Episode 73: Transcript
Episode: 73: The rise of the cute ~aesthetic~
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction and the entire universe. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, author of the upcoming young adult novel Victories Greater Than Death.
Annalee: [00:00:14] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of the upcoming book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, which is all about modern archaeology and what it can tell us about why we abandoned ancient cities even though they were so awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:28] Such an amazing book. So today we're going to talk about cuteness. Squee!
Annalee: [00:00:33] Cuteness! Kawaii!
Both: [00:00:35] EEEEEE.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:36] Yeah. So we're gonna talk about cuteness and how cuteness has become more mainstream in pop culture in the past 20 years. And why are we so obsessed with cute things and cute iconography? And why is there a new emerging academic discipline called Cute Studies? So let's get ready to get cute!
Annalee: [00:00:54] Woo!
[00:00:56] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:22] Cuteness has always been with us, but it feels like in the 21st century, it's become a much bigger deal in the United States. Partly because animated shows have become a bigger deal and video games and a lot of pop culture that centers sort of cartoony aesthetic. And part of it is the Japanese influence, the rise of kawaii culture in the United States, the importation of anime, Hello Kitty, Gothic Lolita fashions, Pokémon, other stuff that's invaded the West.
[00:01:51] And then internet culture also has gotten very cute with lots of cat pictures and memes and lots of kind of internet speak that is very cute.
[00:02:00] So, Annalee, what do you think is causing this kind of rise of cute culture in the West?
Annalee: [00:02:06] It's a huge question. And obviously, it's overdetermined. But I do think that cuteness, as you said, it's associated with animation, and with kind of alternate worlds, in a sense. A way of reimagining reality with kind of a filter on it. And that's why I think it's important to contextualize it in internet culture, where so much of what we see is filtered, whether it's Instagram filters, or it's filtered through some kind of bubble, an information bubble. And so I think a lot of it is connected to the stylization of everyday life, and turning everyday life into a kind of fantasy realm, a kind of virtual reality realm.
[00:02:52] And I think there's some obvious reasons for that. Some of it is purely about, as you said, importing more Japanese pop culture, the rise of K-pop music, which also has a lot of this kind of cuteness aesthetic to it.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:07] For sure.
Annalee: [00:03:09] And the fact that platforms like TikTok are kind of based around, in some ways, I mean, and again, this is where it gets complicated. In some ways, part of success on TikTok involves being able to create a kind of cuteness bubble. And a lot of the videos that go viral on TikTok have some element of cuteness to them, something that makes you squee and want to hit the like button or the heart button.
[00:03:35] All of these types of obsessions with the sort of cute video or the cute, cuddly Animal Crossing creatures, are comfort food. It's about childhood, it's about safety. It's about having a filter that covers up the blemishes and the dark spots and the scary stuff and the wrinkles, and becoming kind of an idealized version of yourself.
[00:04:06] Again, this can be connected with reality TV, it can be connected with influencers, but it can also be connected with the fact that, especially in the last couple of decades, we've been living through really tough times politically. We’re dealing with climate change, which feels insurmountable and so it's really tempting to retreat into a kind of candy colored world where everything is soft and bunnies can talk to you and like the most important thing to do is collect shells at the beach, which is deeply important, but also—
Charlie Jane: [00:04:38] Very important.
Annalee: [00:04:39] Voting is good, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:41] Hearing you talk about this, I was just thinking that part of what's happened in the past 20 years is the rise of cuteness has happened in tandem with the rise of dystopia and post-apocalyptic stories. The Road and Walking Dead. Like, Game of Thrones and grimdark. There's been this bifurcation where on the one hand there's been the rise of sort of grimdark and depressing, scary, kind of jagged bloody, kind of, quote unquote “realistic” entertainment that just kind of wallows in the nastiness of human nature and the nastiness of life.
[00:05:17] And on the other hand, there's this kind of escapist fantasy of like, what if everything was kind of nice? And what if everything was cute and fluffy, and we could just be really nice to each other? I feel like those are the kind of the two poles that we kind of orbit in the 21st century, those are the kind of two… And it really is, in some sense, about escapism, and kind of niceness versus darkness and kind of horribleness. And they're both kind of infantile, in a way. Like neither one of them is grown up in the sense of having more complicated feelings, or more kind of introspection or more kind of a sense of, I don't know, mature relationships.
Annalee: [00:05:58] Or ambiguity.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:01] Ambiguity, right.
