KPFA Anti-Fur Rally Story and fugalfurguy's Response

[frugalfurguy]

KPFA is the original listener-sponsored independent radio station based in Berkeley, CA. A story of theirs caught my ear in May. I'm including a transcript of the segment along with my response. Of course, I have no control over what denizens here do, but I'm not calling for hate mail or anything intimidating to the anti-fur spokesperson or his organization. I'm trying to turn the perpetual conflict between "them" and "us" into an opportunity for greater self-knowledge for myself and whoever would care to join me.

 

But people here get to make their own choices of how to respond.

 

Transcript from "20080531-Sat1800.mp3"

 

[Notes and transcriptionist's disclaimer: This transcript presents a segment of the independent, listener-supported public radio station KPFA's weekend evening news. The timings in small italic font under the speaker labels represent approximate times during the newscast they began speaking for cross reference with an actual audio file of the newscast. This transcript does not omit any part of the segment dedicated to the story. While a good-faith effort was made to represent verbatim the contents of the May 31 newscast feature, this transcript has been neither reviewed nor approved by KPFA. Spellings of proper names not familiar to the transcriptionist were guessed and may therefore be in error.]

 

David Rosenburg (KPFA announcer)

23:12

Animal rights activists gathered in front of the J. Melnick clothing store on Broadway in Oakland today to call for the store to remove all fur items from its shelves. Alfredo Kuba is with the Defend Animals Coalition.

 

Alfredo Kuba

23:27

Protesters are—they're protesting the the cruelty of fur, and uhh they're bringing attention to the public that uhh fur and fur garments are cruel products and basically to stay away from them. Fur is a mockery of nature. They are basically torturing and killing animals for human vanity.

 

David Rosenburg

23:46

Kuba says the animal rights activists have spoken with the store's owner but have not gotten a positive response. He says animal rights groups are determined to keep the pressure on.

 

Alfredo Kuba

23:55

We understand this is the only fur store in Oakland, and uhh we are going to close the store. I mean it is it is ridiculous that in this day and age people are wearing cruel products like this and consumers need to be more conscientious about what fur is made of. It's made out of animals who are tortured and killed for their uhh for their skins and uhh it is just—again it's it's vanity, and uhh it is unnecessary, and humans should abstain from such products, and it also contributes to the destruction of wildlife and their habitat and so forth; so again whether to voice uhh our concerns about how these industries exploit animals to death.

 

David Rosenburg

24:41

That's Alfredo Kuba of the Defend Animals Coalition.

 

A response to Alfredo Kuba

 

Thanks for taking a stand on something you believe in. I'm not sure I understand your position given the sound bytes KPFA selected. What I heard, however, stirs up some challenging emotions, prompting this response.

 

You repeated a word that leapt out at me from each of what KPFA presented as two separate quotes: vanity. I felt hurt and excluded the way you used it. You see, I'm a fur lover. I don't pretend to speak for all fur lovers, but a few among them might identify with my experience. In my early childhood—way before I had any intellectual understanding of human reproduction—I developed my first inklings of what now I describe as nature blunting my urge to procreate and as a consolation instilling an urge to snuggle with fur garments. Surely as Pavlov's ding-a-ling dogs slavered, I'd feel a surge in my pants when I'd see furs. It's not that even then I imagined one picked furs off a bush like cotton. I knew something of their grizzly cost.

 

Indeed, John Money in Destroying Angel suggests that when such fetishes emerge, the object of displaced libidinal fascination is often something with sinister or filthy connotations. Sexologist Money suggests that libidinal fetishes result from a sex-negative cultural atmosphere. Fetishists learn to protect their libidinal realities by making some object responsible for arousal; thus people can remain angelic. It's not as though I reasoned this out as a tot. Still, many among my earliest memories of arousal had to do with seeing or imagining furs.

 

This deviance made childhood a puzzling time, puberty, adolescence, and early adulthood a hazardous hell. I was in sixth grade when a schoolmate, talking to a group of us, introduced to my awareness the possibility that some men desired to be with another man like my mother and father were together. It seemed singular that no grown ups had mentioned such a thing to me. That must mean it was hugely wicked. I knew it didn't quite apply to me, but the idea of unacceptable desires took root. Not until a college biology course did I learn that I wasn't the only person with my kind of affinity for furs, and I didn't get that in lecture but on my own sampling parts of the textbook that hadn't been assigned. By then, I had developed enough self-hatred that my way of acknowledging this revelation was to dismiss it. I wasn't that perverted, I told myself, and redoubled my determination to stamp it out.

