And that's why the movie happens Because she has no positive relationship with any adults in her life, everything about her life is a cage of lies and gaslighting and denial (the scene with her mom sobbing desperately over her dad's infidelity then pretending it never happened)
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Half his own jokes about this shit were about that The thing where he's all "jokingly" abusive to a random 13-year-old he finds on Omegle, "SHUT UP AND TWERK, BITCH" His self-deprecating jokes about how all his fans are idiots and he can get away with anything
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He grabbed something that people were eager to give away, that they almost pushed on him It's like David Bowie back in the 70s, where he defended himself re: the "baby groupie" culture of the time, plaintively arguing thousands of girls were throwing themselves at him
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Lori Mattix, the 15-year-old girl he slept with, continued to defend her "relationship" with Jimmy Page and David Bowie well into her 50s, and even lowkey kind of still does now After all, she says, she worked her fucking ass off to get in that situationhttps://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/15/i-wouldnt-want-this-for-anybodys-daughter-will-metoo-kill-off-the-rocknroll-groupie …
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This is a dicey thing to talk about, because, again, no one is responsible for what an adult man does with an underage girl but the adult man But the whole reason it's such a prevalent problem is the adult men frequently don't have to work very hard for the opportunity
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The "bad guy" in Cuties isn't any one adult male creep It's "the patriarchy", but the patriarchy as expressed through a massively distributed system -- anonymous likes on the Internet, the faceless system of celebrity at work on TV and the radio
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The cruel joke of the movie is that the girls are following this system of incentives they don't understand to exploit *themselves* And are blissfully unaware that the actual adult men they meet view this with either disgust or laughing contempt
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It's not a movie about an actual guy manipulating and exploiting them because then it would be a different kind of movie It would be an "after-school special" where the solution to the problem is to just find guys like that and put them in jail
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Which is the worldview of a lot of the critics, and which is why they hyperfocus on the imaginary pedophile who may be watching the movie and talk like his reaction is the only important one ("If we just GOT RID of the pedophiles then there'd be no problem anymore!")
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Like, that's not what this movie is about Part of what it's about is that, yes, if the Cuties ever ran into someone who was intent on actually raping a child they'd be easy prey But that doesn't have to actually happen for it to fuck up their lives
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In their actual lives, the guys who think that inappropriate sexuality is viscerally disgusting are just as complicit as the creeps who quietly get off on it The scene with the two security guards that gets passed around as the "worst scene from Cuties" is about this fact
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The one security guard they meet is pissed off at having to deal with little girls, and then when they protest that they're dancers and show him their routine he just gets more and more indignant and disgusted
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The second guy, his partner, clearly is a creep, and starts leering and smirking to himself as he watches, but doesn't actually try anything It's clear his primary emotion for the girls is the same as the first guy's: contempt These girls have made themselves "trash"
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Same thing that happens when Amy's cousin realizes she has his phone and tries to get it back -- she ignorantly tries to come on to him, thinking this is how women get things from men And he freaks out and is disgusted And this makes him ANGRIER AT HER
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Which is why no adult ever helps her or intervenes throughout the course of the film Because she has, tragically accurately, divided the world into people who are into her edgy sex shit and get off on it, and people who are disgusted by it and think it makes her trash
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And the latter group of people -- which is much larger than she realizes, which she doesn't realize the first group is in fact a subset of -- she knows is her enemy, that she has to keep secrets from The group of people who want her to grow up to inherit her mom's shitty life
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The people who are like "Why didn't either of those security guards call the cops? Why didn't the 'good one', who clearly hates his partner and hates creeps, save them?" Well shit, because that's not what guys like that do It's a satire but it's pretty on point in that regard
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(And if you think calling the cops would've solved anything here, like cops aren't just as much divided into these two kinds of guys as the security guards were, you don't understand jack shit)
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The point of the movie -- which I think Doucouré knew would be controversial but didn't realize how controversial -- is that none of the cultures Amy lives in knows how to deal with teen girls, they all view her with some degree of disgust and contempt
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The "conservatives" are *just as bad* as the "liberals" Both "sides" don't actually give a shit, they don't actually care what happens to her One way or another they both agree that "bad girls" deserve the shit that happens to them
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Amy's a hormonal adolescent who, like all of us at that age, wants to be desired and wants attention and wants to grow up There's nothing wrong with that Having sexual desire at that age isn't a sign that you've been warped or corrupted or soiled (it started for me at 10)
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The problem is that *the world* punishes you for it, *the world* exploits you for it, it's NOT YOUR FAULT And neither "side" of this debate cares One side says "Don't fucking do that and you won't get exploited" One side says "Go ahead and do it, exploitation is Good Actually"
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But neither side has an answer, neither side realistically says "Hey how can we make it so that kids can be sexual without getting fucked over and destroyed by adults" The movie doesn't answer this question at all (which is a valid criticism, it doesn't really have an ending)
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But the movie's harshest critics seem to just want to pretend the dilemma the movie is talking about doesn't exist "Girls wouldn't want to do that filthy shit if you creeps in the media didn't put it in their head" Well, even if that's true, that horse left the barn decades ago
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"If Amy's mom had just found that fucking phone and smashed it, or if her cousin had thought to lock it better, this movie wouldn't have happened" Yeah okay whatever Maybe Amy still wouldn't be okay though
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Anyway I didn't exactly plan this thread ahead but sure, this doesn't directly address the question of "Why'd you have to film the dancing for real and film it like it really was a sexy music video and troll everyone into calling you a pedophile for making it"
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Honestly, I don't know if there's a good way around that It may well have just been a mistake, straight up, to make this movie But I think it's pretty clear what Doucouré was going for -- she wanted to show the Cuties' show through their own eyes
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Like it's not so much about what the adult audience thinks when they see it (which is the whole problem, because the adult audience WILL have a very strong reaction to it no matter what) It's about the fact that when they do it they feel sexy, empowered, beautiful
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That's a real desire for them, and in and of itself it's *not a bad thing* If they had better parents they'd know why it's so fucking dangerous to indulge that impulse the way they're doing it but they'd still have it at the age of 20, or 30, or 40
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The problem is that no one else sees it that way, especially adult men What she was aiming for was to trigger that polarized reaction, which she wants to critique -- which she put onscreen in the form of the two security guards
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Either the outraged, shouting "This is TRASH!" from Guard #1 or the leering, drooling "This is traaaash" from Guard #2 But either way it's a dehumanizing reaction, it's letting the "HOLY SHIT TEEN SEX" scandalousness override any feeling of empathy you had for the girls
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