1 year ago“Indeed, at the risk of being obscene myself, I am tempted to declare that the closest cousin to cute media is actually pornography. As with porn, our reactions to cute media are often strong, immediate, compulsive, and—at the very least—keyed to biological imperatives and the psychoanalytic rhythm of repetition. (“That is not dead which can eternal lie.”) The involuntary intensity of the cute reaction is a clue; I have heard addicts of various cute feeds on the Internet (like Cute Overload or The Cute Project) refer to their fare as “cute crack.” Indeed, I would argue that the cutification of contemporary culture is actually the reverberant inverse of its increasingly explicit sexualization. Socio-biologically, the effects of arousal triggered by cute media and sexually explicit images might even be said to be two sides of the same apparatus of capture.”
