Inquiry into the nature of cute, # 1
Oh! She’s so cute!
Folks say, bending down to look at her in her stroller.
I smile proudly. When she toddles down the block with her candy basket swinging from her arm in her in her bat cow costume (yes, same as last year, but it actually fits now, I snap away. Cute! Cute, like pornography, impossible to define; you know it when you see it.
But we Americans are only interested in one side of cute. Unlike the Japanese. They seem to inquire, as a culture, into the nature and being of cute.
At my old job folks would gather around every so often and ooh and ah over something cute. A kitten (supercute.com). A baby panda (pandacam). At first I was resistant, but I came to appreciate the softening in the face and in stomach, the warmth behind the ears. I became a convert to the power of cute! And parenthood has given me many more moments of cute therapy: When she walks around with the towel on her head like Max in Where the Wild Things Are; when she gives that fake smile, with eyes shut, in the middle of eating; when she purses her lips and pecks at the air; when she raises her shoulders emphatically and proclaims a string of nonsense from her perch on the broken scooter in our living room.
But there are the moments when I am too tired or stressed to fall for cute. Here’s when my feelings turn deviant. When my fifteen-month-old daughter toddles about the apartment with her pajamas trailing, or yet again takes the dishrag off the refrigerator and wraps her stuffed animals with it, well, then she looks bizarre to me. A stubby top-heavy creature that has taken up residence in our home, a homunculus who has crazily strong opinions on things she knows nothing about.
At nine months, I took her to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum. As we wandered through the rooms plastered with smiling bunny wallpaper, as we circled the enormous totemic super-cute bunny, she grew more and more agitated. Then she began to cry. Howl. We had to leave.
This made me think. What lies outside the small window of cute? Why do we crave to reside in this small window? This window is where we find the helpless, the eager, the absence of will, and the desire to please--the qualities we look for in a pet.
Well, of course, the Jungian side-show of cute is the grotesque, the creepy. The deformed. The Japanese get it. Cute is the narrow zone that does not violate our will to agency. On either side of that zone is the screaming child, the squalling child, the demanding child, who is categorically not cute. As she becomes more willful, as she discovers her own agency (and she is doing so with increasing frequency), I will do well to disinvest myself in her cuteness for danger of it turning—in my own eyes—grotesque.
And what lies beyond cute for the baby? She'll tell me, no doubt.
Cute may be good therapy but it's not a good life-script for her. Or for any of us.
Folks say, bending down to look at her in her stroller.
I smile proudly. When she toddles down the block with her candy basket swinging from her arm in her in her bat cow costume (yes, same as last year, but it actually fits now, I snap away. Cute! Cute, like pornography, impossible to define; you know it when you see it.
But we Americans are only interested in one side of cute. Unlike the Japanese. They seem to inquire, as a culture, into the nature and being of cute.
At my old job folks would gather around every so often and ooh and ah over something cute. A kitten (supercute.com). A baby panda (pandacam). At first I was resistant, but I came to appreciate the softening in the face and in stomach, the warmth behind the ears. I became a convert to the power of cute! And parenthood has given me many more moments of cute therapy: When she walks around with the towel on her head like Max in Where the Wild Things Are; when she gives that fake smile, with eyes shut, in the middle of eating; when she purses her lips and pecks at the air; when she raises her shoulders emphatically and proclaims a string of nonsense from her perch on the broken scooter in our living room.
But there are the moments when I am too tired or stressed to fall for cute. Here’s when my feelings turn deviant. When my fifteen-month-old daughter toddles about the apartment with her pajamas trailing, or yet again takes the dishrag off the refrigerator and wraps her stuffed animals with it, well, then she looks bizarre to me. A stubby top-heavy creature that has taken up residence in our home, a homunculus who has crazily strong opinions on things she knows nothing about.
At nine months, I took her to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum. As we wandered through the rooms plastered with smiling bunny wallpaper, as we circled the enormous totemic super-cute bunny, she grew more and more agitated. Then she began to cry. Howl. We had to leave.
This made me think. What lies outside the small window of cute? Why do we crave to reside in this small window? This window is where we find the helpless, the eager, the absence of will, and the desire to please--the qualities we look for in a pet.
Well, of course, the Jungian side-show of cute is the grotesque, the creepy. The deformed. The Japanese get it. Cute is the narrow zone that does not violate our will to agency. On either side of that zone is the screaming child, the squalling child, the demanding child, who is categorically not cute. As she becomes more willful, as she discovers her own agency (and she is doing so with increasing frequency), I will do well to disinvest myself in her cuteness for danger of it turning—in my own eyes—grotesque.
And what lies beyond cute for the baby? She'll tell me, no doubt.
Cute may be good therapy but it's not a good life-script for her. Or for any of us.
Comments
And so is Phoebe!
Or maybe she isn't cute. Maybe you just think she's cute. So then it's your rose colored glasses that are saving her life.
She can scream and suck you of all your resources, because...well, you think she's cute. Or maybe because she actually is cute. If she weren't cute then she'd be triable for war crimes."