We kind of touched on this last week, the idea that beauty in art sells. Something similar crops up in the most brilliant advertising, though its manipulation is almost always much more blatant (or at least accepted/expected).
If beauty is the heavy sword wielded by the manipulator, there’s another common sub-element of it that I see cropping up a lot: cuteness. Is it just my imagination, or as society gets more and more emotionally locked up, each to his own private island (o’ blackberry) does “cuteness”, the more innocent and child-like the better, become more and more an object of attraction within it.
I mean, kawaii and LOLCats much, anyone?