on the matter of the acceptable target

on the matter of the acceptable target

Alyaza Birze (February 25, 2026)

From very early on in the history of the epidemic, Aids has been mobilised to a prior agenda of issues concerning the kind of society we wish to inhabit. [...] Aids is effectively being used as a pretext throughout the West to "justify" calls for increasing legislation and regulation of those who are considered to be socially unacceptable.
— Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (1987)

the thing about acceptable targets is that they reflect the hegemony of the ruling class, and nowhere is this so apparent as applied to the queer community. the queer, writes the Mary Nardini Gang, "[has] always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile."

that being the acceptable target in this manner engenders immense suffering and resentment is obvious; nobody, i presume, takes unconditional joy in being a part of the “resistance to regimes of the normal,” as Michael Warner once put it. there is, within all of us queers, some essence that against our own desire begs to assimilate. to become one with the ruling class. to finally exercise for ourselves the “mechanism of social control” that is inherent to labeling deviancy.¹ to—in one punch downward upon another group, particularly one that is ‘immoral’—externalize every second of our suffering and resentment in such a way that someone else can finally understand and feel.

but the assimilationist desire; the attempt to make one's self ‘normal’ and ‘respectable’ in contrast to others; the yearning to use the master's tools ‘for good’—these must always meet the reality of a heteronormative world. deviancy is degeneracy, and degeneracy must be destroyed. we are the subjects, to use a turn of phrase from Simon Watney, of “an imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexual” and to whom anything unfamiliar is indecent.² to this imaginary family—always of the nuclear variety, always the one who holds both discursive and ideological power—nothing besides total renunciation of queer identity, and nothing besides its placing back in the closet, will ever be good enough. the only move that can buy them off is collaboration.

your polyamorous relationship, your furry identity, your therianthropy, your most deeply stigmatized fetish—these will never be made ‘respectable’ to anybody in any position of power through sacrificing the most “undesirable” faggot to the wolves. to believe otherwise is how heteronormative society co-opts those who want to liberate into those who actually collaborate. when you accept that we must throw away certain “undesirables,” must label them “deviants,” what you are accepting is the very ideological and moral foundation upon which heteronormativity is built: only what does not transgress, what does not challenge the sensibilities of straightness, is permissible.

notes

¹ Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role” (1968), reprinted in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 27.

² Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (1987), p. 43

on the tension of furry artistry and high culture

on the tension of furry artistry and high culture

or, the trap of ‘high culture’ and the desert of the future

Alyaza Birze (February 26, 2026)

They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death. It isn’t doing the artist any good. There is no place to go except to the struggle of the people today.
— Meridel Le Sueur, “They Want You to Perfume the Sewers” (1988)

i have a theorem rotating in my mind; perhaps you will agree with it, perhaps not. this theorem is roughly as follows: that high culture—the world of art mediated by the gallery, the curator, the art dealer, the buyer—is the antithesis, co-optation, and ultimate death of “furry art.” that to ever play on this terrain as a furry is (and would be) definitionally a capitulation to polite society, and an irreversible step toward the further class stratification of furry subculture. it is hard for me to explain why exactly i believe this, but i feel it is necessary to attempt such a thing given that the separation between furry art and my concocted definition of high culture is no longer complete.

what i suspect is that the artistic qualia of furry art—its aura (as Walter Benjamin might put it) and the manner in which it acts a reflection of the unique, intrinsic qualities that constitute the furry subculture and our shared understanding of it—is wholly unable to survive contact with the social ideology of high culture. likewise the ‘outsider’ status of those who make such art. in being constituted high culture, furry art is separated and alienated from the very context which made it. the qualia are lost and so is the aura; the artists are brought from the ‘disrepute’ of outsiderness to the ‘respectability’ of the gallery-form. in this respect one might go so far as to say “furry art” elevated by, or created for, high culture is not really furry art at all, nor can it be.

maybe such an assertion is an overstatement. but i am reminded here of the words of László Moholy-Nagy, the ‘relentless experimental,’ that “No society can exist without expressing its ideas, and no culture and no ethics can survive without participation of the artist who cannot be bribed.”¹ in our life these words invite the question: in a subculture congealed through social stigmatization and radical (sexual) inclusion, would the inherent conservatism of high culture not act as the very mechanism of the bribery—the very thing that would rob furry artistry of its ability to authentically reflect the qualia and aura of the subculture? and the (monied) interests of high culture and its agents especially: how could these not politically and ideologically subvert furry artistry—preclude it from achieving a “secured existence” that is “uncompromising and incorruptible” as implored by Moholy-Nagy?

