Oh, you're so cute!

How do you fellows & guys feel about being called "pretty"?
I have never been called pretty (because I'm not - I should improve my skin moisturizing regime).

Possible breakdown:
Cute coming from girl about guy: death-knell of potential sex.
Cute coming from guy about girl: I'd totally hit it.
Pretty from girl about guy: sure he's not gay?
Pretty coming from guy about girl: she's OK, but I wouldn't really hit it.
Hot from girl about guy: I'd hit it
Hot from guy about girl: I'd hit it AND/OR I have no chance of hitting it

the FIRST one was TOTALLY hot, the second one, not so much. fwiw.

I would totally get up at 8 AM to take this class.

Two different actresses played the same character, I believe.

cute but not hot : Tab Hunter
hot but not cute : Daniel Craig

I suspect that for gay men it's an age thing, but it's also a self-consciousness thing. Cute people tend to radiate a kind of innocence, an "aw shucks" ignorance, whereas hot people tend to have a look in their eye that says "I know what I want". So . . . can we come up with examples of the elusive male who is both hot and cute? the only example i can think of off the top of my head is Joe Dallesandro circa the Paul Morrissey films like Heat and Trash. He's totally young enough to rock "cute", but because he's a hustler who has seen it all he's also fully self-conscious about his hotness, i.e. he knows the effect he has on others and manipulates them accordingly. Hotness in men has something to do with being able to size up situations and take control of them (hustlers need that skill).

I don't know, I've heard plenty of girls call guys "cute" in that slightly derogatory/demeaning way, especially with regard to short/non-threatening guys. "Oh, he's so cute!"

In my own lexicon, "cute" is a nice middle ground between hot/sexy and beautiful/pretty. It means "there's something about her that I find compelling". And maybe it implies an acknowledgement that the person might not be mainstream-attractive, that there's something offbeat about their looks, but that it works for me. (Maybe even: that I can imagine this person and me as a couple, that we'd make sense together, visually speaking.)

"Pretty" and "beautiful" are more remote and feel more "objective" (to use Jaymc's word), like it's relative to conventional/mainstream standards of beauty. "Beautiful" especially implies some kind of sublime experience to me, like the perfection or visual rightness of this person is amazing and moving to you. "Attractive" is a little generic and usually doesn't imply much investment. "Hot" means that looking at the person makes me actively and viscerally want them sexually.

A person can of course be all of these things at different times, and in different worlds (the public world vs. the private world you share with them).

xpost For me there's def. an association between "cute" and young/youthfulness. I suspect for most people that's true, really.

cute and handsome but not hot: Elijah Wood
hot and handsome but not cute: Viggo Mortensen
cute and hot but not handsome: Dominic Monaghan
handsome but not hot or cute: David Wenham
hot but not handsome or cute: Sean Bean
cute but not hot or handsome: Sean Astin
cute, handsome, AND hot: Ornaldo Bloomps

As for women, when I think cute, I think:

http://bds4me.netwiz.net/0010-self.jpg

(Also see: Jena Malone)

*obv. we're talking relatively, and other people will totally disagree. and i wouldn't bother trying to establish the 'logic' behind any of it.

some come across as both - and i take my hat off to them accordingly.

This kind of blows my mind. NB I'm not big on cute pictures of kittens and so forth -- but then again I don't think of those as "whimsy" so much as kitsch or twee or whatever.

Not to second-guess Lauren, but I read her "whimsy" as the "HER KOOKINESS WILL SAVE YOU"-kind of purposefully inexplicable dizzy girl thing.

And, you know, one of the things I find magnetic about that picture I posted above is that her eyes look intent and intelligent. Earlier you wrote this:

I'm thinking that for me there's no sexual component, I don't want to get off with the cute object, I just want to take it in, make it mine forever

In a weird way this is true of my response too. As in, I don't look at that picture above and think "I'd like to get off with her"; it's more like, "I'd like to marry her, or someone who looked like that". There's a romantic component, but the sexual component is...it's in the future tense, somehow, and the main desire is for fusion, not ownership. But I'm a little atypical in that way, I think.

that was totally an excuse to think about battlestar for a minute

xpost celebrity example: Hillary Swank

xpost: YES, Ally! god, thank you!

You really think so? I don't know, I think she's kind of funny-looking, especially in other pictures. But funny-looking in a way that works for me / her basic "thing" works for me.

xpost Katharine Hepburn?

Is she 'distinctive'?

xpost: Katharine Hepburn came close to being a handsome woman, but she's straight-up beautiful.