Society

In honor of Hello Kity's 40th anniversary celebration Hello Kitty Con, we talked to experts about the character's influence on women throughout the years

This week, about 25,000 of the world’s most devoted Hello Kitty fans are expected to assemble in LA’s Little Tokyo district for the first-ever Hello Kitty Con–a four-day celebration of the character’s 40th birthday, going on now. Created by the Japanese company Sanrio, the little white cartoon has become one of the best-selling licensed entertainment characters ever, generating an estimated $8 billion annually for Sanrio, according to a company spokesperson.

The event, which started October 30 and runs through November 2, has been a long time coming for her most fervent acolytes—adult women who played with her as children in the 70s and 80s and still incorporate her into their daily lives. The sold-out event has acres of adorableness–from Kitty costumed fans to crystal jewelry and even historic artifacts like the very first product to feature the character –a coin purse from 1974, which is on display behind velvet ropes.

Despite her seemingly benign and utterly adorable appearance, the character has become a polarizing cult figure around the world. Fans who collect everything Hello Kitty say she’s empowering, or at the very least a harmless hobby. Critics say she’s a sexist throwback to a time when girls, particularly Asian girls, were supposed to be cute and silent (the character has no mouth). Meanwhile, in some feminist circles, she’s also been embraced as a counterintuitive symbol of freedom to be feminine and strong. And to further muddy the picture, Sanrio recently announced that the character is actually a third-grade girl and not a cat. A 40-year-old girl who looks just like a cat that is.

To get to the bottom of the Hello Kitty phenomenon, we asked experts and female fans to reflect on Hello Kitty “the girl” and the outsized influence she’s had on the culture over the last 40 years.

The first question is of course, why doesn’t she have a mouth. She’s all eyes. Sanrio has always said Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth so people can project their feelings onto her, imagine she’s happy or sad when they’re happy or sad. “She is so empowering because she can be anything you want her to be,” says Jill Koch, Senior Vice President of Brand Management & Marketing at Sanrio. “It’s a lot more powerful to not have to speak.” That way, “women feel like Hello Kitty listens,” says Yuko Yamaguchi, Tokyo-based head designer of Hello Kitty for more than 30 years. “She makes you feel understood.”

Jamie Rivadeneira, owner of Japan LA, a boutique that sells Japanese pop culture merchandise, explains why she has captured the imagination of so many little girls for so many years: “I was naturally quiet as a child, and I related to Kitty because she didn’t talk. She doesn’t have a mouth.”

Hello Kitty’s lack of mouth may also just reflect the Japanese way of showing emotion, which doesn’t always involve expressing feelings using words, according to Christine Yano, anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii, who curated the Hello Kitty exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in LA with Rivadeneira. In some ways, Hello Kitty has become the international representation of Japan’s culture of “kawaii,” which are items that are cute and meant spread happiness and promote friendship. The little cat-like girl has become a touchstone for many Asian girls who’ve grown up in America. “She was made by an Asian company, so unlike Barbie, it was cool to have this Asian cartoon that’s ours,” says Kristina Wong, 36, a Chinese-American writer and comedian. “The first people to get Hello Kitty stuff were Asian girls.”

But not everyone’s a fan. “In the West, having a mouth is important because it gives you a voice, which is power, so some see her as anti-feminist, anti-assertive, anti-vocal,” explains Yano, author of Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific. And indeed, the quiet Kitty has gotten a lot of flack on some Western parenting blogs. One mother writes, “Parents raise their daughters to be confident, articulate and outspoken,” so Hello Kitty’s lack of mouth sends girls “mixed messages about self-esteem,” while another writes, “It’s hard to shout, ‘I am woman, hear me roar,’ sans mouth,” after her three-year-old daughter fell in love with the character.

Likewise, a 2004 editorial in The Japan Times, an English-language Japanese newspaper, argued UNICEF shouldn’t be using Hello Kitty to raise money for girls education programs noting that “someone needs to explain how a cat with no mouth can be a spokesperson for anything—especially girls’ education—and how an image that embodies female submissiveness is supposed to help banish gender-based stereotypes. Kitty is soft and pliable, doesn’t speak and sports a cute bow on her head: There’s your role model, girls!”

