This is a scene from the movie "Cuties" streaming on Netflix. (CNS photo/Netflix) Netflix has come under criticism, mainly from those on the conservative spectrum, on a number of occasions in recent years for some of the content their platform hosts. However, this all paled into the distance with the release of one of their latest movies, Cuties.
Senegalese-French director MaïmounaDoucouré’s debut film, Cuties is described as a coming-of-age, comedy-drama, which follows 11-year-old Amy as she experiences the tension between her family’s religious, traditional values, and her contemporaries’ enjoyment of the world and its seemingly unlimited freedoms.
The story sees Amy grow disillusioned with the Islamic faith her family professes, only to be tempted by her rebellious neighbour’s ‘twerking’ group called ‘Cuties’. Leaving old ways behind in favour of new, she casts off the constraints of her family and takes to the sexually-provocative dance scene, which ends up leaving her in tears and rushing back into the arms of her mother by the film’s end.
Controversy
While the initial controversy was over the poster used by Netflix in the promotion of the movie; a poster which saw the 11-year-old girls scantily-clad in sexualised poses, the latest controversy surrounds the content of the movie itself. A clip which has circulated widely on Twitter since the movie’s release showed one of the dance routines the girls perform, and has been roundly condemned as “sexually exploitive” and “hypersexualised”.
The director of Cuties, MsDoucouré, insists that she is on the same side as her film’s detractors. The critics claim that the film sexualises children – she does too. However, she goes further and claims it does so in order to show the dangerous and damaging effects of child sexualisation.
Writing in The Washington Post, Ms Doucouré said:
“I wanted to open people’s eyes to what’s truly happening in schools and on social media, forcing them to confront images of young girls made up, dressed up and dancing suggestively to imitate their favourite pop icon. I wanted adults to spend 96 minutes seeing the world through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl, as she lives 24 hours a day. These scenes can be hard to watch but are no less true as a result.”
She concludes the same piece by saying that she made Cuties in order to start a debate about the sexualisation of children in society so that change might be made for the better. Her final sentence is intended as a riposte to those criticising the movie’s content, expressing the hope that the conversation about the sexualisation of children doesn’t become so difficult that it becomes caught up in today’s ‘cancel culture’, which sees unpopular viewpoints and topics silenced.
While the desire to raise awareness around the issue of the sexualisation of children is commendable, it has occurred to many that the best way to do this is not to sexualise children – particularly when the medium of choice is visual.
Graphic content
A number of experts have had harsh words about the movie’s graphic content, with Fr Shay Cullen of the Preda Foundation foremost among them. Fr Cullen, through his organisation, has decades of experience in helping children escape and overcome sexual abuse in the Philippines, and became troubled by the preliminary reports of the Netflix film. Speaking to The Irish Catholic, he said:
“I think it’s another step of mass media sexualising a form of child abuse, and actually playing into the whole paedophilia-sex industry…there should be a very strong reaction against it, because it’s a terrible form of child abuse, sexualising young children, and of course, promoting paedophilia and sex tourism for children.”
Having seen the devasting effects of child abuse first-hand, Fr Cullen issued a stern warning about the ravaging consequences of the proliferation of child-abuse content, “We are now here, the problem is that child abuse images are devastating children, young kids. We just received here now three young boys, 10 and 11-years-old, sexually abusing a six-year-old. They have been viewing these child abuse images, which is on these smartphones. It’s everywhere, as you might say, and it’s being distributed here in the Philippines on smartphones. That’s the challenge, not only for Netflix, but for all the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who are allowing all of this child abuse to pass through their servers.”
“Netflix are a distribution company and they’re distributing what’s basically child abuse imagery, and they should be penalised. People should take court cases against them; that’s what we would do,” he said.
The controversy surrounding the movie comes amid the surge of, as MsDoucouré said, ‘cancel culture’. In reaction to the perceived attempts to ‘cancel’ the movie, some commentators, and many media outlets, are defending the film’s content on the basis of freedom of artistic expression, condemning those who take issue with it as “censorious”, and endorsing the choice to tackle child abuse through a visual medium as “bold” and “empowering”.
Taboo
As a society becomes increasingly progressive and heedless of former norms, things that once seemed taboo will appear ever more regularly before the public eye. While the intention of Cuties’ director may genuinely have been to raise awareness around the issues children face i, what she has really done is edge us closer to the place where movies can be made depicting children dancing sexually, discussing pornography, taking photos of their genitalia, and more.
As Enough is Enough (an organisation dedicated to establishing internet safety for children and families) Director, Donna Rice Hughes said: “This sexually exploitive dancing appeals to the sexual fantasies of paedophiles, sexual predators, and traffickers in addition to whetting the sexual appetite of boys and men alike of young girls.
“It says to Hollywood, this type of programming is ok and will get massive media coverage, so ‘Go for it,’” she said.
The traditional practice of offering the benefit of the doubt ought to be applied here with regards to Ms Doucouré’s intentions, but it should not prevent us from speaking out against the strides evil takes into the world.