Why the Right really hates Netflix’s Cuties

Earlier this month, a grand jury in Texas indicted Netflix for “promotion of lewd visual material depicting a child.” The criminal charges were a response to the streaming giant’s decision to distribute Cuties (Mignonnes in French), a new French film about an 11-year-old Senegalese girl named Amy (Fathia Youssouf), living in Paris, who rebels against her family’s conservative Muslim traditions by joining a twerking dance clique called “the cuties.”

The charges mark the latest in largely GOP-led attacks on the film. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called the film “disgusting and wrong” and encouraged U.S. Attorney General Bill Bar to investigate. A Facebook group devoted to the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon suggested Barack and Michelle Obama were behind Cuties, citing the former president and first lady’s Netflix deal. Supporters of the film insist these attacks willfully misunderstand Cuties and the points its director, first time filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, was trying to make about the sexualization of children in Western culture.

For the film, Doucouré drew from her own experiences growing up in a family of Senegalese refugees living in France. “I recreated the little girl I was at that age and what it was like for me to grow up with the Senegalese culture at home and the Western culture outside,” she told the magazine ZORA. At the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, Doucouré took home the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award for the film.

Doucouré has said that the film was meant to criticize the ways children are sexualized in the West through social media and popular culture. It was also intended as a kind of pushback against Western discourses around the oppression of women that fixate on non-European cultures and especially Islam. “We are able to see oppression of women in other cultures,” Doucouré says in a Netflix video to promote the film, “But my question is, isn’t even the objectification of women’s bodies that we often see in our Western cultures not another kind of oppression?” Ultimately, the film is about the pervasiveness, across religions and cultures, of the idea that a woman’s worth is tied to her ability to provide men with what they want, be it sex or obedience – or both.

That may be the real reason the film has stirred up such pushback from voices on the right. The New Yorker’s film critic Richard Brody wrote of the film, “I doubt that the scandal-mongers (who include some well-known figures of the far-right) have actually seen Cuties, but some elements of the film that weren’t presented in the advertising would surely prove irritating to them: It’s the story of a girl’s outrage at, and defiance of, a patriarchal order.”