SAVAGE LOVE

BY DAN SAVAGE

DEAR DAN: Fourteen years ago, I fell for a woman who was into watching guy-on-guy oral sex. I indulged her fetish on multiple occasions at play parties and during prearranged hotel encounters with bisexual guys. While I only did this to please her, I enjoyed these MMF encounters because I got off on her getting off. At the time I thought maybe I was bisexual and had been in denial. But after we broke up, and after becoming more thoroughly educated on D/s dynamics, I’ve come to believe I am in fact not bi and instead straight. I can just be really subby for the right woman. Most people to whom I disclose my history insist that I’m not straight because of what I did for that one woman. I even encounter this in the kink community, where the D/s perspective should be better understood. My argument that I am straight and not bi is that I’ve never been romantically attracted to a man. I’ve never gone down on a man without a woman telling me to and it’s not as if there aren’t any opportunities for me to do so, as I live on the north side of Chicago. (You might be familiar with this neighborhood?) All that being said, do you think I’m straight?

— Sucker For Dom Women

DEAR SFDW: Sure.

DEAR DAN: How do furries happen? The kink just seems so random. And why are there so many furries now but no furries in ancient history?

— Fathoming Unusual Roles

DEAR FUR: Cartoons. Disney. Mascots.

While not everyone who gets off on dressing up in fursuits and/or animal mascot costumes has the same origin story, FUR, many furries trace their kink to the anthropomorphized animal characters they were exposed to in childhood. Now, most kids who watch Disney movies don’t grow up to be furries, just as most kids who take a swim class don’t grow up to have rubber swim cap fetishes. But a tiny percentage do develop these fetishes. Since we can’t predict which random environmental stimuli a kid might fixate on — and therefore can’t predict whose childhood fixations will become adult sexual obsessions — there’s no controlling for kinks. No one’s kinks are consciously chosen and if they seem random, it’s because they kindasorta are random.

Anthropomorphized animal characters didn’t come to dominate childhood (mass media, imaginations) until the 20th century Disney was founded in 1923, Looney Tunes was founded in 1930 — but there were adults running around out there with marionette fetishes acquired at puppet shows before Mickey and Bugs took over. (There are still marionette fetishists out there.) As for the actual ancients, the Roman emperor Nero (37-68 AD) used to dress up in animal skins and pretend to be a wild boar at orgies — according to historians who may have been biased against him — and there are lots of examples of ancient people dressing up as animals for religious festivals and holidays; some festivals included sacred sexual rites, but some of them were just fuck fests because people are — and have always been — kinky freaks.