The communicative properties of footwear

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Two Cathy strips on this topic that I've been saving up:



The last time I posted one of Cathy Guisewite's strips, a reader muttered something about "drivel" and suggested that "for the love of all that is just and holy" we immediately read David Malki's essay on the topic — which struck me as a well-written and carefully-sourced explanation of something that's not exactly a secret, namely that Cathy is mostly about gender stereotypes, and especially stereotypes about consumption.

So to underline the scientific character of my interest in these documents, I'll point interested readers to Andrew's Wilson's home page, which includes this passage:

The Linguistic Construction of Cultural Meanings –
"The Language of Shoes"

In the context of an ongoing research project, known for convenience as "The Language of Shoes", I am attempting to approach the cultural system of footwear fashions from the twin orientations of onomasiology and cultural studies – in other words, I want to find out which terms languages use for footwear styles and what associative meanings these words and objects have within a culture. I see this work as an extension of the Wörter-und-Sachen paradigm pioneered in the early twentieth century, which married onomasiology, etymology, and cultural studies – "from the trivial to the sublime" (Hüllen 1990: 141) – within a strongly object-oriented linguistics. However, my work gives much more emphasis than did the original Wörter-und-Sachen scholars to value judgements and to the constructivist nature of culture.

I'll also link to a few publications from this project: Wilson and Moudraia, "Interactive effects of shoe style and verbal cues on perceptions of female physicians' personal attributes", 2003; "Business organizations' awareness of the communicative properties of footwear: results of a pilot survey on the regulation of footwear with female employee uniforms in a major Polish city", The Language of Shoes Project Working Paper, 2004; "Corporate Values and Cultural Discourses of Footwear : The Case of Female Flight Attendants", Empirical Text and Culture Research, 2009; "British military women in civilian knee-high dress boots : a neglected episode in women's uniform history", Minerva Journal of Women and War, 2009.

However, the key collocation "cute shoes!" doesn't seem to occur in Wilson's oeuvre, so Cathy still has something to contribute to the discussion of onomasiological performativity.



26 Comments

  1. Spell Me Jeff said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 10:22 am

    Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed a universally American male aversion to the word "cute"? Surely some comedian has dealt with this subject?

  2. K-sky said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 10:52 am

    Relevant.

  3. Mary said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 11:26 am

    @Spell Me Jeff
    October 23, 2009 @ 10:22 am
    Quote: Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed a universally American male aversion to the word "cute"?

    I've noticed. For instance, Roger Sterling in Mad Men, Season 2, responded to Peggy, the only female copywriter, when she asked if her request for a larger office was "too forward," with, "No, it's cute." And somehow his use of the word didn't ring true to me. It really didn't feel like a word that character would use, even in the 1960s.

  4. Amy Stoller said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 11:34 am

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuSftsLWh64

  5. HeyTeach said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 12:24 pm

    I think you're right about "cute" and the American male. Although I, being just such a person, use it quite frequently in reference to my wife in her outfits, and my children and their general looks and behavior. Perhaps I'm not the typical guy. However, I NEVER use it to describe the outfits or behavior of my male friends.

    More on topic — I wonder what Wilson would say about me based on my footwear. (I just go for comfort and wear them until they fall apart. Looks be damned.)

  6. marie-lucie said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 1:24 pm

    I don't see these cartoons as about "the communicative properties of footwear" but about some women's obsession with footwear of any kind, especially in the past couple of years when styles of women's footwear have multiplied and some have become extreme. The conversation between Cathy and her husband is about stereotypical differences between men and women in interests and communication styles. Cathy does not notice that at first her husband is copying not only her typical excuses for being late but her vocabulary and speaking style. Cathy eats it up and is ready not only to forgive the lateness but to abet the behaviour, until husband comes out with the real excuse, a stereotypically masculine behaviour, delivered in unadorned speaking style. Perhaps by then her anger is not so much at finding out the truth about his lateness but at having been tricked by a parodic mirror of her own behaviour.

  7. Mike Kelly said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 3:00 pm

    I don't have any problem with use of "cute" in reference to babies, puppies, kittens, and attractive women for whom "beautiful," "sexy," and possibly "pretty" are not appropriate. But calling shoes or "outfits"–a word I can't use in reference to clothing without employing scare quotes–"cute" is impossible for me. I've tried to ask my wife and daughter about what characteristics a shoe must have to qualify as cute–can high heels be cute, for instance–but I've never come close to understanding the usage. Can sexy shoes be "cute"? Can work boots be cute? Apparently my daughter's rain boots are way cute, but I have to go by others' testimony on that.

