Ask Papabear, the First Advice Column for Furries

Latest Letter (February 12, 2026)

Dear Papabear,

Lately, I've been frustrated with puritan attitudes inside and outside the fandom. Outside and inside, I often see people calling anything even remotely spicy "gooner material" (I really hate that word), labeling others porn addicts just for liking NSFW content even at all, and acting like people are too open about this; and while I won't deny this happens, I'm not convinced that it's as big of an issue that it's made out to be due to the following reasons:

As stated previously, I've seen multiple instances of people calling anything even mildly suggestive "oversexualized" or even "soft porn," such as images showing female characters with toned bodies or showing any amount of skin.
People exaggerating about the prevalence of NFSW material. As an example of this, there was an instance on a subreddit called r/Palworld in which I saw a post where someone complained about there being too many NFSW posts on the sub but after scrolling through it pretty thoroughly, I couldn't find a single NSFW post on that sub. My guess is that this user maybe saw one post they didn't like and got upset over it.
Instances of people wandering into NSFW areas and then getting mad upon seeing NSFW content, which is like jumping into a pool and getting mad because you got wet.

All of that is came from both the fandom and the internet in general but for something inside the fandom, I've seen quite a few people acting like having a sexual element "ruined" the furry fandom. I'm old enough to be considered a greymuzzle but I've only been a furry since around 2015, so I don't know a whole lot about the fandom's beginnings. From what I've heard, sex has been a part of this fandom pretty much since its inception, with fanzines containing adult comics and stories as well as there being spicy artwork in the fandom's early days. I can't say with certainty if this is the case but if it is then those complaints are pretty much moot because those who make them are complaining about the fandom being what it always has been but whatever the case may be, is the furry fandom having a sexual side really such a bad thing?

We live in a society that demonizes sex and labels it as something shameful and abhorrent. I disagree with that sentiment very strongly because sexual desire is a perfectly normal and natural thing as well as what makes us who we are as humans and it's because of this that I believe that sexuality is something to be embraced, not shunned.

This is why I'm glad that the fandom is so accepting of sex. It's a place where we can express and explore our deepest desires safely and without feeling any of the shame that society tells us we should feel.

I know I went off on a tangent there and I apologize for that. Anyway, I'm writing this because I wanted to ask you whether or not you think there's anything that can be done to do away with puritan attitudes once and for all because I don't know about you but I've had pretty much all I can take of this whole mentality of "sex bad" and would like for it to end.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that there is a time and place for everything, and whenever I talk about sexual matters, I keep it confined to NSFW spaces because while I believe that sex should be embraced, I believe in being sensible about it. I don't think we should all go wild and screw anything with a pulse. I just think that shaming others for something that's a natural part of us all needs to stop.

Anonymous (age 38)

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Dear Furiend,

Sex and the Furry Fandom is a huuuuuge topic about which I could write a book. Indeed, more and more, I am thinking I will write a book about sex in the fandom. But I have two books I want to get done before that. Without getting too detailed on the history of furporn in the fandom (and that is quite the tale), I will address the many concerns and topics in your letter as concisely as possible.

Firstly, for those unfamiliar with the term, dear readers, a "gooner" can mean a couple of things. In American slang, it can mean someone who is addicted to porn or, more specifically, the practice of edging (bringing oneself or someone else close to orgasm without actually climaxing). However, if you live in the United Kingdom, a gooner refers to fans of the Arsenal football club known as the Gunners. So, don't get football gooners confused with porn addicts hehe.

Now for a whirlwind history of sex in the fandom.

You are correct, sir, that the sex in art and fiction in the fandom goes back to the beginning of the modern furry world. Most people trace it back to Vootie (the first furry APA, which is a sort of limited edition magazine subscription) around 1976, when the first installment of Omaha, the Cat Dancer by Reed Waller and Kate Worley was published. Omaha was a comic for adults that had sex scenes in it but was not really porn because it had a storyline and interesting characters. (Pornography is sexually explicit material produced with the sole purpose of turning on the consumer). Actually, though, it goes back a little further than that when Fred Patten started producing a member directory for the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization (a precursor of the fandom) and this evolved into a kind of bulletin to which the members of the C/FO started to contribute art and stories, some of which were adult in nature. This led to the first fights in the early fandom even before we started calling ourselves "furries" in which members were upset that R-rated stuff was appearing in the directory.

