When Your Son Asks You About Furries, It’s Time for the Sex Talk
But there’s much more on the table than just babies and diseases
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For a long while, I’ve been meaning to have a tough conversation with my son. It’s one that he’s probably already had with his friends and the internet, but now that he’s 11, I thought that it would soon be time to make it official. But before I could, he brought that conversation right to my door.
While I sat on the edge of his bed one night, my son safely tucked in under cartoon character sheets, he hit me with the question no father is ever truly prepared for.
“Dad,” he asked, “what’s a furry?”
A classmate had told him, he said, that furries are people who dress up like animals — to then have sex with animals, which is completely false.
I was thrown completely off guard. “What? Why are y’all talking about…” I started. Stopped. Took a breath. Now it begins.
A couple of years ago, my sister hinted that I might need to have “The Talk” with her son, who was 13 years old at the time. I told her that his father needed to handle that. It’s not like he had died in war…
