At least, so suggests Jim Windolf, aka Sir Grumpster, in the December issue of Vanity Fair. A "cute movement," he says, has "sprung to life against a backdrop of war, economic breakdown, and more Wi-Fi." It might satisfy on a mid-brain level, but it's ultimately "soft and brain-deadening," argues Windolf. So, why has "cute culture" come to reign supreme in America at this particular moment? He has a couple theories: 1) We desperately want to be liked (and to like ourselves), 2)  We're depressed and 3) We're sick sadists.

Wowzers. Total cutekill, right? But let's hear the man out: "In a decade that has slapped us with a recession in the wake of 9/11 and an unending war waged in two theaters, Americans are producing a popular culture that seems to be saying, Please like us," he says. "It stands to reason that popular cuteness came about as some sort of correction, as a way for us to convince ourselves and our friends that we’re not as bad as our recent national actions have made us seem." Then came the ultimate correction: We elected Barack Obama as our president. But he, too, says Windolf, is part of this adorable uprising -- our commander-in-cuteness, if you will. (I mean, have you seen that I-jus'-wanna-pinch-yer-cheek smile?)

Of course, watching a YouTube video of a baby dancing to Beyoncé isn't just about making others like us -- it's also a way to make ourselves feel good on a very basic level. The past decade has left us feeling rather low and, as a result, candy sales have gone up and so too have suicide rates. "At decade’s end, the stats suggest, America is a nation in need of a hug, a Snickers, and the nucleus-accumbens squirt provoked by baby-animal photos, laughing-baby clips, and bathetic movies," he writes.

And now we come to the unflattering portion of his thesis -- that bit about cute culture being at times sadistic. What's so sick about watching a baby in a highchair laughing uncontrollably, you might ask? "The baby may be cute on his own, but the clip heightens his vulnerability by presenting him more or less trapped in a high chair and reduced to a hysterical powerlessness by his father’s sly utterances of 'Bing' and 'Dong.'" He quotes Daniel Harris, author of "Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic," as saying: "There is something dark about using children for the pleasure of our maternal needs. We enjoy being caretakers so much that we will create situations in which they need our care." There's an element of that too in Web sites that delight in playfully torturing pets -- whether it's by dressing them up or putting stuff on them.

All in all, these are compelling, well-argued points. But puppies have elicited squeals since long before Bush came into office and adults have cooed at baby animals since forever. Before there were viral videos on YouTube, there was "America's Funniest Home Videos," "Candid Camera," "Kids Say the Darndest Things" and inspirational posters featuring felines hanging from branches. We humans love this stuff; we can't get enough of it. What seems particularly contemporary is Windolf's attempt to rationalize our collective mid-brain obsession with all things cute, to reduce the 95 millions views netted by the video of the world's most famous laughing baby to the chemical reaction it causes in our brains.  One could argue that this kind of thinking, which distances us from our baser emotions and impulses, is itself a way to protect ourselves against the gloom and doom of the world today. I say, why not have your Puppy Cam and your neuronal self-awareness, too.

Now what? Does any of that information make me safer when I come home past the park late at night? Does it protect my two young daughters?

It didn’t protect Tonia Carmichael, whose body, along with those of ten other women, was found in the home Anthony Sowell earlier this week.

Sowell had been charged with a rape in 1989 and served five years for the lesser charge of attempted rape. He was, like Jaycee Dugard’s accused captor and rapist Phillip Garrido, a registered sex offender. He was, like Garrido, known to his neighbors.

Yesterday a report by California’s Office the Inspector General David R. Shaw cited over a dozen incidents of failure on the part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, including claims Phillip Garrido repeatedly violated his parole. The report charges that that the Department failed to adequately classify and supervise Garrido, to obtain key information from federal parole authorities, to train parole agents to conduct parolee home visits, and, crucially, “to investigate the presence of a 12-year-old female during a home visit.” Garrido, who served eleven years in jail for the abduction and rape of Katherine Calloway Hall, was not classified as a sexually violent predator.

In addition to his supervision from the Department of Corrections, Garrido and his wife were visited by the police in 2006, after complaints from neighbors charging that the couple had people living in their yard. Officers visited the home but never entered it, and Garrido’s parole officer was never notified of the complaint. 

In a rundown neighborhood of Cleveland, meanwhile, residents are claiming police did little to respond to their complaints about Anthony Sowell. Last December, a woman filed a report accusing him of assault and attempted rape. Two weeks ago, a neighbor called the police after finding Sowell standing over a bruised and beaten woman in the bushes near his home. The witness claims police never interviewed him about what happened. The incident is all the more chilling because on September 22, another woman accused him of choking her and raping her in his home. According to the New York Times, “it took several weeks to assign an officer to the case and to obtain a search warrant.” So to review: a woman accused a convicted and registered sex offender of rape, and it took Cleveland police 45 days to arrest him, during which time they received another assault complaint about him.

