As a loud backlash against the Netflix release Cuties mounts online, the streaming service has issued a strong defense of its new film.
“Cuties is a social commentary against the sexualization of young children,” a spokesperson for Netflix said in a statement to media outlets on Thursday. “It’s an award-winning film and a powerful story about the pressure young girls face on social media and from society more generally growing up—and we’d encourage anyone who cares about these important issues to watch the movie.”
Cuties, a coming-of-age drama that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, has been besieged by controversy since last month. That’s when Netflix announced its release plans for the film with a poster showing the young girls who star in Cuties posed provocatively while wearing revealing dance outfits. The film’s description also caused a disturbance. “Amy, 11, becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew. Hoping to join them, she starts to explore her femininity, defying her family’s traditions,” the original Netflix summary read at the time.
“Netflix WTF IS THIS,” a Twitter user wrote at the time. “This is fucking disgusting. Minors shouldn’t be sexualized like this.”
In response, Netflix issued an apology for the artwork and its framing of the film. “It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which won an award at Sundance,” the streaming service wrote in an unsigned tweet. “We’ve now updated the pictures and description.”
Following the initial controversy, Cuties director Maïmouna Doucouré said she received death threats because of the impression that she was “actually making a film that was apologetic about hypersexualization of children.” In fact, Doucouré—who wrote the film after witnessing a group of children performing a “sensual” dance for their parents in her French hometown—had said previously she hoped to use Cuties to shine a light on the challenges social media presents for young girls.
“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 said in January. “The most important thing for them was to achieve as many ‘likes’ as possible.”
Yet this week, as Cuties made its debut on Netflix, the backlash to the film grew even louder—especially from conservative critics and media outlets. The Parents Television Council, a conservative group founded by L. Brent Bozell III, slammed Cuties as “worse than the media would have you believe.” Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, devoted a segment on his highly-rated Fox News show to the film, castigating the “media class” for praising Cuties in positive reviews. A petition calling for people to cancel their subscriptions to Netflix has reached more than 600,000 signatures.
Yet despite the outrage, Cuties currently ranks as the seventh most-watched movie on Netflix as of Friday morning. (Netflix famously doesn’t release its viewership numbers.) In addition to the feature, Netflix also debuted an interview with Doucouré on the platform and YouTube where she explained why she wanted to make Cuties in the first place.
“Our girls see that the more a woman is overly sexualized on social media, the more she’s successful. And the children just imitate what they see, trying to achieve the same result, without understanding the meaning,” she said. “And yeah, it’s dangerous.”
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