cuties

‘Cuties’ exploits 11 year old girls

I haven’t seen the French movie ‘Cuties’, currently streaming on Netflix.

I have, however, seen enough excerpts from the film to know I don’t want to see it and that it’s a morally reprehensible piece of work that Netflix shouldn’t be offering.

That’s because it features sequences of pre-pubescent girls performing highly sexualized dance routines.

Yes, pre-pubescent girls. Eleven-year-old girls (and yes, the actresses are actually that age) performing highly sexualized dance routines. You can easily find them online, but I don’t recommend it.

On Saturday, CPC Leader Erin O’Toole posted a tweet condemning Netflix for streaming this movie. O’Toole rightly remarked that “Childhood is a time of innocence” and that ‘Cuties’ is “exploitative and wrong”.

You would think that everyone could agree that ‘Cuties’ has crossed an unacceptable moral line in the hyper-sexualizing of children and packaging it as film entertainment.

Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

In the United States, valid criticism of ‘Cuties’ has been condemned as a “right-wing campaign” by august liberal publications such as the New Yorker. Here in Canada, the Globe and Mail ran a response to O’Toole’s tweet penned by their Arts writer, Barry Hertz.

Hertz calls the uproar over ‘Cuties’ a “faux-controversy”. He says that the movie is “a nuanced, tender and powerful coming-of-age story”.

Hertz dismisses the concerns of O’Toole and many others who have objected to the movie’s content, and he can’t resist the temptation to wonder whether “perhaps [O’Toole] does not retain the capacity to think critically about anything.”

Barry Hertz must have decided to resort to this cheap, ad hominem attack because the alternative was to attempt to explain why a film featuring close-ups of the gyrating bodies of scantily clad eleven-year-old girls is acceptable.

And that’s impossible to do.

‘Cuties’ is NOT a political issue. It’s a disturbing signpost indicating how rapidly our popular culture is sliding into a moral abyss.

Critics like Hertz insist that the intention of ‘Cuties’ is to explore the clash of cultures and to persuade the viewer that the sexualizing of children is wrong. But these depictions of child sexuality, carefully choreographed and shot, only end up glorifying what they set out to condemn.

Sexualizing children is wrong. It will always be wrong. Everyone involved in this movie is hurting those they claim to be defending. You don’t have to watch child pornography to know that child pornography is the most reprehensible thing on earth.

How many 10 and 11-year old girls auditioned for roles in this movie? What became of that audition footage? To defend ‘Cuties’ in any way is to approve of the abuse of children.

‘Cuties’ has not created a “faux controversy”. It’s a very real controversy, because most Canadians have not lost their moral compasses and are scandalized by the commercial sexualizing of children.

They just aren’t the kind of Canadians who write for the Globe and Mail’s Arts section, I suppose.

Sincerely,

Derek Sloan's signature
Derek Sloan
Member of Parliament

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