Topic: A demographic shift?

Fairly new to the community, and noticed something on my way in:

Dark Romance "booktok" Smut is a staple in pop-culture now, and whenever the Romantic object of the story is non-human the following romance is as furry/scalie as anything ive found here.

This raises several questions for me:

Has this caused an noticable influx of, for a lack of a better word, "normies" into the community?
Has the normies attitude towards the community improved as a ressult?
Are you, or do you know, someone this happened to?(Being introduced through specifically the BookTok brand of literature)
My impression as an outsider was that the community was, historically, always more male than female, and more gay than straight. The majority of that wave would have been straight women, has this caused a demographic shift?

I’m the kind of person that you accurately describe as over-represented in the community - male and gay. I’m a lifelong reader and I love queer literature, but I’ve probably never read anything that counts as “BookTok” or "Dark Romance" - I like the freaks of the old-school, like Angela Carter and Jean Genet. That said, I think there is a lot of overlap between what I’m into and what a lot of "straight" women I’ve known are into.

My best guess is that BookTok has not changed the demographics of the community that much. A lot of the gay male art I've enjoyed has been created by women. If anything, the more noticeable shift in the community, from my POV, is the influx of trans people and new kinds of queerness (which I think is welcome and good).

I don't have data to back this up, but anecdotally it seems like people (often straight women) who are heavily into erotica generally aren't that into drawn visual porn. So there may not be as much overlap with our site's content as you might expect, even though the romantasy fans have furry interest

Big generalization of course but as a whole written erotica tends to be more popular among women and visual porn (drawn or live-action) tends to be more popular with men

wandering_spaniel said:
I don't have data to back this up, but anecdotally it seems like people (often straight women) who are heavily into erotica generally aren't that into drawn visual porn. So there may not be as much overlap with our site's content as you might expect, even though the romantasy fans have furry interest

Big generalization of course but as a whole written erotica tends to be more popular among women and visual porn (drawn or live-action) tends to be more popular with men

if there was any significant demographic shift in other parts of the community, we might've still felt some waves here. but it'd still be really hard to quantify. especially when said incoming demographic is something as ill-defined as "normies".

I think the furry community is mostly straight and bi guys. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, it also means we should keep an eye on ways to keep it inclusive towards those who don't necessarily fit those demographics. As for dark erotic literature, it's not my thing, but I'm just glad people are reading at all. People's attention spans have been completely fried so I appreciate the effort. Maybe someday they'll read some Harry Turtledove.

Iirc, it's fairly evenly split between men & women (I really don't remember, but if I had to put a number to it, I'd say it's around or less than a 10% difference), even more so if you're not exclusively referring to those interested in the pornographic element, & I remember that LGBT people (or at least gay/bi people specifically) are overrepresented (i.e. make up a higher percentage in this subset than in the general population) amongst furries. I wouldn't doubt that straight/bi men are a majority, of both the general & pornographic furry community, but I don't take that as a certainty, let alone the gap being all that large.

I'm a rare example of a straight male furry. As much as I want to be "proud" of it, my imposter syndrome keeps telling me that I shouldn't, because in the general socio-cultural scope, being proud of being straight is a no no. It's no big deal but at times I'm a little confused about where I belong. :|

czyszy said:
I'm a rare example of a straight male furry. As much as I want to be "proud" of it, my imposter syndrome keeps telling me that I shouldn't, because in the general socio-cultural scope, being proud of being straight is a no no. It's no big deal but at times I'm a little confused about where I belong. :|

I understand that feeling very deeply. I'm straight too.
But yeah nothing wrong with being proud of who you are. I feel lonely too sometimes.

aacafah said:
Iirc, it's fairly evenly split between men & women (I really don't remember, but if I had to put a number to it, I'd say it's around or less than a 10% difference), even more so if you're not exclusively referring to those interested in the pornographic element, & I remember that LGBT people (or at least gay/bi people specifically) are overrepresented (i.e. make up a higher percentage in this subset than in the general population) amongst furries. I wouldn't doubt that straight/bi men are a majority, of both the general & pornographic furry community, but I don't take that as a certainty, let alone the gap being all that large.