 

I blamed my perpetual failure to find a girlfriend on my fur fetish, suspecting that prospects detected it or at least some clue of it in me, being absolutely sure that, whether or not they perceived it, I wasn't worthy of their affections until I had strangled my fur coat fetish. My desire to repress my sexuality made my first contacts with psychotherapists mostly pointless. I identified my sexual deviance as the one thing that needed to be changed for me to be totally happy. Demanding that therapists fix it, I frustrated their probing other areas that could use my attention. They also questioned whether I could realistically expect them to banish my fetish.

 

Years went by. The scores of issues I might have been addressing in order to accept wholesome relationships into my life snowballed while I continued futilely to scour from my life what I regarded my capital blemish. I was hurting myself. I was hurting others. And I was so wrapped up in trying to dictate my sexuality that I had to shove my feelings about the pain I was causing ever deeper through compulsive activities. I never developed a specific plan, but the idea of killing myself would sting me with jolts in the gut that felt like yes! Absolutely!

 

Because I survived attempting to repress my fur fetish, I believe I have an unusual empathic angle on trials homosexuals face in a homophobic and heterocentric culture. I've survived my own condemnation of my not being the "normal" kind of person I desperately craved to be.

 

About 12 years ago, still in the thick of repression, I made a play for someone I cared about and very shortly sabotaged it out of a sense of unworthiness. I thought I was cheating not to let her know how undeserving I was right up front. I'd reached an unwelcome bottom in my repression.

 

Feeling desperate and ashamed and sad, I at last made a commitment to a therapy group where I ventured into self-abusive talk about how my fur coat fetish diminished me. Looking me squarely in the eye, my therapist delivered a three-word wallop, "But it's you," igniting a frightening flare of rage. I was angry because what she'd said was true despite all my actions to disown it. It was the beginning of humbling encounters with my animal self. Every punishment I'd summoned had failed. The sexualized desire to gaze at fur garments or women wearing them, let alone to snuggle with furs hadn't changed. Admitting that suicide would have been my only effective way to will it out of existence, and that dedicating my life, as I secretly had, to its eradication, I was after all committing suicide one tiny stroke at a time, I gave up. Capitulation allowed me finally, bit by bit, to take responsibility in many essential areas of my life.

 

When I hear you defame fur garments, you seem to trivialize the drama I've just shared with you. The only reason you see for someone to desire fur is vanity. Have you ever told a parent with even a smidgen of self-respect that everything from the amatory urges that might have lead to conception clear through birth to the struggles of nurturing the offspring was vanity? You just called what foiled that process in my life vanity. The Oxford American Dictionary offered three definitions of vanity. I eliminated the third in which vanity meant a piece of furniture or hygenic fixture. That left

• 1. excessive pride in or admiration of one's own appearance or achievements
  2. the quality of being worthless or futile
  

If you intended the first meaning, there's an implicit moral judgment in the word. If you mean that vanity is the only thing fur garments appeal to, it seems to me you're demanding that people defer to you, not to their own god or disbelief in gods, to determine when their "pride in or admiration of [their] own appearance or achievements" is "excessive" or not.

 

Something else strikes me about the whole feature as KPFA ran it. KPFA's news staff appears to have solicited no opposing or questioning perspective. You've been given a great deal of power in that community. It's as if to listen to someone who would have bought fur at J. Melnick or anywhere would have been worse than giving air time to Hitler, certainly worse than hearing from Mao or Stalin.

 

This highlights a confusing issue for me. It's from media like KPFA I've most heard encouragements for people to live with honesty about non-conforming sexual desires. I'm not going to claim they do a perfect job of honoring members of the LBGT community; however, I value KPFA partly because its inclusion of these rich strands of humanity. But this rainbow repudiates my own animal within's opaque scarlet.

 

So I ask you, and I ask KPFA's audience. What do you want, seeing that my animal within isn't welcome? Do you wish I'd killed myself through repression? Are you going to refer me to a brainwashing group similar to those religious fundamentalists run, intending to redeem gay people from their homosexual iniquities? I've ventured from the religious community that flogged my sexuality, for refuge, into fur coat fantasies. Now, desiring acceptance in a community that claims opposition to such fundamentalism, I'm lead to question if the only way I can be accepted there is by staying in the closet. If you don't like furs, I can certainly accept that, and I don't want you to feel compelled to buy them. But I question whether your campaign of abolition hasn't become at least as much about controlling other people and bowdlerizing their desires as it is about protecting animals.

