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The furor over Netflix's movie Cuties suggests that vocal portions of our population believe that Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile who was found dead in his federal jail cell at Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) on August 10, 2019, should never have been charged with any crimes at all.
The American Conservative described the movie in detail; we summarize their account thus:
- Cuties is a deeply dishonest film that exploits its young cast nauseatingly, yet tries at the end to justify it with a too-pat moral.
- An 11-year-old girl falls in with a group of schoolmates who are absorbed with smartphone pornography. These rootless, restless girls are simply mimicking what they are seeing in pop culture, as experienced chiefly through social media.
- They are desperate for attention, and believe the way to get it is to sexualize themselves through scanty dressing and learning stripper-like dance routines, which they record and upload to the Internet.
- The insanity into which our culture throws adolescent girls is an important topic. Pop culture bombards girls (and boys, but this is a movie about girls) with pornified messaging constantly, and really does tell them that their worth depends on self-presentation online, specifically sexual self-presentation.
The New York Post rejects the movie:
The backlash in America over "Cuties," a Netflix film chronicling preteen girls coming of age, "baffled" its French filmmakers, who describe the project as "a social commentary against the sexualization of young children," reports National Review's Madeleine Kearns. But the problem isn't the message. It's the choice to depict actual minors "in ways that, in any other context, would be considered reprehensible, if not criminal" - like abusing animals to show the horrors of animal cruelty. And while "the moral outrage of Americans at the first whiff of pedophilia was deeply reassuring," it's a shame the "line was crossed" at all. Kearns concludes: "The makers of 'Cuties' didn't merely simulate the cultural degradation and abuse of children" - they enacted it.
Another writer said, "If I kill a man to use his blood in my painting, I may or may not be a good artist. But I am definitely a murderer." American Thinker published a list of laws against child pornography for which the author believes Netflix should be prosecuted.
The Federalist described the defense:
Netflix has defended its decision by protesting that, by engaging in soft kiddie porn, the movie means to condemn it. Okay. I am sure claiming good intentions will really chasten the pedophiles and perverts watching 11-year-old girls getting their pants pulled down, twerking on their hands and knees in their underwear, and other pre-pubescent sex simulations.
All of the statistics about child sexualization are horrifying. At any given moment approximately 10 million children are being victimized through trafficking and exploitation. Often these child victims - as young as toddlers - are featured getting raped repeatedly on PornHub. The human monsters who run that site sometimes get around to taking these videos down.
Enough Netflix subscriptions have been canceled that wokeists are pushing back against reactionary prudes:
If some Americans were shocked by "Cuties," they were even more taken aback by the reactions to their reaction. The "right versus left" cultural divide in the country has grown so deep that there's no longer even a consensus on something as serious as child exploitation, which would have generated broad agreement just a few years ago. Instead, the cultural elites came out in force to snub and insult the rubes who just don't understand great art. [emphasis added] ...
An insufferable opinion piece by Sam Thielman on the NBC News website proclaims that criticism of "Cuties" is just "a cynical ploy in the culture war." Thielman describes the film as "a sweet-spirited French coming-of-age drama" about an 11-year-old girl "looking for friendship among the competitive dancers" at her school. ...
You may think you've fooled the public, but you haven't fooled the children. They get the real message.
NBC columnist Sam Thielman's view rehabilitates Jeffrey Epstein:
The backlash to the film has, however, twisted the deliberately provocative choreography these girls perform into a problem, if not an international crisis - again, a little strangely, since people who take the time to actually watch the film are shown again and again that the characters are dancing to impress one another with their skill, and with how daringly they're willing to imitate the scary and mean older girls, not for the benefit of perverts onscreen or off. [emphasis added]
Note that he asserts that the choreography is "deliberately provocative" and speaks of the 11-year-olds "daringly" "imitate the scary and mean older girls." Let's put this more bluntly: the girls are being taught to be provocative and to violate societal norms. The movie may not be explicitly aimed at perverts and Netflix may not be seeking market share among perverts, but such high-quality child porn is more or less guaranteed to find an audience, particularly since the provocative trailer may be watched for free, as indeed has already happened many millions of times.
Pro-aborts have been telling us for years that, although she may not take HCL to treat covid, a woman has the right to do whatever else she desires with her own body, including aborting a baby in her womb or participating in "sex work" as she sees fit. If that is the prevailing view, the only question is how old a girl has to be to be considered a "woman" with all the rights and privileges that Mr. Thielman and our feminists argue that they ought inherently to have by natural right.
Our laws distinguish between adult women, with whom men may have consensual sex, and pre-adult girls who are too young to consent. Forcing sex without consent is always "rape;" having sex with a girl who's too young to consent is "statutory rape" even if she gave full apparent consent and testifies to that effect in court. Sex under those circumstances is defined as rape by statue because the girl is too young to give consent even if she (thinks she) wants to.
Society also once had the now-quaint notion that men and women ought not to live together without being married, defining such living arrangements as "Lewd and Lascivious Cohabitation" which many state laws held to be illegal. It was also thought that sexual activities should be done privately. The state of Virginia, for example, defined "open and gross lewdness and lasciviousness" as a Class 3 misdemeanor.
Half a century ago, the age of consent was 18. It should come as no surprise to hear that people younger than 18 had sex with each other, and thus were both guilty of statutory rape which was defined as a felony. It was even more common for someone slightly older to have a sexual relationship with someone slightly younger, and thus to statutorily-rape their serious girlfriend or even fiancee.
After a while, society
decided that it was not a good idea to permanently brand a teenager who
had sex
with his high-school girlfriend as a felonious
rapist. In many states, the
law was amended so
that
statutory rape was not a felony when the defendant was less than, say,
5
years older than the victim. Thus, a 23 year old who had sex with
an 18-year old would be charged with a misdemeanor instead of a
felony... as would a 16 year old with one of
the Cuties 11 year olds. California has recently extended
the
range to 10 years, so that a 21 year old can have sex with
a Cutie
without becoming a felon - it's still a misdemeanor. It's not
exactly legal, but neither is jaywalking. The Constitution is as
silent on underage sex as on abortion and sodomy, so California is free
to weaken laws protecting boys and girls from sexual abuse.
Parents who are concerned for their children's safety are free to move
to other states, of course.
Netflix may not have intended this, but their normalization of blatantly sexualizing 11-year-olds would certainly give Mr. Epstein grounds to assert that he had done nothing morally wrong. Indeed, so far as we are aware, none of his conquests were even close to Cuties' ages; they were all years older and correspondingly more mature.
For all the success MeToo has claimed in striking down men who abuse women, it appears that the ranks of the truly powerful close around Democrats who abuse women, without regard to their race but certainly observing their gender. The black male lieutenant governor of Virginia(D) is running for governor in spite of credible rape and sexual assault accusations, and the liberal media have buried Tara Reid's accusations that white male Joe Biden(D) assaulted her.
Although Republicans are routinely taken to task for abusing women, this steady woke-driven normalization of sexual exploitation of women by Democrats seems to be unstoppable. This reminds us just how much of a historical aberration our 50-year belief that a woman had an inherent right to maintain bodily integrity really is.
The next article in this series examines the ways women have been treated throughout history, and still are in most of the world.