BY HEATHER CLARK

SEE: https://christiannews.net/2020/09/14/us-lawmakers-concerned-over-netflix-airing-of-cuties-movie-that-addresses-sexualization-of-girls-by-depicting-child-sensuality/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

A French-made film available on Netflix that is said to be a dramatized “commentary” about how social media and societal role models wrongly influence young girls to sexualize themselves is generating outrage, including from Congress, as its content counteracts its purpose by utilizing 11-year-old female actors who “perform dances simulating sexual conduct in revealing clothing.”

“I urge the Department of Justice to investigate the production and distribution of this film to determine whether Netflix, its executives, or the individuals involved in the filming and production of ‘Cuties’ violated any federal laws against the production and distribution of child pornography,” wrote Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to Attorney General William Barr on Friday.

According to reports, the movie was directed by Maïmouna Doucouré and seeks to address the negative influence sensual role models and social media have on pre-adolescent females by telling the story of an 11-year-old Senegalese Muslim immigrant, named Amy, who joins a girls dance troupe in Paris in rebellion against her mother.

She also finds herself dressing more provocatively and posting various pictures of herself online to gain attention and approval.

The scantily-clad girls engage in various sexually-charged dance moves — all clearly captured on camera and in the face of the viewer — while practicing and performing for a competition. Amy later tearfully realizes the wrong of her pursuits and returns to the arms of her mother.

“The film routinely fetishes and sexualizes these pre-adolescent girls as they perform dances simulating sexual conduct in revealing clothing, including at least one scene with partial child nudity,” Cruz wrote. “The scenes in and of themselves are harmful.”

Netflix has defended the movie, stating that it encourages others to watch the production because of its message.

“‘Cuties’ is a social commentary against the sexualization of young children,” it said in a statement. “It’s an award-winning film and a powerful story about the pressure young girls face on social media and from society more generally growing up — and we’d encourage anyone who cares about these important issues to watch the movie.”

“[Amy] believes she can find freedom through that group of dancers [where there is a] hyper-sexualization, but is that really true freedom, especially when you are a kid? Of course not,” Doucouré also explained in a video posted to the film page on Netflix.

She said that she interviewed a number of young girls before creating the film in seeking to understand how social media affects the way they think about themselves and their bodies.

“I needed to know how they felt about their own femininity in today’s society and how they dealt with their self-image in a time when social media is so important,” Doucouré outlined. “Our girls see that the more a girl is overly-sexualized on social media, the more she is successful. And children just imitate what they see trying to achieve the same result without understanding the meaning. And, yeah, it’s dangerous.”

“We are able to see oppression of women in other cultures, but my question is: isn’t the objectification of a woman’s body that we often see in our Western culture not another kind of oppression?” she asked.

But Cruz says the film could conversely encourage the abuse of children, and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., worries about the child actors who were used for the production and taught to engage in such acts for the camera.

“[I]t is likely that the filming of this movie created even more explicit and abusive scenes and that pedophiles across the world in the future will manipulate and initiate this film in abusive ways,” Cruz told Barr.

“Did Netflix, at any point, take measures to ensure the protection of the physical, mental and emotional health of child actors made to perform simulated sex acts and filmed in sexual or sexually suggestive ways?” Hawley wrote in a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

“Why did your company choose to market this film — which touches on a range of issues, including religion, culture and social media — with a poster solely depicting scantily-clad preteens in sexually suggestive positions?” he asked.

The original marketing image in France had been of the girls walking with shopping bags through the street and confetti flying in the air. The Netflix version had showed the girls in more provocative poses as dancers.

Others who have spoken out against the film include Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind.; and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hi.

Even the liberal site Vice, which found the film to be “a powerful story about the pressure young girls face on social media and from society,” acknowledged that at least some scenes in the film give cause for concern given the age of the actors, even if the underlying message is well-intentioned.

