of all storytelling, if you think about it, right? Centaurs. I don't know. Like, it's just everywhere. And so when I started thinking about that, I was like, wait, this is actually, like, super normal? Yeah, it's like, it's weird and normal. Like, it's definitely weird. Like, he says it's weird in a good way, but it's also, like, it's not. It's not. That's the word I'm looking for.

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Kayla: Niche.

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Chris: It's not niche. It's definitely not.

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Kayla: It's not. It seems niche because for some reason, the expression of being a fan of this in this way is, quote unquote, niche, but the actual fanship itself, that's not niche at all.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Kayla: I feel like every Disney movie.

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Chris: You're right, you're right. It's the, like. It's the identity part of it, right. It's the, like I identify as. I am explicitly acknowledging that I am a fan of this concept of this. Of this thing that I think is not something that most people consciously do, at least.

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Kayla: Right, right.

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Chris: And I think that the other thing that kind of plays into it is the misconception that I had corrected in this interview, which is that, like, yeah, it's totally just people that, like, want to dress up as dogs and cats when they bone.

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Kayla: Right?

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Chris: Like, literally that. I hate to say it. I really do hate to admit it. That was the impression that I had.

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Kayla: Mm.

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Chris: I had the impression. And, like, not. Maybe not 100%, but, like, first and foremost, it's a sexual kink community.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: Where, like, people that like to have sex and fur suits hang out.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: I did not know that it was more of, like. Like, his sports fan analogy.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: And sort of same thing goes with the jerseys. Like, if you asked me before the interview, I would have said, like, yeah, furries are people that like to dress up in fur suits.

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Kayla: Right.

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Chris: Totally had that corrected for me, too.

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Kayla: Because that's what's been expressed to you by the loudest voices in your circle on this, which are not furry voices.

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Chris: Right.

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Kayla: And I think that's just a good example of, like, if we have questions about a community, like, get your a. Get your info from the community. Like, see what they're talking about. Not necessarily what's being depicted on CSI or in your local evening news or from, like, you know, four chan memes making fun of it. It's really easy to have your entire opinion on this thing colored by those outside sources that have a reason for wanting to be unflattering.

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Chris: Yeah, it's funny. Like, I know about that CSI episode. Like, I've heard of it, at least.

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Kayla: Sure.

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Chris: Me too. Seen a single episode of CSI. But when you guys brought that up, I was like, why do I know about that? That also brings me to another point, which were chatting about sort of as were listening to this, but, like, damn good find for an interview. This is, like, the ideal person to talk to, because he's got no. He's got the two magical components. He's got the lived experience, and he's got the like, scientific, like studious. I want to learn about this curiosity.

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Kayla: Search, reality based approach to something.

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Chris: So that was, it was a really good interview.

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Kayla: It was really difficult.

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Chris: Thank you for talking to him.

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Kayla: Thank you for listening. It was really difficult to trying to figure out how to approach this episode because it is such a large topic approaching any sort of fandom, that's a huge undertaking. And so I was thinking about, how do I want to do this? Do I want to approach it the same way that I approach Topaz and go onto the Reddit? Do I want that? Which yielded. I'm so glad we talked to so many tulpas, but the tulpa, my research for the Tulpa episode yielded more information than I could sift through. And so how could I present this in a way that you should have.

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Chris: Created a tulpa to help you sift through it?

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Kayla: How could I present this in a way that was, like, both curated and comprehensive, and finding somebody who was doing research into it felt like one of the best ways to do that and finding somebody who is doing that and is also actively a furry, it's like, I could not have asked for a better interview.

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Chris: Yeah, yeah, it was perfect. Also, he's a gamer, too, so, like, check, check. Although I did feel very sort of like, I don't know, what's the word? What's that word when it's like, you just kind of feel like everyone else. Like somebody just has you begged, you know, when he was talking about, like, well, you know, it's like, kind of nerd culture. And, like, you're gonna like these five things. And I'm like, yeah, but I like those five things just because I like them, not because it's part of my nerd culture. Like, I just like them.

