Bianca Harkless
Editor-In-Chief
Netflix was indicted on September 23rd by a Texas Grand jury for the movie Cuties because they featured “lewd visual material” of a child.
The French film has sparked controversy from the time it went onto Netflix, early last month, for the sexualization of children. The complaint says that Netflix “knowingly” promoted visual materials which “depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was reated, which appeals to the prurient in sex, and had no serious, literary, artisitc, political, or scientific value.”
The TV-MA rated movie follows the story of an 11 year old girl named Amy as she starts to rebel against her conservative family after she becomes fascinated with a free-spirited dance crew. Having watched the movie, I can say that I did not see anything inherently wrong with the storyline. I actually really enjoyed the plot of the movie, minus a few weird points that came across as strange, and I did not see anything that came across to me as promoting pedophillia or anything pedophilic.
The creator, Maimouna Doucoure, has said the movie is not only to show a refugee girl’s coming of age story but to make a statement about the sexualization of young, or preadolescent, girls. The girls in the film do dance extremely provocatively. Twerking in short shorts is one of the more common scenes that people are brought up in. People are also mentioning the way that the camera follows the girls bodies, zooming in on inappropriate places and following the movement for longer than necessary. The creator definitely got her point across against the sexualization of adolescent girls.
With that in mind, there are scenes that are definitely not okay. The dancing is questionable, there is a scene where you see a girl getting bullied and having her pants pulled down, showing off her underwear and her behind, and in turn to the video, she uploads an inappropriate picture out saying that she is “not a little girl”. Without going too far into complaints of others, those are the main scenes which people are bringing up.
As of the 19th of October, 2020, there has been no other word as to the fate of the Cuties movie, but it is certain that a Texas Grand jury has indicted Netflix believing that the movie “depicts the lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child who was younger than 18 years of age at the time the visual material was reated, which appeals to the prurient in sex, and had no serious, literary, artisitc, political, or scientific value.”
Image Credit: Samet Özer on Unsplash
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