Are Zoosexuals Erasable?
Here at Zooey Dot Pub, one thing that we've talked about now and then is the idea of erasure, particularly as it relates to zoosexuality throughout history. Basically, the really simple version that skips a lot of details is, we're pretty sure that way back in the day, there were a lot of diverse cultures all across the world that had all kinds of different ideas about bestiality, with many cultures thinking that bestiality was completely normal and honestly something that everyone will try out as they're growing up and learning about themselves, or some cultures even thinking that bestiality was holy and a way for priests to commune with the gods. But, then puritan Christians killed lots of people with swords and ripped up all of their books and knocked over all of their statues, and now everyone is taught that bestiality is something that Democrats made up in 2024 to trick furry youth into handing over their soul to Satan.
Or something like that. Again, this article isn't about defining what erasure means, but BASICALLY, when I say "zoosexual erasure," what I mean is, "There have been billions of zoosexuals who have walked on this Earth but people are out here acting like that's not true." Zoosexual erasure is when the zoo stuff is omitted from historical records. Zoosexual erasure is when people are banned from e6 for being discovered to be zoophiles ("bestiality rating:explicit" pulls up 750 pages of results btw). Zoosexual erasure is why it can feel like our culture is really scarce, or really new, or something we really have to seek out, because it's not broadcasted widely, it's not preserved well and is in fact often deleted, and it's not typically offered freely to us like Sports culture or Rock N Roll culture or, I dunno, Motorcycle culture.
But, that said, it's 2025, and the Internet sure has gotten pretty popular by now, hasn't it? Does that change things? I mean, the entire nature of data and information is such a different ballgame now. Back in 1200, if someone just finished writing a zooey book, and then you killed them with a sword and ripped the book up, congrats, you have utterly destroyed the existence of that book, you have erased it 100%, that book is gone and it is never coming back, no one will ever be able to read it 825 years later and be able to know that someone was thinking zooey thoughts 825 years ago. But, in 2025, if I just finished writing a zooey book in Google Docs while I was live on Twitch, and then while I'm still live on stream someone kills me with a sword and rips up my computer, lots of people are gonna reupload the clip of me getting killed by a sword even though it's SUPER against YouTube ToS, and also, lots of people are gonna open that Google Doc link and hit ctrl+s to save that zooey book that I just finished writing, and so now that book exists on dozens of different hard drives all around the globe, and is backed up in lots of different database towers at Google and at Internet Archive and on weird scary dark web Chan sites, and, wowzers, even if you wanted my zooey book to be erased, it would be difficult to ever be sure that you had deleted my zooey book from the world once it's been in contact with the World Wide Web.
So, that's my question today: Are zoosexuals erasable? I'm not intending to answer it in a really pedantic way, like, "Yes because someday humans will go extinct and the sun will eat the planet and all of human history will be erased," or, "No because God remembers 🙏" Both of those things might be true. As always I'm just a furry (hi I'm Alissa, this is an Alissa article b-t-dubs) and I'm not here today to tell you if God is real. Really all I wanna do is kind of take inventory of some of the modern zooey shenanigans that we've been keeping our paws busy with lately, and try to imagine how they're going to hold up against erasure as we look forward into the future.
Zooey Podcasting
The year was 2015. "The man bun: is it stupider than the selfie stick?" was a topic much under debate, because I guess we didn't have any real problems back then. And while you were distracted playing Life Is Strange, I was on a mission. I was navigating the Wayback Machine in ways that would astound and amaze my grandma, combing through four years of archives to find every lost episode from a podcast that had been deleted from its original hosting service.
Yeah so, true story actually, this wasn't a zoo podcast or anything, but I really have done this. Basically it was a podcast that sprung up out of this really niche subreddit, it ran for about four years... and then one day the website for the podcast stopped loading and would just give you a server error. And then like a month later, one of the co-hosts made a post on the subreddit being like "Heyyy so in case you haven't noticed, we deleted the podcast and we all hate each other now, bye forever see you in Hell 🖕"
And I was like, Noooooo that's so sad. But then I was like, 💡, Wayback Machine exists!
