Conservatives are currently losing their marbles over the Netflix film Cuties, because it depicts 11-year-old girls dancing in explicitly sexual ways. Having watched it, I can confirm that yes, it’s uncomfortable to watch. The camera lingers. And there are points where it crossed a line.
But, despite lasciviously-shot footage of tween girls dancing in wildly inappropriate sexual ways, to my eye it’s not kiddie porn, as has been alleged. It’s a tragedy.
I can still remember being aged 11, like Amy, the main protagonist in Cuties, and reaching puberty. How disorienting that was, even in an age before smartphones and internet porn. Up to that point male strangers had been irrelevant to my world, but now all of a sudden such men reacted to me, in a way that made no sense. I don’t remember the first time a White Van Man wolf-whistled or beeped at me on the street but I can’t have been older than 11 – still a child, like Amy.
Like Amy, I was lonely and unhappy. I didn’t really understand why men in vans had started beeping at me, but I remember it felt good. I bought a short dress, and found excuses to put it on and wander about my Home Counties village, vaguely hoping for more White Van Men to beep at me and make me feel briefly appreciated. If I were that age today, I imagine I’d be posting pouty selfies on Instagram. Perhaps, like many of those girls, I’d attract the attention of grown men pretending to be teenage boys.
Like my younger self in a too-short skirt, Amy has little interest in real-world contact with boys. Like I did, she wants validation: her main motivation in learning the sexually-explicit dance moves she finds in music videos is acceptance by her female peers.
But the film teases out a principal challenge of being a tween girl. That is, girls reach puberty – the beginning of sexual maturity – the best part of a decade before they reach any kind of emotional maturity. This means you notice that men start looking at you sexually, and realise the power that brings, long before you have any real grasp of what being an object of male desire implies.
It all takes place in a context where sexual self-expression is seen as a social good. The 1960s sexual revolution drew on theorists such as Reich and Freud to argue for the harmful effects of repressing human sexuality. Contraception was becoming more widely available, meaning ‘free love’ was suddenly an option for women without such a high risk of pregnancy. Some decades on, the consequence of that revolution is a general belief that the free play of sexuality is almost always good by definition.
This was the core of most defences of Cardi B’s recent, sexually explicit Number One song WAP: that the artist was simply expressing a liberated female sexuality. But for young girls just reaching puberty, suddenly being handed what might be termed ‘liberated sexuality’ in an adult is a bit like being given a lit flamethrower with the safety catch off.
To me, the most powerful and icky moment in Cuties was not the now-notorious dance scene that’s done the outrage rounds on Twitter. It’s a much earlier episode, where the girls are caught sneaking into a laser tag venue without paying, and the security guards threaten to call the police. They beg the guards to let them go, because they’ve just qualified for the dance contest final, and Amy backs this up by dancing for them. As the guards stare at this twerking child, one man’s face slides from officious anger to open leering. He lets them go.
Shortly after, when Amy gets into trouble with her cousin, she tries the same move again on him, gyrating provocatively and unzipping her jeans. Her father is of course appalled. But those scenes capture the position in which very young girls find themselves at puberty: suddenly conscious of a powerful new way of influencing adult males, and wholly unaware of how adult men might construe those signals.
In my own youth, I met plenty of adult men perfectly happy to overlook the emotional immaturity behind a layer of makeup, preferring to conclude that someone who acts provocatively must understand what she’s doing. Such men find plenty of support within pop culture. The only well-known pop song I can think of about a man declining to flirt with an attractive girl because she’s too young is Abba’s 1979 ABBA song Does Your Mother Know. In contrast, here are 18 lascivious songs about very young women. The list is far from comprehensive. Ted Nugent’s Jailbait even explicitly says the song’s object of desire is just 13 years old.
All those songs celebrate men who’ve chosen to ignore (or to fetishise) a young girl’s actual innocence for the sake of a handful of pert young flesh. At a cultural and institutional level, they’re backed up by our liberal tendency to err on the side of individual freedom – at least when it comes to sexual self-expression – even if that means freeing individuals to offer themselves up for abuse. Consider the towns all across Britain where over 18,000 underage girls were methodically abused for decades by grooming gangs, while the police shrugged their shoulders and called the girls ‘slags’.
The grooming gangs have become a nativist talking-point, with most debate on the subject focusing on the rapists’ South Asian and Muslim heritage. But it’s easy to treat girls in Rotherham care homes as a kind of faceless victim class on which to project anti-immigrant feeling. It’s much more challenging to reflect on the mores that helped normalise the abuse of countless girls barely into puberty, as not a matter for intervention but as undesirable but legitimate ‘lifestyle choices’.
