The release of Cuties triggered a wave of horror and outrage — “I want the parents chastised, directors electrocuted, children put in therapy and anyone else involved arrested”, read one tweet.
Another user tagged a six-minute video interview with the film’s writer and director, Maïmouna Doucouré, with an accompanying, “This the fucking degenerate bitch you should be angry at.”
But less than 30 seconds into the interview, Doucouré summarises the entire problem we have with the film as the exact point of the film itself: “[Amy’s] navigating between two models of femininity.” One is traditional, matriarchal; the other is a by-product of contemporary influences.
Yes, Amy is an 11-year-old girl, but already she discovers her father has taken a second wife which her mother, Mariam, is pressured into celebrating in keeping with traditional community structures. “We must obey our husbands,” a preacher instructs at female-only sermon. At 11, a shy, socially timid girl is being coerced into believing and repeating patterns of patriarchal misogyny and silence — oppressive structures that women are standing up and fighting against in our modern world.
Amy meets the other girls, who tell her they are practicing for a dance competition. Curious, bold, naive yet self-assured, they represent liberation, a direct defiance of Amy’s familial traditions. Here, instead, she finds new family in ideological kinship with the expected binary understanding of a child: this is different from what makes me feel bad, therefore, in some way, it must be good — or at least, better. For the preservation of this new identity, she participates in various acts of misconduct including violence, stealing, and posting inappropriate photographs on social media.
The dance routines are implicitly sexual, but this isn’t something we don’t see when we turn on the television and watch the latest music videos, or indeed, see right outside our front doors, plastered across billboards or selling us a bottle of water. Of course, these celebrities are more age-appropriate when it comes to their actions, but the hypersexualisation of society means that children of all ages are sold something unsuitable as an introduction to discovering their identity.
In an interview in January, Doucouré explained the inspiration behind the film:
“There were these girls on stage (in Paris) dressed in a really sexy fashion in short, transparent clothes. They danced in a very sexually suggestive manner. There also happened to be a number of African mothers in the audience … I asked myself if these young girls understood what they were doing.”
The point is, they don’t. For Amy, however, she does understand what it isn’t doing, namely, submitting to the patriarchy she wants to escape without yet understanding the deeper implications of why it is wrong. These psychological and emotional confusions are stages of understanding the world and the space we want to occupy within it, a natural part of development. What is unnatural, however, is how increasingly earlier in life, girls are subconsciously and socially coerced into filling the roles of grown women. There is no consent to this consumption and placement; only the eagerness of a young girl to emulate and mirror what they see with heartbreaking naivety.
In the same interview, Doucouré goes on:
“I came to understand that an existence on social networks was extremely important for these youngsters and that often they were trying to imitate the images they saw around them, in adverts or on the social networks,” she recalls. “The most important thing for them was to achieve as many ‘likes’ as possible.”
Children are growing up in a world where the customary structures of ‘worth’, ‘individuality’, ‘self’ and ‘development’ are ushered into an infinite digisphere of meaningless validation. Support of close relationships built on love and trust have waned in value when faced with the possibility of loves and likes from millions of strangers. This, they (and young children today) believe, is where I find myself — if I’m ‘liked’, I am worth something, I am something, I am. The ability to control what our children consume is difficult even for those who are tech-savvy; after all, you can parent-lock all you like indoors, but who can stop what their friends show each other? Children are unable to maintain a sense of their childhood in a world where sex sells to us; sex is culture, sex is media, sex is everywhere. And here is where the entire point of the film comes into play — the sexual connotations make you uncomfortable because they are everywhere, as they now are in the world, infinitely, only here, they confront you within the finite boundaries of a screen.
Amy is the focal point of the film, and it is worth exploring another layer to this particular decision. Black people are not only under-represented in the film industry as actors and directors, but their stories are often repetitive and predictable, mirrors of social expectations. Black women and girls in particular have been set in roles of certain stereotypes — though whether or not this is an intentional narrative on the existence of these stereotypes in the first place is situationally-dependent. In music, many black females fight back against the sexual projections of the hetero-male gaze by reclaiming their bodies in increasingly overt ways, i.e., I got, I flaunt it — but for me, not for you. The harder the gaze, the harder the pushback. In my teens, for instance, I relished Lil Kim’s rap on Christina Aguilera’s ‘Can’t Hold Us Down’: ‘If the guy have three girls then he’s the man, but if a girl do the same then she’s a whore’. Still we’ve come a long way lyrically — Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP is in another league comparatively, but I’ll be damned if men don’t talk about women in far more overt ways with the intent of domination, degradation or disrespect. With WAP, they own it: my pussy is wet, sure — but it still isn’t yours for the taking.
Herein lies a dichotomy — society still hates yet feels entitled to sexually provocative women, so long as they provide some form of entertainment, from strippers and porn-stars to rappers and models, ultimately transforming the entire female form into consumable sex symbols or idols. Some women choose reclaim it as a way of rebellion; some women choose to resist it entirely and opt for perpetual modesty. Either way, women’s bodies have always been sexualised, and today they are fighting this war that young girls are not ready for and should not be exposed to, but we cannot seem to control the fact that they are, forcing them in turn, to play the part for something they cannot fully comprehend.
