Hi guys! You all know me, I’m James the Duck, I’ve been involved in FFC since 2018, but I had to make a new account because my old one got deleted when I deleted my Twitter. Anyway, I want to talk about fetishes and how to deal with them. As we all know, the furry fandom is quite infamous for housing a lot of fetishistic sub-fandoms, such as size difference, transformation, feet, inflation, etc. I myself deal with autozoophilia (arousal at images of yourself as an animal), a transformation fetish and to a lesser extent a foot fetish. Autozoophilia and the transformation (or TF) fetish is what lead me into the fandom in the first place, but about a year ago I felt that God was calling me to give them up.
Giving them up has been hard. They had been something that I’ve been interested in and fantasized about my entire life, long before I had any grasp of sexuality. I don’t know when I started getting aroused by them, but I do know it had to have been before middle school. In middle school, when many boys were discovering porn, I discovered a website that archived various TF clips from cartoons and I would watch them to get aroused. I only did this while I was home alone, because for some reason I didn’t want my family to see me watching this stuff. I wanted it to be my little secret.
Fast forward to 2018, and I discovered you can commission TF art and make your autozoophilic fantasies come true. Most of the TF artists were furries, so naturally I joined the fandom. For six years, most of my spending money went towards living my wildest and wettest fantasies through TF art. I then took up drawing, and started making TF art of my own. I knew porn was wrong, so I never commissioned anything NSFW. I even knew that a lot of people were addicted to porn the same way I was addicted to TF art, but I justified it by telling myself I wasn’t hurting/objectifying anybody or looking at anything inappropriate, so it must be fine. Besides, it was making me happy.
That is until January of 2024 when I began to study these things more seriously. I was horrified to come across an article that said that pursuing sexual arousal, even if it’s not pornographic, is a mortal sin. I was Episcopalian at the time and didn’t have the whole system of confession the Roman Catholic Church has, but I knew mortal sins sent you to hell according to Rome so this must be serious. I tried commissioning a TF art piece to snap myself out of it, but the guilt ate me alive for weeks, so I decided to repent and cancel it.
I haven’t commissioned a TF or autozoophilia piece since, and a kind friend redesigned my fursona to not resemble me. For a while, I left the furry fandom entirely because I find anthros attractive and thought that was a mortal sin, but I’ve told three different priests about it and they all said it’s fine. I’ve made too many friends here to leave behind, so I came back. I got kind of obsessive-compulsive about my fetishes and attraction to anthros though, and had to go to OCD therapy every day for 4 months.
I’m doing much better, but the story doesn’t end there. I still lay awake at night fighting these TF and autozoophilia thoughts, praying to God for them to go away, but they only get stronger. I feel like if I just let them be I’ll start indulging them and commit a mortal sin. I’ve talked to two priests about this and they say indulging my fetishes are only a venial sin, but I don’t know whether I should believe them or those who say it’s mortal. And the worst part is, sometimes I cave in to the flesh and indulge my fetishes, and when I do it, I don’t feel bad. In fact, I feel liberated. I’ve committed one sin, so the genie is out of the bottle and I don’t have to walk on eggshells anymore because I’ve already broken them. I know this isn’t how sin works, so I find myself going to confession that Saturday, but then I’m back to being scrupulous and worrying about indulging my fetish and going to hell. So does anyone else have a fetish that they deal with, and so, how do you deal with it?