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Kayla: Are you a furry?

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Chris: Maybe I am. I don't know. But, like, you know, I like anime. I like video games. I like star Trek and Star Wars. I do like fantasy. I can't deny it. I'm just.

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Kayla: You like a girl with cat ears.

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Chris: I do. I do. Yeah.

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Kayla: Don't we all?

370
01:34:10,510 --> 01:34:35,278
Chris: And then to answer, like, am I a furry? Like, for the first time, I actually thought about that instead of being like, no, I'm not a furry. Because now instead of my understanding being like, I like to dress up and maybe, like, you know, bone somebody with fox ears on instead. Now I'm thinking of it as, like, do I think anthropomorphized animals are interesting and neat and cool? Yeah. You know? Yeah, I think I love Disney movies.

371
01:34:35,334 --> 01:35:08,242
Kayla: The answer is. I guess the answer is now is the time to evaluate your fanship and fandom of furries. I'm not saying do that on the show. I'm just saying, no, I'll do it right now. Having that knee jerk reaction. It just kind of makes more sense to sit down and evaluate your own relationship. To how you feel about anthropomorphic animals. Not fursuits, not that stuff. But how do anthropomorphic animals show up in your life? Do you like Disney movies? I know we're kind of repeating ourselves here, but.

372
01:35:08,266 --> 01:35:08,466
Chris: Yeah.

373
01:35:08,498 --> 01:35:15,362
Kayla: Do you like Disney movies? Did you like zootopia? Are you a fan of. I don't know. Is gritty a furry? I don't think so.

374
01:35:15,426 --> 01:35:17,658
Chris: But, like, gritty is his own genre.

375
01:35:17,714 --> 01:35:23,954
Kayla: Is gritty his own genre? Something like, what are the ways that this does show up for you?

376
01:35:24,042 --> 01:35:26,802
Chris: Yeah, not necessarily you.

377
01:35:26,826 --> 01:35:28,378
Kayla: I'm just saying in general, one.

378
01:35:28,474 --> 01:35:42,140
Chris: One person, you listener. And like, honestly, you know, sometimes cat ears can be kind of cute. Like, I'm not gonna. It's a whole. Sometimes it can be kind of sexy. I'm not like.

379
01:35:42,220 --> 01:35:43,972
Kayla: I know that's a thing.

380
01:35:44,076 --> 01:35:45,812
Chris: It's. I'm not gonna lie about it.

381
01:35:45,836 --> 01:35:55,820
Kayla: And that's kind of why I wanted to ask him about the. That spectrum that was going around of like, a girl with cat ears is totally fine, but a cat is not fine. Kind of like, what are you talking about?

382
01:35:55,860 --> 01:35:57,960
Chris: Fuck your cat, but girl with cat ears.

383
01:36:00,240 --> 01:36:48,080
Kayla: And I know I've had this conversation before in our friend group, but, like, if you are somebody who is going, I like this depiction of a girl who is part cat. And the part cat is a tail in cat ears. I don't think you get to then, quote unquote, have some sort of moral high ground over somebody who is interested in a more feral or anthro or less anthro looking depiction of a cat person. I just don't. Yeah, not to make it about the sex. It's not even about the sex. It's just the. I like the way that looks. You're. You're engaging in the same thing. I just. I just want to break down that imaginary barrier a little bit. And maybe if you're sitting at home going, well, I like. I like cat ears.

384
01:36:48,120 --> 01:37:14,258
Kayla: You know, I put cat ears on at Halloween, but I'm not a furry. Maybe think about why you think it's shameful to be a furry. You don't have to be a furry. Like, doctor plont talked about that. Like, maybe it's just not a label that applies to you. But maybe think about why it might feel like something that is wrong or embarrassing or shameful to you, because maybe it can just not be those things. It's just something that you're not into. It's okay.