 

I don't think you're wicked or undeserving. I believe there's something praiseworthy in your passions. At the same time I wonder if you're willing to accept that not every human being is going to have the same virtues. I know that for myself, trying to dictate my animal desires was no virtue, only vanity in the second sense my dictionary provided. Can you find compassion for those of us who aren't as totally angelic towards other animals as you think everyone ought to be? If you admitted that part of the reason people can make money killing and skinning cute, cuddly animals is that the results fulfill real desires of some people, would your confrontation of customs relating to fur garments change? Are there people and interest groups to whom we give over power because people like you and people like me generally don't allow for intimate disagreement? I can certainly admit that if you paid attention to this response so far, you've been at least momentarily willing to set something of huge value to you aside, and I honor that willingness. Can you likewise admit that by giving my attention to your message without alienating from you that I, too, have relinquished a comfort zone? I don't believe that our disagreement requires verbal—if not more overt—warfare, but warfare's probably easier.

 

May we be willing to listen. May we learn to honor that we're both fallible humans, that ultimately we're members of a web of life that embraces and nurtures us, even gives us the energy to disagree, that even the disagreement is part of a system neither of us is in charge of and that our disagreement may ultimately aid our understanding of our roles among our fellow creatures. Thanks once more for being true to what you believe in.

[JGalanos]

http://barackobamavideo.com/viewMedia.jsp?res=290953273&dedupe=1&col=en-all-public-ep&num=10&e=20043854&s=PZSID_pods_pod5_9_3_0008%3BThe+KPFA+Evening+News+%5BKPFA+94.1+FM%2C+Berkeley+CA+-+kpfa.org%5D&start=0&q=fur&expand=true&il=en&match=query,channel&filter=0&index=1&seek=0

 

Audio of the brief animal rights discussion on this program begins around minute 23.

 

The radio program did not even bother to check the spelling of the store's name.

 

http://www.jmalnick.com/events.detail.cfm/id/199

Edited July 20, 2008 by Guest

[RonGav]

Whoa!

 

Well done, Fugalfurguy. I know many of us struggled as you have to some degree. You clearly summed up the anti-fur movement with:

 

I question whether your campaign of abolition hasn't become at least as much about controlling other people and bowdlerizing their desires as it is about protecting animals.

Thank you.

[auzmink]

FFG - stunning response - blunt enough to poke them in the eye. Well done.

 

Auzmink

[Guest]

Your apologia is more than they deserve or will appreciate I'm afraid.

 

As you commented about the liberal radio/press, the PC stance to such issues as fur fetishism is couched in a form of feel good dogma that such passions as a fondness for furs is seen as either a human weakness to ones irrational passions or a deviant path from the one "True" path to enlightenment.

 

No thought of such enlightenment being achieved by the very nature of soft enlightenment found with such a passion for furs.

 

Though much of the psychology you describe over your love of fur happened to me it never reached the level of a personal feeling of "deviancy" despite the few moments of discovery by others.

 

The support of the Anti-Fur fanatics by the liberal press/radio is a preordained knee-jerk reaction.

 

Since fur wearing has been so long a socially accepted aspect of fashion, especially by the more financially fortunate, it is a certainty without question to be considered decadent and perverse.

 

Of course this is while it is they who are the perverse for failing to properly consider and study their actions under the assumption, since it is they who think it, it must be true

 

OFF

[Worker 11811]

Here's the problem with these people...

They THINK in terms of absolutes but they SPEAK in relativistic shades of gray.

 

They use a lot of double talk and half-truths to "prove" their points and they turn logical fallacies to their advantage in order to convince people what they say is true when nothing could be more opposite.

 

1) Animals "might" be sentient (can think and have feelings) but, since animals can't talk, we will probably never know for sure. Therefore, we must treat them as if they do have feelings, just in case.

 

2) Some fur farmers in the past have abused their animals. Therefore, we must treat all fur farmers, now and in the future, as if they abuse animals even if they don't.

 

3) Some rich people wear fur. Therefore, fur is only for rich people. Since there are some bad rich people who take advantage of those who have less, we must treat ALL rich people as if they are bad. So, if all rich people are bad, all fur is bad because it is a symbol of wealth.

 

4) We should vilify foreigners because some of them are bad people. Since many people who make fur come from other countries, then fur must be bad because it is made by bad people.

 

5) "Designated Bad Guys" change from time to time. In WW I & WW II, it was the Germans who were bad because they were our enemies in those wars. Then came the Japanese. After that, came the Russians. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, it was the Arabs who were bad. Now we add in the Chinese.

 

6) Some people think fur is sexy. Because sex is bad, fur must be bad too. (Except when they are promoting their "Free Love" agenda.) Some gays wear fur so fur must be gay too. Fur is bad because gay people are bad. (Except when they are promoting their "Gay Rights" agenda.)

