I Watched "Cuties" on Netflix. This is What I Saw.
The hashtag #CancelNetflix is trending, all due to a little French film called “Cuties.” The film is catching serious flack for its presentation of 11-year-old girls in a sexual way. Some have suggested that the images and content clearly fit the definition of pedophilia.
Many people have strong opinions about Cuties. Just look on social media. But others are quick to say that we cannot pass judgment on the film unless we have actually seen it. While that’s not necessarily true, our work at I.N.F.O. for Families is focused on the hyper-sexualization of our children’s generation, and I felt like I needed to weigh in.
So I watched Cuties.
Know this: I fast forwarded a number of times and turned my head in disgust a few other times, but I watched it. And I must say, it was deeply troubling. (I know that people will comment that if I watched it, then I’m part of the problem. I get that. Just know that the tens of thousands of parents we serve look to us for direction and insight on cultural issues, so I felt a peace to muck through the ugliness in order to help educate others. If you disagree, I’m truly sorry.)
Here’s how Netflix sums up this dramatic movie: "Cuties is a social commentary against the sexualization of young children. 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."
If you send a message Netflix to complain about the content, the quote above is probably the response you will get. While the company line sounds reasonable, they’re not being honest. My quick take: Cuties contains lots of graphic content showing children doing sexually explicit dances.
What is the movie about?
Cuties tells the story of Amy, a pre-teen from Senegal who lives with her mother and brother in France. She is torn between two cultures: her strict muslim upbringing and her new friends at school who have a dance group.
The director, Maimouna Doucoure, is from Senegal and has said that the story has some autobiographical roots. She claims that she wanted to address the early sexualization of girls when she saw a young dance troupe doing explicit moves at a show in a community park. She was shocked by what she saw and wanted to address it in her film. Noble intentions….but at what cost?
If you’re still reading, know that I want to share three different thoughts about Cuties.
First, I want to clue you into the content, which is troubling to no end. Second, I want to suggest where I think the filmmakers were successful in illustrating what’s wrong with our world. Third, I want to call parents to action as they lead their kids to navigate the hyper-sexualized culture they encounter everyday.
1. What is so troubling in Cuties?
The easy answer: everything. If you want more detail, read on. I really hate having to issue a “spoiler alert” in this context because I don’t think you should watch it in the first place.
Obviously, Cuties has numerous scenes of 11-year-old girls dancing in provocative ways. Think MTV Music Awards. It’s incredibly troubling and (as some commentators have suggested) is the perfect fuel for a pedophile’s interests.
And that’s the most disturbing thing about the movie: they used actual children to star in the film. As Robby Starbuck tweeted, “The 11 year old girls who were sexually exploited filming Cuties shot those scenes in front of a director, a DP, a gaffer, their parents, a choreographer, a MUA, a hair person, a camera assistant, a wardrobe person, extras and more. Not one adult protected them.”
Add to that the hundreds of young actresses who tried out for this movie and you have what can only be called mass exploitation of children.
Some of the more troubling highlights from the film include:
Young girls having an explicit discussion of an oral sex video that they see on their phone. (The video is not shown.)
The brief nudity of a teen girl.
A group of 11-year-old girls claiming to be 14 just so they can flirt with a group of 16-year-old boys.
More sexually explicit dancing scenes.
A moment when the girls try to use their sexuality to manipulate men and get out of trouble.
Children dressing provocatively. In one scene, young Amy begins to dress to provoke and she loves the attention. When she gets in a fight at school and another girl yanks down her jeans, exposing her child-like underwear, she is embarrassed. When a classmate posts a video of the incident online, her embarrassment is multiplied.
Explicit sexting by a child. To compensate for the embarrassment mentioned above, Amy takes a picture of her genitals and posts it in a vain attempt to be more “mature.”
A child trying to “seduce” an adult. When an older family friend sees that she stole his phone, Amy aggressively fights to get it back, saying, “I need it.” She even begins to take off her clothes in front of him as if to seduce him. It’s one of many examples here of a child trying to be “grown up” because of the examples she has seen on her phone. Soooooo disturbing.
Even more provocative dancing. These poor children. Actors who are being paid to do this. Trained by adults to pull it off. So very sad. In the final dance competition scene, they pull out all the stops with sexy moves, gyrations, and “come hither” looks. Thankfully, the filmmakers show an audience who is also troubled by it.
An attempt at redemption? In the middle of the final dance number, Amy breaks into tears, frozen in place. It’s like she finally realizes that this is wrong and not something she wants to be a part of. It’s the film’s final attempt at redemption, but it’s far too little and far too late.
2. How does Cuties accurately illustrate the world our kids are growing up in?
The director claims that she wanted to illustrate the hyper-sexualization of young people today. Her suggestion is that social media creates a norm that even the youngest of girls desire to emulate.
All you have to do is scan TikTok and you know that this is true. Social media is giving an entire generation a new definition of femininity.