FurScience's demographics stats from 2020 say that about 73.2% of the community was male while only about 1.1% was female... which seems to me like it might be just a bit inaccurate...
their surveys from other years give a more reasonable male-female split of 73%-25% and 66%-21% of those surveyed. ^{_{(the gap is presumably some combination of non-binary, "other", and similar answers. I really don't know, they don't show the raw numbers, just percentages. I'm guessing this was a "mark all that apply" question, which could be interesting data, but the way they present it is just-- not great.) also no idea how they got that 1.1% female number, probably a typo, but again, no idea. someone in the comments actually pointed it out and they replied kinda shrugging, saying they didn't see where the error was.}}

looking at web stats for e6 and FA statistics from SimilarWeb the population of visitors to e621 is approximately 82:18 and FA is about 75:25.

(all of these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, they're probably not going to be representative of the entire furry fandom. even if the data itself was 100% correct and trustworthy, the samples are likely not representative since the size, and like, amorphous nature of the community would make finding that nearly impossible.)

aacafah said:
Iirc, it's fairly evenly split between men & women (I really don't remember, but if I had to put a number to it, I'd say it's around or less than a 10% difference), even more so if you're not exclusively referring to those interested in the pornographic element, & I remember that LGBT people (or at least gay/bi people specifically) are overrepresented (i.e. make up a higher percentage in this subset than in the general population) amongst furries. I wouldn't doubt that straight/bi men are a majority, of both the general & pornographic furry community, but I don't take that as a certainty, let alone the gap being all that large.

I had always thought that the furry fandom was predominantly male

wandering_spaniel said:
I don't have data to back this up, but anecdotally it seems like people (often straight women) who are heavily into erotica generally aren't that into drawn visual porn. So there may not be as much overlap with our site's content as you might expect, even though the romantasy fans have furry interest

Big generalization of course but as a whole written erotica tends to be more popular among women and visual porn (drawn or live-action) tends to be more popular with men

Yeah, as someone who enjoys both I'll just say visual erotica and written forms are for different moods and activate different parts of the brain, if you get what I mean. The beauty of romantasy/written erotica/spice/smut/whatever you'd like to call it is the bad boy billionaire mafia ceo werewolf can look like whatever you like in your head dependent upon how much detail the author gives.

dba_afish said:
FurScience's demographics stats from 2020 say that about 73.2% of the community was male while only about 1.1% was female... which seems to me like it might be just a bit inaccurate...
their surveys from other years give a more reasonable male-female split of 73%-25% and 66%-21% of those surveyed. ^{_{(the gap is presumably some combination of non-binary, "other", and similar answers. I really don't know, they don't show the raw numbers, just percentages. I'm guessing this was a "mark all that apply" question, which could be interesting data, but the way they present it is just-- not great.) also no idea how they got that 1.1% female number, probably a typo, but again, no idea. someone in the comments actually pointed it out and they replied kinda shrugging, saying they didn't see where the error was.}}

looking at web stats for e6 and FA statistics from SimilarWeb the population of visitors to e621 is approximately 82:18 and FA is about 75:25.

(all of these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, they're probably not going to be representative of the entire furry fandom. even if the data itself was 100% correct and trustworthy, the samples are likely not representative since the size, and like, amorphous nature of the community would make finding that nearly impossible.)

Well, I stand wildly corrected. Regardless of inaccuracies, that's almost certainly more accurate & up to date than whatever half-remembered source I had.

dba_afish said:
FurScience's demographics stats from 2020

I poked around that site and found this

Sexual orientation:

Lesbian, gay, homosexual: 28.8%
Straight or heterosexual: 10.1%
Bisexual: 23.4%
Pansexual: 16.5%
Asexual: 10.5%
I don’t know: 5.8%
Something else: 4.9%

That adds up to about 90% somehow.

Kind of surprised to see so many asexuals, given how sexually charged the fandom seems to be and how supposedly only about 1% of the general population are ace.
I guess it could make sense if they were attracted to fictional furry characters but not real people and so answered that way, though.

aacafah said:
Well, I stand wildly corrected. Regardless of inaccuracies, that's almost certainly more accurate & up to date than whatever half-remembered source I had.

I imagine that digital spaces may have a higher % male than when compared to analog spaces. If you do a survey on furry conventions you would probably get less % male than on an online survey. Of course that is just my speculation looking at videos of gatherings, mostly from USA.

personally i think the furry fandom can't be defined in a binary sense, nor can any fandom, but especially not fandoms like ours because we have a vibrant lgbtq+ community. Any statistics for gender should be questioned, also many of those outside outside the binary do not feel safe answering, or aren't even included. Trans people may feel uncomfortable when survey have ___ and trans ___ instead of cis ___ and trans ___, like imagine if a survey had man and gay man. It separates one type of the same category and only defines that

cadynn said:
I imagine that digital spaces may have a higher % male than when compared to analog spaces. If you do a survey on furry conventions you would probably get less % male than on an online survey. Of course that is just my speculation looking at videos of gatherings, mostly from USA.

their sample was mostly convention-based, but this is prob true generally.

