I’ve seen these sentiments a lot, usually not spelled out like this though. I think the unease often comes from associating anthropomorphic animals with children’s media exclusively. That way it seems scandalous that there is an adult component to the subculture. Pretty much every subculture/fandom has that, of course, but people don’t seem to mind as much when it’s anime, goths and so on.
The fact that they insist it isn’t sexual, when it clearly is at least for many.
In my experience people push back against that characterization because the existence of an adult component seems to make everything else disappear or read as dishonest for some people. There is plenty of perfectly innocent, family-friendly content and we genuinely like it for that, not as a sex thing. Those things can coexist just fine with neither diminishing the other.
feeling like if I saw a dominatrix and her sub licking her heels in a McDonalds
If you remove the sex/fetish stuff from the BDSM community you’d really have nothing left, if you remove it from furries you’d still have a group of people who really love anthropomorphic animal characters, just not also in that way.
The fact that everyone wants to be an animal and for many that is sexual is uhh…not not creepy
If we just roll with that, what do you think about all the people who fetishize vampires, for example? That’s pretty much mainstream now (not just because of Twilight) and it’s literally undead, blood drinking, mind controlling monsters.
"Idk the guy who stabbed me was like…some blue dog or wolf thing, goddammit.” Lol
You’ll be relieved to know that most people in costume can’t see or hear very well, so you’ll have the advantage in a knife fight.
An insignificant portion of furries are actual literal nazis.
Yeah, in open groups with tens of thousands of members you’ll have some bad people, not really surprising is it? Look at anime, comics, warhammer, … anything nerdy and not-so-nerdy, they are there too.
What do you think about other groups then? There’s plenty of people cosplaying characters from media, sometimes in a very tame way, sometimes very much not. Those can be the same people, in the same outfits, minutes apart. You have people cosplaying Princess Leia in basically lingerie, is that alright?
[Insert words of judgement here]
Nah, they are just your average white supremacists except they also have a fursona. It doesn’t have to be intermeshed like that.