Y’all I watched Cuties on Netflix and it is a really good film that take the struggles and dangers of young people seriously. It is uncomfortable but you should watch it.

It’s uncomfortable but the dangers and narratives in it are real and we have to able to get past our discomfort of ever thinking about a world that sexualizes children in order to do the work of solving our world and culture that are already doing so.

All the commentaries I’ve seen on it say “but you didn’t have to show it” when in actuality I think the film is an opportunity to re-sensitize a word that has YEARS of Toddlers in Tiaras, Dance Moms, and real dance and gymnastics that put our real young women ...

sexually exploitative positions as we APPLAUD them. This movie offers a type of model for the familiar tropes of girlhood and tries to correct them.

If you are concerned about the movie bc you want to PROTECT little girls- you have to start by LISTENING to them. Even when it’s uncomfortable. They are, themselves, uncomfortable and hurting and in real danger. The writer/director did that in her making of the film.

I think that lives at the center of this too. We don’t want to listen to little girls. I think about that video on Twitter a lil while back of the little girl crying in the car to her mom about not feeling comfortable going somewhere and her mom didn’t listen. She patronized.

In Seth Rohan’s Good Boys we saw little boys in suggestive situations FOR COMEDY and it got a nationwide cinematic release. But we can not get past the purity politics of little girls to HEAR them when they are telling us that they are hurting.

The main character’s mother is in such disbelief of her daughters crying for help that she CALLS A PRIEST TO EXERCISE HER and it take him to say “there is no evil spirit in this girl” no she’s just a girl who is in need of help.

So if we want to be a culture that empowers girls with the tools to safely navigate their adolescence and maturation at their own un-pressured or coerced pace, we have to be willing to listen to and see what that pressure and coercion looks like. It’s not about you, y’all.

Maybe that, for you, doesn’t look like watching Cuties but I think the film is a good place to see some relevant depictions of the talking points in the discourse.

Of all the commentators I like, the most disappointing take care from @dangelno who literally insinuates that the director of Cuties doesn’t have talent in his video.

He compares showing the girls dancing in Cuties, teaching each other the suggestive dances from the Internet the same way real girls probably have been doing for moths with WAP on TikTok, to Megan Fox’s story of being exploited at 15 in a Michael Bay music video...

... and to the assault scene in Precious which... is not 1 for 1. Not only do I thinks it’s non-analogous but it’s a pretty superficial read.

I DO recommend the review by @ForHarriet because I think it get pretty far into the nuance of the film itself for its length and I just love everything she does and says.

That’s it. I don’t think anyone asked for this but I’m gonna just leave it here