She has also gotten flack when she’s been seen as a symbol of the quiet, passive and submissive Asian woman stereotype. Take Avril Lavigne’s 2014 music video for “Hello Kitty,” which critics bashed because she used expressionless Japanese women as back-up dancers, who looked like “props,” as she screamed “Hello Kitty, you’re so pretty” over and over again.

“Avril does not relate to, look at, talk to, the Japanese women in the video,” says Sharon Kinsella, author of Schoolgirls, Money and Rebellion in Japan. “I find the presentation of the Japanese women as asexual and silent background dancers with mute inscrutable expressions embarrassingly passé and disturbingly colonial in undertone.”

Meanwhile feminist blogs railed against a 2012 ad for Sephora’s Hello Kitty “Head of the Class” makeup collection that shows a woman in business attire putting down her book, erasing math equations on a chalkboard and applying Hello Kitty makeup, arguing the brands are teaching girls that looking beautiful is more important than smarts. “The feminists’ argument is a perception that women might be infantilized by this cute product that doesn’t speak to their full powerful womanhood or their sexuality,” says Merry White, anthropology professor at Boston University and author of Coffee Life in Japan.

The Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s adopted Hello Kitty as a mascot to show that punk girls and women that it’s OK to incorporate cute things into their edgy personas, says Yano. The idea was—and it still applies today—feminists believe in freedom of self-expression, so women can enjoy “cutesy” and “girly” things like Hello Kitty whenever and however they want to, as long as they aren’t doing it because they think they need to in order to be considered feminine or to please men, explains performance artist and writer Denise Uyehara, 48. “You can be cute, but you have to ask yourself, am I being cute because it’s the only way I can get through life, or can I speak my mind directly without using a high cute voice, which is often associated with Hello Kitty and being Asian.”

Kinsella has a theory about Hello Kitty’s popularity at a time when Japanese women were distancing themselves from those old stereotypes. Even as women in Tokyo in the 80s started shifting from primarily family roles to office jobs with higher wages during a “period of unprecedented credit boom wealth” in the city, they were still in an “awkward” position in which the social structure was “hostile” to young, working, independent women. “So liking Hello Kitty, being a bit childish, is a bit like acting like the kind of girl who is acceptable—a little school girl with nice, girly pastimes,” she argues. “They’re suger-coating their obtrusive new presence in the labor market by covering themselves in pink and candy and Hello Kitty, disguising themselves as harmless.”

And for American fans, she’s also an escape from the realities of adulthood. Jennifer Masaoy, 35, says she started making papercrafts of Hello Kitty as a hobby to cheer herself up at a “stifling, repetitive, boring, miserable” job: “Hello Kitty is a way for me to escape work stress, all of the stuff you have to do as an adult to take care of yourself.”

So will this 40-year-old school girl ever get to grow up? Writer and comedian Kristina Wong says she hopes so: “Let’s see Hello Kitty at her first job when she has to go on maternity leave. That’s when we’re going to find out whether she’s a feminist or not a feminist. Let’s put her real situations because cuteness will only get you so far, and there are some moments in life when you actually have to kick some a**.”

Not everyone can be as gracefully cunning as Andy Richter or Gabourey Sidibe, but you can try

This story originally appeared on xoJane.com.

I am rarely watching broadcast TV late at night — at 11 p.m. I’m usually reading a book (currently: America’s Founding Food) and debating whether it’s too late to eat a huge bowl of pickles while my spouse shoots at fake wizardy aliens on the videogamez.

So I usually hear about things that happen on late night TV, later. And thus, last week Marci sent me a clip from Conan. To sum up: Chelsea Handler is on Conan’s couch, talking to Conan about swimming in the ocean. She asks Conan if he likes to swim in the ocean, which Conan answers in the affirmative. Handler then turns to Conan’s sidekick (and, because it’s pertinent here, portly gentleman) Andy Richter, seated on her other side, and asks him the same question, which he also answers positively. But Handler lingers.

“Do you float… a lot… in the ocean?” she asks, nodding. Nervous laughter from the studio audience. It sounds like a thready segue into a fat joke, more than a fat joke itself, as though she’s — heh — testing the waters.

