The tyranny of the cute

I have an ongoing romance with an imaginary university where I just teach and learn in ways quite different from the way it is done in traditional universities. One of the courses I teach in that imaginary university is "Hello Kitty 101." Yes, I am being a sarcastic nut but maybe not in the way you think. I was a Sanrio fan when this pink roving empire of cuteness was just invading the country and the preferences of many little girls in the 70s. But like most things, I eventually shed it, too. Now as an adult, I can’t help but notice that there seems to be a public view of nature that can be characterized by what companies like Sanrio and Disney epitomized, this obsession with Cuddly Unreal Things for Endearment or CUTE.

I don’t think "cute" also means "beautiful" as a recent CNN feature seemed to have had us thinking. The faces of models that babies with their yet uncolored (by culture) preferences, find beautiful are, as research has found years ago, according to a proportion of the face and body which bears the golden ratio or the Fibonacci number which I have already written about more than three years ago in a column entitled "Symmetry and the Rose" (please e-mail me if you want a copy of that column.) Now, why the general shopping population finds so many other things cute – stuffed toys, bags, cellphones and according to a bunch of over-excited young people sitting next to me in a restaurant last week, lip gloss – is something that the golden ratio cannot single-handedly explain. As Natalie Angier’s article "The Cute Factor" in the New York Times last Jan. 3 stated, cuteness is not the same as "beautiful." For reasons which still eludes scientists, "cute" seems to have something to do with things that are rounded, soft and move in a "funny" way that elicit our "oohs" and "aahs" as if they were the most succinct expressions available in the English language. Also cuteness does not have the "snob" factor that beautiful things seem to have; the former are ordinary but somehow pull your affection toward them.

Hello Kitty 101 is a course that will try to give students a picture of nature if nature really behaved like Sanrio or Disney – carefully coming up with designs according to what humans find cute. For instance, I don’t think Hello Kitty herself will survive the wild with that big ribboned pink head of hers. I think she will easily be dinner or at least, a welcome dessert to something as uncute as the hyena. Don’t even get me started with Mickey Mouse and his jumpsuit costumes. The course will try to make students realize that for humans to like cute things is not surprising given our evolutionary story since "round, soft, clumsy and homely" are what human babies look like, but we have to remember that "cute" is not a meaningful perspective, when you want to explore and understand nature because "cute" is not something nature "thinks" about. Life on the planet did not evolve depending on the passing marks given by a bunch of human judges a la American Idol. We were latecomers in the story of life, our ancestors being here only about two million years in a 4.6-billon-year-old planet.

But how many of us are so guilty of this – picking something just because it was "cute." In school, the "cute" ones were the ones who were popular. And you think that parents are the refuge of a "face that only a mother can love?" Think again. In a study reported in the New York Times on May 3, 2005 entitled "Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift" by Nicholas Bakalar, it was found out that a significant percentage of babies who ranked low in the cute scale were not strapped with seatbelts as they sat in shopping carts while a good number of their cute counterparts were. It is also worth mentioning that Dads were even more negligent in buckling up their "uncute" babies.

In zoos, the cute animals are the ones who get the most attention. Even with conservation, scientists point out that we seem to pick creatures to conserve according to their "cuteness." Even Carol Linnaeus, the founder of that system of scientific names, which we all hated when we were in school, seemed to be guilty of having fallen into this cute trap having named the dodo bird, Didus ineptus, which meant "stupid." The dodo is a wingless bird whose head looks like a pilot or swimmer’s cap and has an over-extended, irregularly shaped beak – well, you get the picture, it was not Disney stuffed-toy material if you rendered it lifelike. But it was not a stupid bird. I know of humans who are far more glorious idiots than the dodo bird. I also know of humans on whom nature (and their disposable income) seems to have spent most of her energy to make them cute but on nothing else.

While nature may have "cute" appearances, its elements always have a wildness about them that could be described as anything but "cute." This will be the second part of my Hello Kitty 101 course. Pandas seemed cute until I saw one mauling a tourist outside its cage. Sea lions in the Galapagos were cute until I saw them violently compete for mates or get very territorial and won’t let us pass the only docks in some Galapagos islands or until I saw them get eaten by sharks as nature’s ways would have it.

Gardens and tabletop fountains are "cute" but wetlands are not. But it is wetlands that act like a sponge, absorbing water in wetter seasons and releasing them on drier times. Being such, they harbor the rich breeding grounds of a wide array of organisms, being the place where the sea meets the earth so it is muddy and insect-heavy. In other words, it is not exactly the setting for a torrid love scene of your favorite cinema couple. I myself had to learn to resist this cute trap because when something is cute, it is really just so much easier to cradle it in the emotional nests of my brain and write about it. A close friend of mine reminded me that February is Wetland Month. I have to admit that in terms of science-writing, it is not as easy to write about wetlands as when I had to write about Einstein Year last year, Einstein being the science rock star that he was, with that picture of him sticking his tongue out. But we have to remind each other that "cuteness" does not really figure in natural life. Life forms and habitats are here not because they are cute but because they have creatively adapted to changing conditions. If humans simply used the "cute factor" in transforming our landscape, we shall turn wetlands and all the other places in the planet into English gardens, malls or if the MMDA sees them, a good U-turn site.  

We should be deeply grateful that scientists do not study things because they are "cute," otherwise no one will study viruses, bacteria, insects or other things that are not cute or are not even seen! My aunt, Marissa, recently asked me in an e-mail, why spiders and ants are so annoying. I told her that that is a funny question considering that ancestors of spiders and ants were here before our human ancestors were, so that it is very likely that these spiders and ants, not on e-mail but in the way that insects do, are also asking their niece-ants and niece-spiders why humans are so annoying. Nonetheless, my aunt still plans on spraying them off to the afterlife.

Because humans make important decisions that affect and transform nature, does this spell impending doom for the uncute? Remember, "cute" is based on perception, just like reverence to authority. I read somewhere that a prince is only kept royal by the reverent gaze of his subjects. It is a very thin gaze held only by tradition. What makes something "cute" is as tenuous since the "cute" among us are only as cute as those we find "uncute," which means that Denzel Washington is cute because well, there is Wesley Snipes. Opposites –or our perception of them – are what makes for a complete and beautiful view.

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