Annalee: [00:06:01] Which I think of as kind of a hallmark of adult storytelling, is that you can kind of hold two truths in your mind. That someone can be kind and also be evil or that someone can be good sometimes and bad sometimes. That's a really hard story to tell. It's not as satisfying.
[00:06:18] There's something really dangerous happening in pop culture, when you see such a strong bifurcation, where you see narratives that are just totally purged of anything sharp or dark or gritty. And then at the same time, you see narratives going the other way where everything is just super gritty, and there's no redemption, and there's no love or if there is love, it's all based on like betrayal and transactional crap. These are childlike stories. These are stories that are simple. They're like fairy tales, and they don't even necessarily rise to the level of a traditional fairy tale, which often has a pretty complicated message.
[00:06:54] Yeah, I mean, I think this is the same malady. If we're gonna call it a malady. A symptom, it's the same symptom, that cuteness and grimdark are symptoms of the same problem.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:04] So interesting to think of it that way. And to think them both as kind of infantilizing. I hadn't thought of it that way before. But I think there is something to that.
[00:07:11] There is this new discipline of Cute Studies, which was founded by this academic named Joshua Paul Dale, and there's cutestudies.org and there's a giant Cute Studies bibliography.
[00:07:24] That actually leads us to like the next question, which is, what are the ingredients of cuteness? What are the signs of cuteness and, you know, apparently, a foundational text in the the field of cute studies is this 1979 paper by Stephen Jay Gould, the naturalist, where he talks about how Mickey Mouse has changed over the decades. And it's a famous paper called “Mickey Mouse Meets Konrad Lorenz.” And basically his thesis, Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis is that Mickey Mouse started out as this kind of scrappy rodent who's like on a steamboat. He’s Steamboat Mickey?
Annalee: [00:07:57] Steamboat Willie, but yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:58] Yeah, right. He's kind of this tough… kind of a scrappy rat, kind of, who is on a boat. He's out there, getting his whatever you get on a boat.
Annalee: [00:08:08] He's salty.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:09] He's salty. He's a salty sea mouse. And then over time, Mickey Mouse becomes more childlike and his features become more simplified. His eyes get bigger, his everything else in his face gets a little bit smaller. And he becomes more kind of non-threatening and more babyish, kind of, in a way.
Annalee: [00:08:30] More domesticated.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:31] More domesticated. Yeah. And that's when he becomes the Mickey Mouse we all know and love who will welcome us into Disneyland.
[00:08:38] And so, Annalee, what do you think are the defining features of cuteness?
Annalee: [00:08:42] Well, I used to read a website about 10 years ago now called Cute Overload.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:48] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:08:49] And which I still mourn the loss of Cute Overload. I mean, maybe it's going in some sad form at this point. But it was sort of around the same era as I Can Haz Cheezburger and roughly in the same vein, of just cute animal pictures with really funny headlines and really funny cutlines. The woman who created the site had a taxonomy of cuteness, where she talked about what makes a cute animal and it was a lot of the same stuff that you were talking about with the evolution of Mickey Mouse. Big eyes. Tiny nose. Little feet. I'm sure you can find it online if you look for like “Rules of cuteness,” Cute Overload. But a lot of it has to do with having the features of a baby animal and in biology, scientists will sometimes talk about how when animals become domesticated they go through neoteny, which means they just look more babyish. That a domestic dog has a more babyish face than a wild coyote. And humans also have been domesticated. We live in houses and we eat cooked food and all kinds of other stuff. And human faces have also over the past 20,000 years changed a lot to make us. We've become less hairy and our eyes are closer together and a bunch of other stuff.
[00:10:09] The characteristics of cuteness generally are childlike features. Furriness is really helpful, too. Really soft, soft fur.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:19] Fluff.
Annalee: [00:10:19] Being tiny.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:22] Smol.
Annalee: [00:10:23] Being smol. Yeah, S-M-O-L. There's a whole… I love there's like a whole internet language around it. You can be a chonk or you can be smol, or you can be a boi B-O-I. That's kind of like the cute version of boy. I mean, it has a lot of other meanings, too that we have talked about in other episodes. But it also does just mean like a cute, smol creature.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:46] Mm-hmm.
Annalee: [00:10:47] I think that the other thing about cuteness is that it's not just a look. It's also certain behaviors that are cute. Those range from things like, yay! Jumping around happily because of something else that's cute.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:05] Bounciness.
