Furry Sexuality: Conditioned Fetishes a Better Explanation than Erotic Target Identity Inversion

The recent paper by Hsu and Bailey (2019) on furry sexuality was respectable, first for involving members of the furry fandom (furries for short) in data collection and reporting. Second, it is noted that the apparent emphasis of sexuality in the furry fandom implied by the results might be due to an emphasis on sexuality in the survey announcement. Third, it did not presume zoophilia and, as a result, documented that a sexual attraction to real animals was largely absent among furries. Instead, the paper introduced the new phenomenon of autoanthropomorphozoophilia, an example of an erotic target identity inversion (ETII).

However, this development was lacking in that simpler, more established explanations were not explored first. Given that “…participants most commonly reported that they became furries in the context of online pornography featuring anthropomorphic animals…”, a conditioned fetish (e.g., Rachman, 1966) seems the simplest explanation.