 I woke up this morning to see hashtag cancel netflix trending on twitter and decided to see what this was all about. Unsurprisingly the film cuties is once again bringing the top streaming service a ton of backlash. If there's anything that will bring the left and the right together, it's the topic of child predators. But the story around cuties and hashtag cancel netflix is much more nuanced and it really sheds a light on the veil many of us willfully pull over our eyes on a daily basis. If you're wondering what people are saying about cuties on twitter, look no further than right wing loudmouths like Ben, Racism Doesn't Exist Shapiro, Ex Info Wars B Team member Paul Joseph Watson, and conservative convert Tim Pool. It's no secret that we live in a world of headline readers and it's really interesting to me how many movies, TV shows, books, and other forms of entertainment receive backlash before anyone has even witnessed them. From the outside it's easy to intuitively believe that this movie is abhorrent and that people should boycott netflix for allowing it on their platform. But what is this movie actually about? Recently NPR wrote an article about the controversy and it included quotes from the creator. The French film cuties is being praised for its critique of the hyper sexualization of young girls and the consequences of that as they rushed to become adults in the age of social media. It began several years ago when filmmaker Mamouna Decoré was at a neighborhood gathering and her jaw dropped. A group of young girls in revealing outfits came out on a stage and performed a choreographed routine. Decoré says that they couldn't have been more than 11 years old and they were dancing very sexually and I was very disturbed about what I was seeing. But instead of passing judgment, the self-taught writer and filmmaker said she wanted to understand what she was seeing. She dove into research interviewing more than 100 adolescent girls over the course of a year and a half. It's a period that's very specific, Decoré says, where you are not any more totally a child and you are not an adult, you are looking for yourself and everything is changing very fast. So on the surface this movie looks like the twisted fantasy of some sort of child predator but it's more of a commentary on the massive issue we face today in the age of social media. For example, look at the young creators like Danielle Cohn who has been sexualized since she was 12 or just flip through TikTok for 5 minutes and you'll see kids trying to become the next rich and famous influencer. I don't think people necessarily have a problem with the film. I believe they have a problem with the reality that we're refusing to face as a culture and that reality is that for years we've been glamorizing an industry that takes advantage of children and oftentimes is to the benefit of the parents. If you need further proof of industries that sexualize young women and turn a blind eye, recall the story of Larry Nassar. Nassar was sentenced to over 300 years in federal prison and these were for the disgusting crimes that he did against young women who were gymnasts and he did this for years. The story of Nassar is complex and I can't do the victims justice in the short piece by explaining all the people who neglected to help these young women but in short this doctor of young female Olympic gymnasts spent years molesting these young women. When you hear a story of how a monster like this got away with this for so long you can't help but ask how much was ignored because the parents wanted their daughter to help them get rich and famous. As much as people want to signal to the world that they're against Netflix hosting the movie Cuties, the culture as a whole looks extremely hypocritical. The show Dance Moms premiered in 2011 and it's so successful that it's been on for eight seasons. This is a reality show about real young women in the industry, the writer and director D'Qoré is trying to shed some light on. What people don't want to admit is that Cuties isn't a fictional story. As mentioned in the NPR piece, D'Qoré interviewed more than 100 young girls and researched this industry thoroughly. This is less of a movie and more of a documentary. This is a prime example of the analogy that you never want to see how the sausage is made. When you understand the truth about the industry, you can no longer enjoy it. This movie puts a spotlight on the shows that we've glamorized like Dance Moms and young women like Jojo Siwa who grew up in that industry. Since the dawn of Hollywood, parents have been using their kids as cash cows and as a means to impress their friends. The reality is that this isn't pretty and Drew Barrymore has very publicly discussed how she started drinking, smoking pot and snorting coke by the age of 12. Today, in a world where any kid with a cell phone can get famous and a vast majority of kids want that reality, we should be grateful for a movie like Cuties. As a father, I know that I'd much rather know what's going on in the world of child exploitation than pretend that it's all just the fun world of Dance Moms. It's a whole lot easier for us to get outraged at a movie on Netflix than it is to face the reality that there are more Larry Nisar's out there. By focusing our energy on trivial things like Netflix movies, we don't have to face the reality that people like Larry Nisar were able to get away with their heinous acts right under our noses. What's up everybody? Thanks for watching this quick video essay. I actually just posted this up on Medium too. I had to talk about it and I'm not saying anything new. Like when this first started bubbling up, I saw a lot of people saying these things. They were saying that like this woman who created this movie, she was shining a light on what's actually going on. But right now there's this huge movement where it's easy to call all these things for like being a child predator and all this other stuff. But here at The Reward Soul remember, we critically think. We don't just look at the surface, okay? We dig deeper. We try to take things a little bit further and really think about them. And look at the broader picture. Like I said, this is something that's going on on a daily basis like in reality. But we're wasting valuable time by freaking out over a fictional movie that is depicting real life. You would think that this movie would be a call to arms for people to start looking into these industries and doing something about it. And doing something about these parents who are letting this happen to their children. You know? But one of the biggest issues that I see today is that when we jump into these outrage cycles, we neglect the real problems that are actually going on. All right? But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge thanks to everybody who sports the channel over on Patreon or gets my books from TheRewardSoul.com or gets merch from the merch store. You're all amazing. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.