Hi everyone i hope you're all well so controversial french film
cuties has been released on netflix and oh my goodness has it caused a stir
now the film initially raised eyebrows with the general public back in august
when the trailer was launched on netflix accompanied by a rather questionable
poster depicting the films for 11 year old
female leads wearing skimpy spandex costumes
and posing in provocative highly age inappropriate positions
now obviously i can't actually show you that image in this video because it of
course goes against all of youtube's content guidelines and in fact i
probably can't show you any relevant footage from the film in this video
for that exact same reason however as i mentioned the film is on netflix
if you are interested then you can view it there anyway the poster art and the
film's description on netflix which originally read
amy 11 becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew
hoping to join them she starts to explore her femininity
defying her family's traditions caused a massive reaction
now this tended to swing between criticism from
a lot of high-profile conservatives among others at the film's apparent
exploitation of children and a defense of the movie from those
insisting it was simply a coming-of-age story
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you like it anyway when the trailer was released
obviously not enough of the general public had
seen the film to make a judgment on what it was actually about
and certainly uh netflix's choice of artwork and description did not do the
film any favors it was nothing more than sleazy click
bait and i have absolutely no idea how that flew by when there was a
whole other poster already in circulation
which was used in the french promo material as such netflix
apologized for their choice swapped the poster art to the french version
and changed the description to eleven-year-old amy starts to rebel
against her conservative family's traditions
when she becomes fascinated with a free-spirited dance crew
it's like they were trying to turn it into footloose or something
not quite now the film eventually premiered on netflix on september
9th and law what a fuss did it cause hashtag cancel netflix became the number
one trending topic on twitter usa with users expressing their outrage that this
kind of content had been green lit by netflix there has been a call from
republican senator tom cotton and indiana representative jim banks for
the department of justice to bring legal action against netflix for pushing
explicit depictions of children into american homes and for the
distribution of child democratic representative tulsi gabbard
even accused netflix of being complicit in the facilitating
of the child trade now on the flip side of this were reviews from outlets like
the new yorker variety vulture rolling stone etc
defending the film from these kinds of criticisms they
insist that the problem is not the distribution of explicit images of
children but prudish conservatives who have
organized a right-wing campaign against the film while ignoring its apparent
nuance as a coming-of-age story that makes a
critical point about the sexualization of young girls
in society and the pressure that they can feel to conform to this
now a lot of the reviews quite rightly asserted that many of the vocal critics
of the film haven't actually watched it and certainly when the initial
outrage over the film was sparked in august
they definitely hadn't since it hadn't been released yet on netflix
so in order to avoid this self-inflicted deficiency of opinion
i watched cuties before i made this video and i have a few things to say
the first thing i want to say and separate from the graphic imagery and
themes issues is that the film is boring
boring no the batteries that's boring you're
boring everybody quit boring everyone like it is so
boring i got 20 minutes in and i was already lamenting the fact that i
couldn't just switch it off if i had been
watching any other film and i wasn't making a video about it
i would have watched something else because it was so uninteresting even in
the first 20 minutes before any of the problematic
themes had arisen in the plot it is a very typical predictable angsty
coming-of-age story about an eleven-year-old girl named amy
who is dealing with growing up between her devout islamic family upbringing
and all of the temptations of western popular culture
and how each defines ideal womanhood differently and how
she changes and the family strife that that causes and how she makes friends
that she realizes are bad for her and that ultimately family life is
better than the hyper sexualized dancing she was doing
yada yada honestly it was so predictable that it practically wrote itself there
was literally a moment halfway through when i realized i still
had a full 49 minutes left to go and i was so annoyed i vocally exclaimed my
frustration oh i think i just really hate angsty
coming of age dramas i mean it is up there with my least favorite genre of
film i don't know why this is maybe it's because i was really lucky and had a
very happy childhood but i just can't stand them
and this was not even a good angsty coming-of-age story
i can cope with a really good one good will hunting is my favorite movie but
this one was just yikes oh this goes on for 12 more
minutes second had i not read the reviews prior
to watching the film that explained the intent of the director was to highlight
and criticize the sexualization of young girls in society nowadays
i don't actually know if i would have got that just from watching it
at least not very clearly to someone with absolutely no black background on
the film it may have just come across as a really
weird pre-teen drama about a confused adolescent with some garish and
gratuitous imagery of age-inappropriate costumes dance
moves and behavior which brings me to third the main issue
that critics have with the film that is the highly explicit way these young
girls are portrayed and yes it is as bad as you think it is
particularly towards the end and while that infamous final dance
routine that's currently bouncing around the internet
is not glorified in the context of the film since we see audience members
booing it and the main character runs off stage
crying the key word here as i mentioned a second ago
is gratuitous but before i tell you just how gratuitous
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really really love it if you could share it for me youtube very
deliberately squashes content from independent content
creators in favor of mainstream news outlets like cnn etc
especially if these content creators are conservative
it would be hugely helpful and very very much appreciated if you could help me
bypass that just a little bit and share this video i
