I finally watched Cuties! I say that with a level of pride because I don’t watch TV—-I generally see about 1–2 hours of TV a week, generally on Mondays—-Love It or List It; I also watch My Dream Lottery House; AND this week I went crazy and actually watched an episode of Love After Lockup (which was literally a pro-incarceration TV ad. All of the ex-cons——immediately got out and acted physically or emotionally like ex-cons. lol It explained why my cousin Eric has been in the recidivism cycle of prison for 30+ years.)
I’d heard some hullabaloo about Cuties so I actually looked it up on Netflix because the algorithm and My List, that I provide to them (you do know that’s how the recommendations work, right? Also you’re pushed “like-minded fare” on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. based upon your past history—-literally your own mentality because text and video are essentially broken down into their descriptive components—-words, ideas, political ideologies, etc..)
My cookie (the codename for the digital attachment in your computer that creates the connections) based algorithm is a little wacky because my choices are heavily foreign language, documentaries and one or two odd TV show picks but I tend to watch chunks then turn to reality projects (it took me years upon years to actually watch Breaking Bad. And by the end I thought it was meh, you know. But again not just algorithms but also TV shows and movies reflect aspects of the viewers psychology.
I’m getting to my Cuties point. I promise.
I was doing some work late one night and in my double screen—-laptop and giant screen TV converted to a monitor ala below………
…much as I sit typing this up now, I put it on the big screen.
I will first say that most of the reviews and ad hoc opinions of the film miss huge chunks of points and exposition and storyline.
- One, the immigrant experience.
- Two, the culture clash experience.
- Three, generational expectations from the grandmother to the mother to the daughter based upon largely invisible men and religion.
- Fours, the deep desire to be accepted by Amy the little Senegalese girl.
- Five, childish immaturity even shown when the young girls try to attract the attention of older teenagers and are shunned as too immature.
- Six, the point of group/peer pressure and mentality and points of maturity or self-censorship within the fictitious group of girls. Which I think is deeply illustrated in Amy’s immediate obsession with social media and garnering Likes. In order to garner them she has to do more and more outrageous things that eventually cross social and even sexually appropriate lines..
- Seven, the consciousness and self-consciousness that the character comes to understand.
- Eight, the statement on the things and ways that women are expected to tolerate male—-her father’s decisions—- because of sex-gender, and not equality.
- Nine, the intense role modeling from an older male who tries to correct the girls’ behavior.
- Ten, the shift, the trajectory of maturity levels that Amy, the 11 year old Senegalese girl, goes through.
I thought going in, that one, it was American, it’s not it’s French-”Migonnes “ the title really—-made and that two, it was solely about the young girls being hypersexualized.
There’s actually a deep, substantive film here about many issues—-but a lot of them have to do with the least valuable, equality bearing folk on Earth—-women/girls and an African (read: Black) to Americanized perceptions.
It’s a very, very good film.
To the point of the sexualization of the girls and their dance routines—-that’s what your girl children are exposed to as a suggestive reality.
But, I’ve worked in schools for quite a few years and seen and counseled about what children, girls are experiencing and reflecting back.
Jane, The Non-Virgin
At one school, a girl, we’ll call her Jane to save all involved—-Jane was brought to the office for some mess in class and I was alone in the office. I tell Jane to sit down in the corner at a table, the Principal is in a meeting and will talk to her in a minute. I’m sitting there typing away and Jane comes over to my desk, leans suggestively over the short wall and starts trying to chat ,me up. No, not as a child being friendly—-but as a young woman trying to get a man’s attention with her mid-sized bosom, long hair and blinking eyes.
Now to contextualize this further, a few weeks prior Jane’s mother had come to school searching for her one Monday morning. Jane at 13, had been gone the whole weekend. Her mother thought she might be at the school and when questioned about a level of control over her daughter disappearing for weekends at a time with older guys, over 30, her mother demurred that she didn’t want to anger Jane and risk getting her ass kicked.
