Minghao with a kitten

Minghao with a kitten. I have chosen this picture because I think it's very nice although I'm not completely convinced about the way the kitten is being held by Minghao. Better not to treat cats and kittens as babies. 

I'm also not completely convinced that this is Minghao! :) The Twitter caption is not clear but I think it is. And if it is, Minghao is a Chinese singer, songwriter and dancer living in South Korea and a member of the South Korean boy group Seventeen. I have seen another photograph of Minghao with another cat so this guy likes cats. 

His alternative name is interestingly "The8". It is a very novel name. It is a stage name. The number 8 is liked by many people in China. When it is "laid down" (whatever that means - rotated?), the infinite sign appears. That may be partly why it is considered a nice number.

Minghao with a kitten. Instagram.

It's interesting that if you search for "cats" on Twitter you invariably get a huge number of tweets from South Korean boy bands. These are all very attractive, girly, or androgynous looking boys. I think this is a good thing. It is nice to see the boundary between female and male broken down. It is very much a modern concept.

It would appear that South Korean girls (who are the biggest audience for K-pop) like this kind of neutral, in-between the genders, beauty. And that is fine. Perhaps when they grow up, they may be more attracted to the more masculine (in the classic sense) male appearance.

They are groups that have been created artificially, I would say, by producers who want to make a lot of money out of them. I don't want to misrepresent the situation, and I am guessing, but it is likely that these boys are exploited. I wonder how much money they get out of their songs? No doubt the producer who created the band gets by far the biggest slice of the profit.

On an associated issue, there are a lot of celebrities who like to have companion animals. And they almost invariably create an Instagram account to tell the world about this. Sometimes the photographs are excellent and they genuinely are entertaining to their fans.

Of course, when a celebrity associates themselves with an attractive companion animal it helps to promote that celebrity. It also helps, incidentally, to promote the animal which is often nowadays a purebred cat, sometimes the Scottish Fold because this particular breed has been promoted by Taylor Swift. I have some doubts about the ethics of that because the breed has potential health issues. But that is another matter which I won't go into here.

Here's a bit more about Minghao. He was born on November 7, 1997 and attended Beijing Contemporary Music Academy. The boy band Seventeen debuted in 2015. Minghao was awarded the "Prime Minister's Commendation" from the Prime Minister of South Korea for his contribution to the development of the country's contemporary pop culture and arts.