This was all back in the 1970s. Moving forward into the 1980s, we have the beginnings of people outside the fandom shaming furries and calling them "skunk fuckers" when furries were just a small group of anthro fans attending WorldCon and other sci-fi and fantasy conventions. The insulting term became quite common, and some furries even embraced it. A comic book anthology called Skunk from MU Press was released in 1993 with stories by furries and nonfurries alike. And, naturally, other comics came along (e.g. Genus) with lots of adult stories and drawings in them. There was more controversy about sexual themes with the first furcon, Confurence 0, in 1989. Although there were only 65 attendees, some criticized the con for allowing people to appear in suggestive dress (including Bob Hill performing in his Hilda the Bambioid fursuit).

Fast forward to the late '80s and early '90s, and you get the infamous Burned Furs vs. Freezing Furs "war" in which the Burned Furs protested the proliferation of adult-oriented comics, drawings, and stories in the fandom and pushed for there to be a more family-friendly vibe to the fandom. The Freezing Furs were a short-lived effort to counter the Burned Furs and to say that there was nothing wrong with adult art shared among adults. The Burned Furs movement lasted from 1998 to 2001, was revived in 2005, first as Burned Furs II and then renamed as Improved Anthropomorphics, having a Live Journal site that petered out around 2009 (you can still view the page here Improved Anthropomorphics — LiveJournal). Now, there is nothing wrong in taking a position that you want the furry fandom to be more G-rated. The problem was that members of these groups started flame wars, often threatening each other with violence. Most unpleasant and unproductive to the discussion.

Predictably, the efforts of the Burned Furs came to naught and there is more furporn on the internet now than ever before. Still, people get irked by this (although they aren't furry per se, there are people online now called "puriteens," who, as the name suggests, are young people online who want to cleanse the internet of porn).

The more that people like the Burned Furs and the puriteens try to scrub the world of adult content, the more things stay the same. Of course, there are countries that have managed to block all adult content from their internet providers with sometimes humorous results. For example, when North Korea sent their soldiers to the Ukraine upon the request of Russia, the North Korean soldiers suddenly found themselves with access to online porn. They spent so much time jerking off to the images that they were useless in the field. You see, in North Korea, if you are caught watching adult videos online it can actually result in a death sentence. Pretty extreme!

Whenever a society restricts adult urges to such a degree, the results are predictably bad. For example, Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s led to organized crime distilling and shipping booze, which often led to gun violence; people also made their own booze, often creating such strong concoctions that drinking the bathtub gin they made could easily kill a person. After years of trying to ban alcohol, the federal government finally gave up and repealed the 18th Amendment with the 21st Amendment in 1933.

Restricting sexual behavior has similar bad results. Whenever you tell people, "You can't have sex," they will want it all the more. This is why we ended up with, for example, the Catholic priest scandal. In my humble opinion, the problem the Church had with priests molesting boys (and some girls) for sex has been the result of their not being permitted to marry or to have sex in any other healthy manner. I don't think that the priests were necessarily homosexuals or pedophiles (as claimed by the Church). What they were was desperate to find some sexual release in another human being, and since they had access to boys in their church and had power over them to demand they keep quiet about their prurient activities, that is how they got their sexual release. (Note: this is my opinion, and I know many will argue against it, but I feel it is valid.)

