Outside Diary｜Uncute People

To put it bluntly: people's pursuit of cuteness is a very troublesome thing. Specifically, what I want to say is that men's pursuit of cuteness is full of various unsolvable contradictions. To be more specific, I want to re-examine the aesthetic genre of pseudo-girl/nanniang (男の娘, or it can also be extended to femboy or even brolita/lo Han). The immediate motivation is that I've always had a bit of an obsession with the genre, but I'm not a teenager or early twenties anymore.

This is not to say that males don't deserve to be considered cute, but that, at least as myself, as a realistic biological male, wanting to be considered like the ideal image of "cute" created by visual culture is a kind of thing. It is a near-impossible thing (whether based on masculine physical characteristics or age based on a "cute" image); at the same time, it is a not-so-innocuous things. Of course, on the other hand, as a biological male, it is not necessarily easy or harmless to pursue a more widely recognized male image or masculinity. That is often an unattainable ideal, not to mention the problem of another set of gender roles behind it.

At least for me, the liking for the aesthetic elements of "cuteness", the longing for some ideal social relationship implied by "cuteness", and the need for caring/being cared for, healing/being healed are reasonable enough. part. It's just that these obsessions smack of what Lauren Berlant called "cruel optimism": on the one hand, the pursuit of something that is actually difficult to achieve is painful and fragmenting, and on the other hand On the other hand, these desired objects and the pursuit of them also define and support our own identity to a large extent.

For the cruel side of "cuteness", one solution is to separate the "cuteness" part from daily social relations, and make it a product of a fantasy context that is divorced from daily life. For the research and thinking of cosplay, a form of performance, there are many points to the possibility that this fantasy situation provides beyond daily life. Another solution that is a little more troublesome than this, I think, is to focus on the "cute" ideal itself, and discuss the possibility of its coexistence with other social relationships and human physiological reality. This may involve transferring, modifying, and amalgamating certain elements from different genres. It may also involve reimagining the relationship between different gender identities, different gender roles, and even how we define the relationship between human beings. relationships, and the delineation between the private and public spheres.

One yearns for a certain form of existence, a certain form of connection with others, but the formation of that form itself contains many contradictions, not to mention the intertwined parts of different forms of existence. These problems can only be solved through communication. And temptation slowly clarified-maybe it can be summed up like this.

But anyway, when I change out of my normal shirt on my day off, put on a cute hoodie, and get my hair done, I feel like I can be a better person, more loving, and more worthy of being loved . Even that feeling doesn't always last the moment I walk out the door to face the apartment building's crop-shaven male tenants in big pants and T-shirts.

However, what gives me a sigh of relief is that now we are all wearing masks and cannot see each other's faces and expressions.