Richter, who like many members of the Double-Chin Division of the Corpulence Army can probably recognize even an uncertain effort at a joke about his size, takes an instant to process. Then, before Handler can move on, he replies, “Why, do you sink?” Waits a beat. “Might be that cast-iron heart.”

It is one of the more charming responses to a fat-related jibe in recent memory, partly because it’s delivered with such grace and humor. Richter manages to call out Handler on a cheap, unfunny non-joke about his weight with a witty left hook that both illuminates the casual hurtfulness of these sorts of punching-down quips, and also affirms his individual humanity and dignity — the first thing to get tossed in these moments, when a person’s appearance is itself the punchline. And not only does he out-joke her, he manages to point out the cruelty of her approach (“cast-iron heart” indeed), AND to make her laugh at herself.

Richter’s response is the ideal reaction in such public circumstances, chapter and verse. He spots the joke forming, and kills it with a better, funnier joke, and he does it while smiling and laughing himself. It’s so perfect that if not for Handler’s uncontrollable laughter, I would have thought it was planned. He survives the moment and comes out stronger than his would-be insulter in the end.

Sometimes, this happens, but it’s rare; sometimes a person in receipt of a fat joke in an incredibly public circumstance can manage to own that situation entirely. When the ever-magnificent Gabourey Sidibe was subject to vicious Twitter mockery for her Golden Globes dress back in January, she responded by tweeting, “To people making mean comments about my GG pics, I mos def cried about it on that private jet on my way to my dream job last night. #JK” And all of Twitter — NAY, THE WHOLE OF THE INTERNET — died over how hairflippingly cool this was, how perfectly and endearingly she managed to tell the losers making whale jokes to get over themselves.

Unfortunately, not everyone is Andy Richter or Gabourey Sidibe. And not everyone has the resources to bounce back from “playful” insults, whether they’re malicious or not.

I’m not opposed to fat jokes, when they’re funny; it’s just that so few of them are. They typically follow the punching-down model of humor that preys on people who are the easiest targets to hit and the least likely to have the practiced confidence necessary to defend themselves in the moment (although we’re all brilliant about it in the shower two days later). Jokes that punch down take people who are already battling against cultural assumptions and makes them victims. No one likes to be made to feel like a victim. It’s not funny.

And even when they do make you laugh, it’s important to remember that these jokes often rely on social inequities that position fat people as less human, and as less worthy of respect, consideration, or sympathy.

Chris Farley built a career out of making fat jokes about himself; today, critics are eager to ding Melissa McCarthy and Rebel Wilson for allowing weight to be a central aspect of the characters they play. But I can’t blame either of them. Fat doesn’t disappear just because you refuse to acknowledge it. If you’re a fat performer, people will make fat jokes about you no matter how much you demand to be taken seriously.

And if you’re a fat comic actor, people will make your weight something to laugh at regardless of whether the script or your performance intends for them to do so. This happens because we live in a media culture that has historically only taught us to read fat bodies in two roles: as a punchline, or as a tragedy. (We can hope that this is changing, however.) It’s little wonder that fat performers should try to get in front of that wave, and try to ride it to a place they can feel good about, rather than letting it wash over them and take their agency away.

This is true for lots of us, in fact; without a ready rejoinder to fire back at every hilarious insult, we’re entirely prepared to laugh and play along because drawing attention to how cruel these jokes can feel seems like betraying a weakness; it would be saying, “These things are hurtful, and they hurt me, and it’s not okay.” Which means you necessarily have no sense of humor, right? Because failing to laugh at one thing means you can never ever laugh at anything else in the world ever for the rest of your life.

The first time I ever experienced a fat joke made publicly at my expense was in the 6th grade. I was at a special school breakfast for some patriotic holiday, and the mayor of my hometown was present. Somehow, as we all slid down the long benches attached to the lunchroom’s tables, I wound up sitting directly across from him.

The breakfast plates of scrambled eggs and sausage were disturbingly cold and hard, and no one ate much of that, but at the end of the meal trays of mini powdered donuts were put out on the table. I initially took two, since they were small — I was already keenly aware of my weight and how my peers thought of me — and began eating them. But after seeing my classmates unreservedly grabbing up handfuls, I took two more.

