What Is Up With Cute?
By Ann Huggett (05/05/03)
Everywhere you turn you see it; you can’t get away from it! It permeates marketing, television, advertising, magazines, cereal boxes, fast food franchises, you name it. No, I’m not referring to bad smells or poor spelling. What I’m referring to is the cultural consumerist concept known as “cute”.
This cute business isn’t innocent or baby bland but an East-West dichotomy coupled with corporate fascism, cultural barbarism, and a soupcon of pedophilia thrown into the mix. If these were normal times where public morality and knowledge were at a high level, this bizarre form of cuteness would be laughable.
Unfortunately, nothing's normal now and the bette noir bane of knowledge (a.k.a. "cuteness") is now a rampant phenomenon in our culture. We've all seen it from ads for clothes that made young teen girls look like sluts to some dim bulb here from New Zealand who felt she should win every argument because she was "cute".
Cute to me is a kitten, puppy, or any newborn doing their clumsy thing. Babies, with their round, innocent, non-developed facial features elicit a protective reaction from us as adults. They are cute on purpose and we are hard-wired to respond to this cuteness in order to protect them during their vulnerable time as infants, toddlers, and young children.
The Disney Studios understood this concept and made their Mickey Mouse progressively more infantile in his facial features until the rat like trickster Mickey in his 1929 debut of “Steamboat Mickey” bears no resemblance to the bland goody-two shoes of today’s Mickey. (Disney even did a “Disney Babies” but I don’t even want to go there! You want to see mice and ducks crawling around in nappies, that’s your business!)
It's often been said that the West creates while the East reflects. The reflection of Western culture and advancements is not a true mirroring but more of a fun house reflection since our cultures and mindsets are so different. The Indians and Hong Kong Chinese probably have the best grasp of Western culture since they benefited from British colonialism. The Japanese have a similar grasp due to the American occupation after WWII. This grasp for the Indians and the Japanese, however, is more grasping than absorbed. They love our gadgets, money and status symbols more than the actual concepts that gave rise to them.
Hence you will get our Valentine's Day distorted in Japan as a day when women give men gifts and sweets but not vice versa. Cartoon characters, which have nothing to do with Christmas like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, get the full Santa Claus court press. The fluid animation of American cartoons is reduced to Kabuki poses: static pictures with sounds and over the top emotional responses.
Japanese animation is all the rage now and those round faced, big eyed Pokemons, bland Hello Kitties, and Sailor Moon go-go girlies are simply too cute to bear. The ratio of eye space to facial features is so extreme as to be grotesque. Throw in that little eye sparkle so beloved by anime artists and it makes you want to throw up. That last comment is an adult’s reaction. I have never been able to sit through a “Sailor Moon” cartoon let alone an entire half-hour of “The Powerpuff Girls” despite the cartoon’s reputation for being edgy and hip.
So why are young adults wallowing in this stuff when they should be moving on to serious literature and music? It’s because they’ve been placed in a permanent infantile mindset through the indoctrination in our union dominated schools intent on teaching content-free subjects and emphasizing emotionalism. Young people today have no knowledge of our British heritage or Western culture, no appreciation of history, music, art, or literature. They are childish, cultural barbarians, devoid of logic or reasoning. They welcome the Eastern misinterpretation of their native culture because they, like the Asians, do not understand the basis of Western culture.
Throw in the nubile bodies of young teens and adults, especially with minds still stuck in childish mode, and you get silly pinks and powder blue clothes with cartoon logos, ribbons, and gobs of make-up so these little Lolitas can play at being grown-up without having to face the reality. And the perverts of the world have noticed. Reading an article on Japanese animation last year, I stumbled across a comment made by an adult Japanese male who said something to the effect that Sailor Moon was so cute that he wanted to hurt her! Ugly!
In the US, poor 6 year old JonBenet Ramsey met a horrible fate in her tawdry climb to stardom on the little miss beauty queen pageant circuit. Then adults were pushing a too young child into a bad parody of mature sexuality to the point where she became the victim of a pedophilic sexual predator. Now physically mature young adults try to keep themselves in a permanent state of childish display.
Sex sells and the corporations push those sleazy clothes along with their sleazy entertainers and sleazier music. Teens can swoon over “boy bands” but if you ask kids what instruments these replaceable non-talents play, they’ll look at you like you’ve lost your mind. Those hip-humping on stage struters are a band because the corporate music industry has declared them to be so. The ability to play a musical instrument or sing in key no longer matters. The same goes for the trampy ululating girl singers like Jennifer Lopez or Mariah Carey with Brittany Spears being nothing more than a musical stripper. The music is brainless and/or vicious because that is what the audience now is.
These are the consumers that have been trained to spend their money mindlessly and brainlessly. These are the consumers that drive corporations into fits of ecstasy. These are the voters who will constantly vote for every socialist charlatan who comes down the turnpike promising them the Nanny State where Big Brother government will be mommy, daddy, or husband to them. We’ve already seen these socialist indoctrinated baby-brains throw major temper tantrum demonstrations in public before, during, and after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Their ignorance and hatred of Western forces was so complete that they actively preferred the sadistic, murderous dictator of an Islamo-fascist state to their own democratic countries’ leaders and principles.
Like children, these perpetual youths are totally irresponsible and careless of their mistakes. Unlike children, their mistakes will now have consequences both for themselves and the countries that they ultimately inherit .
(Printer friendly version) Email: Ann Huggett