“There are some scenes that are intentionally provocative … and one in particular that feels unnecessarily eroticized,” it wrote. “The girls have established themselves as an urban dance troupe and spend an afternoon filming footage of themselves dancing to a song called ‘Bum Bum’ by well-known Nigerian artist Yemi Alade.”

“The montage features close-ups of their young bodies, skin-tight clothing and highly sexualized dance moves. This scene is designed to make viewers uneasy, but knowing that the actors themselves are very young is somewhat concerning,” the outlet said.

Online petitions for Netflix to pull the film have surpassed 1 million.

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'Critics' Rush to Defend Netflix's Pre-Teen Twerking Flick 'Cuties'

Where will we as a culture draw a line in the sand?

BY MARK TAPSON

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/critics-rush-defend-netflixs-pre-teen-twerking-mark-tapson/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The brilliant satirical website Babylon Bee recently posted another gem of a faux headline:  “Awesome: Netflix Will Now Just Pump Septic Waste Straight Into Your Living Room,” poking fun at the streaming entertainment service’s reputation for pushing increasingly controversial and offensive content. But Netflix’s latest offering is no joke: a French flick that veers into the realm of child pornography.

Cuties (originally Mignonnes), which debuted Thursday on Netflix, is the story of Amy, 11, a Senegalese girl growing up in Paris who rebels against her conservative Muslim immigrant family and seeks the approval of a bullying quartet of fellow 11-year-old girls who are absolutely clueless about sex but who nevertheless believe dressing and acting like prostitutes is the key to popularity (the ages of the actresses at the time of filming are unclear, but reportedly range from 11-14). Their aimless lives center on rehearsing sexed-up choreography to a rap song for a local dance contest.

As Amy becomes desperate to escape the stultifying, traditional expectations of the women in her family, she exhibits increasingly wanton behavior, such as posting a pic of her genitalia on social media and teaching the other girls how to rev up their dance routine by twerking (if you are mercifully ignorant about twerking, it’s a very popular move derived from strip-club lap dancing, in which females squat and shake their rear ends up and down like primates presenting themselves for mating; needless to say, this is wildly inappropriate for pre-teens). The movie culminates in an extended, raunchy dance performance in which the camera lingers repellently on the scantily-clad little girls’ pelvic gyrations, come-hither looks, and suggestive touching – of themselves and each other.

SPOILER ALERT:

During the performance, Amy is horrified onstage by the sudden revelation of what she has become, and she turns her back on both that downward spiral and her family's traditions, to find liberation in her own identity. But the transcendent ending of self-purification and newfound innocence feels utterly tacked-on, and it is too little, too late to rescue the film from the sense that we have been trapped in a pedophile’s dream.

END OF SPOILER

Cuties has lit such a firestorm of controversy and anti-Netflix backlash that the hashtag #CancelNetflix has been trending on Twitter as people cancelled their subscriptions en massein protest. Politicians have even weighed in. Sen. Josh Hawley called out Netflix on Twitter, with a screenshot highlighting posts to the parental guidance page of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), where warnings about nudity and sexual scenes are shown. Those warnings (see below) have since mysteriously disappeared from IMDb.

Sen. Ted Cruz has written to Attorney General William Barr requesting an investigation into whether the production or distribution of the film has broken any laws against child pornography.

Netflix did concede that its marketing for the film – a movie poster depicting the little girls posing provocatively like strippers – was, to put it mildly, a mistake, and it apologized in the wake of an earlier tsunami of justifiable public outrage. But Netflix stands by the film itself. “Cuties is a social commentary against the sexualization of young children,” a spokesperson said in its defense. “It’s an award-winning film and a powerful story about the pressure young girls face on social media and from society more generally growing up — and we’d encourage anyone who cares about these important issues to watch the movie.”

It’s social commentary! It’s art! And it’s award-winning! But as Breitbart News’ John Nolte wrote in his review, “Cuties is not an indictment of the sexualization of children. Cutiessexualizes children,” and portrays the young girls’ twerking ultimately as a “path to enlightenment and growth.”