385
01:37:14,434 --> 01:37:59,680
Chris: I think you're right. And I've actually been thinking a lot about this question. We talked a little bit about it during the interview in response to one of the things that he was saying. I think there's also an element of what you were just talking. So what you were just talking about was, do I just like to put on furry ears, or am I a furry? And I think that those are, like, there's actually, like, a really big psychological barrier between those two states. Like, I think there's, like, a threshold to be crossed and it act. And weirdly, it reminds I. It weirdly reminds me of when were talking to. When were talking to Molly Maeve Egan about history of sexual abuse. There was, like, a threshold crossing moment when.

386
01:37:59,980 --> 01:38:32,838
Chris: When you kind of go from, like, this is the thing that happened to me to, like, this is like, an identity. This is like, I have been, like, I am a. I am a victim, right? Like, I am a survivor of this thing, and it kind of feels. I don't know why that feels similar to me, but there's, like, this identity threshold crossing that seems to be, like. And totally, wildly different. Like, things to have happen, obviously, but I don't know, I just. I feel like that's another part of it with a furry thing. Right. There's one. It's one thing to say I like something. It's a different thing to say. Like, I am someone who likes this thing.

387
01:38:32,854 --> 01:39:08,184
Kayla: Right, right. Both are stigmatized identities that carry a lot of, you know, can perhaps. I don't want to say, carry a lot of shame, because I don't want to say that furries are ashamed. I don't think that people who are furries are ashamed. I think that people who have negative feelings about furries might harbor some shame about that, or think that it's shameful. I just think that. Just try. And. You don't have to identify as it, but try and examine why that shame is there. Maybe just don't have it be there. Like, I know that's easier said than done.

388
01:39:08,272 --> 01:39:10,256
Chris: Don't feel shame. You guys, just stop.

389
01:39:10,408 --> 01:39:16,720
Kayla: It doesn't have to be a thing of shame for it to not be something that you identify with.

390
01:39:16,880 --> 01:39:37,274
Chris: I do also like what he was saying, too, about, like, there's also, like, gradations of identity too. And he was mentioning how these conventions as sort of, you know, safe spaces allow people to sort of, like, try on different identities to kind of be like, do I like this? Do I like this pronoun? Do I like thinking of it? I don't know. This is a place where I can try it on.

391
01:39:37,322 --> 01:39:37,554
Kayla: Right.

392
01:39:37,602 --> 01:39:50,418
Chris: Like, so what an important. Yeah, super interesting. Super important. Like, I. I think that's, like, a cool. Because of the sort of, like, thresholdy nature of, like, these identities.

393
01:39:50,474 --> 01:39:51,194
Kayla: Right, right.

394
01:39:51,242 --> 01:40:02,104
Chris: Of, like, oh, man, I don't just like to wear ears now. I am furry. Oh, man. Like, I don't just think boys are cute. Like, I actually am a gay person.

395
01:40:02,192 --> 01:40:02,820
Kayla: Right.

396
01:40:04,080 --> 01:40:10,864
Chris: Being able to sort of, like, try that on in a safe way and, like, you know what? No harm, no foul. Like, go kiss a dude. Like, I don't know, maybe you like it. Who knows?

397
01:40:10,912 --> 01:40:11,500
Kayla: Right?

398
01:40:13,200 --> 01:40:16,376
Chris: Yeah. Super good to have shit like that.

399
01:40:16,448 --> 01:40:21,384
Kayla: Yeah, it's a net positive for society. Yeah, absolutely.

400
01:40:21,512 --> 01:40:52,518
Chris: And apparently, I didn't know that they were so good at expunging all the fat because I had heard about the fascism. I know I joked about it up front. Apologies to our furry listeners who might have been offended by that, but it's really nice to hear that they so vigorously sort of, like, eliminated that aspect. Sure. And, yeah, it is weird, too. Like, he was mentioning, why would you want to, as a fascist, like, be amongst. I don't know.

401
01:40:52,614 --> 01:40:53,390
Kayla: Yeah, it's weird.

