In this installment of "Interesting Perversions Online," we take a look at Furry Fans, which is a term for people who take an interest in anthropomorphic animal people and the ways you can touch them.

Now, already I'm being unfair here, because technically speaking you don't have to actually want to have intimate relations with Disney's Robin Hood to qualify as a Furry Fan. It's quite possible to enjoy furries for the fun and amusement they provide without having it turn into a sticky sexual fantasy, in the same sense that it's possible to stand in line for three days for tickets to a Star Wars movie without owning a toy lightsaber.

Enter the "Burned Furs," a splinter Furry group made up of people who have an obsession with fuzzy tiger head people but who are tired of being thought of as abnormal. Their stance is that it's perfectly okay to spend eight weeks and five hundred dollars on a homemade badger suit so that you can wear it in public, but if you have sex in it you're just weird. It's like a Trek fan saying "Well, sure, I'm fluent in Klingon, but that guy used it for his wedding ceremony! Let's all mock him!"

The very fact that the Burned Furs had to organize makes one doubt their proposition that Furryfolk aren't primarily in it for the eros. Nobody's had to form a group to convince people that concert pianists aren't sexual deviants. If I came across an organization arguing that people who sell produce at Farmer's Markets aren't all actually fucking their vegetables, I'd certainly start examining my broccoflower more closely before cooking it.

Which is not to malign perversion for perversion's sake. Heck, given the modern standards of beauty, longing to have sex with a full-figured otter woman is only slightly less realistic than wanting to have sex with a supermodel. And the otter lady is probably more fun at the sushi bar.