According to Furry Nation, the furry phenomenon developed in the 1990s as the internet made it possible for previously disconnected individuals with specific interests to find each other. (A blow for modern alienation, btw.) Furries seem to be the odd group out in a culture which generally seems to be more accepting of difference: the New York Post reported on a councilman who was forced to resign after being discovered as a furry. Despite the culture being more ‘accepting’ of difference, at some point, humans being social animals, some distinction between ‘people like us’ and ‘them’ is inevitably made, though optimally this contest can be sublimated through, for example, sporting contests or other relatively benign artificial divisions.
I’ll leave you to read more about furries on Wikipedia, but I would contend that not much separates furries from other groups which are more socially acceptable, indeed some of them thrive on their distinction from what is they posit to be a majority culture. Burning Man, for example, dubs the majority culture to be the ‘default culture’ and, much like furries, participants will dress up in a costume and assume a Burner name. Various communities organized around sexuality have their own costumes. Furries are often identified with being a fetish, but this would be an erroneous assumption. Comicon has cosplay, in which a participant uses a prefabricated identity. The ‘majority culture’ whatever that might be arguably converges with all of these on Halloween. Even the majority culture will make slight changes to its costumery during other times of the year, like the ‘ugly sweater’ during Christmas. Partly, the reaction against furries is connected to disturbing normalcy--any time something different arises it can produce in the mind some general low level conflict questioning one’s own life course. The easiest resolution is to reject the difference. The general nature of cosplay is that it draws from mythologies that are recognizable to normal culture, and somebody might say ‘Ah, yes, I have heard of Darth Vader. Dressing up like him just isn’t for me though I can see how that might be fun to some people.’ On the other hand, furries often create their own personal mythology behind their cartoonish animal, and that sharper individuality is less understandable. And, given the association of furries with a fetish, sexuality and cartoon animals are clearly an intersection lying outside most majority cultures. That said, anti-furry fervor is less strong than, say, anti-D&D fervor in the 1980s, which often associated people 'acting out' or 'dressing up' in fantasy costumes with satanic worship.
It is also disturbing enough for people to wear masks in public that the practice is often banned. One might argue that masks are a ‘public safety’ issue, in order to more easily identify criminals, but I am unaware of any study bolstering this concern as a basis for such a law--on the whole I grant it’s probably easier for a victim to identify a perp without a mask, but on the other hand a criminal will only be inclined to don a mask during more serious criminal activity. Lately such anti-mask laws can serve the purpose of repressing religious minorities, like women who take the burqa. In Austria such a law recently ensnared a furry, or rather a person employed to dress up in a shark costume in order to advertise a computer repair shop. One can imagine mass resistance to the anti-mask law as a new frontier for civil rights, where devout Muslim women and furries march together.
One of the statistics claimed was that 25% of furries would choose to be their animal permanently if given the choice. This reminded me of the Lobster, in which being transformed into an animal was viewed as a kind of punishment. Generally, the notion of being ‘reduced’ to ‘less than human’ has throughout history been viewed as a negative, from Circe transforming Ulysses’s sailors into pigs all the way through to replicants in Bladerunner. I can imagine though one might find relief in escaping humanity.
Generally, though, the reaction against furries isn’t that strong, mostly because they, like Comicon cosplay or Burning Man or S&M, they all keep to their discreet and discrete locations to enact their sense of community and so don't disturb the majority culture (or, perhaps more appropriately, majority cultures? One issue confronting US and European society is that of multiculturalism in fact). It has taken the business culture a long, long time to implement a ‘casual Friday’ in the normal majority community; it may take much longer still for ‘dress codes’ to be modified to permit people to show up at work in Burner gear or as cartoon Komodo dragons.
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