Should NSFW content be associated with the Furry fandom?

(Disclaimer by the Author: My main objective with this text is not to cause any drama but to explain my opinion about this topic that has afflicted this community for so long – The postulate presented here is as most neutral that I could take)

The Furry fandom

You might already know about the furry fandom (or even be a part of it like myself) but for the sake of everyone’s understanding the Furry fandom in simple terms is a community of people from different backgrounds and even different countries, however, this people have one thing in common and is an interest in anthropomorphic animals or in simpler words animals with human characteristics.

This interest in anthropomorphic animals has lead to a community forming around it. This community was created by people giving their support to the community by producing content that involves this anthropomorphic animals as it’s core. This content can be in any form like: art, music, writing, fursuiting (This term will be explained later on), video producing and many more.

The creation of different pieces of art, music, stories and even suits coaxed the people to find somewhere they felt understood where they were not the only ones with a “weird interest” if you like to call it that way. This different pieces of art (Including from now on: music, writing and fursuiting) were created with different intentions, where this intentions vary depending  on the artist and what he or her wants to express with the art that  is creating.

The NSFW content not just inside the fandom

The NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content exist everywhere, because is an sphere of knowledge where the human develops, for much efforts we try to hide this part of the human aspect is like denying in part the existence of the same humanity.

This type of content is everywhere (if you look carefully but I do not encourage you to do it) and in every community that you can find, unless the community directly is opposed to this type of content or activity. The existence of this content in every community is because that this community is formed from human beings, and this human beings at least in any point of their life will need to get in touch with this kind of topic and we can’t deny it.

Now there is a difference between this type of content and other type of content that might be entitled as NSFW. Usually people who looks at the NSFW content is in search of some kind of pleasure at looking/reading/listening to this type of content. Although there is another type of content that might  be entitled as NSFW that is the Artistic Nudity (Nude art) where the main message of the art is not to cause pleasure on the viewer but to transmit a message through a nude body.

Where to draw the line?

It’s complicated to know were the artistic nudity ends up being some kind of NSFW content that provides pleasure to the viewer and the same way around, because art could mean something different to different people is difficult to say where the limit is.

This is the point were we as a community we have to ask us a question: until what point this NSFW can be acceptable in the community?, well some might say that we should better ban this NSFW content, yet we already talked about we cannot deny a part that is of the human being, in the other hand we have the other thought some people may have that is to leave this content uncensored, and yet if this content occupied more that a 50% of the content produced by the fandom, then it should be even call a fandom anymore, to say the least, it would be more like a fetish. 

The middle ground

As already mentioned we cannot go to the extremes to ban completely this type of content both NSFW and Artistic nudity, there should be a middle ground.

This middle ground can be achieved by working as a community, Im not asking to the artist to stop producing this type of content, still is a real part of the fandom and we can deny it, but it can’t be the whole fandom about this type of content. So there should be restrictions with this type of art and this restrictions are usually a thing of modesty and self-awareness, where actions like showing this type of content to a public that doesn’t know about the fandom can give a really bad image to the whole fandom that could take a lot of time to change.

Other restrictions is where to publish this type of content, this content is not for going around facebook and creating pages and groups that talk about this content as the main topic of the group or page, or in twitter, where because the lesser norms about content that can be published in the website, this content has more accessibility for both people that know about the fandom and those who don’t.

For each thing there is an special place for, for this type of content that might be sensible for some people and I’m not talking about this content in a community but as the human race, because of this there are  some special places where to talk about and even enjoy this type of content.

The same thing should occur with the Furry fandom, use some special places where you could talk about that types of content and even enjoy this type of content, but do not use this places where people do not expect this kind of content to show (Twitter and Facebook).

What now?

If the fandom as a whole took this advice the problems of thinking that the furry fandom is something that always have to be related to the NSFW content, this problems would start to disappear and if you like this type of content, you can still enjoy it, but in an special place.

The problem that we are facing right now is like if humanity sent a spaceship to the outer space to later be found by another intelligent race and what is in that spaceship is only NSFW content, so this new race would think that the only thing that humanity do is that NSFW content, still we know this is not true.

This exact situacion happens in the fandom, where this groups, pages, accounts that are specially dedicated to publish this type of content in spaces where this content should be avoided, is the same as when humans send the spaceship with only the NSFW content, and when people find this pages, groups and accounts, the first thing they will think about the fandom is that they are only something about NSFW things, in the same way that this race in the outer space would think about humanity.

In conclusion

The problems that the Furry fandom has with the NSFW content are problems that first are self inflicted, but at the same time easily solutionable, but it would require a lot of hard work and time to achieve the goal that is to change the image that many people have.

And to answer the question if this content should be associated with the Fandom , I would say yes, but not in a direct way, were we can’t deny is a part that makes our fandom, yet we can’t say also that the fandom is only associated with this type of content.