August 31, 2014

"Mickey Mouse is not a mouse. If you look very closely at him, you can see that he wears gloves."

"Mice do not have the capability, nor the desire, to put gloves on their hands. He also is depicted wearing a pair of shorts with large buttons, which a mouse would be unable to fasten given its mental limitations, not to mention the fact that it has claws without opposable thumbs. Furthermore, the viewer should not be misled into thinking that Mickey is a mouse because he uses the name 'Mouse.' This is merely Mr. Mouse’s surname, and is not intended to confer any mouselike qualities upon him. If you met a man who was named, say, Alan Bird, you would not assume that he was a member of the avian family, even if he happened to have a beak instead of the traditional mouth-and-nose combination seen in most humans, would you? Obviously, Mr. Mouse is simply a man with a loving wife, Mrs. Mouse (a female human), and a normal Homo sapiens existence, just like the rest of us. He even owns a dog called Pluto! How many mice do you know who own dogs?"

Reaction to "Hello Kitty is not a cat..."

ADDED: There! This is the post that pushed me over the line to make a Hello Kitty tag. Going back into the archive to do the necessary retrospective tagging, I find 4 other posts:

1. January 3, 2006: "Cute!" looked at Natalie Angier's "The Cute Factor." She said:
Experts point out that the cuteness craze is particularly acute in Japan, where it goes by the name "kawaii" and has infiltrated the most masculine of redoubts. Truck drivers display Hello Kitty-style figurines on their dashboards....

Behind the kawaii phenomenon, according to Brian J. McVeigh, a scholar of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona, is the strongly hierarchical nature of Japanese culture. "Cuteness is used to soften up the vertical society," he said, "to soften power relations and present authority without being threatening."
Watch out for cute.

2. June 24, 2007: "Is it wrong to tattoo your dog?"
On the positive side: The dog was under anesthesia. On the negative side: It was a tattoo of a cat, and not just any cat -- Hello Kitty.
Yeah, I need to update that, with the news that Hello Kitty is known to be not a cat, but a little girl. Good news for that dog. Also at that old post: links to the Hello Kitty Hell blog and the Hello Kitty text, which I might want to re-take to try to get a better score, i.e., better than self-centered and evil.

(From the anti-Hello Kitty blog, Hello Kitty Hell, found via Metafilter.)

(And take the Hello Kitty test, which is cute and which told me people must think I'm self-centered and evil.)

3. July 17, 2013: "Does anyone in the Bible ever say 'hello'?" Somehow the last paragraph of this post is:
"Heil Hitler" is translated as "Hail Hitler." It's not "Hello Hitler," which seems edgily absurd. You could sing it to the tune of "Hello, Dolly," which has a comma, I might note, unlike Hello Kitty.
By the way, I put my fascism tag on this post after writing about the 2006 post.

4. April 25, 2014: "Avril Lavigne picked a bad week to go all racist." Someone at Vox had written:
"RACIST??? LOLOLOL!!!," Avril tweeted. "I love Japanese culture...." In her defense, this kind of makes sense. Japanese pop does have a pretty camp vein running through it, one that "Hello Kitty" apes.
And I said:
"Hello Kitty" apes? I love those 3 words together, because I can picture "Hello Kitty" Apes... just like I can picture "King Kong" Kitties, but do not market a product called King Kong Kitties. That would be racist.
King Kong is not an ape. He is a... I want to say: He is a little boy. But I google "is King Kong fascist." That turns up a lot, including a book called — I know — "Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity," which quotes Theodor Adorno:
"While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person, just as Hitler posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber."
AND: I considered googling "Is Mickey Mouse fascist," but switched to "did Hitler like Mickey Mouse." I found many references to the Art Spiegelman's "Maus," a graphic memoir about his father, a Holocaust survivor, in which the father's memories have the Jewish characters drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. The second volume of "Maus" begins with a quote from a German newspaper article from the mid-1930s:
Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed.... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.... Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!
ALSO: Here's "A Guide For the Purrplexed/How Maimonides explains the Hello Kitty controversy":
“Know that likeness is a certain relation between two things and that in cases where no relation can be supposed to exist between two things, no likeness between them can be represented to oneself,” the old master wrote in his Guide For the Perplexed. “Similarly it behooves those who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of the Creator—namely, that He is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Him and to us in the same sense. According to what they think, the difference between these attributes and ours lies in the former being greater, more perfect, more permanent, or more durable than ours, so that His existence is more durable than our existence, His life more permanent than our life, His power greater than our power, His knowledge more perfect than our knowledge, and His will more universal than our will.”