Jane at 13, held back a grade, so she was still in Middle school was very pretty yes, with long luxurious hair and a faraway look in her eyes. As I told Jane to pull her little fast self together and immediately took her into the female principals office—I recognized a child/teen who was literally bored with the retinue of girl’s who paid attention to her because she’d been sexualized earlier than normal and therefore had a pseudo-maturity and older boyfriends. But I also didn’t feel safe, professionally, alone with Jane as a hypersexualized girl.
Don't’ LGBTSGL despair, there was a young boy there too, gay as a $3 bill, who too had older boyfriends and eventually married an older man when he came of age.
But before you think they were isolated fast kids I’ll tell you how the City got involved. Turns out several of the kids are latchkey kids—-going home by themselves or with siblings until their parents got home. The middle school kids devise who has free apartments and dozens of them at a time would take over a house and have full fledged sex parties in the home.
Reality Check, everyone: your kids are fucking.
When confronted with this, the parents refused to believe it and further refused the school’s advice on teaching about safe sex. In an effort to insure some level of knowledge and safety, the school invited in the Department of Health for Science Week. And the entire week the kids were taught about HIV (Read: Safe Sex and STIs.)
Later that year I got the overall pleasure of teaching advanced test taking strategies and sitting at a table of middle schoolers asking them if they had any questions, a little boy, 11, puts a condom in the middle of the table and innocently asks me what it is. Some at the table knew, some didn’t. I had to generally explain it.
I offer those fun slices of reality at the same time that I’ll point out that Cuties is fiction.
You know this—-dancing, gyrating, twerking, is a level of trickle down from Adult World? It’s not like kids are sitting around with bananas and debating sex techniques. No, it is twofold—-exposure to information on the internet—-which I don’t think is bad BUT what makes it problematic are adults assuming that children aren’t curious, confused, knowledgeable or little mimics.
Indoctrination, Misogyny and Sexualization of Girls/Women
Cuties is really about the indoctrination girls get as they move towards womanhood in not just the society of the past 25 (internet) years but also in older traditions and religions like Christianity and Islam represented in the film by Amy’s family—-and the expectation of women to be submissive and pleasing towards men no matter their feeling. The mother is forced into a multiple wife marriage by her husband and that woman moves in and is shrouded, therefore without identity. And Amy watches all of this, questions it but is rejected from a sensible explanation because the grandmother and mother have none, and are dependent upon the father.
Therefore independent, questioning thinking about men, sex, sexuality is shunned and shamed by her female role models. And her father considers her behavior more of faulty parenting and childhood insanity and disobedience than female rebellion to such intense structures.
Even her odd neighbor friend and classmate is physically and emotionally manhandled by the girl’s older brother. Not in a directly harmful way but in a way that clearly shows male dominance is occurring in her household too. There are reasons both childish and emotionally starved and misogynistically warped as to why the girls are acting out like this. It’s only at the end of the film that Amy’s mother sees the effects and corrects it which allows Amy to then correct herself. Her mother realizes she’s spent so much time disciplining Amy, as the grandmother does both of them, to conform to this male control system, and that’s why she’s acting out so extremely.
Girls to women are taught to do all of this for the Male Gaze, for reward of attention to their self esteem (how one feels about one’s self internally) and self worth (how one feels about how the world feels about one’s self), whether they are aware of it or not.
The Female Gaze As Creator
The film was directed by a woman Maïmouna Doucouré and as a film isn’t just made in someone’s den—-there’s producers, writers, studio executives involved—-I trust that it was made thoughtfully. And in watching it, I could see how it was made thoughtfully and with restraint about Jane level realities that some young girls are crossing the lines in emulation of.
Also, and this might come as a big shock, it’s fiction.
Now it depicts yes, a reality I can testify does exist but there has to come a point where adults can discern and not be triggered by fiction——because it’s—-wait for it…wait for it——fiction.
Reality Check, everyone: you watch people being killed.
You know what would be fantastic?