However, what's really shocking is the "Predator-Prey Identification as an Indicator of Psychopathy" paper they referenced for their 2017 study, definitively proving that predator furries should be cancelled forever.

oneohthrix said:
their sample was mostly convention-based, but this is prob true generally.

However, what's really shocking is the "Predator-Prey Identification as an Indicator of Psychopathy" paper they referenced for their 2017 study, definitively proving that predator furries should be cancelled forever.

I think you're reading the article you linked incorrectly, it said higher in those factors, not outright psychopathy. Also cancelling people is idiotic and unproductive, it doesn't correct their behavior.

oneohthrix said:
However, what's really shocking is the "Predator-Prey Identification as an Indicator of Psychopathy" paper they referenced for their 2017 study, definitively proving that predator furries should be cancelled forever.

the study they linked wasn't about furries, though...
also, it's, like... really weird?

maybe I'm just dumb, and bad at reading science or whatever, but I hella don't dig how this data is presented. those bar graphs look like they're presenting large differences in numbers when they're less than .4 on the left graph and less than .2 on the right graph, both of them considerably smaller than the standard deviation for both stats.
also, I feel like a test that boils down to asking "Would you rather eat another animal or get fucking killed?" a buncha times in a row wouldn't yeild the most interesting results, it also dosn't really feel like "self-identifying as predators" to me.

mklxiv said:
I think you're reading the article you linked incorrectly, it said higher in those factors, not outright psychopathy. Also cancelling people is idiotic and unproductive, it doesn't correct their behavior.

Also 'psychopathy' may only exist in fiction in any case (as opposed to ASPD, which is, technically, a construct –as are all other DSM diagnoses–, but one that's more specific and thus less usable as a slur). It's notable that 'a psychological effect that cleanly disables the functioning of moral feeling and social consciousness' looks extremely weird when you line it up next to reasonably well regarded psychological constructs. Abuse or distortion of a faculty is far more common an observed effect.

dba_afish said:
maybe I'm just dumb, and bad at reading science or whatever, but I hella don't dig how this data is presented. those bar graphs look like they're presenting large differences in numbers when they're less than .4 on the left graph and less than .2 on the right graph, both of them considerably smaller than the standard deviation for both stats.
also, I feel like a test that boils down to asking "Would you rather eat another animal or get fucking killed?" a buncha times in a row wouldn't yeild the most interesting results, it also dosn't really feel like "self-identifying as predators" to me.

If you think a study has poor methodology, it probably has poor methodology.

.. if you think a study doesn't have poor methodology, it probably does have poor methodology :)

Like it's just a pretty safe bet. Designing an instrument that actually assesses what you want it to assess is legitimately really hard. You can also have other constraints, eg:

their sample was mostly convention-based

that mean that you're not gonna make a solid conclusion even if your method of assessment is really solid.

Meta-analyses (analysis of an aggregation of related studies) have their own problems, but you basically have to look at multiple studies before it's actually reasonable to say something has been shown to be the case.

I wonder if users here would object to completing a demographic survey linked in the news banner or similar.
I imagine it'd be skewed by the amount of people who only come here for porn, though.

braixenarchivist said:
I wonder if users here would object to completing a demographic survey linked in the news banner or similar.
I imagine it'd be skewed by the amount of people who only come here for porn, though.

The site has its own demographic so it'd more represent the site than the general furry fandom.

mklxiv said:
The site has its own demographic so it'd more represent the site than the general furry fandom.

I'd still be interested in seeing it, though obviously, everything should be anonymized.

aacafah said:
Iirc, it's fairly evenly split between men & women (I really don't remember, but if I had to put a number to it, I'd say it's around or less than a 10% difference), even more so if you're not exclusively referring to those interested in the pornographic element, & I remember that LGBT people (or at least gay/bi people specifically) are overrepresented (i.e. make up a higher percentage in this subset than in the general population) amongst furries. I wouldn't doubt that straight/bi men are a majority, of both the general & pornographic furry community, but I don't take that as a certainty, let alone the gap being all that large.

