So many zoos!
The Zooey Dot Pub twitter account currently has 3643 followers at time of writing. Probably by July it’ll pass 4000. It’s an account that just tweets out our little SFW articles, and occasionally other zoo projects done by other people. It doesn’t post any porn, it’s not even doing haha funny jokes and memes. It’s just activism. Pure and simple. I’m not telling you all of this to brag, I’m mentioning it because it shows that there’s (almost) 4000 people on the internet that have come across the account in the past less than a year it’s been live and have decided that they want to see more from it. At least 4000 people to some degree care about zooey activism.
When people form social connections, they usually do so in communities. For instance, you could say there’s a Twitter zoo community, or a ZFU community, or a ZDP Discord community. But, for every one community you’re a part of, there’s a hundred that you’ve never even heard of. And that’s very much true for zoos as well. I feel like I’m pretty well connected in the zoo community, but I was listening to the most recent Zooier Than Thou episode and it was all about Calzoo. I’d never heard of Calzoo before, and I wasn’t familiar at all with the people that were there talking about it. And yet there they were saying that this was a big weekly zoo event with tons of people attending a house in person, with a vetting system and a schedule. It was incredible to hear about! And yet of the people that attended those events I’ve met maybe two or three?
I have my own personal zoo connections as well. I’ve got 6 or 7 zoo friends in real life who I hang out with. We sometimes do get-togethers and dinners, and it’s great having them. But not a single one of them has a zoo Twitter, or is in any public zoo spaces. That’s people that will probably never meet any of my new online friends, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re also zoos.
Which brings me to my point. It’s very easy to feel alone as a zoo. It can be scary to talk about, and you can feel like everyone else might as well be on another planet. But you aren’t alone. Not by a long shot. There are so many zoos out there, just living their lives, content with their small social circles. And as we get more and more public acceptance, the number of zoos who may have been around but were just not “on the record” before is just going to keep growing and growing.
Did you know that in 1910, 3% of people were left handed, but by 1960 it grew to 12%, and has stayed at about that ever since? It can be easy to look at that and say that more left handed children are being born, but there’s an even simpler answer. Before 1910, we used to punish people for being left handed, and would force them to try to convert. Sometimes, lefthandedness was even seen as a kind of evil. However, as we learned in society that being left handed just means that you like using your left hand, and that there’s nothing wrong with that, there was a steady increase in the number of lefties between 1910 and 1960. Once we stopped forcing people to not be left handed, there were more left handed people. Statistics are wild, aren’t they?
In another remarkable study, since 2012 the percentage of people who identify as LGBT in the US has doubled. Some people say that’s due to gays in the media, and on TV. Because of gay books in gay schools with gay classrooms. And you know what, they’re absolutely right. Because the more exposure and social acceptance that something has, the more that people are going to feel comfortable with identifying as that thing.
Zoosexuality is going to see exactly that same trend. The more that zoosexuality is recognized, the more people are going to feel okay about coming out as zoosexual. And the community will grow and grow. Until having a “zoo phase” in college is going to be the new having a “gay phase” in college. At some point in the not too distant future, you’ll be able to sit around a table with people you don’t know, and you’ll say “Oh, my girlfriend is a dog,” and someone will laugh and say “Oh nice, I was really into mares at one point but ended up with a human,” and someone else will say “I actually fooled around with a dog in highschool, we were sorta dating, but I was really young so it wasn’t official.” Someone else will chime in “I’m actually dating a dog right now!”
Because that’s the reality of the situation. There are zoos everywhere. Animal attracted people are everywhere. They just don’t feel brave or comfortable enough to talk about it. All that to say, never feel like you’re alone. Never feel like the zoo community is “small.” We’re secluded, but we’re for sure out there. Anyone can be a zoo.
If you’re someone looking for zoos in your area, just keep putting yourself out there. Be careful, of course, but if you look in the right places, you’re bound to find other zoos who might just be able to bring you into a whole new community you never knew existed.
And if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, know that there’s amazing online communities that are there to support you too.
Article written by Tarro (March 2023)
Find them at https://twitter.com/hereforthezoo
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