If there were as much protest about say the Fast & the Furious or Avengers Endgame depicting mass genocide (by a non-White skinned dude. Yeah, Disney, subtle racism, hmm? Was I triggered by that? lol) Or maybe Wolverine? How about any film Liam Neeson is in? How about all the dead women in Law & Order and SVU?
TV/films are literally a graduate school on how to kill women and how to stay desensitized to it as an audience. It is no coincidence that during the emergence of a BLM movement about the lives of people of color there is a co-movement about #MeToo and women as valuable, existing, still being grossly marginalized and abused in spite of the progress of you know in the past century getting the right to vote. And own property. And not need a man’s written permission to travel.
Therefore to be upset at Cuties is hypocritical. How about all of the cops killed in—-every action film, the security guards, etc.? Sometimes when I see an action film and the hero is shooting folk, I think about how we edit that those are victims and “bad guys” or simple flesh barriers in the way of the goal and not as people begin simulated murdered. I’ll take it farther and deeper—-how many people have watched Arnold Schwarzenegger simulate killing? And then elected him to be a Governor?
Oh, that you can separate as fiction vs. reality?
And what about Kids? Remember this diddy of a film?
Again a fictional account of the sexualization or hypersexualized activities of young children and teens.
This is not a Netflix issue—-they are simply a platform that shows materials created by artists. Some of this yes, has to do with society and big butts (hey, JLO!) and Brittany Spears and Madonna and Janet Jackson and Beyoncé and all of the artistic things they do for adults to garner attention and at the same time young girls see and emulate.
Perhaps a better way to construct what so much entertainment that is sex and violence focused does is to perhaps look at concepts of excessive images and ides of violence and dominations leads to actions of hypermasculinity or toxic masculinity being fed and replayed-exampled by and to boys resulting in school violence, bullying, etc... The parallel of feminine destruction/violence and oversexualization becomes hypersexuality manifestation from girls?
This is the cost, in reality of 500+ channels, streaming everywhere, YouTube, Justin Bieber, K Pop—-those acts being sexually suggestive—-and deeper magazines like Vogue and Elle and the fashion business being designed for pre and pubescent bodies. To be alluring (in Allure magazine) and seductive but not fully, obviously adults. I’m not even going to touch on the body sizes and dimensions forced upon women to be i entertainment, when the average normal woman size is 16. Not a Callista Flockhart ). Which isn’t her fault but the system, fashion and entertainment gravitates towards her as an ideal and sends that message out with millions of dollars of advertising and more detrimentally—-repeats it with a dozen more TV shows of size 2s. Do any action heroes like normal sized or plus sized women? Is Rebel Wilson anything but the comedy girl and not the serious romantic lead—-because of her weight. gain, female reduction in equality.
What A Guy Wants
There's a controversial idea that such films and magazines and TV and music videos being targeted to present pre/pubescent girls is because male biological sexuality is geared to seek out females (if you’re not LGBTSGL, don’t get triggered gays!) who are within that age range as sexually available. More importantly, the theory proves out because of the heavy male control of these visual/presentational forms, which have made it the norm for decades upon decades.
So then, Kyle, is Cuties a form of propaganda manipulation?
I think it’s spotlighting the propaganda/manipulation and how it seeps into the minds of young girls and how some, for a variety of home and social reasons, buy into it wholesale and get out of control. Losing self control to forms of exploitation like the real Jane I knew or like Amy in the film. But Amy realizes the connection of her self-exploitation and her mother and grandmother’s oppression and as maturity warrants, changes her mind about herself and her interests and actions.
It wasn’t hard to watch for several reasons for me—-young girls nor boys don’t fall into my sexuality spectrum (perhaps some upset men and women are unconsciously upset because when they look at the film and see all the dipping and gyrating and pumping—-they can’t help but sexualize the children's doing it.) I don’t sexualize children or even teens because I know and understand them even if they’re being sexually flagrant.