And that, of course, is wrong, because God is nothing like man. He hasn’t a face or a temper or anything else we might recognize....

To paraphrase Maimonides, it behooves those who were outraged this week over Sanrio’s revelation and who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of Hello Kitty—namely, that She is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Her and to us in the same sense.

73 comments:

Amexpat said...

Damn good argument.

I'd also contrast Mickey Mouse with Jerry in the Tom and Jerry Cartoons. Jerry lives the cartoon life of a mouse - cats chase him and he lives in a mouse's abode. MM, by contrast, lives the cartoon life of an average American.

chickelit said...

Mickey's original depiction had him with black gloves: link. The gloves were "whitened" to jibe more with blackface characterization. If you look harder, you will see hidden messages in his clothing.

Gahrie said...

My favorite Mickey Mouse joke:

Mickey Mouse is on the stand in divorce court-

Judge: So, mr. mouse I understand you wish a divorce on the grounds of insanity?

M.M.: No your honor.

Judge: So why do you wish to get a divorce.

M.M.: Your honor, I want a divorce because Minnie is fucking Goofy.

madAsHell said...

I guess Samantha Powers wasn't available.

Anonymous said...

Also: 'Big Bird' is not a bird. he is a creepy old man in a smelly bird suit that likes having close proximity with young children. If a man in a bird suit approached your child on the street you would not think it was an educational moment.

Saint Croix said...

As they asked in Stand By Me...

What the hell is Goofy?

Anonymous said...

Reaction to "Hello Kitty is not a cat..."

You mean all the time I had prostitutes dress up in a Hello Kitty costume they weren't actually portraying a cat? I feel cheated.

Saint Croix said...

Here is the Goofy and Pluto conundrum.

Ann Althouse said...

So I took the Hello Kitty test as Hitler and it said:

"Regardless of what happen, you will never forget to care about other. You must be really happy to hear comment such as 'You are so understanding and caring!'. Taking care of others is probably your most important task. But sometime, you really care too much. For example, if you joke around people who are upset, then you probably end up hurting them instead. So the best way to take care of people is to show your care naturally."

That's actually very accurate, depending on the meaning of "care."

Saint Croix said...

Just think, if Magritte was an artist in the 21st century, he would have told us that this is not a cat.

Minds blown! Art world goes insane!

Anonymous said...

Re: "Avril Lavigne picked a bad week to go all racist."

How did I miss that original post?

Anonymous said...

So I made a comment in the "Willy Wonka" post about Lola in the Nougat Bukkake room; if I had known Althouse was going to next do a post touching on Japanese culture I would've waited for here.

'Hello Kitty' and 'bukkake': the two sides of the Japanese cultural coin. A topic worth exploring, I think.

George M. Spencer said...

So Mickey is worried about his marriage to Minnie.

Sure enough one day he comes home early from work and finds Minnie on the sofa.

"You're fucking goofy!" he shouts.

Ann Althouse said...

The thing about Goofy is, we tend not to perceive him as a dog. The existence of Pluto makes us not see him as a dog, even as we might see Mickey as a mouse and ask: How can a mouse have a dog?

I remember wondering, when I was a child, what kind of animal was Goofy. Admittedly, I didn't think he was a human being, so I was still making the mistake the announcement about Hello Kitty purports to correct. I asked my sister what kind of animal Goofy was. She responded: He's a goofy!

Anonymous said...

'Hello Kitty' and 'bukkake': both keep the woman at an emotional distance through transfiguring detachment. This seeps into the culture and makes the young female dress as a schoolgirl, distancing herself from adulthood. I need a grant.

lemondog said...

And what about Donald Duck with his 3 finger+thumb hands. Among his many activities Donald has been seen playing the violin, driving a car, swinging a baseball bat, golfing (eat your heart out BO). But he does not wear shoes. However Daisy does wears high heels

Anonymous said...

Bukkake renders the man a cipher: he is but a simple appendage, nameless among the other nameless penises. As such, is this not a Feminist statement? How does Hello Kitty lead to bukkake? A lot to think about.