For those who don't know, Wayback Machine is a tool provided by The Internet Archive, that basically takes snapshots of websites every now and then, so that if you're wondering, "What did the homepage of Disney.com look like in 2014?" you can go to the Wayback Machine, type in "Disney.com", pick some random day in 2014 you want to go back to, and then you can be like, "Oh okay I guess they were really advertising the theme park, ha there's a video about Club Penguin on here for some reason, Perry the Platypus is here, yeah okay sure neat."
But the thing is, Wayback Machine doesn't have everything. It's not a 100% complete backup of the entire internet at every second in time. More popular sites get snapshotted more often, pages that are going viral get the most archival attention, and, it may or may not get all of the tangential files on a page; like, maybe it does archive the jpg of the podcast logo, but it doesn't archive the mp3 for Episode 7.
So, I learned, combing through Wayback for this podcast (and through a few random podcatchers that had likewise spottily gotten some episodes but not others), that the internet can remember more than you might expect, but, it also might not be perfect. This wasn't a very popular podcast, and I was able to recover the full mp3s for about 90 episodes (I think there were about 120 all told, but the numbering was inconsistent throughout the lifetime of the podcast which made it difficult to be sure of the exact total).
So, what does this mean for zoo podcasting? Well, I think it's no secret that zoo projects on the internet are the victim of deplatforming so, so, so often. Zoo & Me lost their website at one point, and they were able to get it back up with the same URL and everything, thankfully, but like, that kind of thing can happen.
So like... if the website goes away, does Zoo & Me still exist?
I mean, it probably exists somewhere, in like, the phones of the people who are subscribed to the podcast. I know that I have at least some of the eps in my podcast app right now, and some are even saved to my computer. So I could provide like... 10 random episodes? (Holy guacamole Z&M is on episode 131 already, amazing job Jin, Brass and Akito, that's pawsome as fluff!)
So like... are a lot of the episodes on the Wayback Machine, at least?
Nnnnnno. At a glance, it looks like it tried to snapshot 21 episodes, but the actual mp3 files live off-site through a redirect, so the Wayback Machine actually hasn't even successfully gotten a lot of those 21 that it tried to, womp womp. I think it has Episode 4, Episode 34 Part 2, and Episode 81. Shrug. Maybe there's more to be found there through sneaky-beaky prying and diligence, but, again, just at a glance, what's here would be enough to get a taste of what the show had been, for sure, but definitely not the complete thing.
I do wonder if anyone is archiving the project personally. Like, whether they're a zoo and a fan and never want to see it lost, or whether they're some loser who wants to get zoos in trouble (and mainly just ends up tuning in each week for an hour of hearing zoophiles talk about video games and cars and stuff). There's probably at least one person out there doing that? But, will we ever know? Will they ever share? Will they have to think about it for a while first?
Zooier Than Thou doesn't have all of its episodes available on the site. Like, right now, at time of writing, if you go to the website and try to find Episode 2, it isn't there. My understanding is that it dealt with really serious topics that they didn't know all of the details about yet because it was hot off the presses, and, for some reason or another they pulled it, probably fair, I don't know the exact details of that myself but I fully believe that that kind of thing would only be done for well intentioned reasons. But like. Say it's 2025, and I'm a new listener, and I don't know any of that about why they pulled it, all I know is that there's an episode missing and I want the full experience of this podcast. Is episode 2 out there somewhere? Probably, but, I haven't looked. Shrug.
Zoo Lit
First of all shout out to this one website full of txt files of bestiality stories that I think dates back to like, the 90s? Earlier, but it got a fresh new coat of GUI when HTML was invented? And this website is STILL online. Like, someone googling for illicit animal writing today in 2025 STILL has some slim chance of landing on the same website I did when I was a teenager and reading the same stories I did about humans and non-humans having some time home alone together. I just. Yeah. Wow.