would be so grateful for you if you could do that for me the exact
same point could have been made all the way through the movie about the pressure
that young girls face nowadays to be sexual
and how a lack of education can exacerbate that without all the explicit
imagery it is simply in my opinion totally peripheral to the crux of the
storytelling we know what that kind of stuff is we
have all cringed at the kinds of things that teenagers post on instagram and
snapchat nowadays we've all seen the cardi b video clip or
they're the very least ben shapiro's commentary on it
we know you don't have to present these 11 year old actresses for several
minutes on end multiple times during the film engaging in the kind of
presentational hypersexual behavior in order to make
that point and that's actually what really
irritated me about the film aside from the obvious it was actually
making a very valid point the hypersexualization of teenage girls and
also the fact that it poisons the teenage boys who watch on
have been a subject of grave concern for me for about six years now
i noticed it at first in late 2014 which was when instagram and snapchat kind of
really started to pop off and the stories i heard from my
younger cousins about how girls as young as
11 or 12 would pose in bikinis in explicit ways in order to garner male
attention and when i asked my cousins why their
friends did this they told me that these girls felt like
it was expected of them massive alarm bells rang for me back then and we are
seeing the very worst culmination of it now in pop culture with the rise of
sites like only only fans for instance and it's something that i remember
thinking at the time feminists have simply
missed they were all just so busy whining about silly things like man
spreading and mansplaining that they missed an absolute canker
in the side of womanhood or imminent woman who had given the age of a lot of
these girls and the very falsified view of
relationships and sexuality it was giving them and their male peers
and now it is worse than ever and we have cuties
the film could have made a really solid point about this pop culture
poison and the pressure that young girls are facing but all of that just gets
lost in the way the film chooses to do it
plus like i said it's really boring and also side note i
think the reason or at least one of the reasons that a
lot of the criticism is coming from conservatives is because netflix and
other streaming services were perfectly happy to ditch shows like little britain
the mighty boosh episodes of community etc based on nothing more than a face
value knee-jerk reaction to some of the racial themes
with zero consideration of context or intent and yet they're happy to stream
promote and defend this kind of sexually explicit comment
of minors as a nuanced coming-of-age story that examines and critiques the
sexualization of young girls i mean come on netflix there needs to be some
consistency here an addition and in addition to that
little bit of hypocrisy i have a feeling that one of the reasons it seems to be
largely the regressive leftist pop culture titans who are defending the
film why they are also suddenly tolerant and
nuanced and concerned with context after trashing the idea of context when
it comes to racial presentation is because the main character is black
muslim and immigrant and female it's just another way of signaling to
the world that they are just so terribly progressive mind you we really
shouldn't be surprised at their reaction i mean this is the same crowd of people
who defend child drag queens and drag queen story hour
and insist that that has absolutely nothing to do with sexualizing children
despite you know all evidence to the contrary
the other thing i noticed is how netflix and a lot of the reviewers portrayed the
plot as sort of vaguely anti-conservative themes like the second
description netflix gave stating that amy the main character is rebelling
against her conservative family rather than mentioning that the family
sort of socially repressive beliefs are drawn from their devout muslim
traditions netflix at all however couldn't possibly
be seen to present islam in any kind of even vaguely
negative light i mean that would be islamophobic wouldn't it according to
them having said that however before you go
assuming that the film is an indictment of stringent repressive
islamic tradition it's nothing of the sort the muslim
family in the film is the furthest thing from
abusive the relationships between amy and her mother
her brother and her stern but devoted great aunt
are very loving and affectionate and generally very functional
even in the face of family drama and of course amy's rebellious behavior
even when amy's mother brings in a religious leader to examine amy after
she is caught acting out he makes a point of telling her mother
that there is no devil or evil spirit at work here rather than blaming amy and
prescribing some sort of religious punishment
they're also not super stringent in their faith or at least they don't seem
to be there are no necarbs or burkas it's just
you know hijabs at prayer meetings and in fact these devout islamic
traditions are presented as the ideal eventually
spoiler alert the film ends with amy dressed in normal western non-revealing
clothing watching her family dance in beautiful
traditional formal dress at her father's wedding to his second wife
that's the family drama by the way with a smile on her face and she then goes on
to the street finds some kids who are playing with a
skipping rope and joins in the game happy as larry
so the film can hardly be accurately presented as an
indictment of socially conservative behavior
when that's what amy actually returns to after seeing the uh proverbial
error of her ways however the fact remains that those who are shocked
and appalled at the film for presenting these young girls in this sexually
explicit way and i include myself in that shocked and
appalled demographic by the way are justified in their anger because it
is all totally gratuitous and will absolutely be
exploited no question the same point could have been made
better without that kind of exploitative unnecessary presentation
and those who are blindly defending it as a nuanced coming-of-age story and
saying that any mention of the way that the girls are presented is just prudish
conservatives waging a right-wing culture war are just
kidding themselves sorry there is an awful lot wrong with
cuties and i have to say it is very very
disturbing that those on the regressive left
defending the film are so happy to entertain context and nuance when
presented with sexually explicit imagery of little girls
but not when it comes to a bit of dark face paint presented in a clearly
satirical critical context just saying
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