Annalee: [00:11:06] Bounciness and being really energetic and cheerful. But, I will say, and this goes back to your point about grimdark, is that there's also a strand of cute behavior that's mean. And there's like, mean cuteness. And there's kind of the Tim Burton version of cuteness of a nasty skeleton that's kind of cute. And they’re like, we’re playing with bugs. And it's kind of cute. There's something there that's like stepping on a spider or plucking the wings off flies can also be weirdly cute. And I think that, again, it goes back to the childlike part of it.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:44] Yeah. You know, it feels like pop culture has been offering us a lot of cute icons in the last decade. Right now, everybody's obsessed with baby Yoda.
Annalee: [00:11:54] Yes, show me the bebe. Sorry, I just have to say that all the time.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:00] Oh my God. In our Star Wars episode, I feel like we talked about the idea that like one of the defining features of Star Wars is cuteness. And one of the reasons why Star Wars has become kind of the most successful space opera franchise of all time, is because it incorporates so much cuteness. Like you think about what's cute in Star Trek, or what's cute in Andromeda or Battlestar Galactica. Actually, original Battlestar Galactica had that weird fluffy creature, the Muffit or whatever it was called. The Daggit, I guess it was called? Every time there's a new Star Wars thing, you know, there's gonna be a new cute creature or a new cute droid.
Annalee: [00:12:39] Actually, and that is a feature of the movies. Every movie, they will introduce some soon to be toy creature. And yeah, I was trying to think about it. I was like, Star Trek has tribbles.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:51] It has tribbles.
Annalee: [00:12:53] But tribbles pose a problem. They're not a feature. They are literally a bug that gums up the system. And so you can't just have rampant cuteness, because that will just lead to breeding and probably girly stuff will happen and we already know that that's not acceptable, especially in first generation Star Trek.
[00:13:12] And then there's Doctor Who, where the Doctor is cute.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:16] The Doctor is very cute, especially…
Annalee: [00:13:18] The Doctor is always frickin’ cute.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:21] Especially like the 21st century Doctors like David Tennant, Matt Smith, Jodie Whittaker, not so much, I would say, Peter Capaldi, but—
Annalee: [00:13:28] Peter Capaldi has got a cuteness thing going on.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:32] He's actually cute. He's got that cute little winky—
Annalee: [00:13:33] It’s like an impish air.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:37] He is really cute.
Annalee: [00:13:38] Yeah. And actually, all the Doctors have been cute. The old—because you can have an old cuteness. Like there's little kid cuteness, but then there's like the cute old lady, cute old man thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:48] No, it’s true.
Annalee: [00:13:49] Which is again, because there's this idea that when you become old, you kind of develop childlike traits again and stuff. But the Doctors always have wuffly hair, which like, key cuteness indicator. Where's your hair on the wuffle scale? If it's all the way over at 10 you’re a Doctor.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:05] Especially starting in the ‘70s, the Doctor started to have like first kind of frizzy hair and moppy hair. And then, maybe—
Annalee: [00:14:13] The Doctor has always had a wuffly haircut, no matter what. Even the oldest, even the first Doctor had a wuffly—
Charlie Jane: [00:14:18] The first Doctor’s haircut is kind of just, I don’t even—
Annalee: [00:14:20] It’s a mad scientist haircut but it’s still a bit wuffly.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:22] It’s still a little wuffly.
Annalee: [00:14:23] Yeah
Charlie Jane: [00:14:23] I was gonna say when we were talking about Star Wars, I was like, what are other space opera franchises that have gotten to be like a big deal and the one that comes to mind immediately is Guardians of the Galaxy. And guess what Guardians of the Galaxy has going on? It's got Rocket Raccoon. It's got Groot. Especially baby Groot.
Annalee: [00:14:41] Yep.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:41] You know, the smartest thing they ever did was like ending the first movie with baby Groot because then you're just like, okay, wow, I have to see more of this.
Annalee: [00:14:48] Yep.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:48] Like baby Groot just like made everybody desperate to see the second movie.
Annalee: [00:14:52] And Rocket Raccoon is a great example of that dark cuteness that we were talking about. Where it’s like he is—
Charlie Jane: [00:14:58] Because he’s a dick.
Annalee: [00:14:59] Freaking cute. But he's a total dick. He's always mowing everybody down with his weapons. But he's still cute. He's basically in that weird overlap between nasty and cute. Mean cuteness.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:12] Yeah. And so what are other you know, cute icons? What's your favorite cute icon of the last like five years, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:15:18] I am a big fan of baby Yoda. I like baby Yoda. And it's interesting because baby Yoda in recent episodes has done some things that are kind of awful, like eating someone's unborn babies, which is kind of creepy. Admittedly, they were unfertilized eggs. I get that. I live on the internet too. But come on. That was… everybody thought that was gross and weird. And I mean, even when he's not eating sentient creatures, he's eating frogs and… He eats living creatures.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:50] Mm-hmm. He is not a vegetarian.