Hyperfocusing on Pakistani or Muslim rapists just means we fail to see that this dynamic is everywhere. ‘Teen’ has been a top 10 search term on PornHub for six years running. In 2019 there were 42 billion visits to PornHub. Those millions of men inputting ‘teen rape’ and ‘underage slut’ into the search box can’t all be Rotherham taxi drivers.
The porn industry will shrug and say so what, it’s all fantasy. But the fact that sexual contact with barely-adolescent girls is a male fantasy is precisely the point. Because when you become a barely-adolescent girl, you suddenly have to deal with that. And here our sexual culture fails girls woefully, thanks to the utter inadequacy of ‘consent’ as a means of regulating the collision of female adolescence and adult male lust.
Because our vision of each human individual as a rational, choosing autonomous subject leaves little space for partial, coerced, ill-informed or pseudo-‘consent’. Nor does it have much space for the young girls who consent to sex when what they crave is love. Teenage girls now frequently ‘consent’ to acts they find painful or degrading, because that’s just what you have to do to retain a boy’s affection. And the most heart-breaking part of the grooming gang scandal was the number of girls who genuinely believed that the men who were grooming, raping and pimping them were their boyfriends.
Even among those who escape this grim fate, I doubt there are many adult women today who’ve made it all the way from girlhood to maturity in our ‘liberated’ culture without surviving a measure of sexual trauma. Early-90s Home Counties village life offered limited opportunities for my particular mix of loneliness and emerging adult sexuality to be exploited; but it still happened. I have memories I prefer not to recall. Relative to the world Cuties depicts, I got off lightly.
The internet gives the flamethrower of female adolescence a whole new level of lethality. Selfies and webcams enhance its power – as well as its capacity to burn girls when they try to leverage their youth and beauty in search of affection. But rather than discouraging this toxic dynamic, the internet has swarmed to monetise needy young females.
OnlyFans, a kind of Patreon for user-generated porn, enables girls (there are relatively few male OnlyFans performers) to publish nudes and interact with paying ‘fans’. Popular accounts on the site can rake in tens of thousands of dollars a month.
For a glimpse of the bottomless well of unmet longing that bubbles just beneath our brave new world of female sexual exhibitionism today, consider ‘Neesi’, a young OnlyFans performer. She recently tweeted ‘my dad just subbed to my onlyfans & tipped me $100, THAT is how you support your child’s business!!’. Then in the following tweet, the one-two punch: “do what my dad did [onlyfans link] (by that i dnt mean abandon me)”.
I’ve argued elsewhere that hypermediated, hyper-sexualised ‘empowerment’ offers women no space for the emotional intimacy that by far the majority would prefer. For young girls craving affection (and especially those like ‘Neesi’ with absent fathers), it delivers only the hollow consolation prize of ‘hotness’, long before you need or want it. And being desirable doesn’t mean you’re loved; but by the time a girl works that out, she’s probably already ‘consented’ many times over.
We can decry the lascivious camera angles in Cuties. But the Hobson’s choice it depicts for young girls is brutally accurate: self-objectification as a route to love and social status, public shaming if you embrace it. Nor, the film points out, are ‘traditional’ cultures much of an improvement, as underlined by the scene where Amy’s elderly Senegalese ‘Auntie’ reminisces about being married off when only a couple of years older than Amy.
Cuties leans into our absolute betrayal of pubescent girls. It depicts in uncompromising detail how young girls who crave affection are encouraged by liberal culture to fill the void via their newfound power to elicit male desire. The film shies away from depicting the sexual abuse that all too often comes to girls who take that counsel; but the jaded, wounded young women who’ve survived it are all around us today.
If I have one criticism of Cuties, it’s that the ending implies there’s a way out. But for many girls, there isn’t. Not while we’re so squeamish about the mixture of power and vulnerability that’s unique to female puberty. Not while we prioritise sexual freedom over girls’ wellbeing, and celebrate adult women as ‘liberated’ for sexualised behaviour we wouldn’t want our daughters to copy. And not while we blame those girls for their own abuse, when they follow the examples we provided.
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SubscribeAs usual, it’s always and everytime about female sexual confusion.
Boys that age suffer, too. And all we can tell them – you’re bad for having such intense sexual desires (even though the objects of desire are put in front of them constantly on TV and magazines, and even scantily clad women.) Let’s teach boys how to deal with the urges, not shame them for having them.