402
01:40:53,430 --> 01:40:55,150
Chris: But, I mean, that's its own whole discussion.

403
01:40:55,230 --> 01:41:06,822
Kayla: You're always gonna find. You're always gonna find people with a tendency towards fascism in a lot of, like, in groups. Like, it's just. It's a thing that.

404
01:41:06,846 --> 01:41:08,062
Chris: Sure, yeah.

405
01:41:08,166 --> 01:41:15,708
Kayla: Especially when it's like, I don't know if furries are largely white, but I'm sure there's plenty of white people. And I'm not saying that white people are fascists.

406
01:41:15,814 --> 01:41:16,976
Chris: You're saying white people are weirdos.

407
01:41:17,008 --> 01:41:25,088
Kayla: I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that can be an indicator of the potential towards.

408
01:41:25,184 --> 01:41:31,860
Chris: There's a correlation between belief, white people, and white supremacy. More white people are going to be white supremacists than not. So that.

409
01:41:32,280 --> 01:41:33,704
Kayla: So. Good job, furries.

410
01:41:33,872 --> 01:41:39,416
Chris: Good job, furries. Yeah. Great interview. I don't have anything else to say. Is it a cult or just weird?

411
01:41:39,488 --> 01:41:44,210
Kayla: We've got to. I mean, we talked about it in the interview, but you and I have to go through our own criteria.

412
01:41:44,400 --> 01:41:49,222
Chris: Yeah, I noticed that he went to, like, some. What? Lifton? Who the hell is that?

413
01:41:49,286 --> 01:41:49,918
Kayla: I don't know.

414
01:41:50,014 --> 01:41:50,294
Courtney Plante: I don't know.

415
01:41:50,302 --> 01:41:59,758
Chris: He should have come to our. That's actually kind of a famous cult researcher, for better or for worse. Yeah, but really, he should have come to our show and go, do we.

416
01:41:59,774 --> 01:42:04,838
Kayla: Do we have our completely not. He went to something academic versus our completely non academic.

417
01:42:04,894 --> 01:42:05,430
Chris: Yeah, yeah.

418
01:42:05,510 --> 01:42:06,970
Kayla: He should have criteria.

419
01:42:07,470 --> 01:42:08,850
Chris: Fucking academics.

420
01:42:09,150 --> 01:42:12,390
Kayla: So first one is charismatic leader.

421
01:42:13,570 --> 01:42:17,994
Chris: Is it this guy? By the way, I love that there's, like, a whole group. What is it called? For science.

422
01:42:18,082 --> 01:42:18,898
Kayla: For science.

423
01:42:19,034 --> 01:42:24,418
Chris: I just think that's really cool, too. No, just that there's a whole group and it's, like, interdisciplinary, and it's.

424
01:42:24,474 --> 01:42:27,994
Kayla: Yes, it's very cool. Go check out their website and the work that they do.

425
01:42:28,082 --> 01:42:31,058
Chris: Yeah. So it doesn't seem like there is anyone.

426
01:42:31,114 --> 01:42:41,374
Kayla: I did not really come across a charismatic leader. It's an emergent. More of an emergent group. There are obviously, like, you know, more famous furries and furry leaders and people who are organizing conventions and stuff like that.

427
01:42:41,422 --> 01:42:43,014
Chris: But there's not, like a king of the furries.

428
01:42:43,102 --> 01:42:44,822
Kayla: Not that I discovered.

429
01:42:44,886 --> 01:42:47,782
Chris: What about Robin Hood from the Disney Robin Hood?

430
01:42:47,806 --> 01:42:49,398
Kayla: He is my king of furries.

431
01:42:49,494 --> 01:42:50,966
Chris: He's. He's like the furry God king.

432
01:42:50,998 --> 01:42:53,758
Kayla: I mean. I mean, I really do love him.

433
01:42:53,854 --> 01:42:55,038
Chris: He's. He's hot as fuck.