Bugs Bunny nd Daffy Duck and Their Fetishitic Sexual Relationship
Yes, children can be sexual towards me and it will fall flat because I completely don’t see sex there, male or female. But I think the upset folks watching Cuties SEE sex in the movements, the gyrations because one it’s sexually provocative in its context. But those same viewers miss the overarching reality.
It’s fiction.
I can see Bugs Bunny kick Daffy Duck in the butt, a hundred times. It takes my internal mentality to sexualize that Bugs has a violent ass fetish or that Daffy’s getting off from it. Because I recognize the action AND the overarching context, make the action a representation of perhaps sexualization, but NOT actual sexualization.
There’s an internal differentiation that the VIEWER must do, the art form cannot be resposnible for yoru internalized projections upon it.
Did I just explain how the human brain and fiction works? lol
Back To Jane the Non-Virgin
An interesting side point about us discussing Jane in the school—-one teacher, with a 12 year old daughter said that he was talking to his male friends about Jane and they agreed that if a 12 year old girl came onto them and was physically developed as Jane was, they might hit it. Because Jane had proposed it. Jane’s actions and disappearing with older men was acceptable because she was complicit.
The women in the office suggested that even if Jane proposed sex with an older man, she’s not mature enough to be consensual in such an affair. The male teacher shrugged.
I then pointed out that his friends were also telling him that if his 12 year old daughter flirted, purposefully or accidentally, that they would hit it. It was bit like a rape gang telling a friend that his daughter was on the menu too. Creepy. But male honest.
Adults and Sex and Children's and Sex and Adults Sexualizing's Children
I think not only do adults find the pressure to think about what children are doing and emulating uncomfortable but I think adults, as proven by our news cycle, also have sexual thoughts and actins about children, that the vast majority aren’t discussing because it’s a social taboo.. So when it comes through Netflix into one’s home, it’s like being caught in a form of cognitive dissonance.
Yet, you watch things where women are killed and mutilated thousands of times a year (I dare you to sit with a pad for the next month and simply mark off a check when a woman is abused or killed in your regular entertainment fare); or simulated romance and sex is often depicted as some sort of passionate “struggle” or angry emotions before consummation—-or someone you vote for makes movie after movie, simulating killing people.
No, hold that thought.
Video of FDR or JFK or MLK shooting a variety of people in the head, in the chest, blowing them up. And then on the news asking for your vote/allegiance.
We literally masturbate as a society to fiction that is so close to the line of reality that it triggers some people as if it is reality but then they watch other far more horrible stuff and that they’re desensitized to.
Which makes me question who and why it set them off?
What are THOSE people going through in their heads that immediately kids, children, little girls fully clothed, ridiculously acting out—-becomes both sexualized in the fiction AND then in the external reality, to the point of objection?
I found the scenes slightly ridiculous and almost humorous at children acting so unself--consciously in ludicrous ways.
Because I view them first as children, outside of an aware adult performance to be sexually enticing, not as adult sexual objects.
The Earth Orgy
We're all complicit in this orgy circle jerk of sex-violence. I’m not even going to go near videogames where you’re video armed and directly shoot simulated people. That’s just low hanging fruit.
Netflix is just the GrubHub delivery system. You and I are the willing, never satiated gang, we just have to defend our barbarity by occasionally pointing at something as “too far”. Like hypocrites. We can’t delineate fiction and reality and then be upset that the non-reality art is problematic. If it’s unreal, it’s unreal.
But maybe that’s the bigger underlying psychological problem?
People are starting to not have a filter internally between what is fiction/unreal and what isn’t? I have written fiction for 30+ years——all manner of stuff and I’m very, very clear on what is real and what isn’t. I even go so far as to not engage fiction (TV) on a deeper basis because of how it bypasses the prefrontal cortex (your filter machine) and goes directly into the amygdala—-your core center.
Maybe Cuties is so upsetting because your filter has been ripped so thoroughly that your core reacts to it as if it were reality?
Huh.
Don’t hate the player, hate the Game.
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
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