FurAffinity is quite an interesting website for the "Type" section of its browsing function. It is one of the few websites with "Fetish" bluntly stated as a subcategory of the viewable materials. Yet many of the types of fetish work portrayed can find human analogues aplenty elsewhere on the internet. If we take the purported acceptance and tolerance of the community as a factor, then two hypotheses arise. The first is that, because the community is so accepting and open, it attracts a greater number of sexual deviants who would be shunned in other communities. In this scenario, the base probability for any given paraphiliac of expressing those paraphilias has not changed. The second is that, the proportion of paraphiliacs in the fandom is actually roughly the same as the number in the general population, but they are more willing to be expressive with regard to their paraphilias because of the acceptance and openness of the fandom. There is, of course, the possibility of both: greater proportion and greater probability of expression given presence. P(F) & P(E|F), where F is the event of a paraphiliac being in the population, and E is the event of expressing your paraphilia. Both these quantities would be greater for the Furry Fandom than the general population if both hypotheses were the case.

Another semantic conundrum involves "Yiff." The term may be used in a number of different ways ( https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Yiff ), but it usually connotes sexual meanings and activities. In the furry "mainstream" sense, this is often associated with pornography depicting the usuals: genitals, breasts, bodily fluids, etc. However, isn't it the case that material is only pornographic if it is intended to arouse someone sexually? By this definition, a picture of someone's feet being licked is pornographic to a paw fetishist, but non-pornographic to a non-paw fetishist. To the latter, it might just be gross or creepy, quite the opposite of arousing. A sex-repulsed asexual might not find mainstream furry pornography attractive at all; if the same person is a paw fetishist, he or she might find pictures of toes being suckled arousing, but only in the absence of sexual body parts and fluids. Then the pornographic nature of a yiff portrayal is very individualized: what is yiffy to one is not yiffy to another. The trouble comes in legal and population level statements regarding pornography. Again, paraphiliacs are left out of those definitions. Only characterizations of "weirdness" or "grossness" are left for them.

In the human realm alone, there is enormous arbitrariness associated with the types of sexual fetishes and kinks existing. Having finished Jesse Bering's 2013 book "Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us," I am well aware of the 547 documented paraphilias there are. This is why, whenever I see someone asking, "Why in the world do those people find X attractive?" or some variant, followed by many personal experience stories and speculations about their own fetish development, I think the arbitrariness aspect is not being considered. There is so much researchers still do not know about how paraphilias develop, and part of it is the ethical problems associated with human experiments. A number of theories are floating around out there ranging from sexual imprinting to more neuroanatomical explanations, but no one seems to capture the full story. It's very easy for me to come up with a "Just so" story for why coprophiliacs are attracted to what they're attracted to, or why acrotomophiliacs desire what they desire. I would rather admit ignorance, then become "submissive" to anyone's pet explanation.

Nevertheless, from a sociological point of view, regardless of the mechanistic explanation, the reality is many paraphiliacs are in the same state as the homosexual community decades ago. While the status of the latter community has improved legally and socially, the status of the former has not. The stigma associated with "unnatural" sexual deviance is similar to the stigma against those with mental illnesses in our society; both lead to unnecessary psychological harm and self-loathing. As advocates of erotic pluralism note, we must be open and willing to discuss these sexual matters if we ever hope to strive to achieve a society where self-hatred is no longer the case for many of those with these kinks and fetishes. United States sex education is already lacking in many dimensions, but at least with the advent of the Internet, more and more resources are available to such folks and they often quickly realize that they are not alone. A true prevalence estimate for any particular paraphilia would be quite difficult given how private these matters are, but new methodological paradigms may be on the way now that the Internet is here. One can only look to the future optimistically.