Annalee: [00:15:52] And he also has a thing, a cuteness thing that I associate more often with anime, which is that he's overpowered. So he's a little tiny, cute, wuffly guy, but he can lift a one horn with one hand. He has like psychic powers that are like tremendous. And we know they're only going to get more tremendous. He can probably kill you with his mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:18] Mm-hmm.
Annalee: [00:16:20] I mean, and so in that sense, he's a kind of almost bordering on the manic pixie dream girl in a weird way. Because one of the characteristics, We're going to talk about manic pixie dream girls a little bit later. But one of their characteristics like if you have a River type character from Firefly, is that they're super cute until they kill you with their mind. Until they like beat the shit out of you.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:42] That is a huge trope. Yeah, for sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:43] It's a huge thing. Yeah.
[00:16:45] I actually wanted to mention a couple of recent movies that kind of play into what we were just talking about, which are Detective Pikachu, and the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, both of which have kind of like a cute, cartoony video game character in the quote unquote, “real world.” And you have real human people interacting with Pikachu, wearing his little Sherlock Holmes hat, or with Sonic the Hedgehog. I feel like this is the thing that's been going on in movies for a long time, definitely going back to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But the fact that now we have the technology to do that kind of immersive, we can have a cute kind of CG character running around and causing havoc in a real surrounding is something that kind of gives us a different relationship to cuteness, I feel like. And particularly Sonic the Hedgehog whose whole thing is that he just runs really fast and smashes everything.
Annalee: [00:17:38] I mean, I think we see this in E.T. as well as some of the other kind of like ‘80s cutesy movies that also often have robots and stuff like that, right? Cute robots. I mean, it's interesting. I want to dig into this a teeny bit more. What's the difference between having a cartoony cute creature in the real world. Like baby Yoda in a live action show or E.T. or Sonic the Hedgehog or whatever versus Steven Universe, or She-Ra or even Pokémon, the animated series, not the Pikachu movie? What's the difference between having a cute universe versus a cute creature in our universe?
Charlie Jane: [00:18:21] It's really interesting. I mean, often when there's a cute creature in our universe, it's kind of disruptive, it's kind of this thing that kind of sticks out because it is in contrast to its surroundings. And it's often kind of a little bit destructive, or a little bit kind of messy. And like baby Yoda, eating everything in sight, or Sonic the Hedgehog smashing everything in sight. And often, the world kind of perturbs a little bit in response to having this creature in it. Things just get a little bit cuter in general, like all the humans are just a little bit more like, whoa, what's going on?
Annalee: [00:18:57] So the cuteness is infectious.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:58] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:19:00] Or you get the E.T. scenario where the bad humans who are part of the government or they're part of like some kind of like military industrial complex, or like a science, military science complex, that all of their cuteness has been drained out, right? And they're trying to contain the cute thing. They have to eliminate all cuteness from the universe. And I feel like that's another trope. And often it's portrayed as like grownups versus kids. The kids want to have the happy, cute world. And the grownups are, no, we need to put on our lab coats and be serious now,
Charlie Jane: [00:19:36] Thinking about this from a 21st century context, where we've seen the rise of Greta Thunburg and other young people who are kind of standing up about climate change and gun control and other long-standing intractable issues that adults have pretty much decided, well, we can't really do anything about that, it's too hard. Capitalism, blah, blah, blah. Kids are basically like, no, you know what, it's not okay to just have murder everywhere and to destroy our natural environment so we can't breathe or get clean water, so that we don't have access to resources going forward. And you know, it is kind of this thing where, like, in a weird way, part of what's happening in those scenarios is that kids are kind of, because they're quote unquote, “more innocent,” they're pointing out kind of the obvious. But also, in the case of kids kind of leading the charge on climate change, it is kids having a greater understanding of nature and of our natural habitat and our biosphere, whereas adults are married to this giant crushing machine that we've built.
[00:20:41] And so it is almost the Princess Mononoke thing of cuteness is aligned with the natural and with the healthy, in a way. And the opposite of cuteness is the artificial. The kind of metallic. The sterile.
