The Suits We Wear: Furries & Identity
A Look at Upcoming Deep Insights by Olson Zaltman
Pen in hand, eager to listen and guileless as the day I’d been trained, I asked the clear eyed young man sitting across the table from me what he wished the average person knew about Furries.
He tilted his head up, narrowing his gaze carefully as he surveyed me. He deliberately parsed his words, the gearbox of his mind plainly turning. A delicate silence pierced the space between us. I’d asked this type of question countless times before, but it never felt so personal to me as an interviewer.
He looked at me and said, without a shred of sarcasm, “That we don’t all want to fuck the dog.”
At Olson Zaltman we’ve had the unique perspective of having our office situated less than a block from the largest gathering of the Furry fandom in the United States for over a decade. Founded on the principle of the empowered understanding of the unconscious, as researchers we could no longer ignore the rich menagerie of feathers and fur that come gliding joyously past our windows every Pittsburgh summer, when we all stand in awe as the wild things of Anthrocon come out to play.
Who are these people and what are their stories? We asked ourselves the almost naively obvious — what compels a software engineer, an animator, the lady in the bus across from you on your morning commute or your closest friend to cast the glamour of a wolf, raccoon, or pony upon their human form?
In essence, we learned to take a good hard look in the mirror.
Take a look at your own public persona. What is is that you wear to belong to your tribe?
No, Furries don’t want to fuck the family dog, and neither to do they necessarily want to be the family dog, but it doesn’t take an expert in psychology to see the vein of animal symbolism that runs deeply through the human tradition. The worship of animals was formative in the history of many cultures through time. Think of all those wondrous Egyptian gods and goddesses, dripping in lapis amidst the hieroglyphs. Human bodies crowned with the heads of jackals and crocodiles, every statue a gilded paradox of man and beast that still beckon to the veil between the mortal and the divine, the quotidian and the sacred.
Go in any household in any burrow or exurb today you will find those that well may secretly (or not so secretly) hold the household cat or dog in higher regard than other people. Eagles, lions, and bears still emblazon flags and currencies as the sigils of our collective national identities. Is it really so odd, so unthinkable, to see more of what makes one human in something as pure, powerful and faultless as perhaps we can never be?
Whether from the safety of a crowd or the anonymous womb of the internet, it is easy to disparage those who are different. It was only a few hundred years ago that we burned women as witches, only dozens of years ago that the mere accusation of political subversion was enough to send your neighbor to trial. In short, it is easy to condemn and difficult to understand. Along the journey, we listened and we learned a few choice lessons from the experts in the art of being different today — the Furries themselves”.
We learned that personal growth does not exist in a vacuum. That masks can be worn not to hide, but to enhance. That you can let society choose the suit you wear, or you can create your own.
It seems that Furries have found an answer to a paradigm that many feel but few are prescient enough to grasp: that in this life you can let the world dictate an identity for you, or you can make one for yourself.
Within the next few weeks, we at Olson Zaltman will be doing what we do best — going deep into unconscious behaviors and beliefs to create insights that change the world. Myself and our team of analysts will be creating a report based on our findings and sharing this work publicly. We hope that you, dear reader, will find this work as eye opening as we did.
Sasha Aquino is a Senior Research Associate at Olson Zaltman
