I have come see in the past few years many countries intensifying the criminalization of our sexuality. In general the disposition of many online communities "furries therians otaku ect" seems to be becoming more puritanical and explicitly anti zoo.
This stuff really depresses me . I check zoo twitter often and I feel like the momentum that anti zoo activism has is snowballing partly spurred on by the aforementioned anti zoo legislation.
I think the torrent of internet backlash originated with the whole kero the wolf situation. He was a monster and his monstrous actions painted our community in a monstrous light as a consequence.
While I definitely have seen some more zooactivism as of recently I feel like it is to little to late perhaps?
I guess I'm curious to know where you all stand with this. Do you think this new wave of anti zoo sentiment will continue with its momentum? Or am I fixating too much on the negatives?
I would say that it was always pretty bad within the furry fandom, at least on the dumbass websites where the worst of them congregated. The larger and more "public" the website was, the more toxic the culture was. The furries also had a toxic convention culture that was behaving more like a disgusting criminal gang than anything: it's a pity because, back in the old meet-up days, the people that took part in the furry culture and wanted to meet each other were mostly very docile teetotalar types of people, and nowadays, there are so much drugs among the furries that it's getting pretty ridiculous. Among the furries and specifically among the anthros, the whole culture is really getting a lot worse.
What you are looking at is something more like the furry subculture itself going into a cultural decline, and it's their own darn fault. They became obsessed with being publicly visible, and they became obsessed with trying to make their art hobby lucrative. Did I mention that greed had a lot to do with it? The whole ersatz "libertarian" movement, in the fandom, really did them a huge disservice: it turned into, "liberty of the majority," which translated into, "liberty to look at heteronormative anthro trash porn and liberty to beat up anybody that is weird enough to gross out the pretty girls that you come to try to fuck." The convention culture has become a straight boy's bullying playpen, and it's only a matter of time before they take another crack at Burned Fur Jihad.
If you want to get a taste of what furry used to be, you're going to have to look to breakaway cliques that still adhere to the easy-going and Epicurean outlook of the sci-fi inspired counter-culture from which it came.
The paucity of female furries has been a subject of much discussion, and the straight furs have gone on the war-path to try to burn out anybody that happens to scare the pretty girls away. Unfortunately, a lot of the female furries are more conservative than they will ever realize they are, and zoo sex happens to freak them out. They are only "liberal" in the sense that they have bought into "#metooism," which is turning into a prudish majoritarian witch-hunt that is breeding a sexually repressed and self-hating generation.
Insofar as our general culture, we are having a bit of a sexual counter-revolution, right now. It's getting to a point where women are being stigmatized if they DON'T call out someone they had sex with as a "rapist." They are creating a cultural milieu where it seems like women are forbidden to think of themselves as anything besides victims that need to enter into any potential sexual encounter with extreme caution, lest some vile "rapist" monster might infringe upon their sexual purity. This is eventually going to escalate into a situation where women who really had satisfying sex with men they actually love are getting bullied into throwing the men of their dreams under the bus, and they will eventually revolt. We are a few years out from that, though, and I am pretty certain that Generation Z is going to turn out to be one of the most sexually repressed and self-loathing generations we have had in an entire human lifetime. If you put your ear to the ground, you can sense some reverberations indicating the raw beginnings of a new revolt, but it's not yet on the horizon. Any push-back against it is going to be in narrowly defined, quite frankly bitter niche subcultures, very much like the proto-goth and proto-punk Beat Generation.
Anyhow, us zoos are not the only people that are suffering, right now. Our entire culture is entering into an era of sexual repression, and it's going to get a lot harder for everybody, not just zoos. Everybody is going to suffer, and it's going to suck for everybody, not just us.
Something that really sucks, though, is that this entire prudish movement is getting blamed on feminism, even though it really constitutes the opposite of sexual liberation, and this is largely because the straight boys have not yet fully come to terms with the fact that the feminist movement itself has...and has always had...a conservative wing. In fact, if you look back at the history of feminism, the first-wave feminists often belonged to conservative Christian groups. There was also a feminist anti-gay and anti-transgender movement that really made a truly heroic effort to try to strangle the gay rights movement in the cradle. They saw male homosexuality as a misogynistic war against the female sex, yet they were noxious prudes that would have had women stuffed unwilingly into a hijab. The lack of understanding about the feminist movement's very old and very bitter sexually repressed conservative wing has led people to think that feminism itself is nothing but sexual repression, so the people that have started to chafe under the #metooist sex-negative idea of feminism are misguidedly championing an openly misogynistic party line, and as long as they continue getting suckered into the idea that all feminism is made equally, anybody that attempts to criticize the growing culture of sexual repression is going to get labeled "misogynist" whether that label is deserved or not.
At some point, pro-sex feminism will start to make a comeback, but it's going to start small. It's going to start in rebellious and socially maligned niche subcultures. I don't know for sure where it's going to start, and it's impossible to tell for certain when it is going to start. It WILL start making a comeback, and they will eventually initiate a reawakening of the sexual revolution.
Right now, the Sexual Revolution, IN GENERAL, is just very much on hold. We zoos are not suffering alone. We've got company.
The illusion that this is a specifically anti-zoo movement is really a product of our paranoid, egocentric imaginations. It's not just anti-zoo: it's anti-sex. It's not just affecting us: it's affecting everybody.
The chickens are coming home to roost, though. People's self-loathing is driving them to rampant opioid abuse, and they are dying in droves from overdose. They could fix the problem in a very short amount of time if they just learned to love themselves again.
