In the rare event that you are unaware of what the movie "Cuties" is, it's a French film that was recently released on Netflix. The movie claims to be a critique of Western oversexualized culture, starring a Muslim girl who is said to "join a twerking dance group to the disappointment of her traditional family". I have read several summaries of the movie from people who watched it and unfortunately seen small portions of clips from it. It is being vehemently defended by a large number of blue check mark journalists, under whose pitiable attempts to claim that there is value to the movie they are assaulted by 99% of the people who choose to reply. The problem with this movie is that it has displays of children being exploited, which would in any other context immediately be recognizable as child pornography to any human person. Because this particular child exploitation is masked behind a "message" and a fancy certificate of being an "award winning" (Sundance co-founder pleads guilty to child sexual abuse) "French film" (the French are sophisticated, or something), some bile-spewing, backwater degenerates have taken it upon themselves to defend it as "art":
"The freakout about #Cuties bothers me more than almost anything I've seen in a decade as a critic:"
These are just a few of the attempts to blatantly defend mainstreamed child pornography that I've seen today. I'm sure more will show up as the days pass, since these types of people believe they are much more intelligent than the people who disagree with them and that they could not possibly be wrong, ever. These people will double down until the end of their lives and there is nothing any reasonable person could do to change that. They believe that because the movie is a movie it's magically exempt from the actions individuals took to create it and the images it contains.
For any remaining reasonable people, I would make the following points quite clear, in hopes that they will not be smothered under the gaslighting attempts being made by the mainstream journalists.
What is happening now is a clear-cut example of something I have discussed before. In a previous post I outlined why "referring to non-mainstream theories and opinions as "right wing conspiracy theories" is intentional gaslighting". What is happening right now is that an opinion the vast, overwhelming majority of people hold is being labeled as something that is exclusive to "conservatives", or fill in the blank with any group of people vilified by the mainstream. A man above claims that it's antisemites who are against this movie. This particular accusation is so outrageous because it is slightly layered: far right people are often slandered as being antisemites, and so they extrapolated from satisfactorily simply calling it a "right wing" opinion and went for the throat with "antisemite", skipping ahead on the insult pyramid, not simply calling it right wing but calling it something more aggressive that right leaning people are often accused of being.
This is meant to convince anyone uncomfortable with being called an antisemite or associated with antisemites to (hopefully, from the view of the author) come to his side and start being comfortable with sharing his opinion (as he is a Good Person, and certainly not an antisemite), leaving your uncultured, Nazi opinions behind. Because, see, antisemites are against this film, and if you are also against this film, you may be on the same side as antisemites! Which would be bad, for you and your image, and your aversion to antisemitism should motivate you to begin to support these blatant attempts to mainstream child pornography or else you might find yourself agreeing on a particular topic with people you disagree with on other topics, and we can't have that.
You can see other examples of using manipulative language to attempt to win people over and force this to be a "bipartisan" issue: saying the movie is exactly what "rational" people thought it would be. If you thought this was blatant child exploitation, you are irrational, is what this man is saying to us. Truly, if you were an elevated, enlightened individual like him, you would be rational (a Good Person), and know that this movie simply never was blatant child porn, despite visually seeing evidence with your own eyes to the contrary (tip: this is gaslighting).
Indeed, if you read the parental guidelines to this movie before they whitewashed and edited them to be less obvious that this is blatantly child porn, you would have seen that it actually admitted outright that it is child porn.
Supporters of the movie continue their feet-stomping tantrums by claiming that people cannot merely be against this film for showing children doing lewd things unless they can combat the "intellect" of the movie eloquently. Further down on one of the above links, a blue check insists: "If conservatives, who have jumped on the debate over #Cuties, want to be taken seriously as cultural arbiters, they have to be able to talk about the *text* of a movie like this in an honest, responsible way." All this is saying is that if the person who is telling you the movie exploits children can't manage to combat the messaging and script of the movie in a way that sounds like it's from a Cultured Person, then their opinion is invalid. Simply showing you a clip from the movie that is child pornography in order to prove that this film contains child pornography is "not an argument", they must be able to articulate an argument against the rest of the film, the parts that don't contain child pornography, in order to be "taken seriously" as people who are against child pornography.
