OPINION: Why the Cuties Controversy is Ludicrous

Zoe Stanton-Savitz ‘23

Screenshot of the Cuties trailer on Youtube with 2.1 Million dislikes

Growing up in the digital age, young girls are bombarded with a barrage of media depictions of overly sexualized and objectified women. With the click of a button, preteens are exposed to James Bond coercing women into sexual behavior; scantily clad Cardi B twerking and singing about her “Wet-Ass Pussy;” advertisements for a vast selection of shapewear, make-up and overpriced clothing targeted to size two models and a whole slew of fetishizing movies, TV shows, music and other media. Thus, even before getting their first period, girls are pressured to dress, dance, act and speak in accordance to the whims of an overbearing digital universe. 

First time French-Sengalese director Maïmouna Doucouré attempts to address this issue of harmful mass media infiltration into the prepubescent psyche through her new movie Cuties, which premiered in January at The Sundance Film Festival where Doucouré won the festival’s prestigious World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award. Soon after, Netflix acquired the film, where it began streaming internationally in September. 

The coming-of-age film follows eleven-year-old Amy –– played by the radiant and talented young Fathia Youssouf –– as she struggles to navigate two contrasting worldviews: her Muslim family’s conservative values, where femininity is often suppresed, conflict with those of the glamorous and hypersexualized competitive dance circuit where Amy befriends a group of young girls who call themselves The Cuties.

Cuties sparked a controversy online upon its release. The film, which includes scenes depicting the young characters grinding, twerking, groping and wearing extremely revealing outfits, was condemned for sexualization of underaged girls. Numerous petitions urging Netflix to remove the film from its platform erupted in lieu of the backlash leading to the trending #CancelNetflix campaign. According to YipitData, the negative attention resulted in a loss of eight times the average amount of daily lost Netflix subscribers in the days following the film’s release.

The Cuties trailer on Youtube currently has 2.1 million dislikes and counting and the comments section is riddled with a wide array of colorfully withering comments including the following illustrating the overly zealous battering of the film:

“This movie is a pedophile’s dream”

“Let’s make this the most disliked video of 2020”

“I’m starting to think the movie ‘Cats’ isn’t so bad now”

“This is one of the worst things that [have] happened on the planet”

“Jeffery Epstein would have liked this movie”

The outrage was compounded by unfounded hysteria based on ludicrous theories of child sex-trafficking spread by right-wing conspiricy groups. Senator Ted Cruz even called for a criminal investigation into the creation of the film saying “the film routinely fetishizes and sexualizes these preadolescent girls as they perform dances simulating sexual conduct in revealing clothing, including at least one scene with partial child nudity.” On October 8, Netflix was indicted by a Texas grand jury for the promotion of “lewd visual material.” 

It is clear Senator Cruz has not seen the film. Doucouré took pains to protect the young actors from oversexualization or abuse, and the film does not contain scenes displaying child nudity, nor scenes depicting or alluding to child abuse. 

How did this film elicit such instant and intense retaliation? For one, the mania was exacerbated by Netflix’s poor marketing. Initially, Netflix promoted the film with an almost pornographic poster of The Cuties wearing Spandex and crop tops posing suggestively and a reductive blurb that 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.” This is a gross understatement of the movie’s exploration of femininity as well as Amy’s ultimate decision to live not in accordance with others’ expectations but for herself. 

Also to its detriment, Netflix chose to translate the film’s title to English rather than keeping the original French moniker of Mignonnes. While the French term translates to “pretty, charming or sweet,” in English, “cutie” is somewhat more derogatory, closer to “hot” or “sexy” when referring to women. No wonder the meaning was misconstrued. 

Netflix’s misnomer immediately became a hot topic of discussion on social media, where posting and spreading opinions is effortless, allowing users to perpetuate outrage surrounding Cuties before even watching the film. Public criticism effectively blackballed the movie before it had a chance to redeem its poor marketing and attain the credit it deserves.

That being said, the film is terribly misunderstood. It is deeply engaging, poignant and incites conversation — though not all of it is productive. Perhaps the most telling indicator is the film’s Rotten Tomatoes scores. Though Cuties earned an 86% critic consensus, it only received a 15% audience reception score, proving it retains strong cinematic virtue regardless of the audience backlash.