Then there must have been a demographic shift, i feel like, because even if women joined the community at levels maching their level of representation on the internet as a whole and no higher, it wouldnt even be close to 50/50. And before Twilight i dont really see anything pulling women in at all

toaster_repairer said:
Then there must have been a demographic shift, i feel like, because even if women joined the community at levels maching their level of representation on the internet as a whole and no higher, it wouldnt even be close to 50/50. And before Twilight i dont really see anything pulling women in at all

Ugh, I really hate Twilight because of the messages it puts out that women should just be submissive servants to men rather than having their own agency. It's the usual gross patriarchy bullshit. No wonder, given who the author is and what she believes.

donkdewd said:
If anything, the more noticeable shift in the community, from my POV, is the influx of trans people and new kinds of queerness (which I think is welcome and good).

"Influx" is an odd way to put it when it's more likely the same people finally coming out/realizing what they've always been.

errorist said:
"Influx" is an odd way to put it when it's more likely the same people finally coming out/realizing what they've always been.

I don't think the word "influx" is an offensive way of describing a wave of people coming out and expressing their true self. Every "coming out" is an "arrival" and that's what the word means, in this context.

czyszy said:
I'm a rare example of a straight male furry. As much as I want to be "proud" of it, my imposter syndrome keeps telling me that I shouldn't, because in the general socio-cultural scope, being proud of being straight is a no no. It's no big deal but at times I'm a little confused about where I belong. :|

Im a straight male furry too, and with the amount of Lola/Hopps/Crystal/Renamon/Loona stans i never felt out of place.

Also, dont worry if the average Socio-cultural warrior has a problem with your being unapologetically straight, theyll forget all about it if they ever find out youre a furry lmao

braixenarchivist said:
I wonder if users here would object to completing a demographic survey linked in the news banner or similar.
I imagine it'd be skewed by the amount of people who only come here for porn, though.

It would be very interesting
also, isnt this a predominately nsfw website?

toaster_repairer said:
Then there must have been a demographic shift, i feel like, because even if women joined the community at levels maching their level of representation on the internet as a whole and no higher, it wouldnt even be close to 50/50. And before Twilight i dont really see anything pulling women in at all

I would think in 2026 women use the internet just as much as men do? Everyone is on the internet
The furry fandom does skew male but female furries have been here forever, a lot of older furry artists were/are women. Ex. darknatasha marci_mcadam michele_light caribou_(artist)
A lot of fursuit makers as well like Phoenix Nest, Matrices, Fursuits by Lacy
Anecdotally, women seem more represented among furry artists specifically than the community as a whole. I know when I got my start in the community on deviantart, the folks there were almost entirely girls and women. Would be fascinating to see data on that

wandering_spaniel said:
I would think in 2026 women use the internet just as much as men do? Everyone is on the internet
The furry fandom does skew male but female furries have been here forever, a lot of older furry artists were/are women. Ex. darknatasha marci_mcadam michele_light caribou_(artist)
A lot of fursuit makers as well like Phoenix Nest, Matrices, Fursuits by Lacy
Anecdotally, women seem more represented among furry artists specifically than the community as a whole. I know when I got my start in the community on deviantart, the folks there were almost entirely girls and women. Would be fascinating to see data on that

Furscience has some really interesting data on exactly this! The data is quite old (from 2014-15) and was far more limited than their other surveys, so take the exact numbers with a grain of salt, but it does seem to confirm that women are more represented among artists than in general.

Other interesting facts are a whopping 12% of furries surveyed identifying as trans and 8% as nonbinary (not mutually exclusive).

I feel like the explanations for a lot of this fit well with what we know already:

• Furscience found that among non-furries, artists skew even more heavily female than they do here. In society generally, it's often seen as a feminine hobby that men are shamed or mocked for.
• The fandom has become less male-dominated over time. I wonder how much of this is due to sentiment change vs due to the influx of social media sites like tiktok, twitter, youtube, etc exposing so many people of all genders to the fandom.
• The increased population of men in the fandom is largely due to gay and bi men. They're roughly 5% of the general population, but a huge fraction of it here. In fact, if you subtract the increased number of gay and bi men from the number of total men, you get much closer to a 50/50 gender split!
• The influx of those gay men is due to it being one of the few spaces being gay is celebrated, and has been since the very first cons which were started by gay men such as Mark Merlino and Rod O'Riley. Despite advances, much of the internet still sees gay sexuality as a joke, disgusting, or as a taboo fetish for straight women. This fandom is an escape from all that.
• The influx of trans people is likely a side effect due to the influx of gay men, since studies have shown that they are far far more supportive of trans people than the general population. Thus this fandom being a gay safe space also made it inevitably become something of a trans safe space, and they flocked here for a similar reason. People are also more likely to admit to being trans in a space they are comfortable, amplifying the effect.