434
01:42:55,094 --> 01:42:55,446
Kayla: Yeah.

435
01:42:55,518 --> 01:42:59,542
Chris: Yeah. Expected harm seems opposite.

436
01:42:59,606 --> 01:43:00,518
Kayla: Opposite, baby.

437
01:43:00,574 --> 01:43:00,878
Chris: Yeah.

438
01:43:00,934 --> 01:43:01,214
Kayla: Yeah.

439
01:43:01,262 --> 01:43:07,588
Chris: Especially based on, like. Like, that last part of the interview you're talking about. Seems like it's actually of great benefit to these.

440
01:43:07,644 --> 01:43:08,876
Kayla: Expected benefit.

441
01:43:08,948 --> 01:43:25,788
Chris: Expected benefit. And it really sucks that, like, there was and. Or is a time that, like, therapists and social workers would try to treat the furniture. Try to treat it as a disorder. Like, I guess I get it, but, like, that sucks.

442
01:43:25,884 --> 01:43:31,340
Kayla: Yeah. Yeah. Not a fan. I hope that is changing. Presence of ritual.

443
01:43:31,640 --> 01:43:32,248
Chris: Oh, yeah.

444
01:43:32,304 --> 01:43:40,640
Kayla: High. Go to the conventions. You have the jargon. You have the different ways of engaging in fandom and fanship. It's up there. Fursuits.

445
01:43:40,680 --> 01:43:45,000
Chris: People in the community will dress up in fursuits. That's high ritual.

446
01:43:45,080 --> 01:43:49,272
Kayla: Presence of ritual. High niche within society. This is gonna be.

447
01:43:49,296 --> 01:43:50,608
Chris: This is where we just said no.

448
01:43:50,744 --> 01:43:52,568
Kayla: Well, I disagree.

449
01:43:52,664 --> 01:43:53,344
Chris: Okay.

450
01:43:53,472 --> 01:44:18,530
Kayla: Yeah, I disagree. I think that the discreet community that we are talking about right now of people who self identify as furries and engage in the fandom, engage in the community, like, go to the conventions or make fan art or talk to each other online. I think that is still. Even though it's well known on four Chan or whatever, well known on Reddit. It was on a CSI episode. It is still niche within society.

451
01:44:18,650 --> 01:44:37,410
Chris: Yeah. I think that when you really sit down and, like, define the borders that way, which I think we kind of have to. I think you're right. Anthropomorphic animals with a little asterisk that says, everybody loves anthropomorphized animals. Everybody that has ever lived likes anthropomorphized animals.

452
01:44:38,470 --> 01:44:42,894
Kayla: Antifactuality. I don't see that here.

453
01:44:42,942 --> 01:44:44,958
Chris: I don't see where that would come in.

454
01:44:45,054 --> 01:44:58,976
Kayla: Cause again, doctor Pluntzen very much clarified, like, this is not necessarily about people who are having some sort of, like, identity crisis or don't. Don't. Aren't. Are disconnected from their humanity. Like, it's not. That doesn't seem to be a part of it.

455
01:44:59,008 --> 01:45:06,060
Chris: The only antifactual bits, in fact, that I can remember are, like, the misconceptions that exist and that I personally had.

456
01:45:07,400 --> 01:45:09,616
Kayla: Life consumption, percentage of life consumed.

457
01:45:09,648 --> 01:45:11,032
Chris: Ooh. Did you even ask him that?

458
01:45:11,136 --> 01:45:21,790
Kayla: I didn't, and I think that. I think that with any kind of fandom, I don't see how this answer can't be like, it depends.

459
01:45:21,870 --> 01:45:24,118
Chris: Yeah, I was gonna say it's anywhere from zero to 100.

460
01:45:24,174 --> 01:45:38,562
Kayla: Yeah. Like, we've talked about, again, talked about fanship versus fandom. Talked about how you can be just a casual enjoyer of something versus heavily engaged in fanship and fandom. I don't really know how to answer that one. Besides yes. No.

