More Posthuman Queerness: Boytaurs and Ponyplay

Thanks to fleshbot for bringing to my attention one of the new transformation-based sexual subcultures that have been growing via electronic mediation and networking:

boytaur \'boi-tawr\ n 1 : a guy with four (or more) legs 2 : a guy with any of a variety of multilimb or other transformations 3 : a guy who enjoys the company of boytaurs, and is thus a boytaur in spirit

There's something wildly, almost primally, attractive about a guy with four legs: the crowding of long, sculpted thigh muscle, the four calf muscles bobbing and working in rhythm with his four-legged walk, the four strong male feet supporting his powerful boytaur body. Boytaurs know this attraction well, and it is our constant joy, both to have and to share.

Of course, many boytaurs don't stop with four legs. Some add more legs, going six-legged or more. Some add extra arms. And many, enjoying all their boytaur feet, decide to go wristfooted as well. Other boytaurs have completely different transformations, or none at all, but are still boytaurs in spirit, enjoying their augmented bodies, and sharing that joy freely. boytaur.net is dedicated to helping that sharing go on across the internet, all around the world.

Boytaurs are just one of a growing variety of "animal transformation" subcultures.


According to the Deviant Desires website,

Human-into-animal transformation is the stuff of shamanic ritual and children's fairytales. It's also one of the core metaphors of two of the most popular niche fetishes around today, PONYPLAY (and its many human pet subcategories, such as cowplay, piggyplay and puppyplay) and FURVERTS (with related subcategories fursuiters and plushies.) In both of these fetishes, people dress up in animal costume and behave like animals in more or less scripted scenarios.

At the "If Wishes Were Horses" site, which is devoted to the fantasy of being able to transform into a horse or unicorn, they devote a great deal of attention to future technological methods which will permit such transformations, such as nanotechnology:

Nano-bots could literally reconstruct a body from one form to another, providing they had the requisite information. Whether this would be a comfortable process or one in which the subject would have to be heavily dedated would have to be seen. The subject, if being rebuilt into a horse, would also need to either eat constantly or be intravenously fed with raw material for the nano-bots to build mass with. The easiest route would result in a horse that is equine cosmetically only: still genetically human. However, eventually nanotechnology might be be able to re-engineer DNA itself, and thus make a true equine.

There are many, many animal transformation sites, such as an active site for people who write transformation fantasy stories.

Anyway, I wrote my first transhumanist essay ten years ago and titled it "Embracing Change with all Four Arms: A Defense of Human Genetic Engineering" and I've been asked many times since "Why would anyone want four arms?" Now I've got an answer. At least for four legs.