All fifty states and the District of Columbia are mandated to have a publicly accessible registry of sex offenders, and there are an estimated 600,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. The whereabouts of approximately 100,000 of them is considered unknown. But even those familiar to the system can, like Garrido and Sowell, fly for years under the radar.

There are other flaws in the registry as well. A registered sex offender isn’t automatically a guilty sex offender. And while databases make it easy to access names and locations, they come up short on the details of the offenses themselves. Sex offender criteria can include consensual sex between teens and even public urination. Under the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act signed by George Bush in 2006, offenders as young as fourteen can be required to register for a minimum of fifteen years. Meanwhile, of course, there are uncounted violent sex abusers who have never been arrested or convicted of anything.

All which suggests a complicated, deeply flawed system – one that imperfectly lumps innocent and non-violent offenders in among rapists and kidnappers, a system that pits the right of privacy against the need for public safety, a system so strained that predators who are nothing short of monstrous have managed to thrive within it.

It's reassuring to believe that someone who has done very bad things doesn’t get to slip quietly into your neighborhood or mine, and that that knowledge acts as a deterrent to them. But I don’t know for sure.  Most of the recidivism studies out there are based on information from the mid-nineties, before tougher registry laws and online databases. So I can buy a sex offender app for my iPhone. I can look up my local offenders on any number of online registries. I can go all "Little Children" and, if I wish, plaster my streets with the details I find there. But a registered offender in the neighborhood isn’t automatically a threat. And when there's a real threat, as Phillip Garrido's neighbors in Antioch California and Anthony Sowell's in Cleveland Ohio have learned, knowing he’s there doesn't automatically make any difference in stopping him. 

But the movement's bizarre fringe is nothing new, as Joyce reminds us in an in-depth Double X article. What's really frightening is the impact men's rights activists (MRAs) are having on mainstream politics. As more reasonable-sounding leaders and organizations emerge, groups arguing "that false [domestic abuse] allegations are rampant, that a feminist-run court system fraudulently separates innocent fathers from children, that battered women’s shelters are running a racket that funnels federal dollars to feminists, that domestic-violence laws give cover to cagey mail-order brides seeking Green Cards, and finally, that men are victims of an unrecognized epidemic of violence at the hands of abusive wives" are facing unprecedented success. Joyce reports that a group called RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting) claims responsibility for blocking four federal domestic violence bills. And with the help of organizations like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, MRAs are beginning to find a place under conservatism's big, reactionary tent.

The more moderate men's rights movement also features some high-profile "converts." Joyce introduces us to Glenn Sacks, a popular fathers' rights radio host and writer who she describes as "a former feminist and abortion-clinic defender." Dismissive of the Bernard Chapins of the world, he's working toward the comparatively modest goals of increasing shared custody and lightening divorced dads' child-support obligations during the recession.

What's so wrong with those goals, you may well wonder. As Joyce illustrates, the issues MRAs are pushing are much more complex than they seem. For instance, divorcing parents are  usually able to work out custody agreements on their own. Only 15 percent of cases go to court, and, of those, half involve domestic abuse. Tragically, even in those instances, mothers don't always have the upper hand. A common family-court defense of fathers whose children testify that they are abusive is something called "Parental Alienation Syndrome," "a medically unrecognized diagnosis that suggests mothers have poisoned their children into making false accusations against their fathers." Joyce tells the story of Genia Shockome, a woman who spent 30 days in jail and whose husband was awarded full custody of their children, despite the fact that his abuse had left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. Incredibly, Shockome's story doesn't end there: After criticizing the judge's decision in print, her attorney was slapped with a five-year suspension.

As for MRAs' accusations, inspired by deeply flawed studies, that men and women are equally likely to commit domestic abuse, well, the numbers speak for themselves: "While some men certainly are victims of female domestic violence, advocates say the number is closer to 3 percent to 4 percent, rather than the 45 percent to 50 percent RADAR claims." Toward the end of her piece, Joyce makes a particularly fascinating point about MRAs' domestic violence arguments:

Critics like Australian sociologist Michael Flood say that men’s rights movements reflect the tactics of domestic abusers themselves, minimizing existing violence, calling it mutual, and discrediting victims. MRA groups downplay national abuse rates, just as abusers downplay their personal battery; they wage campaigns dismissing most allegations as false, as abusers claim partners are lying about being hit; and they depict the violence as mutual—part of an epidemic of wife-on-husband abuse—as individual batterers rationalize their behavior by saying that the violence was reciprocal. Additionally, MRA groups’ predictions of future violence by fed-up men wronged by the family-law system seem an obvious additional correlation, with the threat of violence seemingly intended to intimidate a community, like a fearful spouse, into compliance.