  8. u. saldin said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 4:09 pm

    Mike,

    I believe in that context 'cute' means on the particular wearer. For instance, my 2 year old niece wears polka dot pajamas that are extremely cute on her. They would look goofy on me. Just as a pair of heels might be cute on your daughter, but look odd on you. The other day my mother gave my sister a shirt and said it looked cute on her, but that she(my mother) didn't have the bust to wear it.

  9. Anna Phor said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 4:25 pm

    Mike, it's not so much about the characteristics of the shoes or clothing–all they have to be to satisfy "cute" is to be something that looks good on the wearer. But it's also about the relationship between the interlocutors. It's perfectly appropriate for me to call my (female) work colleague's shoes "cute," but it would be inappropriate to call them "sexy." Even if they were.

    You're probably in the wrong social category to use the term–I'd find it inappropriate if a male colleague told me my shoes were cute (with exceptions made for some men and probably particularly some gay men). I don't think my male friends and acquaintances use "cute" (my guess is I'd be more apt to hear that my shoes were "cool"), but it wouldn't be inappropriate if they did in quite the same way as if a male coworker did so.

  10. Mike Kelly said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 5:17 pm

    It seems I've heard my wife and daughter referring to shoes as "cute" even when they're not on somebody. Possibly the term is used as implicitly as a relation: shoes X are cute on Y, or Y looks cute in shoes X. By the way, the latter seems somewhat natural to me, the former not at all, whereas for my wife and daughter, I think both would be natural. But I do think I've heard them, and other women, use the term nonrelationally as well; shoes that they see in a store, not yet on anyone's feet, are described as "cute"–and this nonrelational use seems to be at work in the first Cathy comic above. Such a nonrelational use has struck all men that I've asked about it as alien, and quite natural to the women I've asked about it. I don't know how common these reactions are, and I have no idea why I find it so fascinating. But I do. And, yes, Anna Phor, I think "cool" would be a more common adjective for men to use.

  11. Nathan Myers said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 5:26 pm

    As a teenager I studied the matter and concluded that "cute", as I had heard it used, meant "you could break its neck with your bare hands if you wanted to". Wider exposure has led me to revise the definition somewhat.

  12. Leonardo Boiko said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 5:29 pm

    I’m a grown-up male, and I do use «cute» for other men, for clothes, computers, paintings, &c. On the other hand, I’m a bisexual guy with a penchant for genderfucking. And I have overexposure to Japanese kawaii. And I’m not American. And not a native English speaker either. Come to think of, forget I said anything.

  13. Bloix said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 7:14 pm

    Something is cute if it arouses feelings akin to maternal feelings. Things are more or less cute to the extent that they arouse feelings similar to those that are aroused by the sight of a baby. That's not an emotion that men find triggered by inanimate objects, but it seems that it's one that is easily triggered in girls and women.

    This is current usage. Not too many years ago a man or boy might have said that an attractive girl was cute. I think that is obsolete, just as calling one's love object "baby" is obsolete. And it's hard for me to imagine a heterosexual man saying – unless talking to a very small child – that a dog, cat, or hamster, or a hat, mitten or boot is cute. "Cute" said unironically by a man is utterly gay. (Even then it's ironic – the tone of "gay" speech is unrelieved irony.)

    I say this as a straight man who from time to time will say, "oh dear," and "that's a lovely picture," and "she's adorable." But not "cute."

  14. Morten Jonsson said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 7:30 pm

    I must be utterly gay, because I'd use "cute" in a lot of those instances, unironically. Pretty much all of them, actually, except maybe for boots. And I would (and do) call my love object "baby," too. Thanks for letting me know that I'm not only obsolete but not oriented in the direction I thought I was.

    Or was that some of the famous irony that the young people are so clever with these days?

  15. Lee Morgan said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 8:24 pm

    I'd use cute for a small animal or attractive girl but not clothing or inanimate objects in general. I'm 20.

  16. Graeme said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 8:38 pm

    An Aussie bloke – albeit tenderised – I'd use that's sweet or lovely, almost daily, but that's cute has never passed my lips.

    Cathy the Strip is so cliché laden I can't begin to see humour in it. But if it serves therapeutically for generations of mild OCD sufferers, perhaps it should be subsidised on the healthservice.

    Why the dearth of female cartoonists when there has been gen and a half of very funny comediennes in and around the mainstream? I can only guess that comic strips are passé.

  17. Lazar said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 8:50 pm

    @Mike Kelly:

    "I don't have any problem with use of "cute" in reference to babies, puppies, kittens, and attractive women for whom "beautiful," "sexy," and possibly "pretty" are not appropriate. But calling shoes or "outfits"–a word I can't use in reference to clothing without employing scare quotes–"cute" is impossible for me."