indeed, we must recognize that high culture is definitionally the culture of the ruling class—an expression and extension of cultural hegemony. and what this high culture asks of its subjects, consciously or otherwise, is to ‘perfume the sewers’—to cover up each desiccating bit of the old with a gloss of the new.² the essence of high culture is amorphous, co-opting as necessary to maintain itself, cherry-picking from even the most culturally-challenging movements external to itself and rendering them agents of the very hegemony they wish to challenge. to be sure, we might concur with Walter Benjamin that “the [already] conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion”—furry is certainly met with recoil by many—but there is no innate quality of furry art, no level of aversion it can inspire, which prevents its co-optation when it and high culture meet.³ for high culture is the mechanism through which the ‘truly new’ is stripped of its distinguishing qualia and rendered the conventional. as Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter note, “The value of a good,”—and the degree to which it constitutes high culture—“comes from the sense of superiority associated with membership in the club, along with the recognition accorded by fellow members.”⁴

the question is this: can there be a sort of ‘long march through the institutions’ under which furry art can retain its qualia and aura, by which furry art can challenge the perfuming of the sewers, and through which it can ultimately contest cultural hegemony? i am inclined to think no, certainly not with the absence of politicization and organization that currently characterizes furry subculture. the conundrum of the furry artist and what ought be their relationship with the agents of high culture—gallerist and curator, art dealer and appraiser—is that, in the words of Kyle Chayka, “art becomes retail surprisingly quickly.”⁵ that which challenges is seldom harder to convert into a commodity; and when art is not merely a product of one's labor but a commodity, class hierarchy and inequality are inexorably bound to follow. but perhaps this is the inevitable course of things in this subculture, so wrought already by the spectre of class division if only you know around which corners to look.

notes

¹ László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in motion (1947)

² Meridel Le Sueur, “They Want You to Perfume the Sewers” (1988)

³ Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)

⁴ Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed (2004), chapter 4

⁵ Kyle Chayka, The Longing for Less (2020), chapter 2

a theory on the recurrent furry moral panic

a theory on the recurrent furry moral panic

Alyaza Birze (February 28, 2026)

[...]we should note [the public forum's] centrality for political debates where interest groups attempt to bypass the traditional structures of democratic process in order to force the enactment of laws in the name of the "good" of a population which is never actually consulted.
— Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (1987), p. 42

why do furries relitigate the same handful of moral panics? this is an interesting question to ponder, and many possibilities present themselves. furries are young and opinionated; furries believe themselves culturally and sexually challenging in a way that invites theorycrafting and moralizing; furry subculture is in many ways a ‘train station’ where people endlessly come and go, so there is never a baseline and never a settled consensus. all quite reasonable, all likely contributors. you may feel though, as i do, that these explanations dance around the core of what is happening here—they justify the recurrence, explain the severity, but do not get at what the purpose is exactly of these feverish bursts of discourse. in this vein i have a simple theory: these are essentially ideological confrontations and should be understood as such.

what validates this simple theory of mine is the pathology of the furry moral panic and how little it diverges from what we see in the real world. just as can be observed of a real world moral panic, we see in the furry moral panic a predictable tendency to “[play] on themes which possess deeper, unconscious resonances” that any decent person ought find monstrous—so against the babyfur one is rattled with the specter of normalized pedophilia and child abuse, and against the feral artist one is assaulted with the prospect of covert zoophilic tendencies or rape of animals. and there is always some moral panic, always some subject who must be driven out of the subculture in the name of ‘standards’ which must be ‘put beyond debate.’

but never is the question evoked by this answered—what standard of decency is being applied, and on whose behalf?—because answering it would reveal ideology, make clear that the furry moral panic acts in reality as a site of struggle between those who demand assimilation and those who do not. the moral panic itself, then, can be understood as a reflection of anxiety about diversity—especially of an avant garde variety—and the inherent difficulty in liquidating this diversity to the desired ‘decency’ and ‘normality.’ furries also seem rather predictable moralizers in this respect; it is typical of those who seek fealty to polite society to frame their desires “in the name of the ‘good’ of a population which is never actually consulted.”

to be clear, i should not be interpreted as suggesting it surprising that furry subculture fails to subvert the totality of one's socialization, or the cultural hegemony of one's media consumption. nevertheless, it makes for a rather schizoid scene (if i may be permitted to use the term) for some to find gratification in ordinary furry porn—much less in transformation, inflation, vore and such—but then turn back on it the moral framework and prescriptions of a society that would struggle to distinguish any of it from actual zoophilic desire. if in the framework of polite society we are all dogfuckers, yet we all know this is false, even from a perspective of bad faith it seems rather worth questioning the value of this framework in making social condemnations of other furries.

certainly you will not manage to become some hypothetical ‘good dogfucker’ by passing such judgements, by attempting to use the logic of the moral panic to browbeat the subculture into your desired form. the audience to whose tune you are ultimately trying to dance already knows what to think of you. they have already devised the moral framework needed to permanently otherize you, and all you have done is internalize their logic to otherize your own acceptable targets. ultimately, to appeal to ‘decency’ can play only to the advantage of one side, and that side is Watney's “imaginary national family unit which is both white and heterosexual” for whom only the total renunciation of queer identity is acceptable. it is, in a sense, an appeal to collaboration.

on the matter of visibility in the furry subculture

on the matter of visibility in the furry subculture

Alyaza Birze (March 1, 2026)

There's a lot of unspoken and assumed pressure for furries to be patrons of the arts. This mostly manifests on who wins the lottery for the attention economy on social media. [...] If it isn't a suggesting fursuit photo or cute art, [furries] aren't going to waste their time. This can make it feel like you have to spend money on art/fursuits/etc. to be accepted in the fandom.