Annalee: [00:20:58] The scientific.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:59] Like in She-Ra where you have—
Annalee: [00:21:01] Yeah, the Horde.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:02] The Horde and Horde Prime and their defining characteristic is basically that they're just completely messed up, inhuman, in a weird way.
Annalee: [00:21:12] Well, and guess what? Same thing in Steven Universe, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:21:14] Yeah. Where it's like literally inorganic, although very cute. Pretty much everything in Steven Universe, including the bad guys, is cute.
Annalee: [00:21:22] I don't think the diamonds are very cute.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:25] Yeah, they get cuter.
Annalee: [00:21:26] And they’re the kind of chief bad guys. They do get cuter as they're redeemed. I mean, it's interesting that the bad guys in Steven Universe are raping the environment. Literally, they’re punching holes in the planet.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:38] They're destroying organic life in order to create crystal inorganic life. I mean, in Steven Universe, it is portrayed as a battle between the organic and the inorganic with Steven being kind of the mixture of both. But at the same time, in a lot of ways, the inorganic is the cutest part. The gems are the cutest and even some of the evil gems like Spinel and… Spinel’s not evil. Spinel just has some issues from the way she was treated. But there are a bunch of other sort of really scary but cute gems who fight Steven at various times, including Peridot at first.
[00:22:16] As Steven Universe goes on, I feel like the human characters frequently risk getting pushed to the sidelines so that we can focus only on the gems because the gems are the cutest and funnest part. So I don't know, I think it's complicated, but I do think that there is a thing where cuteness, if we're gonna posit cuteness is kind of an escape from postmodern, late stage capitalist kind of dystopia and environmental collapse. Cuteness is in some sense, an attempt to return to the natural, even though, as we just said, cuteness is an artifact of domestication.
Annalee: [00:22:51] Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, it is very much associated with domestication. But at the same time, a lot of cute creatures, as we've been discussing, are tricksters. They are much like the natural world in that they're kind of unpredictable, and they can be destructive as well as cuddly. So that's definitely one of the versions of cuteness, is the kind of uncontrollable but adorable force. Which actually serves to bring us together because we realize we have a bunch of stuff in common. We all have to catch the crazy runaway zoopy flop with the wuffly floof. Right? You know what I mean? That’s our job.
[00:23:35] I mean, that's what filmmakers wanted to do with the Fantastic Beasts movies, was to turn it into chase down the wuffly fluff. And then we all know that series went in a—
Charlie Jane: [00:23:49] And then it became Grendelthorpe or whatever.
Annalee: [00:23:50] Weird direction that didn’t really work out.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:52] Grumpy thump.
Annalee: [00:23:53] For anyone.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:54] GRUMPY THUMP.
Annalee: [00:23:57] Yeah, but I think that there is definitely that strand.
[00:23:58] Well, why don't we take a quick break, and when we come back, we will talk about whether cuteness is a problem.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:04] And also the dark side of cuteness.
Annalee: [00:24:07] The dark side of cuteness.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:09] What?
[00:24:09] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:22] For this episode, I read up on a bunch of articles about cuteness and I read up on the Cute Studies canon. We're gonna link to the Cute Studies Bibliography in the show notes for this episode. And one of the things that is brought up a lot in discussions of cuteness is the idea that it's harmful and particularly that it's harmful to female-identified people who are encouraged to be more infantilized and to be less serious and to be pretty all the time. And that it's kind of tied in with a lot of internalized oppression. I think that there's an undercurrent when people worry about too much cuteness in pop culture that our culture as a whole is becoming feminized. Do you think that these are serious concerns or do you think that this is just people exercising their own internalized misogyny? Or a little of both?
Annalee: [00:25:06] You know, me, I'm all about a little of both. It's both things because we're grownups and we actually can sustain an understanding of ambiguity.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:14] Ambiguity!
Annalee: [00:25:15] I know. We don't explode if we hold two thoughts in our minds at once. You know, some of the anxiety is the same anxiety that you saw during the 1970s disco era, where there was this fear of pop culture feminizing men, and turning women into something that we didn't understand either.
[00:25:34] I wanted to return to the manic pixie dream girl trope briefly to talk about this. One of the debates within discussions of cuteness has been over this idea of a manic pixie dream girl who's basically a stock character in a number of sci fi and fantasy stories where it's just a super cute, but also competent, woman or girl who is often a love interest, and can sometimes be kind of gothy. And I think the allure of the manic pixie dream girl is that she's both cute and smart, or cute and powerful in some way. So she embodies this kind of contradiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:20] Right.
