Sometimes, I Want to Squeeze the Shit Out of My Pug Sophie…and That’s Normal? Have you ever found some little furry fucker in the petting zoo so Cute you just want to pinch or maul the little fucker? That’s referred to as cute aggression, and as the link attests, it’s a real thing, discovered by Yale psychologists and all, back in 2013. But like many discoveries, they just labeled this shit, because if they’d lived in the Philippines, they’d know that in the Filipino language of Cebuano, there has always been a word for wanting to violate something overly cute, and that word, dear Readers is gigil, pronounced “ghee’-gill”. I first learned of the word about four months after a major surgery, when all those days away from the gym added up to some serious love handles. Irene violently gripped my tummy blubber and taunted “gigil, gigil, gigil” which of course I assumed meant “fat fucker, get back to the gym.” But no, apparently Irene had developed a passive aggressive attraction to my love handles, who fuckin’ knew? The questionable attractiveness of my side blubber notwithstanding, the cause of this perverse reaction to overwhelming cuteness seems to be a form of circuit breaker, the brain can only handle a certain threshold of emotion before sensory overload, wherein that excess feeling can morph into a diametrically opposed reaction, like anger and rage. Sounds fucking nuts, right, but think about people being so happy they cry… same thing in reverse. Now in the actual study they gave people bubble wrap to pop while they looked at all kinds of photos that could be considered either funny, cute or neutral, and apparently people popped the shit outta their bubble wrap when they encountered the cute photos. The initial conclusion was that the inability to actually cuddle, interact with or nurture the “representation of cuteness” caused a passive aggressive frustration, but this explanation fails to account for the same reaction when faced with an actual cutie, like my pug Sophie, who is so fucking cute sometimes you just want to smother the little bitch…in rub-rub and scratchy-scratch of course. Did you really think I wanted to kill my little rump roast?

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