https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/opinion/furries-culture-war.html
Y'all need to start waking up and getting serious about things going down. The 4chan kids are adults now, but they haven't grown up one bit.
Topic: Furries Increasingly Becoming a Political Issue
Posted under General
mate, this shit was months ago, and also it's really not anything new. stuff like this has always happened with niche cultures, if politicians can find a scapegoat and make up lies about them to make it seem like the sky is falling they will. that's politics. it's just that furries were the target this time, so you noticed.
Ugh, paywall. I was able to copy-paste some of it before the paywall pop-up appears. Is the whole article just the two paragraphs?
Bruce Bostelman, last month warned of an alarming new variety of deviance making its way into the state’s schools. “It’s something called furries,” he said.
And educators, indulging them, “are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for the children to use,” said Bostelman.
Are we sure this is NYTimes, and not The Onion? I guess this is the quality of journalism their paywall helps them maintain, apparently...
crocogator said:
Ugh, paywall. I was able to copy-paste some of it before the paywall pop-up appears. Is the whole article just the two paragraphs?
if you cancel the loading of the page after the text has loaded but before the pay wall thing you can read the whole article.
A Nebraska state senator, Bruce Bostelman, last month warned of an alarming new variety of deviance making its way into the state’s schools. “It’s something called furries,” he said. Schoolchildren, Bostelman claimed, were identifying as cats or dogs. “They meow and they bark.” And educators, indulging them, “are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for the children to use,” said Bostelman.
Perhaps needless to say, none of this was true. Bostelman later apologized for spreading falsehoods, saying, “It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly.”
It's a bizarre conspiracy theory that a bunch of conservative politicians somehow managed to fall for.
They really through – and some still insist that it's true – that some schools have been accommodating to furry students by providing litter boxes.
Obviously, none of this is true. The fact that some people believed it is frankly embarassing.
John Oliver talked about it in his segment about rocks, go watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEa3sK1iZxc
This magnificent thing originated from there:
Full article:
Why Are Seemingly Functional Adults Falling for the ‘Furries’ Myth? (Goldberg, 2022)
A Nebraska state senator, Bruce Bostelman, last month warned of an alarming new variety of deviance making its way into the state’s schools. “It’s something called furries,” he said. Schoolchildren, Bostelman claimed, were identifying as cats or dogs. “They meow and they bark.” And educators, indulging them, “are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for the children to use,” said Bostelman.
Perhaps needless to say, none of this was true. Bostelman later apologized for spreading falsehoods, saying, “It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly.”
What interests me is why he thought this was really happening, and not just in decadent enclaves like New York City or San Francisco, but in his own Midwestern backyard.
Part of the answer is surely social media. As The Associated Press reported, the rumor, a mockery of transgender identification, has persisted in a Facebook group called Protect Nebraska Children. The same rumor has cropped up in Iowa, where a school superintendent had to send out a letter to students and parents debunking it; in Michigan, where a parent brought it up at a school board meeting; and in Wisconsin, where it was spread by a conservative radio host.
The deeper question is why apparently functional adults find these outré suburban legends plausible. My theory is this: The current freakout over sex and gender identity in schools is a generational conflict, one driven in large part by older adults’ fear and bafflement at the sexual mores of the young.
The “satanic panic ” of the 1980s, a frenzy of accusations of ritual child abuse that resulted in the conviction of dozens of innocent people, was driven in part by deep anxiety over working women and day care. Four decades later, the country is once again in a moral panic about monstrous things being done to children, with teachers and entertainers accused of “grooming” them for abuse. And once again, it’s driven in large part by unease over rapidly changing gender roles and norms.
Arguing for Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill last month, a Republican state senator, Dennis Baxley, described speaking to his psychiatrist son about the number of school kids coming out as L.G.B.T.Q. “Am I crazy or what?” he said. “All the sudden we’re having all these issues come up about this topic of their sexuality and gender, and I said, ‘I don’t understand why that’s such a big wave right now.’”
Baxley concluded that experimentation was being encouraged by schools. “There’s something wrong with how we’re emphasizing this,” he said.
Baxley is correct that there’s been a great evolution in how students think about gender and sexuality. You can see it in video from the student walkout at Florida’s Pembroke Pines Charter High School protesting the Don’t Say Gay bill, in which ebullient teenagers wave rainbow flags and chant for gay rights. Such a scene would have been unimaginable when I was in school decades ago.
Many of the goofy, moshing Pembroke boys look, on the surface, a lot like the jocks I remember hurling anti-gay slurs. It’s obvious that more kids are going to come out in high schools where they’ll be accepted and celebrated than in those where they’ll be bullied and abused.
There is, of course, an even bigger generational shift with trans issues. Many middle-aged liberal parents I know have different ideas about gender than their more radical adolescent kids, and I assume the gulf must be even larger in many conservative families. Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist leading a crusade against Disney for its opposition to the Don’t Say Gay bill, told me a friend of his sent his middle-school daughter to an all-girls choir camp over the summer, “and a third of the girls came back saying that they were nonbinary or queer or gender nonconforming.”
Faced with a gender landscape that they find unnerving or worse, conservatives are trying to use schools to turn the tide. The result has been an explosion of book-banning and educational gag orders, including proposals even more extreme than Florida’s. While that state’s Don’t Say Gay bill sharply limits what teachers can say about gender and sexual orientation, a proposal in Tennessee would ban public school classroom materials “that promote, normalize, support or address lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (L.G.B.T.) issues or lifestyles.”
