Maid in Japan

Last night I was served pancakes by Little Bo Peep. Then as she poured my tea from a white china teapot she called me 'O-Himesama' (Princess), her large, limpid eyes shining above impossibly cute dimples. I was sitting next to Alexander the Great and to his right, three Japanese men from the Board of Education, who all had ears like cats.
This is only partly true. She wasn't actually Little Bo Peep, but my waitress was dressed very much like her. She did pour me tea, though, and she was very cute, in the Japanese sense of cute. This was my first visit to a Maid Cafe, which is all the rage with Japanese computer geeks and manga addicts. The girls who serve you are dressed as 'Meidos', which are based on female characters from manga comics. They look a bit like lifesize dolls. Everything in the cafe is very doll-like. It's like being at a tea-party inside a doll-house. When you eat at a Maid Cafe, the Maid will call you 'Master' or 'Mistress' or another name of your choice (hence 'Alexander the Great', his real name is Alex), and treat you as such. They don't stop at pouring your tea, some will even spoonfeed you. 'Cute' is a big theme. There were cute soft toys sitting on shelves behind the counter and cute music playing (the songs have names like 'Candy Candy' and 'Cutie Honey'). You can borrow the cafe's cute cat ears or oversize bows and ribbons to wear in your hair as my colleagues were.
So are the Maids cute, or not? I asked some students and friends. My students (female) were unanimous. "Very cute!" they cooed. One foreigner friend said 'They're scary' and another said 'Too artificial. It's too posed.' This might be a big difference between our sense and Japanese sense of what is 'cute'. At the Maid Cafe, we looked through books of photos of the Maids, posing with soft focus, pretending to bake cookies and pouting, gazing up at the camera with wide eyes and lips glazed in strawberry lip-gloss. According to the Japanese guys we were with, this was very cute. Although the Maids are very pretty young women, and their outfits are fantastic, I wouldn't call them cute. For me, cute is something which is unintentional. For example, my students' English is often very cute - like today in class, a boy writing about child labour in 'Bang Radish' (Bangladesh). Cute is when we are vulnerable. Not just looking vulnerable, but when we really are.
Maid cafes have been criticized for showing women as subservient. So how, as a feminist, would I feel about this aspect of it? Well, when I was there, I could see nothing subservient about those women at all. They might act 'cute' but they are completely in control. Quite a few single geeky guys came in when we were there and they were all mushy and adoring of the Maids, bringing them soft toys as presents, and doing whatever the Maids told them to do. The girls might be their Maids, but those lonely manga geeks are the girls' slaves.