I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with cuteness. While I can appreciate it (almost) as much as the next person, I hate it when it’s forced on me. Like, just for example, let’s say I’m at work and one of my co-workers brings in their “adorable” two year old son/daughter/whatever.
I’ll be innocently plowing through some hideous presentation, not in the best of moods, when Mr. X’s “darling little cherub” will pop up at my desk, grinning ear to ear, and start rearranging my stapler, tape dispenser, paper clip holder, and anything else he can get his grubby little jam-encrusted hands on. The cadre of co-workers following this little angel around, most of them childless, will all watch this and coo, “Oooooh, isn’t he just PRECIOUS?” “Oh my god, that is just SO cute.” Blah blah blah.
It's the same kind of thing that happens when you go visit your Aunt Agnes and her darling little (extremely long-haired) cat comes and crawls up in your lap. “Oh, isn’t that SWEET,” says Agnes, “Puddles likes you.”
"Puddles?" I respond weakly
“Yes,” Aunt Agnes responds/gurgles. “Her is so coot, isn’t her?”
I nod agreeably even though Puddles is rubbing copious amounts of fur onto my lint-magnetized sweater, while also arching her rear end area dangerously close to my face, causing horridly vivid assumptions/imaginings of a recent trip to the litter box.
But anyway, the point is, okay, yes these little creatures may be cute, but that doesn’t excuse them from doing non-cute things. I think we have been too easily manipulated into deciding what is considered “cute” and what our responses to cuteness should be. So, imagine my delight, when a dear friend (who is very cute, by the way) sent me an old article he stumbled across called, appropriately enough, “Cuteness” and that was written by a Mr. Daniel Harris and published in a not-so-cutely-named quarterly called Salmagundi way back in 1992 (wow, the 20th century! They WROTE back then??). I still find it has resonance, though.
Actually, I must confess, when I first read Mr. Harris’s column I initially lumped it into a category of “things that should not be analyzed.” This group includes treatises on everything from “A Proposal to Classify Happiness as a Psychiatric Disorder” to “Cultural Presentations of Self in Professional Football” (both REAL articles! I swear!). However, after a second reading, and after innumerably more run-ins with cuteness, I’ve become a big fan of Mr. Harris. He says, “Cuteness...is every parent’s portable utopia, the rose-colored lens that colors and blurs with soft-focused sentimentality the profound drudgery of child-rearing.” Hard to believe that’s a sentence about cuteness, eh? And of course when I tried that on the next parent I met at the grocery store who was foisting their child’s cuteness on me in the check-out line, I simply got a “Um, what?” as a response.
But I was satisfied.
Mr. Harris also discusses how the “aesthetic of cuteness is carefully designed and heavily mannered.” For examples, he trots out a list of dolls like So Shy Sherri, So Sorry Sarah, and the Cabbage Patch Kids. I must stop here, however, and mention in the fairness of complete disclosure that I had for a very long time a Cabbage Patch Kid that I bought when I was much younger (okay I was still an adult--22--but I was a YOUNG adult). Anyway, Mr. Harris provides a quite entertaining description of So Shy Sherri that will undoubtedly keep me from ever looking at these kinds of dolls in the same way ever again.
He refers to Sherri as an "anatomical disaster...her legs are painfully swollen, her fingers are useless pink stumps that seem to have been lopped off at the knuckles, and her rosy cheeks are so bloated that her face is actually wider than it is long.” Although I sniggered over this vivid description, I have to admit to feeling sorry for any potential daughters of Mr. Harris if they were to ever ask for a So Shy Sherri for Christmas only to have dad launch into that hideous account of Sherri’s deficits as a toy.
Also, I must admit that had I stumbled across Sherri in a store before I ever read the above “exposé,” I probably would’ve went “Awwww, look, isn’t that CUTE?” However, when I got Nathan (my Cabbage Patch Kid), I was forthright enough to admit that he, like most every other Cabbage Patch Kid, was only cute in a hideous sort of way.
Harris also discussed the “cruelty of cuteness” a fun anomaly of a phrase if ever there was one. His best example of this is the real live fainting goat “which has acquired of late a perverse chic as a pet (bred with myatonia, a genetic disorder, it coyly folds up and faints when you scream at it).”
Now how many of you out there, who may not have heard of this unusual creature, just thought, “Oh, how CUTE!”?? I am ashamed to admit I’ve been morbidly curious to see this animal do its thing, but I can’t really say that it’s because I would think it’s cute; but, rather, because I would find it.....um....interesting. Yes, that’s it. It would be interesting to me to see. And instead of saying, “Oh, how cute,” I would be more likely to say something like....like....oh, like “My, how very odd. And how distressing to find that other, less enlightened individuals would look upon this tragic spectacle as something ‘cute’.” And then I would walk away, sniffing with disdain.
Really, I would.
r maybe I’d take my cootsey-wootsey wittle Nathan to see it.
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