 

I could go on and on till my fingers bleed from all the typing. I think you get my point.

 

But, in every case, they always say whatever they can... whatever half-baked idea comes to mind... whatever they think they can dupe the unsuspecting public with to prove their point. No matter what bullshit spews from their mouths, no matter whether it is really valid or not, the message is ALWAYS the same...

 

"All fur is always bad all the time, for any reason!

 

The truth is that they only have one argument on their side:

They feel bad when they think about all the cute, furry animals that are killed to make fur coats.

 

It's an appeal to emotion. Plain and simple.

 

The the is that the "Appeal to Emotion" IS a valid form of argument but it can not be the ONLY form of argument in a debate. You have to back up your feelings with facts but they HAVE NO FACTS! It's all smoke and mirrors.

 

Here's the kicker! This "Appeal to Emotion" and the use of bogus facts all leads to one final goal...

 

"Give us MONEY!"

 

This is when you should be on your guard! Whenever somebody comes out with a series of arguments, whether you believe them to be true or untrue, then follows up with a pitch for money, YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BE SUSPECT!

 

Any reputable organization ALWAYS states its goals clearly and logically, BEFORER they ask for money.

 

"You should become a member of Public Television because your donation keeps our programming on the air for all to enjoy for free."

 

This is why I say PeTA is bad, because they don't state their goals and they couch their real intentions in half-baked rhetoric.

[frugalfurguy]

Thanks for the responses!

 

J. Galanos, the transcript is my own production and so the misspelling of J. Malnick was my error, not KPFA's. Sorry for the confusion!

 

Hmm! My intention was to invite dialog, not to triumph. If my response came across as a KO punch, I've definitely got some work to do at communicating empathy. That doesn't mean capitulation. I have to be empathic to my own way of seeing things first. But if I'm not able to extend empathy at the same time to my honorable opponent, I'm not ready for mutually respectful dialog. The way I see things, it's very human to desire to snuggle with furs. That doesn't mean it's a universal human desire. It's also a very human impulse to feel distress at the destruction of animals to make furs. In certain ways, this impulse reminds me of a scene from Hotel Rwanda in which a relief worker arrives at the hotel with a carload of abandoned of orphaned Tutsi children to protect them from the general massacre outside the compound. I don't mean to draw an exact equation. Plenty of fur lovers would question genocidal murder. However, there's a common thread in the desire to intervene on behalf of a vulnerable creature. If no human beings felt revolted by the source of furs, quite possibly, there would also be none to put their lives on the line in a crisis like that portrayed in the movie. I say honorable opponent, and I mean it; honorable and still opponent.

 

I see furs as an epitome of human ambiguity. So much of our culture is about nudging us towards expressing sunny values: courage, picking on someone of equal or greater strength while defending those with vulnerabilities against bullies, caring for those who've experienced misfortune, the list of angelic virtues can continue much longer. So when someone who hates furs points out that when we have creatures that weigh just a few ounces to barely a tenth of our own weight killed and skinned, we're not acting "the way we're supposed to" they have a point.

 

But my problem was that I wasn't being honest to pretend not to have these desires. Much as we're conditioned to believe we're supposed to express only the angelic traits, I'm learning I have to accept and be compassionate to my whole being which includes my shadow. And in my shadow lurks the attraction to furs. I'm an animal, too, and it's especially the animal inside me that's drawn to furs.

 

I realize not everyone here feels the same attraction to the kind of community KPFA serves, and I'm certainly not telling anyone here they should be attracted if they aren't. However, in matters other than its majority's view on furs, I find this a community with which I share considerably among my passions. Conservation, challenging corporations' domination of my life, grassroots political and economic empowerment, egalitarianism are among my values, and I find plenty of kindred spirits in this community. For me the pain and the challenge is dealing with what seems this community's overwhelming tendency to censure furs and anyone who questions that position. What I'm building towards is to show up, not to banish those who disagree me, but to engage as if I have something of great value to offer to the community. However, if they're unwilling to accept what they may very well dislike about me, I don't want to have to go back to pretending it's not there.

 

I have to accept whatever the outcome and make decisions that reflect self-love. I have to accept whatever feelings come to me as a result. For so much of my life, I've chosen to hang onto some sense of control by isolating from others. That wasn't healthy caring for myself. I want to belong somewhere. I believe I already all but belong among KPFA's listeners. The significant but has to do with my relationship with furs. I want to deal with these differences in a way that's considerate of others while taking care of my own needs and dignity.

 

Thanks for listening!

 

frugalfurguy