Ann Althouse said...

If Mickey Mouse is a man, he's a man in shorts, and this post should have my "man in shorts" tag….

jr565 said...

Mice don't wear gloves. However, kittens wear Kitten Mittens:

http://youtu.be/47D9-U8hn5I

So why couldn't mice wear gloves?

Bob said...

ROTF

Anonymous said...

That first reason is why I deeply mistrust anyone using cuteness, or ' personality,' or anything emotionally related in positions of power and/or authority.

Respect is earned, so show me why you want to be in charge, and I'll try and show you why I'm good to have around. If we both do our jobs, then there'll be a chance to share more personal and intimate moments along the way.

I presume you know this, as you're in a more responsible and presumably consequential position, so you'd better be real good if you're doing 'cute.'

The less vital or the possibly less substantive someone's job usually is, the more politics and 'fluff' enters in, especially from the start.

On a more vaguely related note, but hopefully germane for this blog, this is why there aren't too many women generals around, and perhaps why in IT, the hard sciences etc there are few women. You've got to lead men into battle in the first case and/or you've got to know stuff fewer women are interested in knowing and focus on one thing for long periods of time so you can know more.

Why are some women (feminists) using bad statistics and ideology to argue women should pursue the proper use of statistics and truth?


Shawn Levasseur said...

It can cause problems when in a world of human-like animals, a pet is shown.

One comic, "Omaha, the Cat Dancer", where the protagonist was a human-like cat, and other characters were dogs, pigs, birds, etc., had a good approach to handling this.

When Omaha got a pet, it was a species not used for the human-like characters. She had a ferret.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Mickey is multitudes.

Things, concepts, dreams.

Mickey was and is varied and getting more variable.

In fact, we are defining Mickey now, in our unique way.

Mickey is meta.

Anonymous said...

Mickey Mouse is an aesthetically designed man-mouse cyborg. Every line is exactingly placed to give pleasure and not seem out-if-place.

This icon rests atop an empire of dreams, innovation and advancing technology, as well as safe, family shared fantasy fun.

Do not cross the mouse.

Anonymous said...

I love when the Althouse post gathers size as it rolls down the mountain; this might end up being the post that uses each and every one of the Professor's tags.

Anonymous said...

Need to introduce 'insect politics', Althouse.

khematite@aol.com said...

Will Elder & Harvey Kurtzman's "Mickey Rodent" in Mad #19 (1955):

http://johnglenntaylor.blogspot.com/2009/01/mickey-rodent-mad-19.html

Darnold Duck on Minnie Mouse:

"Somehow. . . the idea of a mouse with lipstick and eyelashes and a dress with high-heeled shoes; a mouse ten times bigger than the biggest rat. . . this idea has always made me sick!"

traditionalguy said...

Made in the image of God is a form idea. But Disney drawing tens of thousands of cartoon flip cards by hand needed to use stick figures as much as possible. And animal names were chosen not to be offensive to men and women shown being silly. That's about it as far as finding the "meaning" behind it all.

Maimonides is a great teacher/Rabbi but he did not accept the revelation of the miracle incarnation of Jesus as being fully a man and being fully God into his theology.

Anonymous said...

Mickey Mouse makes his statement about bukkake by not having a zipper on his pants: this also contributes to his emasculation. We perceive him as an adult, yet the high pitch of his voice and the lack of need for a zipper is a strong indication of castration. By castrating Mickey Mouse we are symbolically castrating the American male. And people wonder why we have problems.

William said...

If there's one decision in my life that I truly regret, it was getting that Hello Kitty tattoo on my upper arm. I thought it would cause women to find me more accessible, but no such luck........Also I feel that it has caused people in the State Department to take me less seriously. No matter how hot and humid the weather, I no long wear wife beater shirts while delivering White House briefings.

Anonymous said...

Does Mickey Mouse's life as a cartoon render him castrated, or does castration render him a two-dimensional cartoon? Or is the castration part of a transgender process? I always felt that Mickey Mouse was hiding a severe case of depression, attempting to disguise it with too-obvious attempts at frivolity.

Anonymous said...

If she is a young girl, then one day Hello Kitty will menstruate. This is the cue for the beasts with tentacles to arrive. Japan.

traditionalguy said...