Excellent point. As I mention elsewhere, it is interesting that the author of the Ranker article approvingly linked to above doesn’t make any distinction, in her list of songs about teen girls, between those sung from the perspective of grown men and those expressing the sentiments of age-appropriate school boys. She regards both as “creepy.” That says something notable about how straight male desire is viewed in Woke-estan.
Maybe read the part about pornhub usage again or is that the straight male desire you’re referring to?
As I stated quite clearly, I’m referring to the author of the Ranker article, who claims to find it “creepy” that teenage boys are sexually attracted to teenage girls.
Always and every time? Your point that boys suffer too is well made but Ms Harrington is commenting on a movie about young girls, hence that is the focus of the article. Nowhere does she suggest that underage boys are the problem.
No I havnt seen the movie, and probably wont, but I see the problem..Thats right underage boys are not the problem, but possibly bemused voyeurs of media activity that probably intriges, excites and terrifies them. Even my own father and his chum secretly muttered a few “Phwors” when they see their son bringing his girl friend back for tea… Its an old fella that is saddled with the blame for looking, watching whilst knowing he is watching another generation doing the same thing he attempted and was part of a lifetime ago. As a father I remember having to pick my 2 daughters up from their Sat dance class when they were 9-13yrs old.. to enter with the other mums and dads to watch a large room full of lively young pre-teens dancing madly to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”. I assure you I was scarily aware of the irony. By the time they were 14 they could dress up and look 24, yet they going out generally to meet their boyfriends of a similar age who certaily didnt dress like a 60’s dandy, but in long baggy shorts, sloppy T-shirts, and back-to-front baseball hats…. OK they werent entirely innocent but all were young, naive and being as pretend Kool!! as they could muster and it wasnt too dangerous, because I still acted as a taxi service to keep them safe for about 3-4 yrs (bloody exhausting). Now Im a grandad who hopes his grandkids can have fun, dress up, pretend to be fairies, pirates, kungfu ninja masters, or pouting wannabees taking selfies, and dont get assaulted by the faux reality crap on the net. They will eventually of course but hopefully by that time theyll be shown and educated by their parents and elders, to laugh at it, hide when necessary and take it in their stride as we still try to.
Does anyone today not know this, all of the above? Was it necessary to actually exploit children, to show us that horrific exploitation of children occurs? This defense is nonsense.
Did you read it as a defence? It seemed to me to be taking the movie as the starting point for articulating a huge problem that has challenged me for years. Giving sex in the expectation of love – only yesterday a young woman expressed her concern to me about her brother, essentially pretending he is a girl’s boyfriend when all he wants is sex.
Remembering myself in the 1960s, this article says it all for me. I was never ‘abused’ but have often looked back at an early unsatisfactory marriage as a result of this search for genuine affection. I believed that because someone wanted me I was loved. I can easily get in touch with that very young insecure girl and wonder how the idea of female equality has become so tarnished. Ultimately I find it sad that so many young women today seem to think that getting drunk in public is about freedom. I find it even sadder that we don’t appear to have any answers to the questions this article raises and acknowledges.
This is a thoughtful, intelligent article. Caitlin Flanagan made similar arguments in her book “Girl Land.” But we live in a society that no longer cares. And we lack the self confidence to enforce high moral standards. Just another indicator of our declining civilization.
Film makers make films to make money, their sponsors expect to make a profit. The rationalisation that this film is in any way excusable because it is critical of what it depicts is a delusion.
Would you want your 11 year old daughter to star in this film ?
Sadly I think it’s a very clever foot in the door, and entirely predictable.
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
Children now get their standards of behaviour from celebrities and insta-influencers rather than their parents. If Cardi B’s recent hyper-sexualised “WAP” video says twerking is not only acceptable but “empowering” then young girls will understandably be practising it in their bedrooms the very next day.
If Bella Thorne boasts of how easy it is to make a million dollars by selling her (illusory) nude photos on OnlyFans then young girls will be signing up to do just that. Until “responsible empowerment” becomes fashionable among the insta-celeb crowd expect things to get a lot worse.
Interestingly the first green shoots of “responsible empowerment” may be coming from Kim Kardashian, often at the forefront of new initiatives and an extremely savvy businesswoman and role model. She has recently announced that “Keeping up with the Kardashians” is soon to end and that instead she will be going to Law School in order to pursue her passion of prison reform. I can only hope that this new model of “responsible empowerment” will be copied enthusiastically by more key influencers.
