 I'm just a little girl. In season 13 of South Park Episode 8 titled Dead Celebrities, Kyle Broflovsky's brother Ike is possessed by the ghost of Michael Jackson, who is in denial about his death and believes himself to be a little white girl. Welcome to the channel, new viewers. To help Jackson come to terms with his death and get Ike depossessed, Kyle and the boy sought out what Jackson wanted in life, and that is to be that little white girl. So the boys have Ike Jackson compete in a child beauty pageant, which is the first thing that anybody thinks of when they hear the words little white girl. I never want to say those three words again in my life. Just in a mildly inappropriate outfit, Jackson is ready to impress the judges. He asks the boys how he did in the swimsuit category before his big musical performance. The other girls there are also wearing heavy makeup and shitty frocked up outfits their mums probably spent years on the sewing machine making. Then Stan asks the judges to give little miss Jackson the vote just so they can make sure Ike will get depossessed by Jackson. One of the mums overhears this and says it is more important for her little Kylie to win and tightly squeezes her daughter's cheek enough to hurt her cheek implants. All the while the mum talks to her like a baby, which I mean she kind of is. We then see another little girl perform some weird stick caparae thing in yet another inappropriate outfit. Cut back to the judges, one of them has started to take photos and the other is doing his best Robert Pattinson impersonation. Disclaimer that Robert Pattinson is not a butt laugh, but I was just making a joke about masturbation and I believe that jokes are much better when you explain that you are not saying that the person you're joking about is a butt laugh. Little St. James, I'm sorry, little miss Jackson now takes the stage and sings his song I'm just a little girl, whilst a mother aggressively adjusts her daughter's appearance in the background. The two male judges are now both going sonic on their cocks, which the boys take note of. Their understanding of this behaviour is just that they like Ike's performance in the same way that Harvey Weinstein really liked his privacy. The police arrive, thank God. Since the only remaining judge is the one that didn't jerk off to children, the boys are worried that she won't pick Michael. But after Cartman works his Chipotle way magic, the judge is convinced an Ike is crowned champion. The girls are all very upset, tears running down their faces, spreading makeup everywhere. The mothers in the audience are pissed. One of the girls apologises to her mum for not winning but her mother just slaps her in the face without a single word. In just four minutes South Park has perfectly encapsulated everything wrong with this disgusting industry. Some of the obsessive parents who try to live vicariously through their young children and achieve fame and success no matter the cost to their safety, as well as the creeps who indulge in this business, the inappropriate outfits, the swimsuit category, the copious amounts of makeup and cosmetic surgery, as well as the physical abuse. Plus the boys not understanding that the judges jerking off to Ike is abhorrent, highlighting how even at their age they don't fully grasp how immoral the judge's behaviour is. Imagine what it's like for the younger girls competing. Not a single stone left unturned. It's not the most poignant South Park social commentary, certainly not the most subtle. And it's not a revolutionary breakthrough on the topic, but it fully realises its concepts and themes, and they didn't need to actually sexualise a child for it to make an impact. And then there's Cuties. Unlike Clementine Ford, I actually watched the movie before I formed an opinion on it, so here it is. In Cuties, the main protagonist is fed up with the rampant sexism that she faces thanks to her family and religion. So she joins the Cuties dance group that she influences into becoming more suggestive as she slips into insanity. There are multiple scenes focusing on the arses of young children putting them into a sexual light and in outfits that would make Madonna blush. The criticisms of this behaviour come from Amy's conservative family, notably her mother and auntie. However, their views are what the film is also criticising by having the main protagonist rebel with this inappropriate behaviour. Because of the depressing situation these characters are in, the hurt felt by the harsh form of the Islamic conservatism from the men in their lives, Amy's behaviour is treated as the extreme response you'll naturally get to those extreme ideals and practices. And the resolution? Somewhere down the middle. Option C, the third door. Ditch the underage twerking competition. Ditch the wedding for your dad's second edition to the harem and just play with the kids in the street, skipping rope until you reach the sky. Aw. Lovely. But some movie happened before this ending. The portrayal of child sexualisation is treated as the girl's conscious choice rather than the voyeurism from the mother's or Michael Jackson's ghost in South Park. This reaction is only natural. It is the man who are wrong. The way that the movie addresses the ickiness of what our protagonist and her friends are doing, other than the already discredited familial observation, is by having some weirded out reactions to the final dance. This reaction is only briefly shown during the sequence, as the camera is more concerned with the 12 year old doing slut drops. And this is only a footnote on the scene as a whole, since it is more about the, oh my god, I love my mum revelation. So Amy ditches the dance, not because it is gross or wrong, but because she preferred to be with her mum. The classic tale of a character realising what truly matters. But then she ditches her mum and goes to play in the street. Oh yeah, we'll get to that as well. And this is the film's major pitfall. Two little nuance on an issue that is so extreme. And the little nuance that we do get comes at the very end where the mum and grandmother have suddenly switched roles? Instead of the mum chastising her daughter and grandma telling her to chill out, it's flipped for no apparent reason. Maybe mum had a character rock off screen or something. Even if it actually was consistent with what we saw of these characters, if