The Nazis adored it; the Japanese commercialised it – why we’re trapped in the cult of cute
In the fable The Wolf and the Dog, La Fontaine depicted the former as wild and free, the latter as stupid and servile. What nonsense. True, the wolf may once have been an apex predator that ruled over our forests – but -today there are none left in Britain.
By -contrast, -domesticated mutts are thriving, thanks to a survival strategy -beyond the wit of wolves. Your cockapoo or pomeranian has soft-pedalled its savagery and made a virtue of its powerlessness, instead: rolling on its back, -whimpering plaintively, looking up with big, watery eyes.
In order that their human masters wait on them hand and foot, dogs have harnessed, without quite -realising it, cuteness. They are the forerunners for what today has become a globally lucrative craze – from somersaulting pandas on YouTube to Jeff Koons’s balloon-rabbit sculptures – and the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at London’s Somerset House, titled Cute.
What is cuteness? In 1943, the Austrian zoologist and sometime Nazi psychologist (as well as future Nobel laureate) Konrad Lorenz proposed that behaviours that create the appearance of helplessness motivate us to care for our offspring – and that the same -visual cues can arouse equally intense emotions when we encounter them in animals, such as kittens, and even in dolls and teddy bears. “Whenever something reminds us of a baby, from puppies to pandas, from a sock puppet to two dots with a curved line below them, it can trigger our cuteness detector,” explains professor Joshua Paul Dale, a specialist in “cute -studies” at Tokyo’s Chuo University. “And that activates the pleasure centres of our brains.”
Lorenz devised a set of characteristics that might provoke such a reaction, including: a large head, wide-set eyes, short limbs, a soft body and wobbly movements. At the time he was setting out his argument, the best known icon of cuteness was Mickey Mouse. Mickey had made his first appearance on November 18 1928 in Steamboat Willie. But as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously observed, over the decades that followed, the cartoon mouse slowly evolved from a “slightly sadistic” rodent with a long snout, to a sweet-natured creature with oversized eyes and a wee nose. Mickey looked younger as he got older. At the ripe old age of 95, he has never appeared more childlike. Mickey’s metamorphosis makes a lot of sense when you consider that his masters, the Walt Disney Company, have made exploiting cuteness the key to a century of global domination – from Thumper to Baby Yoda.
Now we live in a world in which cuteness has serious cultural clout; a time in which baby-faced K-pop band Blackpink are considered worthy of honorary MBEs from King Charles III, and when “cute studies” has emerged as a -legitimate academic pursuit. The curators of Somerset House’s exhibition will explore how an aesthetic so charming and apparently harmless – adorable animals, chubby-cheeked babies, TikTok’s “crying girl” meme – has gained such a stranglehold on our culture.
Naturally, there will be a section devoted to cats, including Louis Wain’s anthropomorphised feline portraits which, from the end of the 19th century, encouraged people to see cats as appealing pets and not just as working animals brought in for pest-control. Another gallery, filled with cute, classic toys such as -Sylvanian Families, reminds visitors that “by inviting us to become childlike again, cuteness can provide a -sanctuary from life’s anxieties and encourage a sense of belonging”.
No doubt that’s true – but cuteness can be sinister, too. A few years ago, Islamic State joined the cute cat craze by spreading propaganda images of jihadists playing with kittens in Raqqah, captioned in cutesy internet slang (“My Mewjahid protectz me” and “I Can Haz Islamic State Plz”). Or consider the ceramic collectibles of Porzellan Manufaktur Allach, dating to the middle of the last century: cute fawns, bunnies, lambs and puppies that become disturbing once you learn how they were made – by forced labour at Dachau concentration camp. Heinrich Himmler described the kitsch figurines as “one of the few things that give me pleasure”, singlehandedly banishing the idea that cuteness can ever be a force for good.
Ground zero for the late 20th century’s cuteness boom was not Disney’s Californian drawing board but the Tokyo office of a dry goods entrepreneur called Shintaro Tsuji. One day in the 1960s, he applied a simplified flower motif to some of the beach sandals he was offering for sale – and those bearing the cute floral design were soon outselling those without. Tsuji then established a company called Sanrio and assembled an in-house team of cartoonists to exploit this lesson.
In 1974, Sanrio launched Hello Kitty, a fingerless, mouthless cartoon cat with a big round face, triangular ears, tiny circular nose, six rudimentary whiskers and a ribbon. Conceived as a rival to Mickey Mouse, her first appearance was on a coin purse. By the time she made her international debut a few years later, Hello Kitty had a back story: she was, apparently, an English feline from the London suburbs.
Celebrating her 50th -anniversary this year, Hello Kitty is now the face of a globally ubiquitous -multimedia brand, whose more than $80 billion in earnings exceeds the combined all-time revenues of the Batman, Marvel and James Bond franchises. (The most successful media franchise in the world is also both cute and Japanese: Pokémon, with a revenue of more than $100 billion – another sign of how infantile our brand-fixated economies lean).
