I can safely say that we can pin the blame on the media for publicizing the less tasteful members of the fandom. And we can also blame some of those less tasteful members for being slack-jawed and not caring what kind of long term consequences that it would carry over for the rest of us clean Furs and Anthro enthusiasts. CSI, I believe, featured a "furvert" (someone correct me if I'm wrong; I don't watch CSI), and an Animal Planet documentary/special didn't help with its focus on the Furries who are taking it to the next level by modifying their own bodies to resemble that of the animal they chose. And we can blame 4chan's trolls for coining the term "furfag".
We can also blame our own nature as humans to immediately fear, mock, and hate what we don't understand. Most of the people who tell us to "Yiff in Hell!" are simply trolls, or narrow/closed-minded bigots with no tolerance for what differs from them, and with no openness to learn anything more about us. What I think they don't understand is that yiff and yiffy pictures have a human equivalent: Human porn. But no, that's overlooked because "that's normal." Pretty much the opinion that they can bastardize fictional human characters, like Samus Aran, Lara Croft, Dante (DMC) or any anime character, but that we (generally speaking) can't bastardize Star Fox, Swat Kats, Disney's Robin Hood, or Sonic the Hedgehog.
They say that human porn and erotic acting out is normal. And the few fursuiters who engage in imitative acts aren't demonstrating a norm of their own? At least they're interacting with the same species, regardless of the suit. The percentage of zoophilic (in the erotic sense) Furries -those who *might* engage in bestiality- is actually below 5%. A exponentially tiny number compared to the rest of us who are clean and would just like to be left to our own devices.
In my personal opinion, the less we go searching for acceptance, (hopefully) the more the world will leave us to our own. We don't need this to be another GLBT acceptance issue. No offense to anyone of these orientations; I only mean the way that the "normal" world treated the issue, which was very tastelessly.
I sincerely apologize in advance if I offended anyone during the course of this monologue.
The best we can do is to educate the curious on the ways of the cleaner Furries, ignore the trolls, and don't let someone else tell you what you can and cannot be. Let the ignorant world think what it wants; we know who and what we are, which is all that really, truly matters.
We are who we choose to be.
~adapted from Tim McCanlies, screenplay author behind "The Iron Giant"~
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