What about the modern stuff where we're being all zoo pride awoo LGBTZ zoofurs zooromantic zoo-la-la?
To Thine Own Self Be Zoo, where local trans girl therian Eggshell Ghosthearth posts zoo stories, has been running for two and a half years now, the total length is currently about equal to the first Wheel of Time book, or the first two Lord of the Rings books. And, as I was just checking something in the Wayback Machine with this one, I did a big happy gasp because actually the best case scenario happened, as far as archival wins.
Basically what I was going to talk about here is, because this website is all just text, the files are really small .Text doesn't take up very much data at all compared to audio or especially video. And so like, anyways, on the website, you can just read the stories straight on the website, or you can download PDF versions, txt versions, etc. The txt file with all of the website's stories is 2MB, which is like, pretty small. The downloadable zip file that has the entire website in it is 38MB. And, what I just found is that Wayback Machine actually has that zip file. So, incidentally, they've basically snapshotted the whole website in one move, rather than needing to crawl like 500 separate files.
So, yes. Zoo lit is very archiveable, because, yeah, text is small. This seems advantageous to resisting the forces of erasure. So, Zooey Dot Pub is really small and can fit in your pocket too, right?
Wellll...
The current website backup file of Zooey Dot Pub (not publicly available, but just to give you an idea,) is about 1GB. Which, I doubt that'd be the biggest file you've ever seen, but it also seems like a lot for a project that is ostensibly all text? I think it's the kickass thumbnails we do. Too much awesome to be contained in mere meg territory, here at ZDP we gotta give you that extra something and spring for the gig hosting plan, y'know?
Just skimming, it seems like Wayback Machine is reasonably interested in archiving us, I didn't do a deep dive but it had snapshotted the first few articles I tried to click on.
But also like, to be clear, this article isn't about Wayback Machine specifically, I just think that Wayback Machine is a very relevant tool to the erasure question. It is a very notable archival force that runs countervalent to erasure. But, say that they decided randomly one day that zoos are icky and they want to purge all of the icky zoos from their archives? Zooey Dot Pub will be finding ways to survive on the internet for a long time all on our own, as we have been. We're a team of fucked up cockroaches.
If you wanted to back up all of the text of ZDP in one swing, I think the RSS feed has all of the text of every article? Don't quote me on it, this is just based on skimming through it and my browser lags a LOT just from having this page open, but it seems to have all of the contents, just with a lot of extra web 3.0 barnacles on there as well.
Call this egotistical, but I think that in 100 years, someone who wants to is going to be able to easily access the entire contents of Zooey Dot Pub. I think we've made a big enough splash, gotten enough eyeballs, that in an attention-driven economy, we're worth a gig on enough people's hard drives that we're not vanishing from history any time soon, and someday there will in fact be a bespoke effort to enshrine what we have done.
Zoo Video Games
Can't erase what doesn't exist.
Zoo Bling
Okay so like, I'm talking a lot about online stuff, because that's where this question has stemmed from: in a world that has become so online, can zoosexuality still be erased? But I do want to take a quick sidebar to mention that I very often wear zoo-themed accessories irl, and I just, find it really funny to imagine what it would mean for that to get erased.
Like, what, is every building I walk into going to notice that my necklace is green and brown, and tell me that I have to leave, and then wipe the security video of me when me and my zooey necklace were briefly in their lobby?
There is a serious angle to be had here about like, erasure in the workplace, or erasure at furry conventions, or even erasure at home, and that's not really the point of this article today, but I just wanted to mention, zoos irl, we're out here, we ballin.
Zoo Discourse Online
So hey, you might remember that the Zooey Dot Pub Discord got banned.
That was like, two years ish, of daily zoo chatter.
