Cute Url

[Lorna Schildt]

Joiningthe swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.

Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.

You know that feeling when you're holding something adorable and suddenly want to mash its cute little ribcage into its lungs? It's a feeling generally accompanied by a statement like, "Aghck it's just so sweet! I could just crush it!" At face value this is a fairly psychopathic urge, but it turns out this frustration is actually a well-documented psychological phenomenon known as "cute aggression."

The phenomenon was first properly documented by two Yale graduates, Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon, in 2012. They set up a experiment in which they handed out sheets of bubble wrap to 109 study participants and showed them either slideshows of cute, funny, or neutral-looking animals. The general theory was that people watching any of the three slide groups would fiddle with the wrap, with only minor bubble-popping upswings for the cute slides. But what researchers observed was that the people looking at cute animals completely freaked out, popping far more bubbles than either of the other two groups.

To find out why, I spoke with Anna Brooks, a senior lecturer in cognitive neuroscience from Southern Cross University. According to Brooks, this behavior is "frustration about an over-the-top reaction that we can't really act upon." Not only that, but everyone feels it far more acutely when they can't physically touch the animal they're seeing.

The science behind cute aggression is still reasonably murky, but Brooks explains that the typical theory comes down to cross-wiring in the brain. " The brain's mesocorticolimbic system mediates the response to cuteness," she says. "Dopamine is released, and that makes us feel good. But interestingly, this process also is involved when we act out on aggressive tendencies. It's possible that there's some cross-wiring of the response to cuteness and aggression being mediated by dopamine release."

I asked Brooks why this might be the case, and it turns out there's a pretty interesting evolutionary explanation: The human brain chews up vast amounts of energy, especially when we're feeling emotional. And that's why brains have to be able to modulate their own emotional responses. As Brooks says, "The ability to regulate one's strength of emotional response is highly adaptive: It stops us from investing too much energy into things."

In layman's terms, while we're melting into puddles looking at small dogs on Facebook, we're basically expending energy that our bodies could better spend on something productive. So our brains compensate. They hand over a rush of the opposing emotion to mediate the experience and basically tell us to get on with our day. Brooks likens the experience to that slightly mad feeling you get when you're so desperately sad that you begin to laugh hysterically.

Dyer and Aragon from the original Yale study referred to these mechanisms as dimorphous expressions of positive emotion and concluded much the same thing after the experiment. As Dyer explained in an interview with Live Science, "It might be that how we deal with high positive emotion is to sort of give it a negative pitch somehow. That sort of regulates, keeps us level, and releases that energy."

Cute aggression is a universal psychological phenomenon that all humans experience to varying degrees. The Filipino language, Tagalog, probably has the most succinct word to describe the feeling: Gigil, which means gritting your teeth and trembling when a situation becomes overwhelming.

Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil' textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

Amy Ireland is a theorist and experimental writer currently based in the UK. Her research focuses on questions of agency and technology in modernity, and she is a member of the techno-materialist trans-feminist collective, Laboria Cuboniks.

Maya B. Kronic is the agent, patient, and product of an ongoing research project on hyperstition, gender accelerationism, and cuteness. They are currently co-director of research and development at Urbanomic.

Cuteness is a type of attractiveness commonly associated with youth and appearance, as well as a scientific concept and analytical model in ethology, first introduced by Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz.[1] Lorenz proposed the concept of baby schema (Kindchenschema), a set of facial and body features that make a creature appear "cute" and activate ("release") in others the motivation to care for it.[2] Cuteness may be ascribed to people as well as things that are regarded as attractive or charming.[3]

Doug Jones, a visiting scholar in anthropology at Cornell University, said that the proportions of facial features change with age due to changes in hard tissue and soft tissue, and Jones said that these "age-related changes" cause juvenile animals to have the "characteristic 'cute' appearance" of proportionately smaller snouts, higher foreheads and larger eyes than their adult counterparts. In terms of hard tissue, Jones said that the neurocranium grows a lot in juveniles while the bones for the nose and the parts of the skull involved in chewing food only reach maximum growth later. In terms of soft tissue, Jones said that the cartilaginous tissues of the ears and nose continue to grow throughout a person's lifetime, starting at age twenty-five the eyebrows descend on the "supraorbital rim" from a position above the supraorbital rim to a position below it, the "lateral aspect of the eyebrows" sags with age, making the eyes appear smaller, and the red part of the lips gets thinner with age due to loss of connective tissue.[4]

A study found that the faces of "attractive" Northern Italian Caucasian children have "characteristics of babyness" such as a "larger forehead", a smaller jaw, "a proportionately larger and more prominent maxilla", a wider face, a flatter face and larger "anteroposterior" facial dimensions than the Northern Italian Caucasian children used as a reference.[5]

Physical anthropologist Barry Bogin said that the pattern of children's growth may intentionally increase the duration of their cuteness. Bogin said that the human brain reaches adult size when the body is only 40 percent complete, when "dental maturation is only 58 percent complete" and when "reproductive maturation is only 10 percent complete". Bogin said that this allometry of human growth allows children to have a "superficially infantile" appearance (large skull, small face, small body and sexual underdevelopment) longer than in other "mammalian species". Bogin said that this cute appearance causes a "nurturing" and "care-giving" response in "older individuals".[10]

The perceived cuteness of an infant is influenced by the gender and behavior of the infant.[11][12] In the Koyama et al. (2006) research, female infants are seen as cute for the physical attraction that female infants display more than male infants,[11] whereas research by Karraker (1990) demonstrates that a caregiver's attention and involvement in the male infant's protection could be solely based on the perception of happiness and attractiveness of the child.[12]

The gender of an observer can determine their perception of the difference in cuteness. In a study by Sprengelmeyer et al. (2009), it was suggested that women were more sensitive to small differences in cuteness than the same aged men. This suggests that reproductive hormones in women are important for determining cuteness.[13]

This finding has also been demonstrated in a study conducted by T. R. Alley in which he had 25 undergraduate students (consisting of 7 men and 18 women) rate the cuteness of infants depending on different characteristics such as age, behavioral traits, and physical characteristics such as head shape, and facial feature configuration.[14]

Borgi et al. stated that young children demonstrate a preference for faces with a more "infantile facial" arrangement i.e. a rounder face, a higher forehead, bigger eyes, a smaller nose and a smaller mouth. In a study that used three- to six-year-old children, Borgi et al. (2014) asserted that the children showed a viewing time preference toward the eyes of "high infantile" faces of dogs, cats and humans as opposed to "low infantile" faces of those three species.[15]

There are suggestions that hormone levels can affect a person's perception of cuteness. Konrad Lorenz suggests that "caretaking behaviour and affective orientation" towards infants as an innate mechanism, and this is triggered by cute characteristics such as "chubby cheeks" and large eyes. The Sprengelmeyer et al. (2009) study expands on this claim by manipulating baby pictures to test groups on their ability to detect differences in cuteness. The studies show that premenopausal women detected cuteness better than same aged postmenopausal women. Furthermore, to support this claim, women taking birth control pills that raise levels of reproductive hormones detect cuteness better than same aged women not taking the pill.[13]

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