BTW the Disney character later re-named Mickey Mouse was first drawn by Walt as a black man called Steamboat Willie.

Anonymous said...

traditionalguy said...

BTW the Disney character later re-named Mickey Mouse was first drawn by Walt as a black man called Steamboat Willie.

This renaming was because of the sexual connotations of 'steamboating'.

Anonymous said...

Young girls at Disneyland can wear Mickey Mouse ears because there is no subtext of the penis. Unless you look at the big round ears as symbols for the testicles, thus rendering the body underneath a penis.

traditionalguy said...

3000 Thanks Betamax. I Goggled it and found that Steamboat Willie was a black man Captain on a Steamboat giving a black Mickey Mouse grief for being happy go lucky singing and dancing.

It was apparently Disney's early talkie cartoon and emulated Al Jolsen's black face pioneer talkie, The Jazz Singer.

Anonymous said...

Re: "Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed..."

By rendering Mickey Mouse as castrated -- and thus the American male, as well -- Disney gave Hitler the idea that America would not be a strong foe, thus encouraging his actions in Europe. Mickey Mouse gave Hitler the confidence to pursue his grandiose plans of conquest, and thus Disney himself must be held partly accountable for the Holocaust.

Anonymous said...

I really need that grant.

Fernandinande said...

Watch out for cute.

"Beware neoteny."

Anonymous said...

It is in this light that Spongepants Bob gave Putin the green light to invade the Ukraine. In the pants, only spongy material: that is the New America.

Anonymous said...

There is no evidence that Disney's characters possessed rectums; as such, there is no excrement to be seen. In Disney's view of America our hands are eternally clean.

David said...

It's Sunday. Day of (the) rest.

Anonymous said...

If Mickey were a monkey rather than a mouse there would always be the subtext that he throws his shit indiscriminately. Consider how this may have changed Hitler's actions.

David said...

Consider that Mickey may be a machine.

An ATM, from Disney's perspective.

rhhardin said...

The Mickey Mouse Song doesn't work in German, either.

Micky Maus.

The translation proves he's a mouse, by the way. A name wouldn't translate.

The name might be different in another language, but it wouldn't be a translation.

Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. I am a young girl with breasts beginning to blossom. Older boys are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. I am a young girl experiencing the first awakenings of sexual thought and desire and tickling feelings. Older boys are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. I am a young girl with the realization dawning that I can wrap men around my finger by innocently wearing a Catholic schoolgirl skirt. Older boys are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. I am a young girl who now has thoughts of more than stuffed animals sharing my bed. Older boys are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. I am a young girl ready to leave the things of a young girl behind. The world in front of me is scary and enticing. I now understand the secrets of the detachable shower-head. Older boys are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. I am a young girl waiting for pubic hair so that I can shave it all off, like a true woman. Older boys are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. I am a young girl who has become aware of how males look at me when I lick my lip-gloss lips. Older boys and School Teachers are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. I am a young girl who has become aware that I am sometimes followed by strange men in vans. Older boys and School Teachers and Strange Men are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

glenn said...

Looks to me like a lot more people need to become acquainted on a personal level with subsistence farming.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Hello Betamax3000 Kitty says:

I am not a robot, I am a young girl. Today I am going to the Public Pool and it will be the first time I will wear a two-piece swimsuit. Older boys and School Teachers and Strange Men and Fathers with Children at the Pool are beginning to notice me. I am not a robot.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Beta,

Don't hate the players, hate the game.

furious_a said...

Curious George is not a monkey, he`s an ape.

Billy Oblivion said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPalGBxzSc

Saint Croix said...

If Mickey Mouse is a man

That's a big if! I don't think his balls have dropped. His voice makes me insane.

These cartoons are pretty awesome, though. I didn't realize Disney was making new cartoon shorts with Mickey Mouse. I think these are funnier than the classics. And the animation is awesome. See this one for instance.

And Mickey is naked in this one.

lemondog said...

Steamboat Willie

Captain appears to be a black cat to Mickey as black mouse.

Perhaps an earlier version?

Saint Croix said...

Wow! In this one Mickey figures out that Goofy is a dog. Awesome.

phantommut said...

Ceci n'est une pipe.

rhhardin said...