they kept those characters in that role, it certainly didn't make up for having literal children presented to us as provocatively as possible for the last two hours. It's just little girls in skimpy outfits mugging for the camera whilst electro club pop plays over their dancing. The presentation fails the message. Think about how a point of criticism for a lot of C-tier war movies is that they often present the message, war is bad, oh the horror, but divulge in all of the drama, epicness and adventure of large scale battle and fight scenes. Man, war is terrible. Look at how cool it is. Pearl Harbor or Hacks or Ridge, it's Hollywood's favourite bit of cognitive dissonance. That is essentially what we get in cuties, but what's even worse that these are real children dancing and engaging with in real time, the very thing this film is trying to criticise. Perhaps a forensic investigation might be able to find the self-awareness in this film, but as it stands, what we see is just gratuitous butt shot or lip bite or finger bite or other after another. Real children really doing these things. Imagine if the directors of those earlier mentioned war films actually instigated an armed conflict in an open field for their movie, or someone directing a serial killer mystery actually having people murdered and then arranging their limbs to look like a matisse. The presentation makes whatever theme that writer-director Maimouna Dukeray wants to explore irrelevant. By that, I mean relevancy of the theme in context with the film, not of the importance of the issue in real life. But let's pretend that it is relevant for a moment. An extreme idea or practice brings out extreme responses. The harsh Islamic conservatism brought out to this young girl's need for sexual freedom, yuck. We constantly see Islam in this dire, depressing, sexist lens. Mum tears up when she finds out dad is marrying another woman. There's physical abuse, lack of freedom, misogyny, the protagonist stresses and anxieties with the following tradition. The movie is heavily critical of that, backs it into a corner with no escape. What do we get for the sexual freedom? Some concerned looks. To be fair, there is one aspect of the over sexualization that does get criticized to some extent, but it's a very confusing situation. Amy sends a revealing photo of herself out into social media that causes all of her peers to see her as a quote unquote slut. The phone that she sent the images from was her uncle's established by an earlier scene in the film. And as far as I know, this scene was about her taking those photos and sending them onto his socials because she was upset about being asked for the phone back. If that's the case, it should be on his profiles and there should definitely be some fallout from her family or her friends would be worried about this older man who's taking photos of her. The other assumption that you could make is that she sent it from her own account, but this sort of flies in the face of her getting embarrassed when the other girl pulls her pants down during that fight. It's clear she's not so eager to bear so much of herself so publicly. Is the justification just that she's crazy and rebel, young, crazy, sex, social media, blur? Oh well, we have other issues and consequences to ignore. I'm sure it all worked out. I will give the movie credit for the classroom scene where a boy slaps Amy's buttocks just because he could. There was an attempt at addressing an issue that comes without afraid of existing that sort of gets it. Just because someone is displaying themselves provocatively or flamboyantly doesn't mean it's an open invitation for unwanted advances or harassment. Well, it did that better than Captain Marvel. Good job, maybe you did the bare minimum. And this isn't even a criticism of the sexualization per se. It's more a criticism of this kid's behavior, the behavior that's wrong regardless of how somebody presents themselves. Otherwise, Cutie's fails to acknowledge anything else beyond those weird looks at the final dance that I mentioned earlier. It reminded me of Back to the Future when Marty is playing the new sound to the kids in the 50s. Dance Mums does a better job than this. At least that shows us how the mothers and instructors are just repugnant twats. And as much as it isn't their faults and it's probably thanks to the emotional drain by the clang parents and authoritarian instructors, the kids are shrill little brats. But this movie puts the whole thing on our main character. She brought the overt sexualization to the Cutie's dance group that was, you know, only just a teensy, tiny, little bit sexualized for children before her. Meanwhile, there are other awful behaviors that the film doesn't even seem to acknowledge at all. The Cutie's falsely accuses a security guard of sexual assault after he catches them trespassing in the laser tag arena. What if rumors start spreading about this poor dude now that he's had these false allegations levied at him? What if he loses his job now because these rumors make it back to his supervisor? This is not something that you want to present and leave unchecked. I feel like I have to watch Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt now to lift my spirits. Then, because of course, why not, our protagonist pushes another little girl who took her spot in the dance group into a rivet incapacitator so that she can rejoin the Cutie's for the final dance. And this is never brought up again. What if she is still drowning as the credits roll, assuming she hasn't drowned already? Don't worry, guys. The main character is happy now. Don't worry about that girl. She might've killed. Her big realization at the end comes at the expense of her friends, both the dance group that she promised to help out and the girl that she left to drown. So, yeah, Cutie's is a morally reprehensible piece of garbage. I feel I should be put on a list somewhere just for watching it. I'm sure the duke or I had the best intentions, but unfortunately, they couldn't follow through with those intentions on screen. It has absolutely nothing to do with her being a French Senegalese Muslim woman. We'd be saying the exact same thing if some white dude from the States had made this pile of shit. She just made a bad movie, and I hope the next one will be better. Until then, I look forward to the next episode of South Park.