While we don't all live under such strict demands as those in the priesthood, many modern societies (including in the USA) are very restrictive of open sexuality (as you wisely noted in your email). When sexual restrictions are codified--such as in anti-prostitution laws--the results are quite damaging. In an article published in The Journal of Law and Economics ("Do Prostitution Laws Affect Rape Rates? Evidence from Europe"; Vol 65, No. 4, November 2022), authors Huasheng Gao and Vanya Petrova state:

"Liberalizing prostitution leads to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibiting it leads to a significant increase. The results are stronger when rape is less severely underreported and when it is more difficult for men to obtain sex via marriage or partnership. We also provide the first evidence for the asymmetric effect of prostitution regulation on rape rates: the magnitude of prostitution prohibition is much larger than that of prostitution liberalization. Placebo tests show that prostitution laws have no impact on nonsexual crimes. Overall, our results indicate that prostitution is a substitute for sexual violence and that the recent global trend of prohibiting commercial sex (especially the Nordic model) could have the unforeseen consequence of proliferating sexual violence."

Of course, certain laws restricting sexual activity are good to have, including laws against rape (which is actually a crime of violence, not sex) and against having sex with minors. So, I'm not saying all sexual behavior should be allowed--not by a long shot. I'm saying that restricting sex and sexual materials across the board is unwise.

Even more influential than laws against sex are social prohibitions--because they are much more far-ranging in nature. If we took all such restrictions to heart, the only sex that would be allowed would be heterosexual sex between married couples and only for the purposes of reproduction. Everything else would be met with stringent disapproval to say the least. While American society has become a little more permissive over the years, allowing for sex between unmarried people, for example, and becoming somewhat more open to gays and lesbians, there is still a lot of disapproval in the air.

All this contributes to my arguments for allowing porn, including furporn, to be available to adults. Before I go into that, I need to add the proviso that there is, of course, a bad side to porn. One is porn addiction, which is detrimental to one's life in that it can grossly interfere with work, school, personal relationships, and just having a life if you spend hours and hours consuming pornography to the exclusion of daily tasks. And, of course, the whole porn industry is highly exploitative of those who get drawn into making the videos, magazines, and other content.

I'm not talking about that aspect of it, though. There are, in fact, positive sides to adult art, which can be a celebration of natural desires. When it comes to furporn, the visual and roleplay side of it can help us explore our evolving sexuality. Furporn can be a useful tool in this because it helps us to explore sexuality behind the protective mask, if you will, of fursonas. What I mean by that is that adopting another form in the shape of a furry character can buffer one against feeling embarrassed or guilty because of social stigmas that we have not yet overcome. For example, I have spoken to furries who say they use a fursona of the opposite sex to explore whether they might be gay, bi, or trans, or perhaps they adopt a dominant character in an RPG who would do things that they would fear doing in real life (or the opposite in which their fursona is a submissive lover who wants to relieve the stresses of responsibilities in real life). One can also explore a variety of fetishes within the relative safety of furry roleplay, which can help you determine whether or not you might wish to explore such practices in real life. Doing all this in, say, an online RPG also has the advantage of being an extremely safe form of sex (you can't contract an STI by looking at a monitor or your phone, can you!)

Exploration of one's sexuality amongst consenting adults is a healthy way to grow and develop as a person. Those who shame people about furporn and other adult forms of pornography are very likely either unable to wrest themselves from a controlling society or are too afraid to admit they have sexual desires themselves. Criticizing people and trying to control content online (or anywhere else for that matter) is an attempt to remove temptation from their lives or to feel superior to those who, in their opinion, are immoral. A good example of this includes the various cases of politicians trying to pass "morality" laws or religious figures criticizing sex or homosexuality as "sin," only to learn later that the politician booked a massage with a gay sex worker or the religious leader has had several affairs behind his wife's back. As the Shakespearean line goes, "Methinks thou dost protest too much."

To answer your question, no, I don't think we will ever do away with puriteens and Burned Furs and holier-than-thou types. Nor will those people ever get rid of pornography and human sexuality. My answer to the Puritans is that if you don't like porn, don't consume it. As for those who do, that's fine. Explore away. As long as you are doing things consensually, legally, and safely, you're fine.

This is your life. Explore the world and explore yourself, including your sexual side. As long as you are hurting nobody else, do what you like.

Bear Hugs,
Papabear