Finding the line between being owned by things and pressured by a sense of necessity vs wearing something and showing something — or nothing — to feel good is a lifelong battle women go through. Society is built on demands of the female body — to look a certain way, be shaped a certain, show certain things within particular contexts but not in others (think breastfeeding). Without even realising it’s even being taken, young women lose ownership of their bodies and spend much of their adult life struggling to reclaim it or fighting against further theft.
This is where art has previously triumphed, or at least been allowed to, as a platform for these uncomfortable frustrations. French cinematographers in particular have often produced films that embody, question or rebel against social constructs, creating dialogue about realities of a particular time. The French New Wave of the 1950s and 60s was not only stylistically revolutionary, but also gave birth to a kind of cinematic sincerity, philosophy and emotion that powerfully conveyed the economic, gender and cultural issues in the country at the time, many of which centred around the complexities of the female perspective.
Call Me By Your Name, also tagged as a French ‘coming of age’ film, was lauded as a masterpiece because it represented an underrepresented community in defiance of cinematic bias. Cuties, however, is evil because it portrays social realities that make us aware they are inappropriate, and yet that is the entire point. We cannot bear to see it presented to us on screen, and yet it rotates across the magazine covers, the Instagram posts, the TV screens. It is still a coming of age film — for our era, one in which the transitional journey of childhood to adolescence to womanhood has entirely broken down. The camera pans through scenes and movements and bodies with as little regard as society has for protecting young girls from being surrounded by the sexualisation of just about everything. They cannot escape it — in fact, they are sold it.
Jeune et Jolie follows a 17-year-old girl who, unsatisfied following her first sexual experience, remains curious about sex and sexual fantasies. She chooses to become a prostitute, and through her, we discover changing attitudes towards sex and love, and the blurred boundaries around sex as social constructions. As all young children ‘come of age’, sexual curiosity is part of the process. But as the culture of sexualisation has increasingly normalised in tandem with accessibility and overt sexuality, this age of curiosity has dropped ever lower and lower. TV show Toddlers and Tiaras that gave us endless Honey Boo Boo memes was considered an entertaining platform for child pageant shows which, despite coming under scrutiny for many years, have continued to thrive in cultures across the world. (Notably, male beauty pageants were only founded as recently as 2014, and nobody seemed to care enough to cancel entire TV channels because of these shows.)
Cuties does not normalise paedophilia. Nor does it condone it. And it definitely does not accept it, or tell viewers that they should either. It tells us that the exploration of femininity is taking place in an age range it shouldn’t — because of us. This is not some cinematic realm that encourages child sexuality — it is a direct portrait of the world we live in where children cannot safely explore beyond the boundaries of tradition, even if they themselves are questionable and potentially damaging, without sexuality immediately slamming into their lives. People are outraged at being presented with the culmination of a series of events in our world that infiltrated so slowly that taken alone, each change could be condoned and excused. But Cuties has compressed it all, it has led to this point.
It shows how hyper sexualisation has been condoned, even encouraged by corporations, advertorials, music videos and the media across platforms that make it so easily accessible and consumed by children. The entire point of showing it up is a reflection of how we have not. We have allowed and enabled the sexualisation of women to take place for so long that as the years have gotten older the age of women has gotten younger to the point they aren’t women at all — just girls.
The irony of the global moral panic towards anything unsettling is that upholding morality requires the direct confrontation of immorality. Yet we are offended by things because they represent or show the immorality itself and instead choose to cancel them. We refuse to face it should it create darkness in our own bright awareness, seeking solution through cancellation which is really just a way out of things. We see the darkness in films because they exist in reality; and yet we quickly blame the presentation of these very present realities with the fact that their portrayal is the problem, rather than the fact they exist in the place.
People will decry freedom of expression as an inadequate excuse for justifying, embodying or glorifying certain behaviours, saying, ‘it didn’t need to be shown this way’, but will allow the exact same things to take place in their daily lives, in the rap videos poised to distract our children, in the magazines we buy, in the sexualised society that we perpetuated in the call for freedom and liberation in the 1960s and continue to push for to this day. Is it supposedly easier to accept films and documentaries that tackle rape, racial injustice, sexual harassment, violent murders, war, drug abuse, domestic violence? Is this outrage really to suggest that because the focal point of this film is children, and how society has ultimately changed what it means to be a child today, no matter how important the reality of that meaning is, it simply cannot cross our screens?
Or are we now so fundamentally afraid of peeling back the layers that mould the outrage we feel towards the causes we fight against that facing the horrors themselves would ironically be too distressing? We are definitely not afraid to shout and be heard; perhaps we are too afraid to listen and be shown.
The anger towards Cuties should be a moment of reflection on your own consumption and presentation/treatment of womanhood — you have closed your own eyes, perhaps even fallen victim to it in some way, thinking it’s just a new dress or just a dance trend, thereby normalising sexualisation in environments you should not because you are past the age of consent and can therefore, by law, rightfully define how you should be seen as a woman. But, the children?
They are not yet women.
And yet when confronted with the harsh realities that supposedly underpin the hashtag protests, there is an immediate hypocritical cancellation of the format in which it is delivered.
It is not the responsibility of the artist to modify reality to suit the sensibilities of consumers. To continue down this path brings us dangerously close to choosing to fight against the things that fight for what we claim to be fighting for.