This is not a compromise you need to actually make. It's actually entirely valid to point out that the movie required children to be exploited to be created and saying "the entire thing is in fact wrong for this reason". They could have filmed a movie about this topic without exploiting actual children. If they did this exact same movie without the child porn, no one would have cared. It may have even been universally accepted as portraying an important message! No doubt the oversexualization of Western culture is actually bad, which I agree with. I, however, cannot agree with the decision to show underaged girls twerking and rubbing themselves to make that point.
Indeed, believing you are an intelligent, cultured individual for being
able to "look past" the child exploitation present here is quite ironic -
nuance is something that is lost on the majority of people. It seems
very un-nuanced to condemn this entire film for "just a couple parts"
that are child exploitation, but it is actually just as lacking in
nuance as accepting the entire film for "just a couple parts" that are
child exploitation. You have accepted the whole package - the message and the child porn - as opposed to condemning the entire package. It is the same amount of nuance. The correct nuanced position would be that the shots filmed and produced that show children in compromised positions was irresponsible and should have been handled entirely differently.
Indeed, I have read several people say that the scene where the girl takes a photo of her privates and posts it online is quite lacking in any attempts to soften the distress this scene should cause. Somehow, this scene is filmed in a way that elicits the correct emotional response (shock, distress) - but they managed to film the dances, the twerking, the touching and everything else horrible in here in a pleasant and jolly light. It is very ignorant and shallow minded for the individuals who produced this film - giving them to benefit of the doubt as not being child predators themselves and genuinely believing they were filming something "shocking and distressing" - to film these particular scenes in a light that was pleasant and upbeat, as if they were truly attempting to make people aware of the effects of Western society's hypersexualization on children, they should have known that such a scene filmed in this way would be a gift on a silver platter to individuals who seek out these sorts of things for their own pleasure. It should have been filmed and produced in a way that elicited shame, horror, and distress - but it was not. This is the issue, and this is a nuanced position. You are not an intellectual for "looking past" the child exploitation happening for the message of the film, you are simply irresponsible.
Now, I've been seeing this circulating, and if you have been tricked by the following argument, allow me to provide you with some help: "People create movies criticizing the travesty of war by making war movies showing in vivid and uncomfortable detail the crimes against humanity that occur during war." This argument attempts to say that the film has full license to show children being exploited in order to criticize the oversexualized culture of the West, which is what they are claiming to be doing in the movie.
Here is the part where that argument falls short: no one is actually killed in a war movie. It's all simulated. The actual war crimes are not actually being perpetrated, they are being depicted and everyone goes home with all their limbs once it's over. Unfortunately, showing children behaving sexually in a movie is undeniably, inseparably literally child exploitation. The fact that these children performed these hypersexualized dances, lifted up their shirts, and touched each others bottoms doesn't go away when the movie is over. They are literal children, being encouraged to behave in a way for adult viewers. That is literally what child exploitation is. That is literally, that is precisely, it is exactly, it is in absolutely no uncertain terms exactly in every single way what child exploitation is.
The only way the "war movies" argument would be valid would be if in war movies, they actually bombed civilian homes and murdered women and children in drone strikes. The harm done by exploiting the children who "starred" in this movie is permanent. Those children performed those acts. Now pedophiles are in their living rooms, watching these scenes on repeat with their pants down and you are genuinely trying to argue it is art. This is unbelievable.
This analogy does not work because you are not simulating child exploitation, you are performing it. They are literal children that have been groomed to perform these behaviors on camera. It does not matter what messaging you put before and after it. You filmed children touching each other and dancing provocatively, intentionally, and then showed it to people. There is a scene that is literal, by the definition of law, child pornography and then you showed that on Netflix. These children cannot consent and they have been exploited - actually and in real time these children were harmed. That is why the movie is bad. It actually does not matter, despite the protests of the blue check brigade on social media, what is before and after the exploitative scenes.
