Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

Netflix movie “Cuties” is generating a lot of fury and rightly so.  Every sane person would agree that there is something disturbing about watching a movie where minors are dancing seductively and sexually suggestively. It makes one feel uncomfortable. Even the name “Cutie” is resoundingly deceptive and is a reflection of the dishonestly misappropriated language that has a clear meaning and attributing to something else. The word “Cute” according to the dictionary is defined as something attractive or pleasing in a youthful, dainty, quaint or fun-spirited way.  This is not what sexually suggestive twerks by 10 yr old girls is, and people who think otherwise may rightly be suspected of harboring deviant desire. The rest of the normal people these dances less than cute, at best disturbing, or outright offensive and since it involves minors, criminal.

Why would a minor dance in a sexually provocative way? Is it to attract a mate? Minors aren’t legally permitted to mate, nor marry nor give birth. Why then would a minor be directed in a movie to perform sexual seductive acts? Is it to attract men?  Its crime for a man to be sexual involved with a minor. People who denounce this movie for preparing the ground for criminal acts are on track.

Perhaps, Netflix, together with those who produced the movie are aware of the hypocrisy that led to the success of playboy magazine back in the 50’s. When Hugh Hefner launched playboy in 1953, there was certainly a loud public outcry, and people lashed out against playboy and many families avoided going to a cinema advertising pornography, yet astonishingly, even as protests were on going, private purchase of pornographic VCR tapes was skyrocketing, and thus Hefner who was making big bucks couldn’t care less about public protest. He saw the protest for what it was worth, worthless hypocrisy.

Perhaps, Netflix, like Hefner, is determined to ride out the storm, stay the course and in the end make a lot of money. By being innovators of child pornography, they are rest assured that there will be plenty of bucks at the end of the tunnel. It may even be that Cuties is even at this moment experiencing a windfall in spite of the pretense at protest. Thus, those of us who wish to resist the Cuties “new normal” must guard against curiosity, and hypocrisy and stop privately funding Cuties by watching it in private or else we would be hypocritically cooperating in the triumph of sexual objectification of minors and would be no different from pedophiles for whom Netflix made this movie .

Furthermore, this is not an isolated incident. There are far worse content that we should all stand up against. The Internet is brimming with pornography websites, chief of which is Porn hub, a publicly listed company in USA, with more than 40 billion visitors yearly, where anyone can upload pornographic content no matter how deviant.  Research confirms that many of the content in these sites involve minors, kidnapped or trafficked women and children. Society cannot afford to turn a blind to these extremely hard core sites while fretting over Cuties because again, that would be hypocrisy. It is sad that studies has it that pornography addiction is very high among Christians who attend Church regularly, people who should be at the vanguard of the fight against pornography. Little wonder then that pornographer are getting richer by the hour. We all need to join hand together to fight this or else Netflix’s persistence will eventually lead to the normalization of film like Cuties.