In the film, 11-year-old Amy sees a lot of booty-shaking music videos and starts looking at women’s bodies differently. We witness a real-time shift of her definition of normal and desirable. This can happen to any of our girls who come to believe that TikTok or Instagram offer a reliable definition of beauty.
At one point, the film shows the brief nudity of a teen girl in a video shared online. (It’s a split second image of her breast.) Troubling as that is, the young girls in the film enviously observe that the video “got a lot of likes.” In this way, Cuties illustrates a real trend: girls who will do anything to get more likes, more followers, and more attention. That reality in our kids’ world troubles me to no end. It should trouble any parent.
There is one more thing worth noting in the film’s narrative. Amy’s poor choices coincide with some significant upheaval in her family. She is experiencing some major insecurity at home, which makes the acceptance by her peers all the more attractive. This is Parenting 101, but if your kids don’t feel safe and loved and valued at home, then destructive behaviors (often influenced by peers) are likely to follow.
In no way do I commend Cuties or endorse what they had to do to make their point. It is dark and ugly and should be removed from Netflix for breaking all sorts of reasonable standards. But the film does illustrate a real problem: the early-sexualization of our girls. And we have to fight against that to protect the young women we are raising.
3. So what is a parent to do?
If our kids get buckets of content from social media but little direction from their parents, then we can’t be surprised when they begin to embrace the world’s ideas about sexuality. In our book, The Talks, we compare this to giving plutonium to a preschooler and letting them play with it in the backyard. They’re just not ready.
This lack of parental involvement is illustrated in the film. Young Amy gets her period and her Mom offers little help. She simply says, “You’re a woman now,” and walks away. When you compare that type of neglect with the engagement she gets from her peers and even from her phone and you can see why she is struggling.
Our kids need us to be present and they need us to be clued in to what they are encountering. That requires us to get our collective heads out of the sand and to start being intentional to equip and train them to make wise choices about everything from their sexuality to their relationships to their time spent on their phones.
If anything, watching Cuties reminded me of one truth: if there is an absence of information from me as a parent, I shouldn’t be surprised when my daughters (or my sons) buy into the perspectives that they are being bombarded with every day on TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat. Or whatever trendy new app kids are on today that we don’t know about yet.
My kids need me to step in to some difficult conversations and your kids need you to do likewise. Studies show that parents are still the NUMBER ONE influence regarding the moral choices that teenagers make. It’s about time we started leveraging that influence.
Do you need some help?
If you’re going to start equipping your kids navigate our hyper-sexualized culture, you might need some help getting started. We have some biblically based resources designed to do exactly that.
At I.N.F.O. for Families, we have been providing resources to help parents have meaningful conversations with their kids about modern sexuality for almost a decade. Our ground-breaking book, The Talks, gives parents a biblical and practical framework to have critical conversations with kids aged anywhere from 5-20.
But over the years, parents asked us for more. They wanted tools that they could put into their kids’ hands that would share a biblical perspective of sex and relationships. They wanted teen-friendly books that would help tee up these “talks” with their kids. So that’s what we gave them.
The perfect book for your teenage son.
We wrote The Young Man’s Guide to Awesomeness for teen guys. It covers three key issues: How to Guard your Heart (sexual purity), How to Get the Girl (the right way and time to enter a romantic relationship), and How to Save the World (getting your life moving forward with purpose).
It is a book for teen guys who DON’T want to read books. (Anybody have one of those?) We made it to be funny and easy-to-read. It even has 25 linked videos that guys can watch as they read, just to keep their YouTube-watching brains engaged. But it’s also full of truth. Every chapter contains a scriptural perspective and discussion questions where mom and dad can step in and be a part of the conversation. It’s a book that every teen guy should read.
The perfect book for your teenage daughter.
We wrote Meet Me in the Middle for teen girls (and their dads). It addresses 10 key conversations that every adolescent girl needs to be having with her father. It’s actually two books in one: there’s a book for the girl and a book for her dad. It is the perfect solution for dads who want to keep pouring life and love and God’s perspective into their daughters, but during a season when the relationship can be a bit awkward. (I’ve launched two adult daughters and I’m raising another, so I know this first-hand.)
Meet Me in the Middle addresses issues like friends, beauty, guys, sex, porn, identity, and a girl's relationship with God. Ideally, father and daughter will read the book one chapter at a time, passing it back and forth to each other. Then, each chapter concludes with discussion questions to get parents and kids talking.
The perfect tool for families to talk about Smartphones.
We have recently launched Smartphones 101, a new digital course that families go through together. It contains 10 short videos and discussion guides that cover all the things that you need to talk about with your kids: social media, texting, relationships in the digital world, explicit content, predators, and more. It also gives specific details on how to safely set up a teenager’s phone and an editable smartphone contract you can use with your kids. Click the image below for the details:
