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Yeah, I'm working on an article about it, but this is the most thorough account I think I've given so far. Copied for convenience:
Different people have different reactions to strict religious environments. I was a serious, religiously scrupulous kid who took my faith's commandments very seriously. I was also always a bit odd. Mormons have a strict prohibition against pornography, unmarried sex, or dating before 16 years old, something that extends to generally strict modesty standards and instructions not to look on women with lust more broadly.
I internalized those standards and, so far as I can tell, developed an instinctive disgust/irritation reaction to seeing women in any sort of immodest or 'sexy' settings: bikinis, billboard models, sex scenes or kissing in movies—everything intended to arouse, even tame stuff, was something to grimace and look away from. No dating, no relationships, no sex? Fine by me. I'd shove all that stuff into a corner and deal with it when I was an adult or something. This extended for me even to things like crude sex jokes from other guys, which bothered me in particular when they came from other Mormons—didn't they care? I valued modesty and chastity and was scrupulous in those values. Sexual things were threats and temptations. Noticing them with anything other than disgust was a personal failing.
But, well, I was still an adolescent boy, and hormones don't simply disappear when ignored. I took my faith's prohibitions seriously and rarely dug where I wasn't supposed to, but seem to have sublimated my romantic feelings into an interest in something safely outside the realm of the real. At some point, I wandered onto deviantArt, where I found a few extraordinary artists who portrayed the world of anthro animals in compelling, beautiful ways—see here or here for (safe) examples—and without being able to articulate why I was so fascinated by that world or was paying so close of attention to it, began to follow their work with interest. I've always loved nature and the sense of wildness; the artists I found excelled at capturing emotions close to my heart. Art (and I do mean art here, not as a euphemism) became a non-threatening, meaningful outlet for me to explore the idea of romance disconnected from the baggage, cruft, and uncertainty around a real world where I had internalized that I should clamp down on all feelings in that domain.
I'm not convinced that people are born with immutable romantic interests, but I am convinced that past adolescence, some stay more-or-less fixed. In my case, a strict upbringing that I took seriously, combined with the need for some sort of outlet and an insistence on staying glued to the computer when possible, meant that my own oddness was channeled and focused during a sensitive development period towards a deep-running interest in and appreciation for anthropomorphism, along with a conviction that I was asexual. I'm quite sure at this point that the interest is immutable, and I wouldn't change it—I remain mostly detached from the furry fandom for many obvious reasons, but I continue to love the impossible world I was so drawn to in adolescence, for all the same reasons.
I kept telling myself that romance would come later, that crushes and noticing interest in people and all the rest would be right around the corner, but as I got older and it kept not happening I started to seriously ask myself whether I was capable of being in love. In my early twenties, after I stepped away from Mormonism and let myself examine questions of romance in any way connected to the real without flinching away, I finally noticed a sense of romantic interest in people—men, that is—and was thoroughly relieved to learn I was normal enough to be able to fall in love. So then I started dating, met my now-husband, and lived happily ever after. The end.
In short, I see my interest as a sublimation of religious scrupulosity towards all things sexual, the result of being an odd person who took a strict environment seriously while having open access to outlets that eventually swept my pre-existing tendencies into a specific, peculiar cultural niche. I like to tell people, because I think it's true, that five hundred years ago I would have been a monk. But I grew up in the early 2000s, so I became a gay furry instead.
So it goes.
Thanks for sharing. I have some more questions, but I'll wait for your piece on it (where I'm sure some will be answered). I think that anthropomorphism and ideas of lust seem to have a long history, I know they crop up occasionally throughout history in different and interesting ways, furry-ism can't be dismissed as a purely modern phenomenon. Anyway, I look forward to your writing.
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