Solving the Pedophilic “Cuties” Problem Means Canceling FAR More Than Netflix
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“Sex is not messed up because it was put in the closet,” noted philosopher C.S. Lewis. “It was put in the closet because it was messed up.” This comes to mind when pondering the Netflix-featured film Cuties, a pedophilic work including “multiple scenes of scantily-clad, 11 year old girls dancing erotically, exposing themselves, and roleplaying in both heterosexual and homosexual acts,” as the National Pulse relates it.

The French film (big surprise) has created tremendous controversy, with #CancelNetflix trending on Twitter. Yet mainstream media have defended the movie — casting its opponents as “right-wing” prudes — even though the work absolutely is soft-core child porn.

This is no exaggeration. America First Students founder Jaden McNeil points out that the film’s original description (it was changed; tweet below) stated that the pre-teen girl characters engage in “twerking.”

Merriam-Webster defines “twerking” as “sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting.” Put simply, it involves simulation of sexual acts.

So it’s unsurprising, then, that well-known film review website IMDb’s “Sex & Nudity” rating of Cuties is “Severe,” with the site stating that it contains “Explicit sex and nudity.”

Moreover, the Pulse tells us that the Internet Movie Database originally characterized the movie thus:

“Parental Warning: During one of the many highly sexualized & erotic dance scenes that purposefully exploit & objectify numerous scantily clad under age [sic] girls, one of the female child dancers lifts up her cropped top to fully display her bare breast. This is lawfully defined as pedophilia and can be extremely distressing to many viewers.”

So it appears the film is getting the Roman Polanski dispensation, where people powerful and trendy — and participating in societal destabilization — get a pass on what could get you or me arrested.

Pundit Matt Walsh mentions this in his commentary on Cuties (video below), saying he won’t show the most explicit clips because he’s worried about the FBI showing up at his door. Note that descriptions of explicit scenes begin at 3:51.

It’s thus no shock that the film is rated 18+, and about this the following Twitter respondent makes a good point.

Why? Because they’re inclined to and make money doing so — and because they can.

As to inclination, the Sundance Film Festival, which honored Cuties with an award, “was cofounded by a man who’s now in prison for child sexual abuse,” points out Matt Walsh.

This is an old story, too. Dwaine B. Tinsley, Creator of pedophilic Hustler comic strip “Chester the Molester,” was arrested in 1979 on child sex abuse charges. As Timeline put it in 2017, “It turned out, the work was hiding its creator in plain sight.”

Corrupt people often create work reflecting themselves — thus defining deviancy downwards in a way that justifies their cherished sins. This should make you wonder about the mainstream media voices applauding Cuties.

For example, New Yorker film critic Richard Brody praised the work as an “Extraordinary Netflix Debut.” Dismissing the movie’s opposition as a “right-wing campaign,” he snidely wrote that he doubts “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.”

Take that, you knuckle-dragging Neanderthals! Pay no attention to that pervert behind the curtain! And, dontcha’ know, this “wokeness” means the movie is actually a good thing!

This is a common tactic: claim the work in question’s social message is so important and advances such a noble end that the means shouldn’t be questioned and, furthermore, that the means are necessary to facilitate that end.

Of course, this is rationalization. But those not bent on deceiving themselves should consider a certain apocryphal saying: “Moral issues are always complex matters — for people who have no principles.”

The principle here is simple: You don’t sexualize children, period. Full stop. It doesn’t matter how good or great you think your cause is; you don’t do it. And if your judgment dictates you must, your judgment — including that of your cause’s importance — is thrown into question.

Unfortunately, Netflix’s abomination du jour didn’t emerge in a vacuum, but is part of what I outlined in my 2013 essay “The Slippery Slope to Pedophilia.” Moreover, this slope was predictable given our cultural trajectory and is a result of our Sexual Devolution — and what underpins it.

The increasing tolerance for pedophilia is logical, in a way, if you accept a usually unspoken premise. It was well articulated by convicted pederast and ex-Hollywood youth talent manager Martin Weiss, who, caught on hidden audio, justified his behavior to a late-teen boy he’d molested when the kid was 12. “It is a natural function,” explained Weiss. “The only difference between us and the rest of the animals in the animal kingdom is that we socialize it.”

If animals feel like it, he later stated, “they go for it.”

It has long been common to hear that man is just an “animal”; in other words, that he’s but a material being. Correlative to this is that sex is just a physical act. What this is, and what Weiss was espousing, is a biologically deterministic perspective:

All animals have sexual urges. Man is just another animal. Animals engage in mating activity, solely governed by their urges, usually as soon as the sexual capacity develops, including with much older members of their species. And since pubescent children have developed the sexual capacity….

This is logical as far as it goes. But it’s still wrong because the premise — that man is just another animal existing in a morally nihilistic universe — is wrong.

Realize here that we can’t blame this problem on just the small minority of pedophilia advocates. For the above materialistic justification is enabled by millions of people who, though rightly repulsed by pedophilia, embrace the man-as-animal notion and sometimes use it to justify their own favored sexual behaviors (fornication, polyamory, etc.).

And ideas matter. If we posit false ideas and help cement in the public’s consciousness that they’re valid, they will be used in all areas where they’re applicable — and they will have unintended consequences (one shouldn’t think he can keep convenient rationalizations solely to himself).

Our problem is not that we have to cancel Netflix, though everyone should. It’s that we have to “cancel” the Sexual Devolution and put carnality back in the closet — and then take God and virtue out of it.

Photo: mphillips007/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images

Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.