A few weeks ago, the French film Cuties landed on Netflix amid a torrent of criticism that the movie promotes pedophilia. The outrage was largely tied to the image that Netflix had chosen to market the film, which showed the movie’s 11-year-old protagonists—a group of girls who form a dance troupe—in sexually suggestive poses and clad in skin-tight, barely-there costumes.
The image was, as many who had seen the film at festivals rushed to point out, indicative of what the film is attempting to critique: a culture that teaches girls from a young age that the best way to be seen is to be sexy. Netflix later apologized and replaced the movie’s poster, but that didn’t matter to the mostly right-wing public figures who seized upon the film as the latest example of the liberal Hollywood elite’s degradation of North American values. Fox News host Laura Ingraham called upon her 3.7 million Twitter followers to boycott Netflix. Ted Cruz wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr asking him to “investigate the production and distribution” of the film to ensure no child pornography laws were violated. Taking his cue from his counterparts south of the border, newly minted Conservative leader Erin O’Toole tweeted that he was “deeply disturbed” by Cuties and wrote “We must do more to protect children.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that none of these shocked—shocked!—political leaders have seen the film, which centers on a young Muslim girl from Senegal (Fathia Youssouf) who has just arrived in Paris with her mother and younger siblings. Cuties is loosely based on writer/director Maïmouna Doucouré’s experiences as a young girl of Senegalese origin growing up in Paris. Amy (Youssouf) is saddled with the responsibility of looking after her two younger siblings and bored by the conservative religious instruction her mother and aunt force upon her. When she sees a girl from school dancing in her public housing complex’s laundry room, she’s transfixed, and with the help of videos on social media she learns some moves of her own.
Cuties isn’t really about a young girl’s “sexualization.” Amy and her friends aren’t totally naïve, but the film suggests they’re also not fully aware of the implications of their racy routines. The girls don’t act upon any sexual impulses; they only pantomime them in their dances. A scene at the end of the film where the girls perform at a dance competition to an audience of shocked, disapproving adults—the scene that the original, reviled Netflix poster depicts—mimics the reaction of Cruz, O’Toole and the rest.
That’s one irony of the outrage the existence of this film has stirred up. Another is the fact that Amy is rebelling against a similar kind of conservative culture in the name of which these politicians claim to want to protect girls. Amy’s faith teaches that women’s bodies are sinful. Her aunt points out that at Amy’s age, she was already engaged and married just a few years later. There is rage boiling beneath Amy’s quiet exterior, and no wonder as she learns at the beginning of the film that her father, still in Senegal, is bringing another wife with him to Paris and they’ll all live together under one roof. Her mother has prepared a special room in their cramped apartment for the couple that no one else is allowed to enter.
Cuties isn’t about sex; it’s about the isolation, burden of responsibility, and suppressed anger of a girl caught between two worlds. And yes, it’s about what the lure of sexuality means to a girl who feels invisible—the power that eroticism affords, even if, as Amy realizes, that power has serious limits. Instead of shutting down this conversation in the name of protecting children, it’s worth asking why so many girls internalize the message that it matters—maybe more than anything—how appealing they are to men.
“Some people have found certain scenes in my film uncomfortable to watch,” Doucouré remarked in a Washington Post op-ed that she shouldn’t have had to write. “But if one really listens to 11-year-old girls, their lives are uncomfortable.” Ted Cruz and Erin O’Toole aren’t interested in hearing about the uncomfortable realities of young girls’ lives. The bitter irony is that they are some of the people with the greatest power to enact change for real, not fictional, girls and women. They could attempt to solve the actual problem of child sexual abuse, or the fact that online images of such abuse have proliferated at an exponential rate over the past decade. But perhaps the Ted Cruzes and Erin O’Tooles of this world have made a strategic calculation: they can reach more people and wield their considerable influence more effectively by simply feigning fury about a Netflix movie on Twitter. I don’t know about you, but I’m deeply disturbed.