Another argument I have seen people attempt to make is that it is okay that these children were filmed performing these actions for a movie because they auditioned for it and were paid. This argument would fit neatly alongside an argument for the actual professional filming and creation of child porn, and thus it is an astronomically irresponsible argument. It does not make it okay to film children in compromising positions because you have paid them. We as a civilized people understand that children are still developing mentally, they have unblemished trust in adult authority figures, and they cannot truly consent to such acts. It is the job of sane, responsible adults to protect children until they have grown enough to recognize what is and is not safe to do. These truths are self-evident and the attempts to erase them from our memory banks is done intentionally by people who wish to exploit children. Do not fall for this type of manipulation - they want to harm children for their own gain and are seeking your permission. Do not give it to them.
The main argument, overall, is that the film has a message and there is a purpose to the sexualized scenes the real children actresses engage in, thus it's not actually child pornography, nor morally wrong. As I have in no unclear terms explained in the last few paragraphs, that actually doesn't matter. They could have filmed this movie without those parts, but they chose to include them. This was an active decision by the people who created this movie. It is, actually, okay to say that any particular scene in a movie makes it inappropriate - this happens all the time with movie ratings. Indeed, sometimes entire scenes are scrapped from movies for being "too much" so that they can go down an age rating, or because the people creating the movie find that it's simply "too much" for the kind of film they're making. This did not happen. They didn't "accidentally" exploit these children and add these disgusting scenes in the final product, it was an intentional decision. These children were instructed to practice these acts, repeatedly, until they were to the satisfaction of the directors. They filmed these shots dozens of times, then watched them all and chose "the best take" - because that's how movies are made. Thus we can look at their intentional decisions and say that these scenes were too much and should not have been put out for all the world to see. It is entirely good and justified for us to say that this is wrong.
I have read the thoughts of many people who have watched the movie - many regular, non-blue check people. The vast majority of opinions I'm seeing are that the film does have its messaging and is mostly a normal coming of age story, but for no clear reason it has these extreme sexualized scenes. At best, people say it's in a "neutral" style, but most people believe these scenes are portrayed with unironic positivity. They are filmed in a bright and pleasant manner with "lingering booty shots" as explained by one normal, everyday person. Many normal people who chose to watch this film "with an open mind" have concluded, through the lens of their very own eyes, that this movie unnecessarily sexualized their child actresses. Attempting to convince someone to doubt their own testimony is gaslighting.
When you see something that is distressing because you know deep in your soul that it is detestable and morally wrong, and someone tries to tell you that you are simply not cultured enough to understand it, you are being gaslit. Do not allow yourself to be manipulated into believing that the evil you knew you saw was simply "art". I will reiterate that the intended messaging in the movie is not incorrect, but the means were a violation of every assumed duty we have as adults to care for and protect vulnerable children in society.
I have not seen this movie and it is a red herring to say I must see it to criticize it. It is not necessary to compromise my mental health or give fuel to the burning rage I have against what society has become for me to know that certain scenes in this movie were irresponsible, damaging, and exploitative. I have seen enough from clips and read enough from people who have chosen to watch it. It is also a red herring to invoke any whataboutisms about other movies or TV series that have exploited children, as believe it or not, I was actually thoroughly disgusted with Good Boys and found it to be outrageously irresponsible to take literal children and have them perform those scenes for a film. I despise Toddlers in Tiaras and child beauty pageants - I never said I did not. All of these things are part of the slippery slope that has lead us here. Indeed, many of the people who organize such disgusting exploitation of children are pedophiles - South Park has a very explicit joke about this in one of their episodes, where one of the child beauty pageant judges is clearly rubbing himself behind the judging counter. These are all also terrible crimes against children and are responsible for getting us here in the first place. Yes, they are bad - Cuties is also bad, and actually measurably worse. It is not hypocritical for me to not mention all of these other things while explaining why the blue checks defending this particular movie need to be investigated by federal police.
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