461
01:45:38,726 --> 01:46:00,890
Chris: Yeah, I feel like perhaps not. You can go to, like, one convention a year, and then it's like 2% of your. It's like, I'm going to these things all the time. And all I think about, which is not even necessarily bad. Right. This is a inherently, it's a. It's a neutral criteria. Criterion. Even though typically it's in harmful groups.

462
01:46:00,930 --> 01:46:01,394
Kayla: It's not.

463
01:46:01,442 --> 01:46:07,130
Chris: It's not great. But in this case. Yeah, it definitely seems. Yeah, it depends.

464
01:46:07,630 --> 01:46:09,770
Kayla: Dogmatic beliefs. Dog.

465
01:46:11,070 --> 01:46:25,030
Chris: Yes. Hi. Hi. Dogmatic beliefs and also high catmatic beliefs. Avians are. Sounds like are a little lower down the list. What about he didn't answer you about the killer whale thing? Cause I like that.

466
01:46:25,110 --> 01:46:27,934
Kayla: I get the sense that the killer whale is not super high up there.

467
01:46:28,022 --> 01:46:31,586
Chris: Okay. I think that's what I would want to be. No, I'd probably be a bear.

468
01:46:31,678 --> 01:46:32,274
Kayla: You bear.

469
01:46:32,322 --> 01:46:33,274
Chris: I think I'm already a bear.

470
01:46:33,322 --> 01:46:34,270
Kayla: You are a bear.

471
01:46:34,610 --> 01:46:36,762
Chris: I'm glad that you told him about wee bears.

472
01:46:36,866 --> 01:46:38,706
Kayla: Wee bears is one of my favorite shows right now.

473
01:46:38,778 --> 01:46:46,282
Chris: Wee bears is excellent anthropomorphic animals. It is a children's show that is very. Just pleasant.

474
01:46:46,346 --> 01:46:47,602
Kayla: And so pleasant.

475
01:46:47,746 --> 01:46:49,682
Chris: Calming to watch for adults.

476
01:46:49,706 --> 01:46:53,670
Kayla: It is soothing for the nervous system. Dogmatic lease is low.

477
01:46:54,290 --> 01:46:56,976
Chris: Okay. If we don't punt it, then, yeah, fine.

478
01:46:57,138 --> 01:46:58,400
Kayla: Chain of victims.

479
01:46:59,420 --> 01:47:04,676
Chris: I can't think of a pun for this one, but it doesn't seem like it's a recruity kind of deal.

480
01:47:04,748 --> 01:47:08,960
Kayla: Agreed. Doesn't seem like it's a victimize y kind of deal.

481
01:47:09,700 --> 01:47:12,960
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's neither, really.

482
01:47:13,340 --> 01:47:14,108
Kayla: So, no.

483
01:47:14,204 --> 01:47:14,924
Chris: So, no.

484
01:47:15,052 --> 01:47:21,308
Kayla: Last one. Didn't really get into it. But I think we can extrapolate. Safe or unsafe to exit.

485
01:47:21,484 --> 01:47:26,220
Chris: I don't get the impression that you're gonna get, like, ostracized or punished if you leave.

486
01:47:26,300 --> 01:47:46,280
Kayla: I think the only kind of unsafe exit present here is if you were somebody who, unfortunately, had a therapist that tried to treat you out of the community and then you lost your social safety net. But that's not really the community's fault. So I don't think that there is an unsafe exit involved in the furry fandom.

487
01:47:47,260 --> 01:48:01,482
Chris: Yeah, I get the impression. I like the social safety net way of looking at it. I get the impression, and, in fact, I think he even kind of mentioned this a little bit, that people essentially just sort of become friends regardless of the community over time.

488
01:48:01,586 --> 01:48:02,330
Kayla: Right, right.

489
01:48:02,370 --> 01:48:13,626
Chris: You know, it's like. It's like with the sports fandom, right? Like, I. You know, oh, I go and watch the Gator game with people, and then, like, ten years go by, and now I'm friends with Steve. You know, like, oh, yeah, Steve.