So, what do we do about the increasingly mainstream men's rights movement and the worrisome gains it has made? Personally, I'm torn. It's certainly chilling to hear Sacks empathize (albeit ambivalently) with men like George Sodini, the deeply misogynist Pittsburgh gym shooter, telling Joyce that "the cataclysmic things I’m seeing done to men, it’s always my fear that one of these guys is going to do something terrible. I don’t want to say that, like, I condone it or that it’s OK, but it’s just the reality." But I also realize that the more marginalized these groups feel, the more extreme (and potentially violent) they become. With that in mind, do we go to war, or do we try and hear MRAs out? Is there common ground to be found, or is the new men's rights movement nothing more than the old men's rights movement with a fancy haircut and a flashy suit?

However heartfelt the sentiment may be, a T-shirt-ready phrase doesn’t capture the reality of a life senselessly lost or the grief of a parent. Speaking from Tehran in her native Farsi, Hajar Rostam described the horror of watching her daughter’s life slip away in front of the world. She has seen the video once, she said, and the “look of death” on her child has haunted her every day since. “The look in her eyes at that moment. I wake up with that look in her eyes every morning; I go to bed with the image of that look in her eyes every evening." Despite her loss, though, she said that she had supported her daughter’s participation in the protests and had joined in them herself.

Rostam also described the events of her daughter’s last day, how she had already been tear-gassed, how she was struck down mere steps away from her car as she made her way home. She further told what’s happened since Neda’s murder -- how the family was forbidden to hold a memorial for the girl, how they’ve kept her room as she left it.

Though she granted the interview at what the CNN anchor referred to as “considerable risk to her own safety,” Rostam explained “the look in her eyes in those last moments ... had a story to tell.” So in her death, the mother of Neda, whose name meant “voice,” tells it. Rostam said she visits her daughter’s grave once a week. “People go and write on her grave in red ink the word ‘martyr’” she said. “And the authorities go and wipe it off.”

ABC is milking all that it can from Diane Sawyer's exclusive one-on-one with Rihanna, which previews Thursday on "Good Morning America" and plays in full Friday on "20/20." In the promo for the interview, Rihanna looks like she's dressed for a visit to grandma's house: She wears a white turtleneck and appears fresh-faced and rosy-cheeked. ABC shares a quote from the interview with the songstress: "I want to give as much insight as I can to young women, because I feel like I represent a voice that really isn't heard," she said. "Now I can help speak for those women."

On a similarly wholesome note: She's being honored as one of Glamour magazine's women of the year and is featured on one of the handful of different covers for the December issue looking like she's bubbling over with joy. In an online preview of the magazine's interview with her, she reveals the vulnerability she felt after the police photo of her injuries was leaked: "It was humiliating; that is not a photo you would show to anybody. I felt completely taken advantage of. I felt like people were making it into a fun topic on the Internet, and it’s my life."

But a different, darker side of Rihanna -- one that refuses any sign of weakness -- is on display in her new music. On Tuesday, the music video for "Wait is Ova" (see below) premiered and, hot damn, she looks bad-ass. The gritty black-and-white video was filmed in Washington Heights, New York and shows Rihanna swaggering toward the camera, tossing her hands in the air and giving a stare that dares the viewer to try -- you just try -- messing with her.  She wears a black eye patch, a Mohawk-like bouffant and thigh-high boots with stockings. Sexy and impractical as it sounds, it actually makes her look like a fearsome superheroine -- or villainess.

It gets even better. At one point in the video, there's a close-up of her grabbing her crotch while singing the lyrics: "I'm such a fucking lady." Translation: I pity the fool who thinks I'm just a little lady. Like Ciara's "Like a Boy," it flirts with the idea of sexy, feminine fortitude. As a friend e-mailed me after watching it: "Somebody hold me, because I'm scared." Me too, and I'm absolutely loving it.

This video comes on the heels of the release of "Russian Roulette," the first single off her upcoming album which features a cover image of a topless Rihanna wrapped in barbed wire. It's already inspired plenty of debate over whether it defends abusive relationships -- and what influence that might have on her young female fans. A sample of the lyrics: 

And you can see my heart beating
You can see it through my chest
And I'm terrified but I'm not leaving
Know that I must pass this test
So just pull the trigger

The song ends with a gunshot. It's an undeniably disturbing single; the lyrics, which weren't written by Rihanna, revel in the twisted and tragic romance of an abusive relationship. It brings us to a very dark and uncomfortable place, but it also seems an honest reflection of the dynamics of domestic violence. The video for the song drops during ABC's primetime interview this Friday -- so, brace yourselves for the response.

It's inevitable that every song and video released by Rihanna in the near future will be subject to a critical exegesis. She's been elected the new poster-child for domestic violence and, as such, is expected to deliver the appropriate public service announcement -- but let's not forget that it's her experience. She owns it; not us. As she told Glamour: "Even if people don’t love [the album], I made exactly the piece of art that I wanted to make. It’s super fearless -- which is exactly how I feel right now. I am in a really good place."

Hopefully we can allow her to be both the wholesome, soft-spoken Rihanna and the cocky crooner with a gun tattoo and gangster swagger.