Cute, Pretty, Or Sexy?

Cute, Pretty,

Or Sexy?

Whether itOs childlike, ethereal, or smoldering, female beauty takes many different forms.

By Rebecca Mead

Beauty, like wisdom, is easy to identify but hard to quantify: As Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography, you know it when you see it. The crucial subcategories of beautyNcuteness, prettiness, and sexinessNare, however, easier to distinguish. Reese Witherspoon? Cute. Drew Barrymore? Cute. Nicole Kidman? Pretty. Halle Berry? Likewise. Angelina Jolie, Eva Mendes, Jessica Alba, and Scarlett Johansson? Sexy all the way.

The distinctions between cute, pretty, and sexy are, to some extent, culturally specific. In Japan, where it is not all that unusual for women well into their 20s or even 30s to dress like two-year-olds, with appliqud animals on their skirts and their hair worn in pigtails, cutenessNthe Japanese word for OcuteO is kawaiiNis itself a kind of sexiness. (There exists in Japan a womenOs magazine called Cutie, which explains how the reader might cutely accessorize herself and her life by, for example, sticking heart-shaped cut-outs all over her toilet seat or covering her television set with furry fabric.) In the UK, where the word OcuteO tends to mean appealingly diminutive rather than erotically attractive, cuteness and sexiness are much further apart: In Britain, dogs, children, and iPod nanos are cuteNnot grown women.

In the land that produced the Mouseketeer, the cheerleader, and Sandra Dee, cuteness has come to mean a kind of unthreatening little-sister charm. One helpful definition of cuteness is that provided by evolutionary psychologists, who argue that its origin lies in the appeal of helpless infants, to which adult humans are hardwired to respond positively for the sake of the survival of the species. Cuteness, this theory goes, consists of baby-like attributes: snub noses, big eyes, dimples, oversize heads, and soft, floppy limbs. This accounts for the appeal of giant pandas, who, with their big black eyes and furry curves, are considered cute even when they weigh 300 pounds.