Annalee: [00:26:20] Or she kind of satisfies the urge to have the tiny little wuffly girlfriend, but at the same time because she's competent in some way or because she has powers like in a Harley Quinn kind of way. That we can kind of pretend like we're not buying into these sexist tropes that girls need to be tiny and wuffly. I'm just gonna keep using the word wuffly until we're sick of it.
[00:26:47] I mean, that's what's interesting about the manic pixie dream girl, is it's trying to sort of split the difference between girl power and girl cuteness. Powerpuff Girls, if folks can remember back that far.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:58] Diablo Cody is making a new Powerpuff Girls TV show, right now.
Annalee: [00:27:01] Which makes total sense because Diablo Cody is like literally the auteur of the manic pixie dream girl like I don’t hink she ever writes anything but that which is fine. I mean, again, I think that the manic pixie dream girl can be a powerful figure. To return to the Harley Quinn example, I have a concern not that our culture is being feminized, which I'm like, excited about, I think, you know, more feminization for everyone.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:23] Same.
Annalee: [00:27:25] If it wasn't good, we wouldn't want to do it.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:27] For sure.
Annalee: [00:27:28] I mean, feminizing is a victimless crime. Okay. It's not like murder. The girlier you get just the happier you are. There's, no one is harmed by this. We need to guard against cuteness bringing us back to a place where we are insisting that women need to be diminutive and domesticated and adorable. But at the same time, we need to be wary of condemning cuteness, because it can become a way that people explore their bodies and their expression and their gender in a healthy way. It can be a way that men are able to be adorable, and able to be wuffly, themselves. Like the Doctor in Doctor Who who's like a wuffly guy, oftentimes.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:15] Yeah, and I think that, to the extent that there's a central ideology or kind of ethos of cuteness, it is to be nurturing. It is the idea that cuteness goes along with a certain nurturingness that when you encounter a cute creature, you want to take care of him, her, it, them, and pet them and fuss over them and be nice to them. And that if you're cute, and you get hurt, people will like, take care of you. And that cute people take care of each other and that… Like the idea of like being feminized and the idea of male-identified people being feminized is important that they will become more nurturing and less toxic. That this is kind of an antidote to toxic masculinity.
[00:28:52] I think where cuteness is kind of problematized or where it becomes legitimately a problem is when it becomes kind of selfish and like all about like, look at me, how cute I am. It becomes egotistical. It becomes, I have to be the center of all attention and you will nurture me, I will not nurture you, kind of thing. And that's kind of like when we think about the dark side of cuteness, that's what we come to.
[00:29:16] And I think that part of what's been going on in terms of the dark side of cuteness is that as cuteness has pervaded pop culture in the 21st century, we've seen more cute things that are spiky. And I've talked before on the show about my obsession with the Harley Quinn animated series. You know, it has some issues especially in the first season with some kind of edgy humor that didn't really work for me, that crossed the line. But at the same time, it is a show that is very cute. Harley Quinn is a very cute figure and I think actually Deadpool is another figure who I think is very cute. And especially kind of cartoony and kind of adorable, but also gruesome and bloody and destructive and selfish and kind of a problem. But I think that part of what's lovely about both Harley Quinn and Deadpool and as their ascendancy to the top of pop culture as our reigning king and queen of kind of cute superheroes, is that they're kind of lovable. And also, they refuse to be tamed. They refuse to be controlled, and they're chaotic. They kind of mess everything up. They don't clean up after themselves. They just go around causing mayhem everywhere they go. And I think that's a thing that comes from cartoons, the idea of just like mayhem.
Annalee: [00:30:34] The Animaniacs, literally.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:37] The idea of mayhem and destroying everything in sight, but in such an adorable way. It's like in Avatar, The Last Airbender, which I finally binged because it was on Netflix. There's the running trope where they're constantly being chased or chasing someone, and they knock over this cabbage guy's cart in every episode, and he says, “My cabbages!” and it's like, on the one hand, you feel bad for this guy whose cabbages are constantly being messed up, but it's adorable. And it's funny, and it's like, “Aw, my cabbages.” And it's in the service of cuteness. I feel like that's kind of liberating, in a way, the idea that you can go and make a mess, and sometimes you can mess things up that need to be messed up.
Annalee: [00:31:16] I want to tug on a couple threads here because one thing that you brought up that's super interesting is the idea of untamed cuteness. And we were talking before about domesticated cuteness. So I think that there's tamed and untamed cuteness.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:30] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:31:32] And I think that's a good way to think through that question of, is cuteness something bad or dangerous? Because an untamed cuteness does something very different in a narrative than tamed cuteness does. I think of Cinderella when I think of tame cuteness, how her relationship with nature, she subjugates nature.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:50] Right, the mice.