    My views exactly.

  18. mollymooly said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 9:17 pm

    In Ireland, cute retains its original sense of "acute", i.e. "cunning". Many of our ugliest male politicians are very cute.

    In the sense of "visually appealing", "cute" is double-damned for Irish men as both girlish and American. Of course, if you're a tweenie Irish girl, it's extra-awesome for the same reasons.

    [Off-topic] I've never before noticed "ticked" for what I would have called "ticked off". Dictionaries tell me "ticked off" originated in the US in the 50s. By this metric, Irish politicians will stop being "cute" any decade now. [Whaddaya know, it wasn't off-topic after all.]

    [(myl) The original sense of cute survives among Americans in a few collocations, like "cute trick" (e.g. here) and "cute move" (e.g. here).]

  19. svan said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 10:17 pm

    Bloix said: Something is cute if it arouses feelings akin to maternal feelings. Things are more or less cute to the extent that they arouse feelings similar to those that are aroused by the sight of a baby. That's not an emotion that men find triggered by inanimate objects, but it seems that it's one that is easily triggered in girls and women.

    As a woman (albeit one who doesn't use the expression much), I disagree that this is the sense in which "cute" is used in relation to inanimate things such as shoes. However, it find it nearly impossible to put into words the sense in which I do think it is being used.

  20. Kenny Easwaran said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 10:46 pm

    Really? A heterosexual American male couldn't say that an iPod or a Mini Cooper or something similar was cute?

  21. lhc said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 11:22 pm

    Cute doesn't just mean "looks good". "Hot" shoes are different from "cute" shoes. Red snakeskin stilettos with sharp toes, a heavy chain for a strap and a metal heel–hot. Red patent heels with not so sharp toes and bows on the side–cute. Ideally, the hot or cute shoes make the wearer hot or cute. Men might not use these words to describe shoes, but they use them to describe women wearing the shoes.

    The presumably linguistically sophisticated men protesting here that they don't understand what women mean by calling shoes cute are just repeating the point of the Cathy comic: women have their own uninterpretable (i.e. irrational) language. Seriously? You don't understand why your daughter's rain boots are cute? Would you call them "hot"?

    Similarly people who claim that they "just go for comfort" and "looks be damned": I bet it would be very easy to find perfectly comfortable shoes you wouldn't be caught dead in (neon basketball shoes, Tevas, Birkenstocks, checkered Vans, Rockports, those slip-on suede sneaker things), and that most people could guess which kinds of shoes you wear by looking at a picture of you above the knee. Saying your clothes are "just comfortable" is like saying that your speech "just communicates content". You just can't get away from indexicality, even in ratty old running shoes.

  22. Bloix said,

    October 24, 2009 @ 12:46 am

    Well, maybe "cute shoes" for adults are shoes that make the wearer look or feel child-like, or little-girl-like — or playing at being little-girl-like – that is, capable of arousing maternal/paternal feelings in others or arousing the sort of semi-paternal sexual feelings that older men sometimes have for younger women. The whole "cute" thing in Cathy is so highly sexualized in such a perverse way that it's hard to articulate without getting fetishistic about it. "Cute" embodies the notion, childish = sexy, which is something most adult men don't say about themselves and shy away from saying about women.

    Oh, and mollymoody – i'd forgotten about that meaning. I do say, "don't be cute" to my children, when what I mean is, you're being disingenuous, or, at the office, "it's too cute" when what I mean is, that argument is paradoxically clever but unpersuasive. And the meaning is a cross between cunning and childish – clever but transparently so, the way a precocious child can be annoyingly clever.

  23. Bloix said,

    October 24, 2009 @ 12:58 am

    In this xkcd, there appears at first to be a young man referring to a laptop as "cute," but no!
    http://xkcd.com/642/

  24. Bob Ladd said,

    October 24, 2009 @ 3:52 am

    lhc: "You just can't get away from indexicality, even in ratty old running shoes."

    Nicely put.

  25. Aaron Davies said,

    October 24, 2009 @ 9:57 am

    Are you sure the first strip hasn't been posted to LL before? I know I've seen it somewhere, and I could swear it was here…

    [(myl) Yes.]

  26. Katherine said,

    October 27, 2009 @ 11:47 pm

    Bloix: isn't the author of the strip male? Does that mean he used the word cute?

    Graeme re: dearth of female comic authors
    I think you are just looking in the wrong places. I read several webcomics written/drawn by women, and have heard of several more.

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