About a month ago a small, independent, French-made, Sundance award-winning film was thrown into a cultural wars vortex. It was intended as a critique and discussion starter about the sexualisation of children in the digital age, but for many uninformed, outraged social media conservative dolts who hadn’t seen it, it became an example of the very thing it was supposed to be criticising.
The outrage was spurred by an ill-advised publicity poster, which Netflix posted ahead of the film’s release on the platform, showing the young girls at the centre of the film’s story — the “Mignonnes” or “Cuties” — posing suggestively in skimpy costumes, about to perform a sexy dance for viewers. The backlash was, as it often is in the age of Twitter and Facebook, swift and severe, with people recoiling in disgust at the sexualisation of children that the poster seemed to be promoting and demanding, film unseen, that Netflix remove Cuties from its service. The call was quickly taken up by US political representatives and conservative media pundits, and Netflix at least seemed to have half-heard after it removed the poster and apologised.
The film finds its origin not in the realm of a salacious imagination but rather in the sad, depressing and difficult realities of the world in which we and these young women live.
The streaming service did not, however, bow to the pressure to remove the film. Were those so outraged by an admittedly stupid mistake on the part of the Netflix publicity team, actually to take the time and watch the film, what they would find is a carefully, tenderly realised piece of social realism that examines the pressures placed on female children. In an increasingly sexualised world, they are constantly bombarded on social media, easily and quickly available at the click of a button, with ideals of what women should be to rise to Kardashian heights of digital celebrity.
In an opinion piece published in The Washington Post this week, the film’s director, Maïmouna Doucouré, described being inspired to make the film after attending “a community event in Paris a few years ago when a group of young girls came on the stage dressed and dancing in a very risqué way. They were only 11, and their performance was shocking. Curious to understand what was happening on that platform, I spent the next year and a half interviewing more than a hundred 10- and 11-year-old girls across the city.”
The film thus finds its origin not in the realm of a salacious imagination but rather in the sad, depressing and difficult realities of the world in which we and these young women live.
The film’s main character is 11-year-old Amy, whose family has immigrated from Senegal to Paris, where her mother must deal with the humiliation of her husband’s decision, acceptable within Islamic culture, to take a second wife. Amy is placed under inordinate and premature pressure to uphold the religious and cultural traditions that have proved so unbearable to her own mother. In seeking an escape from this claustrophobic and crushing environment, Amy is drawn to a group of girls at her school who spend their time imitating the sexy dancers they see on social media. This leads to an adoption of sexualised performance that is outside the group’s lived experience or understanding of sex itself.
As Doucouré writes in her op-ed, this is also carefully based on real experience: “The stories that the girls I spoke to shared with me were remarkably similar. They saw that the sexier a woman is on Instagram or TikTok, the more likes she gets. They tried to imitate that sexuality in the belief that it would make them more popular. Spend an hour on social media and you’ll see preteens — often in makeup — pouting their lips and strutting their stuff as if they were grown women. The problem, of course, is that they are not women, and they don’t realise what they are doing. They construct their self-esteem based on social media likes and the number of followers they have.”
That is the reality of the world that the film so successfully manages to make us uncomfortably aware of. It does so without having to resort to gratuitous, dangerously pornographic tropes or situations, and it’s for that careful handling of the material that Doucouré won a directing award at the 2020 Sundance festival.
The culture war that the film has become part of is outside its conceptualisation. It is a victim of a world that has been terrified by the revelations of the nefarious people who live in it — people such as Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein — to the point that any discussion of a very real problem is shut down by those who don’t want to listen.
In the age of “cancel culture” and social media justice warriors there are indeed necessary and important battles to be fought about representation and the sexualisation of children. In this case, though, it would be best if those on both sides looked, thought and knew what they were talking about before they jumped on their phones. To do anything else is simply to be Donald Trump.
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