Annalee: [00:31:51] The birds do her bidding, the mice do her bidding. It's not like Princess Mononoke where she's part of nature. And she—
Charlie Jane: [00:31:59] Right.
Annalee: [00:31:59] She occupies a place within nature. Instead, it's, oh, I'm the princess and the mice are my footman. And it's not—all of the cuteness is very tame. That's why the manic pixie dream girl is such an interesting figure because she is kind of untamed cuteness, but often, the narrative trajectory, where we find her, is a story of her being tamed.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:23] Right.
Annalee: [00:32:25] Which is a bigger story about how women are treated in general, in pop culture. You have an untamed tomboy who has to learn to be a princess or whatever, or learn to be subjugated to the prince. But I think that's really interesting.
[00:32:39] And the other thread I wanted to tug on here was about what these kinds of cuteness are reacting to in our real world because I am a big believer in pop culture as a response to real life events. It's not an exact science, of course. But I think what you were saying about how the cute figure, regardless of tamed or untamed, elicits nurturing from the people around them, is so interesting, because we're living at a time, especially right now in the United States. Our political leaders are neglecting us. And the worst abuses that we've suffered have involved governmental neglect. Neglect by the health care system. Neglect from the places we think of as nurturing.
[00:33:27] Government is complex, but at its core, the government is supposed to serve the people. It's supposed to have a caretaking function. And I think it's interesting that we're seeing so many fantasies about cuteness at a time when we're dealing with anxieties about who's gonna fucking nurture us? Who’s going to take care of us? If our leaders can't, can we imagine a creature that will enforce nurturing?
Charlie Jane: [00:33:53] Oh, wow.
Annalee: [00:33:53] How do you come up with a magical figure whose power is to build nurturing in the world around them? And I think Steven Universe deals with this super well.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:04] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:34:04] And really kind of asks those questions right out. The Mandalorian is asking those questions, too, because the Mandalorian is set during a time of incredible political instability. The remnants of the Imperial regime are everywhere and still have power. The New Republic is kind of dodgy and isn't really that helpful. They come in occasionally and help. But one of the things I've often wondered about baby Yoda. Here is fan theory ahead, excuse me. But I always have wondered if baby Yoda has a psychic power that makes people want to take care of him.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:44] Oh, wow.
Annalee: [00:34:44] The Mandalorian before he met baby Yoda was just a bounty hunter. And then he meets baby Yoda and suddenly he's like I'm gonna risk everything including all of my family in the covert to save this alien baby.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:02] That's a really interesting idea.
Annalee: [00:35:03] And we see in a whole bunch of other scenes like the doctor who takes care of baby Yoda when Werner Hertzog gets a hold of him, the doctor does everything he can to protect baby Yoda. And I'm like, what if that's Yoda’s power, and maybe we need something like that right now. Maybe we need a superpower that gets us all to remember how important it is to take care of each other and important it is to take care of the most vulnerable among us. And like, gosh, I wish I could implant baby Yoda in the White House right now and just force everyone in the White House to be like, wait, we need to take care of people.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:41] This ties into a thing that I'm obsessed with in general, which is empathy and the fact that if we had more empathy as a species, if we had more awareness that other humans who are not our immediate family or immediate in-group are suffering and need help, that everything would be very different in our society. I don't know. I mean, it's interesting to think about that. You mentioned Steven Universe, and you and I have been watching Steven Universe Future now that it's on HBO Max.
Annalee: [00:36:08] Yeah. Which is so good.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:10] And it's all about how Steven is now 16. His old coping strategies are not working anymore. He's no longer just able to fix everything for everybody else. People don't need him the way they used to. But also, his cuteness is kind of getting out of control.
Annalee: [00:36:24] Also he's not as cute anymore.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:26] Yeah, ‘cause he's a teenager. And I won't spoil the ending, partly because you haven't seen the ending yet. But also, our audience might not have seen the ending yet. But his body is kind of getting out of control. And he's turning like randomly pink and kind of getting distorted.
