If you didn't know this, you must not've had a sister

and she must not have locked you, tiny boy, in the rabid poodle's cage and called you sweetums and fed you Cat Chow wrapped in Carefree bubblegum, classic bubblegum flavor. You must never have been so adorable. Here, let's bring you up to speed. Lara Glenum has a piece on Aase Berg, gurlesque, grotesque, burlesque, so forth at the jam-packed with treasures new issue of Action, Yes.

Berg’s poem radically upends the notion that women, young girls in particular, are free from sadistic compulsion and cruelty, burrowing into the heart of the dialectic between cuteness and violence. The preoccupation of pre-adolescent girls with all things cute, perhaps, speaks not to their attraction to things that mirror their own innocence but to things that mirror their own abjection and fear of further deformity; it reflects the degree to which they have already found themselves stripped of significant social agency. Cuteness, then, far from being a harmless aesthetic category, reveals a state of acute deformity.