When You're Cute - Everything's Tiny?

Have you ever noticed that essentially anything miniature is considered 'cute'? Mice are suddenly cute when they make tiny, high-pitched, soft yawns and sneezes in cartoons; in real life, smaller mice are considered less scary and much cuter than the larger rat. This perception only really holds with regard to the expected size of the target; a spider that's the size of a thumb nail is HUGE; one the size of a dot on a page is 'cute' (barring strong arachnophobia). Like so many other things, cuteness is relative when it comes to size invoking the cute reaction. However, what we actually find cute isn't a cultural thing; it's an innate thing. Combined with our natural human tendency to find meaning in anything, it is not surprising that we find 'cute' not just in our offspring, but everywhere.

Cuteness can be found in adults as well as in children. There is strong evidence suggesting that female attractiveness is more or less judged by the same set of 'rules' regardless of culture or background. For the moment, we're going to focus on women because a) based on current research women are just easier to generalize about and b) because not many men are actually 'cute' in the biological sense. The word has simply been misappropriated to mean attractive when used in the male sense, and while this is debatable, after the age of 10 very few boys qualify as being 'cute' by psychological metrics. If they are, then chances are they look very feminine and attempt to mask it any way they can.

When you're cute not everything is tiny - what I mean by this is that you look child-like. As it is biologically adaptive for us to hang around to raise our children, nature gave us our reaction to 'cute' so that we would actually want to stick around. It is not just our culture which is obsessed with youth in women regarding attractiveness; most attractive women actually exhibit child-like physical features, such as large eyes, small noses, smallish, full mouths - even small size. This causes the same knee-jerk reaction we have to cute kids to occur with cute women: you want to protect them. This is often why your average super-model isn't cute (after all, she's huge) while your average petite woman - regardless of actual physical attractiveness - is considered cute. The tinier you physically are, the more likely you are to look cute because people simply can't get over how tiny you are.

So regardless if you're at the top of the height chain or the bottom of the height chain, some baby-ish characteristics make you more attractive, but at the top end you're a 'sexy' model; at the bottom end of the height spectrum you're a pixie. It's the women in between that you've got to watch out for.