Annalee: [00:36:39] Yeah, he’s Hulking out a little bit.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:41] He’s Hulking out a little bit and it's interesting. And you know, I've been watching more of the new Adventure Time spin offs, and it's really interesting to see how the Adventure Time universe always has this undercurrent of danger and kind of scariness and spikiness but it's couched in cuteness. And part of that cuteness does kind of promise, in a way that things are probably going to be okay, in the end. Like, even Ice King gets to be kind of okay, and everybody gets to kind of be okay. And nothing’s ever perfect. But Adventure Time is a great example of a story that's very much about, especially the original show, is very much about a male hero and his friend who was his best bud. And they're kind of guy bonding, but it's just adorable. And their form of masculinity is just super sweet and cute and nurturing. And I hope that kids who are growing up watching cartoons like this are going to grow up to be better people than those of us who grew up watching GI Joe or whatever. Not that GI Joe wasn't awesome.
[00:37:46] So Annalee, as a final question, as our kind of resident horror movie expert, I wanted to ask you about why are there so many horror movies, especially recently about like a creepy doll, about scary children, about things that are cute, but sinister and just terrifying.
Annalee: [00:38:03] Yeah, I mean, the creepy clown is obviously—
Charlie Jane: [00:38:04] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:38:04] A huge trope that also goes back a long, long way. Scary children. Again, you could go back to fairy tales. This is a recurring human fear that seems to transcend time and place to a certain extent, too. It goes back to what we talked about at the very beginning with how cuteness is a kind of filter.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:27] Mm-hmm.
Annalee: [00:38:29] We use it all the time on Instagram. Like when you turn yourself into a cute puppy or a fairy or whatever you're doing to make yourself sparkly on Instagram or whatever fucking app you're using. That's exactly the fear, is that this is kind of, that cuteness is a form of manipulation. It's a curtain that you pull over the truth. I think this actually helps us understand a little bit about those fears around cuteness, the fear of feminization is also a fear that something really dangerous and toxic is pretending to be cute.
[00:39:04] When I played D&D when I was a kid, one of my favorite monsters was in the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which is a very classic D&D module. And there's, I'm sorry, if you haven't played it before, I'm about to give you a spoiler for the module. But there's a monster called a bunnyoid. And you get into this environment and you see this cute little bunny on top of a tree stump. And of course, if you're me or the members of my party, you're like, let's go pet the bunny. And then as soon as you get there, the tree stump and the bunny rise up. And it turns out that the bunny is a little head decoration on top of basically like a sarlacc. Like a giant mouth, rarr! With tentacles and everything, and so I think that's why we have this continuous tug of war between being seduced by cuteness and when I say seduced, I don't mean In a sexual way, I mean like hoodwinked by cuteness. But at the same time yearning for it because it is comforting. And we do like to be nurturing and we like to be nurtured. And so it's too easy to fear betrayal. The kid’s gonna grow up and stop being cute, or the bunny is going to turn out to be an angry monster. And indeed, in many, many stories they do.
[00:40:22] So I think the flip side of cuteness is always monstrous. And again, those two options are very simplistic options, right? What we really need, I think, are stories that can hold both things at once. That can say yeah, this is a character who needs to be nurtured. And this is a society that needs nurturing. But at the same time, we have to be wary that there will be bad actors who will take advantage of our urge to be caretakers, and we have to guard against that. So we have to be good at like sussing out which cute things are truly vulnerable and truly need care and which are actually bunnyoids.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:04] Yeah, watch out for utility monsters basically.
Annalee: [00:41:07] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:10] So I think that’s a good place to stop. Thank you so much for listening to this show. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us every two weeks at OurOpinionsAreCorrect.com. We're on Twitter at @OOACpod and Facebook as OurOpinionsAreCorrect. And we have a Patreon, patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Every dollar you gives us just makes us cuter and more nurturing towards the universe and helps us to—
Annalee: [00:41:34] And you do get special extras, very cute audio extras.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:37] You get very cute extras.
Annalee: [00:41:38] Extremely adorable writing prompts. In fact, my writing prompt a few weeks ago was all about cuteness.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:46] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:41:46] You can find out more.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:49] So we really appreciate any support you can give us. You can find us everywhere podcasts are found if you can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, talk about how cute you are, talk about how cute we are talk about everything that's cute and adorable and awesome.
[00:41:59] And we want to thank our amazing, brilliant, audio producer Veronica Simonetti and the wonderful, indispensable Chris Palmer who provided the music, and we want to once again—
Annalee: [00:42:09] Who is also cute, by the way.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:10] Yes, everybody involved in this is extremely cute, I have to say. And we want to thank you, the cutest people of all, for supporting us and for listening to us and we'll be back in two weeks with another episode.
Both: [00:42:21] Bye!
[00:42:24] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.