To grasp how this came to pass, you need to understand what Japan was like in the 1970s. Hello Kitty merchandise arrived at a time when the country was in the grip of an economic recession. What arose in response to that recession was a highly lucrative cultural regression to childhood. The trend became known as kawaii – the Japanese word for adorable. As kawaii gained in popularity, its self-infantilising followers embraced baby talk, pastel-coloured fashion and fluffy animals. They also revelled in manga: comics in which the big-eyed heroines seemed eternally childlike.
The decade bore witness to a generation that refused to grow up. And who could blame them, if growing up meant becoming trapped in the cheerless world of work? Who wanted to face reality when reality was mired in economic recession? Kawaii typified a retreat from the alienating real world into a post-modern simulation.
Japan has long had a controlling interest in cuteness (“All small things are most adorable”, wrote the courtier Sei Shōnagon in The Pillow Book as long ago as 1002). But the country is not alone in seeking refuge in soft and fuzzy feelings. Today, grown-ups in the West have not only been seduced by cute novelties from the East – whether Hello Kitty or bubble tea – they have also become “kidults” on their own terms: we read Harry Potter, binge Marvel films, and gorge on -cupcakes, heedless of the truth that these were all, at least initially, products for children. Following the success of last year’s Barbie blockbuster, toy maker Mattel has confirmed that it has 45 other films in development inspired by its various brands, including a Polly Pocket movie -starring Lily Collins and directed by Lena Dunham.
The adult-child hierarchy has been subverted in our search for an escape from grown-up life. The canniest of cultural businesses have made money from exploiting that -blurring of lines, effectively monetising our infantilisation.
In her 2012 book Our Aesthetic Categories – a study of how our judgments of taste have changed in the 21st century – the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai argued, with echoes of Lorenz, that cuteness is the -“aestheticisation of powerlessness”. She meant simply that things that submit to us – pets, dolls, a Japanese cartoon cat – give us pleasure. “The less formally articulated the commodity,” Ngai thought, “the cuter.” Consider, she suggested, a baby’s bath sponge shaped like a cartoon frog: “its purpose is to be pressed against a baby’s body and squished in a way guaranteed to repeatedly crush and deform its somewhat formless face.”
Art connoisseurs of previous centuries argued over distinctions between the -beautiful, the -picturesque and the sublime – but such categories are no longer enough if we want to understand why things give us pleasure today. -Cuteness is one of the new ways we judge what delights us, at a time when we are -surrounded, not by beautiful paintings or sublime natural vistas, but by mass-produced objects such as frog sponges.
The fetishisation of cuteness, part of our cultural turn towards childishness – especially in response to uncertain, uneasy times – might seem obviously terrible. It reduces us to passive mass-market consumers – a century after the thinkers of the Frankfurt School warned of how we prefer to dull our senses with consumer products rather than take control of our destinies.
There are other downsides to this rise of cuteness. Don’t kawaii street fashions (such as Lolita subcultures, appropriating Victorian girls’ dresses with oversized bows), mark a step backwards for equality of the sexes? Certainly the fact that Hello Kitty hasn’t got a mouth has been seen by some as emblematic of female submissiveness.
But matters aren’t always that simple. When Avril Lavigne released her Hello Kitty music video in 2014 – in which blank-faced Japanese women, dressed in hot pink tights, danced automaton-like – she faced a backlash for indulging in Orientalist stereotypes. By implying that women who embrace cuteness are patsies of consumerism, Lavigne had failed to see that cuteness can have a thrillingly subversive energy.
Indeed, cuteness might be a form of post-modern irony par excellence – an appearance of powerlessness that is anything but. It’s striking that Somerset House’s Cute show includes a section on the pink balaclava-sporting art collective Pussy Riot, who, the curators argue, use a subversive form of cuteness to protest against Putin.
Academics have ascribed all kinds of benefits to cuteness, from a 2012 study that found that viewing -pictures of puppies can have a powerful effect on concentration (perhaps brain surgeons should watch animal videos on YouTube before going into the operating theatre), to a more recent report on how featuring images of -kittens on recycling bins greatly increases their usage (maybe -cuteness could even save the planet).
Less encouragingly, -American neuroscientists have also discovered a phenomenon called “cute aggression”. When something cute appears before our eyes, a minority of us are consumed not by warm feelings but by a murderous impulse. When you confront an adorable image, you may also find yourself wanting to destroy it so that you’re not overwhelmed by positive feelings. Certainly that’s how I feel when I see another repeat of Bambi on TV.
But the pursuit of cuteness can be a violent business in its own right. Just think of the demand for cuter, more Insta-worthy pet dogs – with foreshortened muzzles, flat faces and big needy eyes – irrespective of evidence that dogs bred to look adorable can suffer from severe physical and psychological problems. Looked at this way, the cute economy is hardly benign. Perhaps, then, La Fontaine was right and dogs would have been better off remaining wild, rather than becoming the wheezing occupants of their owners’ handbags.
Cute opens at Somerset House, London WC2 (somersethouse.org.uk) on Jan 25; Stuart Jeffries’s latest book is Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern (Verso, ￡20)