Yiff

"We're not 'seeing' each other" — because these God-damned suits have mosquito screens where the eyes should be.

Yiffing refers to individuals in fur suits, or furries, having sex with one another. The reason that individuals wear fur suits in the first place is that they have gotten tired of the bath-house lifestyle. Having sex with complete strangers in a bath-house can lead to getting AIDS. Having sex with a complete stranger in a fur suit is too soft and cuddly to be harmful.

Ape expert Jane Goodall states that "Yiffing is just fuckin' weird, to be honest." Yiffing is the sole reason why God lets humanity suffer and why good things happen to bad people. There are reasons other than sex why individuals wear fur suits. But no one believes them.

History

Back in the heyday of 8-bit computing, the jiffy was the quantum unit of computing. A large-scale processor could move several keystrokes to the screen in a single jiffy, which was called multi-processing. Unfortunately, the star programmer was from Sweden and he called it a "yiffy" — and slept with every secretary we hired. The connection was made, as it were, and suddenly the term had a new meaning.

The fur-suit end of the phenomenon was slower in coming and involved the annual company Hallowe'en party as well as the mascot of the local Minor League Baseball team. And a few gallons of vodka, all told. But the standard had been set and, given the industry's, er, cross-pollination, the phenomenon became world-wide.

Statistics

The Wikipedia article on Furry fandom gives exact statistics by which Wikipedians often claim they have the facts and everyone else merely has right-wing mush. The following statistics are especially relevant:

• 97% of furry Wikipedians are either homosexual or say they are open to it or have something cheerful or breezy to say about gays.
• Only 2% of them admit to a secret desire to sneak up on the family pet and initiate unwanted cross-species sex. That makes the other 98% "closet" dog-rapists.

Grammar

Wikipedia tells us that the term "yiff" indicates sexual activity or sexual material. The website Wikifur says it is a verb or noun or adjective or exclamation; like, who needs rules?

What this means for the reader is that, when one is at a costume party and one seems to be allergic to someone else's costume (as most of these are dry-cleaned at most once per decade), one must be on guard that a sneeze does not come out sounding anything like "yiff." Everyone in the vicinity will interpret the sneeze as a request for anonymous, one-time sex, and the people dressed up as wolves or other predators are likely to drag the sniffler into a closet without further negotiation.

Media coverage

Articles on people who wear furry costumes, in magazines such as Inanity Fair, have focused on the sexual aspect of the furry fandom, probably because you would not sell many copies with a cover story on zippers.

A reporter attending Anthrocon 2006 noted that it was not "about kinky sex between weirdos gussied up in costumes", which can only mean that the reporter wasn't getting any at all; a rare example of sour grapes invading the usually pristine world of journalism. Nevertheless, fur-suit people spend much time debunking misconceptions, especially to helpless companions who never held them in the first place but were just trying to get near the dance floor. In October 2007, a Hartford Advocate reporter attended FurFright 2007 undercover because of media restrictions. She learned that the restrictions were intended to prevent misinformation, not indeed because most of the attendees were Bat Fuck Insane.

Furries' belief that they will be portrayed as "obsessed with sex" has led to mistrust of the media, of social researchers, and of everyone not wearing ten pounds of carpet to the simplest block party.