Some of this stuff, no doubt, is purely cynical. The Trumpist website American Greatness recently celebrated the term “groomer ” as a right-wing attempt to do “what the left always does: coin a novel political epithet.”
But the school culture wars are also driven by alarm and confusion. Last year, I wrote about a sexual assault in a Virginia high school bathroom that was attributed, falsely, to trans-friendly bathroom policies. The victim’s family was interviewed by the conservative website The Daily Wire, and the ending has stayed with me. The girl’s mother, fighting against progressive policies on trans kids in the name of her daughter, complained that the girl herself had grown increasingly progressive.
“Where does she get these ideas? From school, obviously,” the mother said. “It’s not from our home.”
Updated
thegreatwolfgang said: . . .
Oh, thank you.
darryus said:
if you cancel the loading of the page after the text has loaded but before the pay wall thing you can read the whole article.
Ooh, that's a useful tip! Thanks.
crocogator said:
Ugh, paywall. I was able to copy-paste some of it before the paywall pop-up appears. Is the whole article just the two paragraphs?
Are we sure this is NYTimes, and not The Onion? I guess this is the quality of journalism their paywall helps them maintain, apparently...
NYT, among most of the other "we used to be newspaper" companies, are basically just tabloids. If you want to see another fucking hilarious one, Euro-side, pull up The Independant.
People always fear what they don't understand...
Nearly 100% of NYT articles are on the Wayback Machine:
It's only a matter of time before transspeciesism sweeps American schools, but students will have to fight for their right to a sandbox.
Of course the news is fear mongering about us, that's their job. I seriously doubt normal people actually care.
I highly doubt either politicians or media truly care about furries.
The politicians probably just wanted to do their usual thing - take away attention from one of their controversies or segue into another issue or whatever.
And the media probably just had a slow news day.
When were furries ever *not* a political issue? Fritz the Cat was called racist all the way back in the 60s. Also a general social menace.
orangeleaf said:
When were furries ever *not* a political issue? Fritz the Cat was called racist all the way back in the 60s. Also a general social menace.
At least we aren't dragged through the current circus in the media - We don't see people yelling "Furphobic" or demanding "Fur representation" in any franchise. On the other side we also don't see conservatives constantly blaming us for everything. Either the fandom is too niché or too wierd for either of them to touch the topic XD
Updated
lonelylupine said:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/opinion/furries-culture-war.htmlY'all need to start waking up and getting serious about things going down. The 4chan kids are adults now, but they haven't grown up one bit.
It's a lot of bluster with no actual punch behind it. People complain about things that they don't like, it's just what people do. There's no real threat there. What, the great political machine is going to take time out of its busy schedule to specifically target the furry community, an incredibly small niche demographic in the grand scheme of things? That's absurd lol.
We're fine. Or at least as fine as we've always been.
On that note. As has already been said. Stop supporting and sharing stuff from NYTimes. Theyre sensationalist and designed to cause trouble JUST to push clicks
Hilarious.
demesejha said:
On that note. As has already been said. Stop supporting and sharing stuff from NYTimes. Theyre sensationalist and designed to cause trouble JUST to push clicks
Read the full article that TheGreatWolfgang posted, it's actually a good piece that debunks the nonsense that the senator claims in the first paragraph, and connects it to the anti-LGBT scaremongering that is weaponised by the American right-wing.
jockjamdoorslam said:
Read the full article that TheGreatWolfgang posted, it's actually a good piece that debunks the nonsense that the senator claims in the first paragraph, and connects it to the anti-LGBT scaremongering that is weaponised by the American right-wing.
This linkage has been going for years now and not just from conservatives. Some liberals think being furry is lgbt or "queer" and I put the blame on sonicfox and political furries for making it a bigger deal than it needed to be.
orangeleaf said:
When were furries ever *not* a political issue? Fritz the Cat was called racist all the way back in the 60s. Also a general social menace.
This is about the furry fandom as a whole, not a controversial furry character that came out before south park...
Every time I think they hit the bottom, they dig themselves a whole new circle of Hell.
lonelylupine said:
Turns out we're being used as a disinformation campaign because one school is stockpiling cat litter in case of a mass shooting, because we living in a country that has to worry about things like that.Every time I think they hit the bottom, they dig themselves a whole new circle of Hell.
When we hit the 88th circle, you're gonna see some serious shit
kora_viridian said:
One way you can tell how long someone's been a furry: mention "that time the mass media got all worked up about furries", and see which one of these things they come up with first:1) Time magazine article in about 1990
2) CSI TV show episode, 2003
3) (another one in here I don't exactly remember, but I think it was a TV show episode)
4) Run-up to the 2022 election
I remember the infamous Asperger's rapist episode on I think it was L&O:SVU? Another show that had questionable episodes.
alphamule said:
I remember the infamous Asperger's rapist episode on I think it was L&O:SVU? Another show that had questionable episodes.
Remember the... I think they did at least three about gamers, then while that was still being talked about House and CSI did ones on gamers too.
votp said:
Remember the... I think they did at least three about gamers, then while that was still being talked about House and CSI did ones on gamers too.
Oh my word this is hilarious. How did anyone sign off on this?
kora_viridian said:
One way you can tell how long someone's been a furry: mention "that time the mass media got all worked up about furries", and see which one of these things they come up with first:1) Time magazine article in about 1990
2) CSI TV show episode, 2003
3) (another one in here I don't exactly remember, but I think it was a TV show episode)
4) Run-up to the 2022 election
I remember something about an episode of the Tyra Banks Show featuring someone named Chewfox...but who the hell watched Tyra Banks anyway lol
I never heard about the Time article, what was that about?