Quote Originally Posted by Kenny View Post
"Working up the courage" is not called "escalation". Those people who choose to live as furry as a means of circumventing taboos they do not want to break are only doing so because they are fully aware of what those taboos are about. Escalation however happens when you lose that awareness, or when you never had it to begin with and are trying new things. "Courage" does not make you lose that awareness. Courage would make them feel more comfortable with their interests, and further strengthen their self-esteem. For someone to start abandoning their values and to start breaking taboos they held onto before, the exact opposite of that would be needed.
Why would a zoophile care about societal norms lol. Being a furry is already heavily straying from what most people would consider normal. I doubt being "openly furry" is easy, I would imagine many furries have a difficult time with social interaction.
Personally, I think that as long as "furryness" is not a pervasive aspect of someone's life (to the point where they would literally walk around dressed in a fursuit at home for example), it should still be considered as normal. It's only when people actually get into fursona and shit like that that it's actually scary from my point of view.