Except it’s not a straw man though, because the furry=fetish stereotype has a verifiable source of when it entered the mainstream culture from a pair of TV episodes in the 90s and 00s - the famous CSI episode and one from a similar show that I can’t remember the name of. These two painted furry conventions as basically sex dens filled with orgies of people in animal costumes, and that was the first time most people outside of niche parts of the internet had even heard of furries.
Before furries, it happened to Trekkies. People said that people only liked Star Trek for the sexy green alien women. But it isn’t often that a fandom is treated like this and for this long. Anime had a similar but not quite the same stereotype, but that’s largely relegated to the really bad parts of the anime fandom.
And it’s very similar to the pathologization of trans women as men who get off on the idea of seeing themselves as women.
I’m not saying that they think that furries are sexual predators or something. I’m saying that the idea of furries being a fetish is a stereotype born from a malicious place that painted an entire minority as a bunch of sexual deviants for viewership on TV, and that they’re perpetuating that stereotype.
Still nothing about being a deviant, go cry about strawmen tho
Except it’s not a straw man though, because the furry=fetish stereotype has a verifiable source of when it entered the mainstream culture from a pair of TV episodes in the 90s and 00s - the famous CSI episode and one from a similar show that I can’t remember the name of. These two painted furry conventions as basically sex dens filled with orgies of people in animal costumes, and that was the first time most people outside of niche parts of the internet had even heard of furries.
Before furries, it happened to Trekkies. People said that people only liked Star Trek for the sexy green alien women. But it isn’t often that a fandom is treated like this and for this long. Anime had a similar but not quite the same stereotype, but that’s largely relegated to the really bad parts of the anime fandom.
And it’s very similar to the pathologization of trans women as men who get off on the idea of seeing themselves as women.
I’m not saying that they think that furries are sexual predators or something. I’m saying that the idea of furries being a fetish is a stereotype born from a malicious place that painted an entire minority as a bunch of sexual deviants for viewership on TV, and that they’re perpetuating that stereotype.