Mickey is a name. Mouse is a title. Like Jesus Christ.

Stephen A. Meigs said...

Best to think of the drawing as part girl, part cat, probably. The sort of male girls naturally want doesn't much tend to be into fantasizing about stuff while actually being intimate. That would be like having sex to experiment, the kind of thing men who visit prostitutes want, or pretend they want (with young women generally) so they can justify experimentation with sodomy. But it is important that the meaning of meaningful intimacy be better understood, and recollection can be an aid. Especially can careful recollection be important when during intimacy a girl is fantasizing about something else while being intimate--what she is fantasizing about may be quite important to understanding her feelings, but it is just not very appropriate for a male to significantly try to get into her fantasy while actually trying to be true to the reality of the situation at hand, which requires real-time understanding of his and her feelings towards this reality—too much stuff to think about at once and too much like using her as an experiment.

Anyway, when a girl is fantasizing about doing stuff she isn't actually doing while simultaneously actually doing important stuff with him (say, in common with reality and her fantasy), that's the sort of event that should cause a male to especially want a fixed image of her during the event. With a very good fixed image of her in his mind as if he drew it there carefully, he may at his leisure, when he is not occupied with a present intimacy that he is quite occupied in trying to make beautiful, consider what exactly she was fantasizing about, and even imagine and maybe fantasize about it himself and consider the many moral considerations involved, e.g., so next time in intimacy he will know with little thought what is beautiful or not in that part of her demeanor involved with whatsoever fantasy she might be having, or so when being less intimate with her he can communicate his impressions and new opinions in talk or other standard fashion, leading to a general increase in wisdom.

Cats are different. When a girl is fantasizing about being cruel while loving, she is fantasizing about being what a black cat represents, which is like what a calico cat represents. When a girl is, say, enjoying the clean elegant control her lover has over some other girl, which he uses to force the latter to be herself, she may be like a she-wolf, but it's not like she is fantasizing about behaving in she-wolf fashion, she's just being like a she-wolf. Fantasizing you're a black cat involves fantasy by definition, and being like a calico cat also involves fantasy, because fantasizing about being black cats is what calico cats do.

Drawing and, more generally, a visually artistic frame of mind, is useful in males intimate with girls that are into mixing fantasy with intimacy. Calico cats mix intimacy with fantasy, and so accordingly there is a need for part-girl part-kitty drawings more than there would be for part dog part girl pictures, or whatever. Quite generally I tend to like art with cats in it. Cat art is more like the sort of art that is most useful when actually considering girls, because art in the visual sense is most needed when girls are kittenish.

Admittedly, I don't actually draw cat-girls like Hello Kitty (in fact, I rarely draw anything), even though I suppose my theories sort of suggest that might be a good sort of training, at least to the extent I may have intimacy with kittenish girls.

wildswan said...

Reading the comments I am reminded of the last time I saw Mickey in a movie house. It wasn't clear then either what he (?) was doing through the blizzard of hurled Cracker Jack boxes, ice and Coke. Audience participation never changes when Mickey is on screen

Robert Cook said...

I always saw that Goofy was a dog, and pondered, even as a kid, the oddity of a dog that walked and talked as a man while Pluto was a dog who barked and walked on all fours as a dog.

But...they're cartoons, so the rules of reality don't apply!

BTW, that Micky Mouse cartoon that St. Croix linked to was awful! (I only watched the first minute.) If this is what they're doing with the characters these days, they oughtn't bother. (Of course, MIckey Mouse was no good for most of his career...after they redesigned him.) And where are these shown? As opening cartoons for other Disney feature films?

Saint Croix said...

BTW, that Micky Mouse cartoon that St. Croix linked to was awful!

The singing one, right? It's insane. I don't think it's awful, though. It's retro cool. Check out the other three I linked to. The animation is amazing.

I think they're just shorts they're throwing up on youtube for fun. I haven't seen them anywhere else.

Here's another one I really like. And this one, too.

Saint Croix said...

Here's a wrestling one that is awesome. And a sleepwalking one with Mickey and Goofy.

Saint Croix said...

And Donald lays an egg. This is like Fantastic Voyage, except it's cool.

Saint Croix said...

And the best one with Mickey and Minnie. In Venice, baby.

gbarto said...

Stephen Meigs needs a grant too.