Predictably, the left-leaning mainstream film critics have leapt to the movie’s defense, calling it “extraordinary” and “inspired” and dismissing its detractors as uptight “scandal-mongers on the right.” “It’s actually a sensitive portrait of growing pains that deserves to be seen,” Rolling Stone reassured its few remaining readers.

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody dismissed the “scurrilous campaign” from conservatives he claims simply don’t understand the movie. “The subject of Cuties isn’t twerking,” he insists. “It’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived of the resources — the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion — to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective.”

RogerEbert.com critic Monica Castillo also argued that the movie “actively critiques the very thing pearl-clutchers were mad about — the sexualization of children.” Mashable critic Angie Han chimed in similarly: “It’s upsetting, and it’s supposed to be — because the whole point of Cuties is how damn hard it can be for girls to navigate womanhood in a society that’s all too eager to tell girls and women what they should be, and not at all interested in what they might be or want to be.”

This argument is delusional; it is actually feminism, not “society,” that is all too eager to tell girls and women what they should be and is not at all interested in what they might be or want to be. Cuties reflects a sexualized pop culture that feminism has intentionally created, to “liberate” our daughters from the patriarchal chains of the nuclear family.

Tim Robey at the UK Telegraph praised the film as “a provocative powder-keg for an age terrified of child sexuality” (emphasis added) – a description that says much more about Tim Robey than it does about the purported prudes he is sneering at. He tittered approvingly that it has “pissed off all the right people” – by which he means people who vehemently oppose the sexual exploitation of children under a patina of art.

But Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang praised the movie as not at all “exploitative,” condemning its detractors as “putative grownups” who “can never be bothered to do the hard work of looking at something, let alone learning from it.”

Well, I did the hard work. I watched Cuties, and I learned from it – or at least, it confirmed what I already knew, which is that the entertainment critics at mainstream media outlets will defend any perversity, any ugliness, any slog through the gutter, rather than seem judgmental or moralistic. None of them is willing to align themselves with the “scurrilous,” Philistine “pearl-clutchers” of the right who just don’t understand art. None of them is willing to admit that they are apologists for an inherently exploitative showbiz industry that is populated with pedophiles at the highest cultural and political levels who have a vested interest in normalizing the sexualization of children.

Breitbart’s Nolte points out that “a full 88 percent of critics approve of Cuties, Netflix’s piece of soft-core child pornography, while only three percent of the audience agree.” This speaks volumes about the vast chasm that lies between the worldview of our leftist cultural elites and that of everyday Americans, who are becoming increasingly repulsed by the sinful excesses of pop culture.

The critics are tragically correct about one thing: our culture hyper-sexualizes women and children and shows no sign of reining that in. We are submerged in a cultural cesspool of such bottomless degeneracy that the number one song in the country is a steaming pile of rap pornography called “WAP” (as in, “wet-ass pussy”), marketed by a music video that glamorizes self-proclaimed “whores” (that is the female rappers’ own word, not mine). Shame on us. And yet the Democrat Party legitimizes former stripper Cardi B, the Grammy-winning “recording artist” behind that hit song, by letting her interview empty-suit presidential nominee Joe Biden for Elle magazine (because even fashion magazines now are leftist propaganda outlets.)

So yes, Cuties’ purported message that today’s little girls don’t know how to navigate our sexualized culture is a very real issue. And who made our culture what it is today? Who dragged our values down to the point at which a movie like Cuties is nearly unanimously defended by our media elites? Answer: the secular libertines of the Marxist left, whose relentless aim has been, and still is, to undermine the values and family structure of Western civilization, to push the envelope of “art” until no envelope even exists anymore, until there are literally no moral boundaries, no limits, no line in the sand.

If a movie that sexualizes children can be defended by claiming it is a critique of the sexualization of children, then what cannot be defended? It’s hard to imagine how our culture could degenerate even lower, but it can and it will unless enough Americans with a moral compass find the backbone to say no more, to put an end to the left’s domination of our media and entertainment.