You're not morally superior, you're illiterate
I'm going to have to start this post with a disclaimer because I fear some of you may take what I'm about to say as some sort of fucked up endorsement. An animal, nor child has the capability to consent to sexual activity. Engaging in sexuality activity with either is not only morally reprehensible but rightly illegal. Do not pass go, do not collect 200$. Are we all clear on this? I do not, nor will I ever endorse, celebrate or proliferate something that could result in CSAM or undue harm to an animal. My day job is to quite literally help ensure one of those two things never happens, or if it does that the person who engaged in it is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Are we all crystal clear on this? Good.
Kids, it's time to talk about you and the artwork you despise. If you haven't spent any time in furry discourse over the last checks notes 40 years, you may have missed the topic that likes to rear its head about once every 3 months or so and make its way through the community like a little gremlin. That topic of course? Does feral artwork make you a zoophile? Does cub artwork make you a pedophile? All these questions and more answered by your friendly neighborhood cat.
But to start, let's lay some research out shall we? Who wants to talk about violent video games?
Remember Jack Thompson from the 90's? If the name doesn't ring a bell, let me remind you. After Columbine as the US was scrambling for answers for a school shooting (something we never seemed to actually get an answer for apparently), a lot of theories came out trying to explain what might turn someone violent.
One leading scapegoat? Violence in Video games. That's right, Twisted Metal II or Grand Theft Auto was turning little billy into a shooter. Mr. Thompson was leading the charge on attempting to prove that violent video games made children more violent. As it turns out he's not 100% incorrect. A meta analysis conducted in 2018 with 17,000 participants (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1611617114) did indeed show a correlation between violent behavior and violent video games.
Got-em right? Well... almost. Further studies seem to show this meta analysis may not have been entirely foolproof. Further studies concluded that so many disparate individual studies with little commonality between them were likely not a great basis for the foundation of a meta analysis. Complicated all the more because there are a great many more studies that seem to indicate there is in fact no correlation between video-games and violent behavior (https://fortune.com/2023/05/02/stanford-researchers-scoured-every-reputable-study-link-between-video-games-gun-violence-politics-mental-health-dupee-thvar-vasan/) (https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/933708)
Alright so great, tons of study data, what is it actually telling us? Well, what it's actually saying across all the studies is that it's not actually clear if the violent video games are causing the behavior or if the myriad other social conditions in a child's life affect violent behavior, and thus it's not really the video game its the environment the video game is played in. All that to say while violent people may play violent video games, violent video games in and of themselves do not on their own (isolated from all other factors) inherently make someone more violent.
But... there's also I think a more important factor at play here. These studies are all of children, who based on all current research don't have developed brains until ~25 (https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/brain#:%7E:text=The%20research%20also%20shows%20that,when%20making%20decisions%2C%20he%20said.) I invite anyone to find me a study that focuses exclusively on adults over 25 and their interactions with violent video games and behavior patterns. It might be sort of difficult as psychology has this nasty problem where all of their studies just so happen to be based around the behavior of undergrads.
All this to say, grown adults will exhibit significantly different behavior then children and high school graduates. But why are we talking about the effects of video games on behavior? Well dear reader, it's because you know what we don't have a lot of studies on? The relationship between taboo sexual material and acting upon it (SA / etc.)
You see the problem is, to conduct a study on the relationship between those who would offend and whatever it is they masturbate to, we'd need them to self report. And as a shocker to about no one, pedophiles by and large tend not to do that. There are some limited studies (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6874943_Pedophilia_and_sexual_offenses_against_children) and (https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/sites/default/files/media/2022-03/the-prevention-of-childhood-sexual-abuse.pdf) the general theme here is that even actual offenders are guaranteed to be pedophiles. Of those surveyed 1/3 had no attraction to children, they did it for control.
And I realize as I write a series of citations on any sexual matter folks begin immediately asking if I know age of consent laws by state and did I vote for Ron Paul in any recent elections, the answer those being I assume 18 or over and no. Further studies on pornography and sexual offense even further lean into the fact that porn DECREASES sexual crimes. (https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/sites/default/files/media/2022-03/the-prevention-of-childhood-sexual-abuse.pdf) / (https://www.christopherjferguson.com/pornography.pdf) / (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/nyuls31&div=41&id=&page=&t=1558206251)
The long and skinny of this disturbing and large number of available citations for a link between porn and cases of SA? Largely that it either is in no way a predictor (IE their consumption of the material had no effect on their likelihood to offend) and that SA as compared with the availability of porn appeared to be a pretty categorical inverse relationship (IE Porn Goes up, SA goes down). Note there are obviously criticisms of these study methodologies, and there aren't a great many studies that isolate drawn or fictitious pornographic works separately from real porn.