Which is more “empowering” for a young girl of any age: striving for a valuable qualification that will give her money, status and real power to change the world for good…or learning how to shake her bottom?
Come on insta-celebs, you have made millions from these kids, it’s time to be a role model rather than a pimp.
You are right, I believe, in all of the above. Unlike many of its huffing and puffing critics on Twitter, I watched it, all of it. (And got myself sent to the psychiatrist and blocked out, for daring to challenge the cry for cancellation. But that’s another discussion.) And, to my fiercely anti-left conservative mind, this movie speaks about the desolation brought in a teenager’s life by absent parents, torn roots and denied belonging. The scene that really made me cringe was when the mother faints on the floor, and Amy, the girl, doesn’t even get up from the table to help her mother. She just waits, with a hint of bored, even disdainful, indifference. I think this depicts exactly the kind of attitude we have towards something or somebody that irks us, and we don’t understand why, and somehow feel entitled to be spared any effort at changing the situation. It’s an infantile attitude, but lots of adults still carry it with them all their lives.
I saw a very short clip from Cuties, that someone put on Twitter. That was more than enough. I think Mary Harrington calls it about right. The only thing I would add is that humans have a well-developed abiltiy to believe what they want to think is true. That may account, in part, for the beliefs of abused people that their abusers are really looking out for their interests. Denial has a long history. But people need constructive opportunities. Boys may not be drawn into sexual exploitation in the same way as girls (or, at least, not as much) but they get drawn into other things, including criminality and abuse. Everyone wants to feel the approval of others.
The use of these children to make the programme is in and of itself criminal. The perpetrators being the parents, the producers and the funders (the audience for such sordid content).
All those songs celebrate men who’ve chosen to ignore (or to fetishise) a young girl’s actual innocence for the sake of a handful of pert young flesh.
Not so. Some of those songs express the perspective of school boys having feelings for their age-appropriate peers.
I’d add that the fact that the author of the Ranker article doesn’t make any distinction, and regards both as “creepy,” says something notable about how straight male desire is viewed in Woke-estan.
NB: not all the victims of the grooming gangs were in care homes in Rochdale, Rotherham, etc. Many still lived with their parent/s who, when they complained about the authorities’ lack of concern for the protection and welfare of their daughters (and the complete failure of the authorities to implement child protection law) were fobbed off or criticised as ‘racist’.
But the author is correct about the ‘lifestyle choices’ excuse. I’ve known social workers use it as a means of avoiding taking action, for fear of being seen as ‘judgemental’
Yes, author, we all know that the film isn’t meant to exploit girls.
But the young girls shown being sexualised are, in fact, real little girls. They aren’t some sort of computer generated actresses. At 11, or 12, young women are not in a position to say “I want to have this depiction of me following me around for the rest of my life, or used as fantasy fodder for pervy men.” Even adult actresses struggle with the trade-offs of that kind of thing n their careers. As a parent I’m not sure how a mother or father says that’s ok for their minor child.
Some stories aren’t well suited to film mediums and this is one of them, it would have been much better as a short story.
A good unhysterical article. I have not so far seen any review of “Cuties” that compared, or paired, it with “Girlhood”, about a group of slightly older girls in a similar setting; that film was better, and widely praised, but the two films had a lot in common.
Thank you Mary. Thoughtful and intelligent. As always, there are other sides that need acknowledgement. I wish to provide some.
Most men are disgusted by the exploitation of children. Both boys and girls. So are most women.
However, something nobody wants to deal with is the fact that it is almost always mothers who push their daughters into these sexualised situations and promote their early sexualisation. They are taught that they are sexual objects principally by their mothers and female instructors. This is not to deny male predation.
Girls are then taught to exploit boys (often also craving love and confusing the two as popular culture does) as objects of play with this new found sexual power. The outcome is boys learn to see girls as objects. If you don’t, you are seen as an outcast. Unfortunately this is how our society functions.
I was glad to witness and actually be part of a dance school for a short time, that did not exploit children’s sexuality. Unfortunately it wasn’t that popular.
Most men, most women, almost always mothers – what is your evidence for these statements, especially the attack on mothers?
It sounds as if you have been the victim sonewhere along the line, but please don’t condemn almost all mothers.
Do you think this includes the mothers of the pre-adolescent girls in the film?