But this simply isn't true. You only benefit from those things if you're trying to win a popularity contest in your own mind and become an influencer on social media. Your Twitter follower count isn't your worth to your friends, and if you think that it is, you have the wrong friends.
— Soatok, “Is there extreme classism in the furry fandom?” (17 February 2022)

this is not an essay about whether there is “extreme classism” in furry subculture, a question i find myself uninterested in answering at length because i think the answer is obvious. (yes.) but it is an essay about the language adjacent to this question—about the ‘attention economy,’ about the ‘popularity contest,’ about ‘acceptance in the fandom’ and to what things this is tied. because the truth is this: the subtext that none of this matters if one has the right friends, the right mentality is little more than wishcasting. such a thing can only be true if one believes that furry subculture is in some sense socially meritocratic, a community—to adapt a phrase from Dennis Altman about the gay bathhouse—that is far removed from the “bondage of rank, hierarchy, and competition that characterise much of the outside world.”¹ but the subculture is not a meritocracy any more than the gay bathhouse of which Altman spoke was a utopian ‘Whitmanesque democracy.’

one may say with conviction that there is no need to ‘spend money on art/fursuits/etc. to be accepted,’ but this is not really true. the furry without the signifiers of furrydom will probably not get far socially; the furry with money to splurge on these signifiers will probably pay their way to into many social groups. to buy off people is cheap, to buy commodities cheaper still. disposable capital lubricates ownership of the very luxury commodities (art, VR models, fursuits) upon which furry subculture is built, and the ownership of these luxury commodities in kind facilitates the accretion of social capital and attention—visibility, in other words.

indeed, visibility within the subculture is often just a byproduct of what identities are privileged under the existing social order outside it. this dynamic can be felt across many facets of identity, but in furry spaces it most often reflects class hierarchy. the spirit of the ‘suspiciously wealthy furry’ is not an ex nihilo invention; the specter of the furry tech worker, the white-collar wage-earner, looms in almost every furry space. true, these phantasmal furries are over-invoked. (one presumes the median furry cannot be described as any of suspiciously wealthy, or tech-worker, or otherwise white-collar.) but discursive abuse does not really change what these phantasmal furries signify to many: a growing material hierarchy and inequality within the subculture—facilitated through visibility—that cuts against its meritocratic founding mythos.

and if visibility is not physical capital—if it does not convert one-to-one into success, or spend one-to-one into popularity or stability—it still greases the wheels much as literal capital would. by its very nature visibility is a form of social capital: it opens doors; creates opportunities; provides chances for things to happen that otherwise would not, just as physical capital can. if our subculture is a lottery of attention, then we neither enter it nor play with equal odds and it debases us to pretend otherwise. hierarchy and inequality reify visibility and always have; one cannot negate material reality by having the ‘right’ friends (as though friendship is fungible or trivial) or by tuning out the ‘popularity contest’ (as if one can simply opt out of the social forces to which they are subject).

of course, i do not want to overstate the case. some level of social hierarchy and therefore inequality is immutable. we cannot redistribute intangibles like attention or visibility on Marxist grounds, nor would such a thing even be desirable anyways. the perception of hierarchy or inequality of social status is also not synonymous with genuine hierarchy or inequality; particularly in online spaces—so manipulated by algorithms and so corrosive to how we relate—one may attain a very warped sense of what one's place ‘should’ be.

but these are complications, not refutations; that we cannot completely level the playing field and might attain a false consciousness of where hierarchy or inequality exists does not invalidate the very real hierarchy and inequality that does exist. if we speak of a world in which ‘[furries] aren't going to waste their time’ unless something is a ‘fursuit photo or cute art’—a luxury commodity—then we are speaking of, resigning ourselves to, a world in which there is a split between those who have and those who have not. we are resigning ourselves to the dichotomy between those whose sole visible representation was bought by the leftover between rent checks; and those whose visibility in art never evokes the cost of living at all. we are resigning ourselves to sociality in which some will never be so fortunate as to ‘be seen’ at even one furry meetup; and some will be able to arrange their lives around these spaces and their social circuits. we are throwing up our hands and allowing some to suffer tremendously at the hands of another for want of visibility; and allowing others to weaponize their visibility in the service of harm. and we are resigning ourselves to a world in which there are those who will, every day, bear the shame of begging others to live because it is what little leverage their visibility allows them; and those who will, each day, never know the indignity of groveling because their visibility has already paid the bills.

what we should—must—speak of, and dream of, is something better. we must embrace politics, and politicization, of our subculture in the service of that something better. because i will not settle in any community, any society, any system for such TINA bullshit—“all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is... it could be you!”—and you should not either.²

notes

¹ Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America, The Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 79–80.

² Martin Jenkins, “Introduction” in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (Sussex: Soul Bay Press, 2009), 1st ed.