Do you know what historians would do for two years of daily chatter from Ancient Mesopotamia? (actual historians pls don't hate me I assume that would be a good find but I didn't actually ask anyone, but like, my only point is that a lot of data got erased with ZDPD that one could argue will be considered history someday, and like, I wanna make a point that queer historians in 500 years might be like "We fucking hate Discord for deleting this data on the zoo movement that would have been invaluable," but like, again I'm not actually a historian, but that's just the vibe of what I wanted to put out there.)
Discourse is really messy to quantify because it happens all over. There's people talking on every platform, publicly and in DMs, in text and in voice, online and irl, etc etc etc etc. Different platforms have rules that you're not supposed to be zooey on them to begin with, others will seemingly allow you to have zoo flags and stuff but then randomly ban you (erase you) for saying "bestiality" too many times, other platforms are bespoke zoo platforms (Zoo Community) and are only subject to erasure inasmuch as the platform as a whole is able to continue being online.
And like. Sometimes some of that stuff gets erased? Sometimes it gets shared and saved and stuck into the consciousness of the internet forever?
I have absolutely no idea if there's an archive of ZDPD out there. I haven't tried to find out yet. Shrug.
Discourse also just gets remembered. Like, by our brains.
Discourse is very messy, and sometimes hard to even say if something has been erased or not. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's tried to re-find a meme they saw a while ago, or a piece of furry art, and been like, "What the heck?? Why isn't this turning up, it was so popular on that day I saw it! I'm sure it must be somewhere, and I just don't know the right keyword to find it..."
Zoo Music
I think this one is very comparable to zoo podcasting. Fundamentally, we're primarily looking at audio files here, or possibly some video files if we're trying to track down stuff that was only uploaded as a YouTube video.
Zoo music is possibly also more spread-out than zoo podcasting. Like, with zoo podcasts, we mainly have ZooTT and Z&M, and then a small handful of others that never ended up having the same longevity. With music, we often talk about Zipwok and Shiv here at the magazine, but there are also so many zoos posting songs to the chatrooms they're in, just sharing little things they've been working on or things they decided to do spur of the moment. So like, if someone wanted to go full investigative journalism private investigator sleuth, maybe they could actually put together a really killer box set for the zoo archive that has things most of us literally never even heard before.
Stickers
Steeeeve's stickers from Zoo Stories are literally impossible to remove from any surface once they are stuck there, zooey stickers will actually never be erased for the rest of time, this is surprisingly the one aspect of zoo culture that is indisputably eternal.
One Pedantic Thought
For any wannabe puritans with swords out there, I think that you'll find zoosexual erasure very impossible to accomplish to 100% completion. I see it like this: Zoosexual erasure will never work completely for the same reason that prohibitions on alcohol never work completely; Alcohol can be fermented out of food, more or less, and so to make sure you get rid of alcohol, you would have to make sure that you get rid of food; Zoosexuality appears in a certain percentage of human beings at random, more or less, and so to make sure you get rid of silly cheeky zoos, you would have to cause the apocalypse.
I think with the assistance of the internet, a lot of what we've been up to lately is here to stay, much more-so than it was back in the days of copying a book by literally rewriting the entire book by hand again. In the year 2125, we might not be able to look back and say that we have a 100% complete snapshot of everything zoos were doing with no Lost Episodes or questions, but I think there will be no doubt that we at least know what the big zoo projects were, and what the cultural zeitgeist around bestiality and zoophilia was at this time.
Also like, I'm kind of tickled by the idea of zooey hipsters. People in 2125 who are like, "Oh, I'm not like other girls, I'm not that interested in the latest zoo pop, I prefer the old stuff from back when everyone actually had to think for themselves, I prefer reading Zooey Dot Pub's 2024-2029 works while I listen to Zipwok's Zooey ASMR in the background, but you have fun with your (tasteless) modern zoo films and let's plays."
Article written by Alissa Dogchurch (July 2025)
Find ZDP on Telegram at https://t.me/zooeydotpub
Find the ZDP RSS feed link in our footer any time you're on the website! That url for anyone interested is https://zooeydotpub.org/feed.xml