I don’t know of course, but Karl Juhnke might have been(?) thinking of news and other reporting around Benjamin Britten and, in a very different world, Michael Jackson. I have no stats on it, and it’s probably not common, but it did occur.
Stop watching. That’s all you need to do. Get off your arses, turn the sh*t off, pitch the tv and screens and make your own entertainment. Learn an instrument, join a choir, join an am/dram, sing in the blood bath.
I promise you, it’s far more rewarding. And it’s bloody real. Yea, that word, “real”. It’s not virtual. You don’t get your emotional jollies by imagining this person (or child – sic) doing this or that. You do it.
You make a valid point. But I wonder why you feel the need to make it with two references to excreta and one to bodily fluids. You’re clearly intelligent and articulate – maybe try setting a good example to those less able to express their views.
There’s a useful comparison here in Philippines…physically, girls mature at much the same age but mentally much sooner mainly because they are encouraged to do so. Due to smaller houses, fewer rooms and beds they instinctively learn all about sex from the rest of the family and are encouraged to do so. They are groomed by mother!
This is a good thing….the girls grow up quickly but also know what’s right and wrong and that they have their family at their back.
In UK by contrast, I agree that theres a huge void between physical and mental maturity. Its part a carry over of Victorian values, part parental failure to see the problem and part the home/ school learning responsibility thing.
All was ok under this situation providing people were decent and responsible with all children. Unfortunately some elements of the Muslim community were no so and quickly detected this shortfall in our culture ….Of course such exploitation and under age sex is illegal and those responsible should be removed from society for a long time.
But as for Cuties, it’s the real world it’s just the exploitation that’s harmful…
“Young Girl” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, 1968, also deals with an older man rejecting a girl on the grounds of age.
Edit; Just looked on the Ranker list linked in the article and there is this song!
Its message is clearly, You have misled me, yes, I’m tempted but it is wrong. It is the epitome of ” a man declining to flirt with an attractive girl because she’s too young”. So why is it on the list?
Further – Don’t Stand so close by The Police is on the list. Specifically about the problem of and rejection of underage temptation. (Definitely teacher/pupil, but given a newly qualified teacher and A level student, the age is not inappropriate, it is more about the power relationship. but it still is about NOT succumbing)
For many of the songs listed I agree with someone below who pointed out that the age of the admirer is commensurate with the age of the admired. One or two are questionable, but it seems smut can also be in the eye of the beholder.
You are a joke of a journalist. By your own admission the film and filmakers “crossed the line” and repeatedly. Stop making excuses for the sexualisation of children. You will be the same Femanazi that will condemn the men that purchase sex from these same girls in a few years.
This movie is sexual grooming on a mass scale. I know you and your ilk love Jeffery Epstien and his followers. You are coming for our children and we (the parents of these boys and girls) are not having it.
There is no more primal force on this planet than the instinct to protect our young.
This is a disgraceful article. You should be ashamed of yourself Mary for trying to push this narrative. There’s too much that can be said to counter your arguments and I’ve got better things to do (see Carole H below for example). But I repeat. Shame on you.
Assuming you read Ms Harrington’s essay in full, did you properly comprehend it? In going no further than theatrical harumphing, your comment suggests not.
It is notable that, unlike most other commenters so far, neither your comment, nor that of Carole H. below, which your invoke for support, makes any effort to engage with the any of the points raised by Ms Harrington.
Whether you agree with her views or not, Ms Harrington’s essay is intelligent and thought-provoking and deserves the same in return. Surely, that is the point of UnHerd as a forum for intelligent readers.
You know David, in part I agree with you. But I’ve heard so much of this nonsense lately, and tried to engage with opposing views, that I’m just exhausted. So, yes, I did read it in full. But life’s too short. You talk about “theatrical harumphing” but all you’re doing is engaging in the same sort of ad hominem that I have come to expect these days. Why would one bother?
No, my criticism of your comment was not an ad hominem attack; it did not attack you on some personal basis while avoiding the substance of your comment (such as it was). To the contrary, my criticism was clearly directed to your contribution, specifically its unfairness in being strongly and ostentatiously critical of Ms Harrington’s piece without any attempt to substantiate your criticism.
I agree with you on one point, however. Wading through the mass of unintelligent, subjective comments that clog up comments sections, even those of some more serious journals (not UnHerd’s, thankfully), can be very dispiriting. But on that point, and in answer to your question ‘why would one bother’, my friendly suggestion would be that, if indeed you cannot be bothered, staying silent would be a better course than strong single-line denunciation followed by an express refusal to articulate your view.