Netflix’s “Cuties” was controversial from the word “go” and for good reason. The entire movie centers around a young Muslim girl who joins other young girls to form a “twerking” dance troop against the beliefs and values of her family.
The revulsion started with the promotional art for the movie, which featured the girls in their skimpy dance outfits in provocative positions. This absolute rejection continued with the trailer which didn’t help the situation at all.
Netflix ended up apologizing for the poster, but not the trailer. Especially not the movie. As of this writing, the trailer has 1.6 million thumbs down on YouTube. The world has made its disgust clear.
It turns out that the movie was even worse than we could have imagined.
The IMDB website has listed this as a pornographic movie and for good reason. The amount of sexual content involving children is extreme. This includes cameras focusing in on breasts and crotches of minors, the removal of clothing of minors, and the mimicking of sexual acts of minors on each other.
I’m dead serious, people should go to prison for this.
“Lawfully defines as pedophilia” and look at the media ratings.
All of you are going to hell. #Cuties pic.twitter.com/Vf4MrwEQuV
— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) September 10, 2020
Despite this being evil to the utmost obviousness, the left has taken this as a right-wing attack and thus, has begun mounting a defense of the pedophilic movie.
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody released an article titled “Cuties,” the Extraordinary Netflix Début That Became the Target of a Right-Wing Campaign,” where he proceeds to make the controversy around the movie the result of conniving by far-right “scandal-mongers”:
In fact, the subject of the film is exactly the opposite: it dramatizes the difficulties of growing up female in a sexualized and commercialized media culture. I doubt that the scandal-mongers (who include some well-known figures of the far right) have actually seen “Cuties,” but some elements of the film that weren’t presented in the advertising would surely prove irritating to them: it’s the story of a girl’s outrage at, and defiance of, a patriarchal order.
So sexualizing children is okay if it’s about resisting the patriarchy according to the New Yorker and we shouldn’t listen to the people angry about sexualized children because they’re “far-right.”
I’m currently on Twitter where the hashtag “#CancelNetflix” is trending and I can tell you that the outrage here is bipartisan.
The New Yorker’s tweet promoting the piece was deleted but as of this writing, the piece itself is still up at the website. I’ve linked the archived version of the piece just in case they delete that too.
The Independent defended the film, stating it’s too moving to be marred by the promotional poster, and launches a defense about the movie, stating that it’s a critique on the hyper-sexualization of girls:
Yes, the dance scenes are uncomfortable to watch at times. In fact, they should be uncomfortable. The experience they reflect – that of being an 11-year-old girl constantly pulled between different versions of what it means to be a woman when you are, really, still a girl – is excruciating.
Doucouré explained in an interview with the French radio station France Culture that she chose to film those dance scenes, which includes close-ups of the girls’ bodies and of their faces, in a way that would bring the viewer as close to Amy as possible. In those moments, we see the girls as they would like to see themselves. Yet the film constantly bookends those scenes with sequences that bring the girls back to their unfair, complicated, unnecessarily brutal reality.
Let’s say that the intention of the film’s creator was to raise the alarm of hyper-sexualization around girls. Let’s say the film was indeed meant to make you think about how girls on the verge of entering into womanhood deal with the modern world.
This is not how you do it. The clip below features children dancing in wildly provocative and sexual ways. Viewer discretion is advised.
Someone needs to go to jail for this shit! pic.twitter.com/Ln0CnZSyok
— 𝗚𝗵𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗝𝗶𝗺 (@GhostJim4) September 9, 2020
This isn’t a question of storylines. Sexualizing children is wrong. Full stop. I don’t care if the movie is trying to make that point. You don’t make that point by sexualizing children in a movie.
The film needs to be taken down immediately, and Netflix needs to made to understand that you don’t engage in this. You don’t even flirt with it.
(READ: The Mainstream Media Has Divorced Itself From Western Culture)
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