Cuties is a beautiful film. The child actors take on the heavy themes with grace and depth, and Doucouré’s expert storytelling makes the film compelling and heart-wrenching. Some scenes of The Cuties dancing sexually in revealing costumes do come off as cringe-worthy, but they are interspersed between melancholic examinations of youthful innocence melting away, overtaken by an overwhelming adult emotionality that Amy is unequipped to handle. Amy’s position, torn between an unforgiving conservative family and the torrent of hypersexualized and objectified women provided by the digital world, pushes her to cross a boundary in her personal feminine freedom. 

The disturbing scenes coupled with Amy’s progression are all completely purposeful. What most viewers don’t realize is that the director and audience are on the same page. Doucouré wrote this story to uncover the eerie but alarmingly real phenomenon of young girls mimicking social media’s hypersexualizion of women.

“For me, this film is sounding an alarm,” Doucouré told TIME magazine following the release of Cuties. “This film tries to show that our children should have the time to be children, and we as adults should protect their innocence and keep them innocent as long as possible.”

Doucouré also reportedly researched the movie’s topic long before shooting, interviewing “over a hundred preteens” who recounted seeing online images sexualizing women every day, especially in the dance and music industries, and felt insecure in their own femininity, like Amy. Her research proves that the movie is meant to depict a reality –– not some perverse fantasy facilitated by a perverse gaze. In addition, a child psychologist worked on-set during filming and continues to counsel the young actresses on how to deal with their newfound fame. 

“Our girls see that the more a woman is overly sexualized on social media, the more she’s successful,”  Doucouré said. “The children just imitate what they see, trying to achieve the same result without understanding the meaning, and yeah, it’s dangerous.”

In other words, the audience is supposed to feel uncomfortable. Doucouré’s goal was to expose the media’s oppressive and coercive effect on children, upon which the media and entertainment industries are fundamentally built. Cuties is not motivated by prurience, but rather the urge to unveil and combat this harmful culture’s effect on young children. Doucouré’s message was misconstrued and overshadowed by an online mob of uninformed contrarians who have not seen the film. Their abundance of hateful comments have now unfortunately discouraged possibly interested viewers from seeing the film.

In Cuties penultimate scene, The Cuties attend a public dance competition where the on-screen audience and the film’s viewer become one and the same. Seeing the fictional audience become visibly uncomfortable at the children twerking and gyrating before them justifies Doucouré’s shocking but effective use of hypersexualization.

This is the crux of the film. It’s a relief to arrive at this scene and understand that the distressing emotions thrust upon the audience thus far are deliberate. The dance competition becomes tragic as the girls discern that what they’ve been doing  — though encouraged by a vast digital world — is objectionable and in some cases, repugnant. Amy quickly realizes this and runs offstage in tears. The end expresses Doucouré’s theme unequivocally — these girls are unaware of the harm caused by their actions, making their own hypersexual behavior all the more disturbing.

On a personal note, I am a college student engulfed in the same social media as these children. I see preteen girls half-dressed and caked in makeup striking poses and performing dances not dissimilar to those of Amy and her crew on TikTok and Instagram every day. I understand where these young girls learn these behaviors because I witness them. Perhaps Cuties denouncers are not as immersed as I am in an online culture that can at times, indeed be absurd and disconcerting. To them, Cuties is a fictionalized emulation of child pornography. To me, it renders truth.

The controversy over Cuties is nonsensical and paradoxical. Adversaries condemn the film for the very thing it is fighting against; however, many didn’t bother watching the film before speaking against it. Pressuring Netflix to remove Cuties sets a dangerous precedent for censorship of other movies.

The job of art is not to comfort an audience; it is to delineate a fundamental human truth, even if it’s hard to watch. Controversial but iconic films such as Midnight Cowboy, which received an X rating for its portrayal of homosexuality but was later deemed “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress; La Grande Illusion, banned in Germany for criticizing World War II as useless but now known and taught as one of the greatest anti-war films of all time; and A Clockwork Orange, cesured for explicit violence and sexual content but now recognized as a cult classic about moral ambiguity and political dissent, would not exist if not for the rejection of censorship and embrace of radical art. In these cases as well, audiences labelled the films crass or distressing before watching. Though there is little danger of Netflix removing Cuties, the outrage continues. I urge people to watch this touching film before heightening this ludicrous controversy.