490
01:48:13,658 --> 01:48:14,290
Kayla: I love Steve.

491
01:48:14,370 --> 01:48:27,672
Chris: One of your best buddies, Gator Steve. So. And, you know, that seems to me to be sort of like, the safety net would still be there, even if you don't, like, can you stop going to conventions? You know, but you still see Steve on the weekends.

492
01:48:27,736 --> 01:48:28,340
Kayla: Right.

493
01:48:28,720 --> 01:48:31,632
Chris: Steve would be a furry who dresses up as a Gatorader, by the way.

494
01:48:31,696 --> 01:48:33,140
Kayla: That would be a really cool outfit.

495
01:48:33,520 --> 01:48:40,664
Chris: Speaking of which. And that's another overlap. Every single sports team has a furry.

496
01:48:40,752 --> 01:48:41,776
Kayla: Except for gritty.

497
01:48:41,888 --> 01:48:48,132
Chris: Except for gritty. Gritty is his own thing. But every other sports team has somebody that dresses up like anthropomorphized animal.

498
01:48:48,216 --> 01:48:48,828
Kayla: We love them.

499
01:48:48,884 --> 01:48:55,636
Chris: So there you go. If you have one, it's totally normal. But if, like, if everybody's doing that, we freak out. That's when he doesn't.

500
01:48:55,668 --> 01:48:55,788
Courtney Plante: Yeah.

501
01:48:55,804 --> 01:48:57,292
Chris: Then we just go wild.

502
01:48:57,396 --> 01:49:00,772
Kayla: So not a cult. We agree with doctor plont. It is just weird.

503
01:49:00,836 --> 01:49:05,960
Chris: Just weird. And as you said with him, weird is cool.

504
01:49:06,380 --> 01:49:38,062
Kayla: I'm really grateful to have had this conversation. It feels really good to maybe help demystify, like a somewhat maligned group, do a little bit to maybe help present it as something positive, like the positive, beneficial thing for society and for individuals that it is. I'm also really grateful that actual scientific research is going into this. So again, thank you to doctor Courtney plant for this conversation and also to all of his colleagues at first, science for the work that they're doing. That's it for me today. Do you have anything else? I have something to leave us on, but I want to share.

505
01:49:38,086 --> 01:49:58,200
Chris: I was just going to echo your sentiments and say glad that I love when I have misconceptions corrected or when I learn new things that I didn't know before. And also, like, specifically with furries, like several other, like, I didn't know anything about tulpas, really, until you did your episode. I didn't. I hadn't even heard of empty spaces.

506
01:49:58,280 --> 01:49:58,616
Kayla: Right.

507
01:49:58,688 --> 01:50:29,714
Chris: Until you did your episode, furries. On the other hand, if you had, like, if when you asked me back at the top of the episode what I thought about furries, and then you ask me, but what do I actually know, right? Two very different answers. And, like, I guess what I'm trying to say is for something that I feel like I had knowledge about, I totally didn't. And I really appreciate getting the goods, getting the actual knowledge from the scientist's mouth.

508
01:50:29,802 --> 01:51:07,020
Kayla: Me too. I want to leave us today with this quote of from Rod O'Reilly, who is a furry themselves, in a documentary called the Fandom. A furry documentary, just to give us some more food for thought about the furry fandom quote. There's this weird thing that humans do. We take animals and we put our words into their mouths to talk back to usually about us. It's a very strange thing, but we've done it for centuries. We learned to read from anthropomorphic animals. We learn right from wrong from anthropomorphic animals. But most people don't notice it. Furry fans are the people who notice that we do this and think that there's something really special about that.

509
01:51:07,680 --> 01:51:08,632
Courtney Plante: Damn.

510
01:51:08,816 --> 01:51:14,360
Kayla: This is Kayla, this is Chris, and this is cult or just weird furries.