“That’s a lot of donuts you’ve got there!” The mayor bellowed, pointing at my plate and laughing. My classmates all looked at me and laughed as well. I stopped eating at once, and began wishing desperately for a sudden illness to render me unconscious.

This would have been bad enough, but then, when the mayor went up to the stage to address the whole school, he referenced it again: “I’ve never seen donuts disappear so fast!” He laughed again. “There was one chubby girl who went back twice!” And it was like MY WHOLE MIDDLE SCHOOL TURNED AROUND AND LOOKED AT ME. Like a scene in a movie. The mayor told the whole school I was fat and ate a bunch of donuts. I couldn’t make this up. The fact that the mayor himself was undeniably fat was little comfort; hell, part of me is still angry at him, and he’s been dead for like 20 years or something.

Twelve-year-old Lesley could do nothing but sit and turn red. Since then, I’ve rarely suffered such events in embarrassed silence. I’ve done almost every approach to jokes and insults lobbed at me in public. I’ve made vulgar quips right back (“Sorry, I got this fat because your mom bakes me pie,”), I’ve responded cheerfully and unflappably (“Thanks for noticing! All my hard work is paying off!”), and I’ve given people a stone-faced, “That’s actually not funny at all.” And for my trouble, sometimes I am doubly humiliated, but sometimes I come out the winner. It’s okay to laugh it off, but it’s equally okay to get mad. I just can’t bear not responding at all.

For the most part, people who make fat jokes are not vicious monsters. They just don’t always realize how they might be unwittingly having a lasting hurtful effect on the people around them. They need to be told.

That’s why watching the clip between Chelsea Handler and Andy Richter is so thrilling. It’s thrilling to see someone making a cheap shot about someone’s appearance get their comeuppance, and to have that comeuppance come in such a perfect form that even she has to laugh at it — and at herself.

Lesley Kinzel is Deputy Editor at xoJane.com.

John Spinello sold the game for only $500

A Chinese shampoo commercial doubles as a pitch for couples to stay together

In today’s overly ambitious advertising era, a shampoo ad that merely touts its ability to combat split ends is severely lacking. Rather, haircare marketers must also aim to end sexism in the workplace and, according to a new Chinese spot, divorce.

Leo Burnett Hong Kong created a commercial for Procter & Gamble’s Rejoice shampoo that acts as a marriage counselor. The four-and-a-half minute long ad, which the ad agency claims has been viewed 40 million times in a month, follows a couple on the brink of divorce. But the wife (who, if we may, has some great hair going on) will only sign the papers under one condition: Her husband must agree to hug her every day for a month.

Thus begins a rom-com (minus the com) in which the wife makes her husband travel to different landmarks from their relationship — where he proposed, where they shared a first kiss, where they met — and asks for that hug. While there are no scenes of hair-washing prior to their encounters, things escalate on the husband’s end from wistful hair stroking to full-on hair smelling.

You can probably guess how things end. (Hint: The official hashtag for the campaign is #IBelieveInLoveAgain).

The spot is cinematographically beautiful and acts public service announcement of sorts. Rejoice claims that of 3 million Chinese couples who divorced last year, 100,000 reconciled.

We wonder if any of them had stringy hair.

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Do you fall into your city's stereotype, or are you a standout?

On Tuesday, LinkedIn published a series of maps that break down which cities are specially skilled in certain areas, based on the skills and locations listed on user profiles.

New York City is filled with finance professionals, for example, while Miami residents are experts in travel; San Francisco is packed with computer whizzes, while Houstonians love oil and gas. Many cities, according to LinkedIn, do in fact fit their stereotypes: others include Nashville and music, or Los Angeles and entertainment.

What’s also interesting is a look at some the cities’ other top skills. Cheyenne, Wyo., for example, is the nation’s least populous state, yet has a significant number of people skilled in emergency response services; Mobile, Ala., is particularly known for worker safety; and residents of Portland, Maine love arts and crafts.

LinkedIn also analyzed Western European cities, yielding a somewhat surprising result that the majority of European cities’ top skills are in the computer fields.

Check out the U.S. and Western Europe maps below:

"Pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice / Whatchu know about that latte life?"