Joshua Paul Dale (Profile)
THE manhole covers outside Joshua Paul Dale’s front door sport bright portraits of manga characters. Hello Kitty appears on construction barriers at the end of his road, alongside various cute cartoon frogs, monkeys, ducks and more.
Dale lives in Tokyo, epicentre of a “cutequake” that has conquered mass media (the Pokémon craze, which began in 1996, is now one of the highest-grossing media franchises) and encroaches, at pace, upon the wider realm. The evidence? Well, for a start, there are those small, cutified police officer mannequins standing outside Dale’s local police station…
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Do our ideas of and responses to cuteness have a biological basis? How culturally determined are our definitions of “cute”? Why is the depiction of cuteness on the rise globally, and why did the concept originate, as Dale shows, in Japan?
In Irresistible: How cuteness wired our brains and conquered the world, Dale makes no bones about it: he wants to found a new discipline, a field of “cute studies”. His efforts are charmingly recorded in a first-person account that tells us a lot (and plenty that is positive) about modern academia.
The interdisciplinary field Dale envisions will combine studies of domestication and neoteny (the retention of juvenile features in adult animals), embryology, the history of art, the anthropology of advertising and numerous other fields in an effort to explain why we just have to grin at hyper-simplified line drawings of kittens.
Cute appearances are merely heralds of cute behaviour, and it is this behaviour – friendly, clumsy, plastic, inventive and mischievous – that most rewards study. A species that plays together, adapts together. Play bestows a huge evolutionary advantage on animals that can afford not to grow up.
But here’s the sting: for as long as life is hard and dangerous, animals can’t afford to remain children. Adult bonobos are playful and friendly, but they have no natural predators. Their cousins, the chimpanzees, have much tougher lives. You might get a decent game of draughts (checkers) out of a juvenile chimp, but with the adults, it is an altogether different story.
The first list of cute things (in The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon) and the first artistic depictions of gambolling puppies and kittens (in Scrolls of Frolicking Animals) come from Japan’s Heian period, from AD 794 to 1185 – a time of peace lasting four centuries. So what is true at an evolutionary scale may well have a strong analogue in human history. In times of peace, cute encourages affiliation.
If I asked for an example of “cute”, you would probably say a kitten or another baby animal, but Dale shows that while infant care is the most emotive social engagement that cuteness releases, it is a social glue of much wider use. “Cuteness offers another way of relating to the entities around us,” he writes, “its power is egalitarian, based on emotion rather than logic… on being friendly rather than authoritarian.”
Is this welcome? I’m not sure. There is a clear implication that cuteness can be weaponised – a big-eyed, soft-play Trojan Horse to emotionally nudge us into heaven knows what groupthunk folly.
Nor, upon finishing the book, did I feel entirely comfortable with an aesthetic that, rather than getting us to take young people seriously, would rather reject the whole notion of maturity. Dale, a cheerful and able raconteur, has written a cracking story, straddling history, art and complex developmental science – and although he doesn’t say so, he has also established that this is, after all, the way the world ends: not with a bang, but an “Aw, kitty!”.
Simon Ings is a critic and writer based in London
