Strong women hate cute girls

Why does girliness, for some, evoke such discomfort?

I have an aversion to cuteness. By this I don’t mean cute kittens or those cute little Japanese erasers shaped like sushi. I mean cuteness on women. Big doe eyes and little button noses; short pleated skirts and frills and bows; women of a stature below 5’3; and pastel pink, God forbid. Before you diagnose me with a case of internalized misogyny, I’d like to argue that cute girliness goes a bit beyond a hatred for anything feminine or girly;  it is, rather, feeling unsettled when a woman performs as a girl. 

We live in a society where both men and women mingle across dirty sidewalks and campus classrooms wearing jeans and sneakers. Thus, in contrast, when a grown woman walks past in bows and ruffled socks and a pastoral little floral dress, it evokes the motifs of a dainty girl-child. I began to wonder why cuteness evoked such visceral…discomfort in me. The answer goes down to the political, psychological and sexual semiotics of what it means to navigate the world as a woman. 

There is a certain uncanniness to an adult being “child-like”: in Freudian psychoanalytic, the “uncanny” is to experience a hint of the repressed or the horrific in the familiar. Cuteness is a major subject of societal and psychological repression; whether it be women repressing girlish hobbies or fashion as they enter the masculine world of work, or people in general taught to repress their “inner child” as they mature. Cuteness evokes this childish uncanny, and many women may feel this aversion to cuteness because they don’t want to be seen as childish and silly when they must be perceived as serious and mature adults to thrive in their careers. 

The fear of cuteness and by association being perceived as childlike affects a person’s credibility in the office, but also affects a more troubling realm of the psyche. What we arbitrarily consider cute sadly evokes the docile lolita of masculine fantasy. I personally recoil at the sight of such flagrant visual docility on the part of other women, almost as a horror at the danger she is putting herself in. When I see a woman who has exited puberty – think 18 or older, an adult – dressing in a soft, feminine, “cute” way, I almost feel like what I consider to be a bedroom persona is being displayed on the gritty but gender-“equal” streets of real life. The gaze she will attract will more likely be that of a man seeking the adorably submissive and cutesy girl, not a strong-headed woman. In summary, many women may antagonize the “cute” because they don’t want to be infantilized, or worse, eroticized. And unfortunately, these two tend to go hand in hand. 

This corruption of cuteness does not inherently dwell as a product of every male psyche. Cuteness as sexual, in the way we know it today in the West, is not a bias held in the rest of the world. In East Asia, kawaii and ageyeo subcultures are almost exclusively perceived as simply that: a subculture and a form of feminine expression. Lolita in the East is the name of a Japanese fashion, whereas in the West, it’s the name of a sexualized nymphette. In Japan, kawaii (cuteness) became a way to rebel against the increasing pressures of the bleak adult world (albeit through consumerist escapism). 

After experiencing an economic downturn in the 1990s, Japanese corporations decided to capitalize off of kawaii. Cuteness was advertised and exported to the West, where it became tragically warped by its new consumers. The fetishization of East Asian women as docile has its origins in the prominent cultural notions of the “East” that emerged in the late 19th – early 20th century. During this era, the West’s political and military domination of the East via colonization, atomic bombings and military occupations painted a dynamic between East vs West as one of child vs adult, cute vs strong, docile vs dominant. 

Or perhaps, am I jealous? I have never been a “cute” girl: I’m tall, hairy, and I have a large hooked nose. That cute feminine fantasy is never something I could access, let alone wanted to access. On the rare occasion I have been called cute, it was by men interested in me. I still remember the first time one of my close male friends called me “cute”: it seemed as though he blurted it out like an intrusive thought. That was the beginning of the end — I knew at that moment he had feelings for me. By no fault of his, cuteness took away my agency. The banter we would share where I felt like his equal no longer felt the same. I was now a cute girl, the coquettish object of male fantasy. Desirable, disturbingly eroticizeable: the cute girl is everything I wish I was and everything I would loathe to be. 

Although I may squirm at the thought of wearing a Sanrio shirt or a frilly dress, I applaud the women who do. These forms of expression shouldn’t inherently draw the hostility of one’s sisters and the arousal of men. It takes courage to be “cute” when these two forces simultaneously exist. And it takes courage to express yourself as a woman when every step you take may land you in the minefield of unwanted sexual attention.