I dump all this research on you because I think it is important that we do have at least a somewhat solid foundational basis of the effects of given taboo or unsavory materials on the actuality of someone to offend, and the general consensus seems to be if there is a correlation it is incredibly weak, or there is no correlation at all.
Are we all fine with the science here? Obviously this could easily be seen as cherry picked examples of studies, and I am certain that were there a greater wealth of studies on this matter we might be drawing different conclusions. But I think I can reasonably state that at this time, based on available scientific data and analysis there is either no or a weak correlation between acting out on something based on the taboo material you were reviewing.
I'm obviously not a sociologist, and not qualified to interpret the literal mountains of data in those studies above, but I would hope that from at least a Layman's perspective even being incredibly pessimistic about the quality of the above studies. At best for counter arguments, the likelihood of some causal link between consumption of taboo materials (be they violent or sexual) and acting on out on those materials is contentious.
So... Let's talk about the elephant in the room, or maybe it's the cat.
Why did I walk us through pages upon pages of research so I can talk about twitter drama? The fact of the matter is there is a growing movement here in the United States thanks to things like project 2025 ( https://msmagazine.com/2024/09/25/florida-ban-sex-ed-schools-project-2025-porn-ban/) to introduce highly regressive christonationalist policies to restrict the consumption of ALL pornographic material.
Multiple websites have begun taking steps to protect themselves legally in the coming months and years (https://e621.net/forum_topics/45501). Furaffinity has begun what appears to be the process of intentionally removing cub related materials. There is a growing regressive, puritanical movement in western culture (https://soatok.blog/2022/06/21/a-greymuzzles-lament/) and the furry fandom in particular to isolate elements of the sexual side of the fandom from the fandom overall.
This is certainly not new, nor is it the first time this has happened. It's a wave among many waves of the push between sexual expression and exploration and concerned views about the effects of overtly taboo materials on the health of the community. Or to put it more plainly, "If we keep letting make feral porn it's gonna bring more zoophiles into the fandom."
Ignoring for a moment that I have just unloaded a mountain of scientific evidence that there is in fact no evidence for that being a likely causal relationship, let's get into what the furry fandom actually is. And what Project 2025's porn ban's really are. Because you see if your actually read the copy paste bill they've shipped out to every state, they're not just talking about porn, but anything objectionable... you know... like queers.
( https://soatok.medium.com/if-you-hate-furries-youre-anti-lgbt-cce35a948a57 ). The fact of the matter is that the furry space, and the LGBTQA+ space are intrinsically tied to one another. I believe it was put best to me "If you need more than one powerpoint slide to describe your sexuality you might as well hop on". Furries are an expression of weird. And weird is important. Because my dear LGBTQA+ friends and family, they're not going to stop once they've gotten rid of the "Weirdest" amongst us. You may even agree with the targets right now, but when the chips hit the floor they're putting us all up against the wall, even the good queers, because to the folks wanting to exact this Christian ethnostate, we're all an abnormality and we've all got to go.
When you engage in this attempt to "Silence or expel the weirdos" you are providing the framework for your own persecutors gangplank. Because at the end of the day, if they aren't hurting anyone, if they just "make you feel icky" why do you want to expel them? And let's be clear, they're not hurting anyone, and if that little mountain of research in this post above shows anything it's that we can be relatively sure of that.
Because, kids, you are confusing aesthetics of a situation for consent and they are not the same thing.
BDSM, Adult Baby, Consensual Non Consent. Many elements of these "Vanilla" kinks, are by definition straight up illegal. They are acts that isolated from a sexual fantasy between two consenting adults would get you a host of charges. And that is why consent is so much more important then aesthetic. A situation can make you uncomfortable all you want, but if all parties in the transaction are consenting to the matter then it isn't any of your business.
This is why the VERY FIRST THING you will cover in ANY environment that is walking you through any sort of kink is how to make consent clear, concise, and how to revoke that consent if you need to. Consent between the parties is the most important thing during sex. Not how it looks, not what they're fantasizing about, but that all parties
If you can't distinguish between the fantasy of a drawn image and the reality of an actual crime, it is YOU who have failed the assignment. It is you who has confused an aesthetic choice for a consensual one. Because you know who the consenting party is when someone masturbates to a picture? The person masturbating, that's it. That's the only person who's consent matters in that moment, and this is why... it's none of your business.
If you do not understand the concepts of consent, if you do not understand how to separate a fictitious world from the real one, that is a YOU problem. Fantasizing about something, and acting upon a fantasy are two entirely different matters and grown adults are entirely capable of keeping the two seperate. It happens every single day, it is the basis of being an adult to be able to isolate the fictitious and the real. If you can't tell the difference between a kink or fetish and a paraphilic disorder, that is on you.
Anyway, this post got me banned from /r/furry on reddit, which makes me laugh.
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