Archive Home Page Perhaps the place where "cute" enters into the picture is the last part of
the evolution of evolution thoughts (realizing that it's just a theory
without supporting data). It's youth and vitality and innocence we seek and
when those things are taken from us by either or culture or natural
processes, then somehow we seek to replace it or compensate for it.
Selling youth and vitality is one of the mainstays of advertising and it's
much easier to go out and and buy it as a vicarious replacement than to
reopen those wells within ourselves, even though that almost always results
in just a temporary ameloration of the loss. When this moves to the domain
of relationships if the folks aren't aware of the motives then there is the
potential for a lot of harm. You can't "own" youth in another person and you
can't "be" who or what they are and the dynamics of this kind of substitution
is the fastest path I know to domestic violence and the rage associated with
my statement "you hate all you love". Youth like love can be shared, but
CANNOT be owned or conquered (symbolic conquest of the fear of death) without
very destructive consequences for both parties. The gay teens here online
that I've talked to often voice their frustration with this. As one of them
said, they feel like SOME of the older people hitting on them are trying to
suck the youth out of them.
Evolutionary success in the straight culture for males is now often
characterized by power and a sexy young woman as a mate or plaything as a
symbol of their prowess. The woman is taught to find a rich doctor and the
man is taught to accumulate power so he can get the sexy young woman. This
is of course the classic find a powerful provider evolutionary instinct of
the female and the classic conquer all rivals evolutionary instinct of the
male.
What has changed is that in this culture at least neither of these things are
necessary for survival, yet they continue to be artificially supported. The
ultimate tragedy is that people are now included as products in the
marketplace. Foreign brides for rich bachelors. In India the dowry system
is often little more than an exercise in selling daughters to the highest
bidder (Ghandi considered it a travesty). Young women and young men alike
are available for sale, and savvy and unscrupulous marketers know that in
the promotion and creation of alienation from the self, they can produce both
supply and demand. And in my own inner matrix here in the ultimate
marketing culture "love for sale" is not just the name of the pet store of my
youth, but the symbol of the final act of the ultimate degredation of our
humanity and the appeasement of the dragon.