This entry is the personal opinion of Kaatryn MacMorgan, and not necessarily shared by CUEW or members of the leadership triad. It is provided as a discussion prompt.
It is inevitable that in the holiday season (or whatever we are allowed to call it now) one's mind turns to how things have changed in the past year, and when one begins to think in that vein, the inevitable turn is how things have turned over the years. I guess if I was immortal, it'd be centuries, not demi decades, that I would be thinking in.
The term fluffy bunny was around when I was still new to Wicca. ...
Although I don't know the exact time, from journals and books of shadows, I know *I* used the term in private fifteen years ago. It was used by me and others to refer to the willfully ignorant, including people who felt Alex Sander's claims of the source of the Alexandrian Tradition were true (most Alexandrians, these days, have no trouble about this, it's usually pretenders to their tradition that have Sanders-literalism,) people who believed Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe was the source of Wicca (the first common disputation of this within the Pagan community is found in Lethbridge's 1969 The Witches,) people who accepted without question all the claims of Gerald Gardner (like the Alexandrians, it is usually pretenders to Gardnerianism that have this literalism, as those actually trained in these trads know, and work around, these flaws...people aren't traditions, and no trad is about unconditionally accepting any leader's word....but I digress,) and other examples of blatant ignorance in the face of mountains and mountains of evidence to the contrary.
As time went on, the term was also used to include the new agers who bled into Wicca- the believers in the Golden Age Matriarchy and the Paleolithic cult from the FICTION of Jean Auel, the believers in nine million "wise women" killed and those who truncated the Wiccan Rede into "harm none." These people were not termed Fluffy bunnies by virtue of their beliefs, but by virtue of hubris- of overweening pride in the correctness of their views and the hell with the rest of us.
The definition of fluffy bunny was simple- those who believe stuff despite mountains of evidence to the contrary and are nasty and bitter to those who disagree with them. Think of the Bunny in Monty Python's Holy Grail....so cute, with grreat big teeth, out to attack people without bottles of Chambord to throw at them (I digress again...)
This extensive definition is because the term fluffy bunny, and the term non-fluffy, have been redefined by the very people who it was first used upon, and this means the word is now dead in the water, tainted beyond recognition and turned 100% meaningless.
[I do not include in this redefintion war nonfluffy.com, which predates the redefinition.]
Fluffy Bunny is now used as a term of social control by authoritarian pseudotraditionalists (in my experience, people claiming membership in BTW and various FMTs who do not turn out to actually be members of British Witchcraft or Familial Magical Traditions under actual examination) and is used to refer to members of traditions they dislike, members of their own traditions (or those they pretend to) who they disagree with, people new to Wicca and, in short, anyone not bitter and nasty to people.
An example I encountered recently was a teen who had read Ravenwolf's Teen Witch and went looking for more, because the book raised a lot of questions for her. She contacted me, and a bunch of other people, and got viciously attacked as a fluffy bunny because she had read that book first....
Let me make this clear. A friend bought the book for her, and she had problems with it and went looking for more....which is what most of us would hope one would do, and was labeled as a fluffy bunny because she'd READ SOMETHING.
Another example I recently encountered was by a dear friend who asked to cite All One Wicca in her definitions page for her coven. Although she labeled the page as definitions used by the community and not all her own beliefs (the dictionary in All One Wicca is likewise labeled) she was attacked in a vindictive hate email as a bunny for listing "The old religion" as a term used for Wicca. The author of the email had apparently gone googling for "The old religion" with the intention of correcting people (what sort of busy body goes looking? I can imagine correcting someone in a page you accidentally find, but why LOOK for trouble?) and attacked her for her bunniness for claiming Wicca was old (it was not her claim, her claim was that people use "the old religion" to mean Wicca, which googling certainly bears out!)
In a third example, a newcomer to Wicca who still believed in the Golden Age Matriarchy was called both a bunny and STUPID. This was not a case of someone who had reached other resources and reached a conclusion despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. This was someone who was new and inexperienced and had read only one book and thought "wow I like this" and went looking for more info. She was thinking Wicca might be for her, after reading one book, and was criticized both as an IRAB (I read a book) Wiccan and a fluffy bunny and STUPID for having thought the book was true.
The only thing I can imagine, in part based on talking to the now-defunct ranting witches, is that those of us who were against the bunny in years past have been so good at putting an end to the willfully ignorant that people wanting to look smart now think the way to do it is by attacking people, not by reasoned dissent, and as a result, a term that was used as a metaphor (one rarely said so-and-so is a fluffy bunny, but used fluffy bunny as an example of an extremist person that probably didn't exist, but was a compilation of all of the different forms of willful ignorance rolled into one) has now become a term to throw around to make oneself seem smart or like an "insider."
The smart insiders have no use for the term anymore.