______BY TRACY QUAN | Fur Fashion Week is an archetypal New York happening that has been usurped, in no small way, by a band of committed fanatics. Last week, Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta, Valentino and others showed their furs to the usual assortment of favored customers and members of the fashion press. While models worked the runway in coats that most fur-owners could never afford, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals staged its annual protest, the fur-owners I know were quietly checking out cold storage rates. (If you haven't stashed your coat away for the summer, now's the time.) Public statements about fur -- aesthetic or political -- rarely speak to the concerns of the average fur-owner. While the enemies of fur continue to overstate its evils, industry lobbyists understate its pleasures. So, if you go to the Web site created in part by the D.C.-based Fur Information Council, you learn that fur is a symbol of good-hearted pluralism, rather than decadent luxury. It is not "Let them wear snowsuits or freeze their asses off on the coldest day of the year." It is "I do not like what you wear but I support your right to wear it." Fur is the fashion of "choice" -- a bland buzzword loaded with political significance, especially for women, the primary wearers of fur in North America. But the politics of fur aren't, as PETA wants us to believe, about extending human rights to animals. Nor are they simply the politics of choice. The real politics of fur are the politics of beauty and erotic power. That's why PETA's message has been trumpeted in recent years by supermodels like Christy Turlington and movie stars like Kim Basinger who would "rather be naked than wear fur" -- on billboards, in magazine ads and even atop New York City taxicabs. PETA's mission is to undermine fur's inherent sexiness, which has been recognized and celebrated in popular movies (think of Raquel Welch in that memorable fur bikini), New Yorker cartoons, Broadway show tunes, contemporary American novels, crude jokes -- and, of course, French literary criticism. "Coldness and Cruelty," a provocative study by Gilles Deleuze of the 1870 novella "Venus in Furs," should be required reading for everyone associated with the fur trade. The author of "Venus in Furs," Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, is the granddaddy of modern male masochism. How fitting that Masoch's protagonist is besotted with a demanding woman who would rather lounge around in furs than get naked with him. Nothing could be more attractive to Masoch's narrator than "the idea of a beautiful tyrant, both voluptuous and cruel, who insolently and inconsistently" does whatever she wishes -- "and wears furs." Fur had a bad reputation before PETA tried to give it one. Getting a fur is often a rite of passage for a woman who lives by her sexual wits -- proof of her skill, power and allure. In "Portnoy's Complaint," an Upper East Side floozy from West Virginia inadvertently reveals that she can't spell: After reading a note that was intended for her cleaning lady, Alexander Portnoy concludes that "furget" is exactly how a prostitute would misspell "forget." Insults aside, he's on to something. When a Manhattan call girl becomes a "kept woman," a new fur coat is the trophy that traditionally legitimizes the new relationship. For two people embarking on a long-term illicit union, a fur coat often plays the role an engagement ring would play if they were discussing marriage. A sugar daddy becomes something more than a john when he springs for a mink, and the coat is material proof that he has been, like Masoch's narrator, emotionally conquered. N E X T+P A G E: John + fur = sugar daddy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTOGRAPH BY SYBILLA HERBRICH