I appreciate your personal opinion and just felt like sharing my own personal counter opinion. Being a gay person in the furry community, posting nudes on IM groups is something that is just done almost like you would post a selfie at the beach. I have seen nudes of most of my friends and even some of my coworkers and the other way around. No one treats it as weird or awkward, its just something you do.

It doesn't devalue personal interactions offline or make me feel like a soulless void. I feel like most of the issues that the general public has on this issue is not fundamental parts of humans or society, but simply norms which we have come to embed so deeply they feel fundamental.

I don't mean this as a personal insult but if you are a furry you are already so deep in the degeneracy that you wouldn't notice anything of the sort. Like in BNW, it's rare that the people who submerge themselves in the shallows are cogent of what they've done. Most often it manifests as a vague sense of dissatisfaction or unease in the quiet times. I'm not saying you specifically are this way, but furries are not known for being successful, self actualized, confident people outside of their community.

I agree. I've a lot of experience with the furry community and I certainly wouldn't want to live in a society structured like that. You have issues like the extreme focus on sexuality, the constant barrage of extreme sexual content (like non-consent/rape porn) and the tacit tolerance of pedophilia and/or abuse in some furry spaces. I don't think it's healthy for someone to base their identity on a community whose main focus is pornography, and extreme forms of it, at it. It's not an issue with anthropomorphic characters themselves, but the community that formed around them and how it regulates itself. Some people I've seen even developed an exclusive sexual attraction to anthros, which basically kills their chances of having normal sexual and romantic relationships; such extreme cases are pretty rare, though. I'm not too keen on using the term "degeneracy" because it reeks of religious connotations, but I certainly see why people describe the furry fandom like that.

I used to think porn is pretty neutral in the terms of the harm it does to the consumer, but over my years in the internet, I encountered many people who invest much of their time into porn, or structure the way they view others (women mostly) based on porn and I've come to the conclusion that consumption of porn, specifically during one's teenage years, is psychologically damaging. It does change the way you view sexuality, what you perceive as attractive and your sexual preferences. I was exposed to porn at a young age and I'm pretty sure it did me no good. I worry that kids who are nowadays exposed at even younger age might develop maladaptive sexual preferences and views.