There really is no bottom to the cesspool our entertainment industry has become. Many of you probably already saw this story earlier:
“Cuties”—the film glorifying pedophilia that’s set for a Netflix release in early September, remains a point of contention in the culture wars. The streaming platform has now apologized for the poster, but has not said anything about the film. The backlash surrounding the film was swift and fierce today, as the public got wind of this film that appears to be advocating for the sexual exploitation of tween girls.
Netflix told Deadline that “We’re deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Cuties. It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which premiered at Sundance. We’ve now updated the pictures and description.”
However, Netflix has not apologized for the content of the film, which features fully the imagery in question—or at least it does in the trailer, available on the site. Cuties, a French-language film, was well-received when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. It won the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award at that film festival…The story is about an 11-year old girl who joins “The Cuties,” a dance troupe. According to Deadline, she “rapidly grows aware of her burgeoning femininity—upsetting her mother and her values.”
While the film has been praised by critics, the American public is not so sure this is the kind of content it wants to see about 11-year-old girls.
If our entertainment is a mirror in which a culture sees itself, this latest outrage says something particularly vile about who we have become. And yet, the backlash will be minimal in terms of Netflix’s bottom line, because most of us are simply lack the ability to be shocked. Films and TV shows that would have rendered our grandparents apoplectic now garner scarcely a shrug. We’re getting used it. That, and in a culture where the vast majority of people watch porn as well as pornographic entertainment, outrage has been blunted by complicity.
This is about the sexualization of children. It is the last frontier of the sexual revolution, but with Drag Queen Storytime, sex changes for kids, and entertainment increasingly flirting openly with depravity’s darkest impulses, we should be very fearful about the direction in which we are headed.
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Update: Here’s a piece over at First Things titled “Why We Shouldn’t Watch Cuties” by C.C. Pecknold, who has pretty much the same conclusion:
We have all watched the steady march of progressive sexual morality for decades, and we have seen one moral boundary after another knocked down on the most illusory and disingenuous grounds. The steps from Obergefell to Bostock were incredibly swift. And as California proposes lowering the age of consent to fourteen, and as groups such as MAPs (“Minor Attracted Persons”) lobby for pedophilia as a sexual orientation that deserves inclusion in the LGBT community and protection under the law, many are intuitively ready to draw the line. Dawn Hawkins, executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, has done so, stating that “‘Cuties’ clearly sexualizes children, and in particular, girls of color. The pornography industry is built on these stereotypes, and Netflix is taking a page from this playbook by featuring these children in such a manner. Netflix must stop this practice immediately.”
