TEXAS, September 11, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Texas legislator Matt Schaefer has called for an investigation into a new Netflix film accused by conservative commentators of promoting “child porn.”
Shaefer announced on social media that he is asking the state’s Attorney General’s Office to “investigate the Netflix film ‘Cuties’ for possible violations of child exploitation and child pornography laws.” Conservative commentators and social media–users are calling for Netflix to be “canceled” after the film about girls as young as 11 performing sexualized dance acts went live on the platform.
I have asked Texas Attorney General Paxton’s office to investigate the @netflix film “Cuties” for possible violations of child exploitation and child pornography laws. #CUTIES #txlege
— Matt Schaefer (@RepMattSchaefer) September 10, 2020
Robby Starbuck, a director and producer, said, “The whole team behind Cuties needs to be investigated.”
Starbuck highlighted a January interview with Cuties director Maïmouna Doucouré in which she says that “more than 700 young girls” had auditioned for the film, “none of whom had ever done theatre before coming on set.”
“As a director I call [sic] tell you it’s not normal to audition 700 little girls with no acting experience,” Starbuck posted to Twitter. “What were they told to do during auditions? They preyed on inexperienced people starstruck by Hollywood.”
The whole team behind Cuties needs to be investigated. Look what I found. As a director I call tell you it’s not normal to audition 700 little girls with no acting experience. What were they told to do during auditions? They preyed on inexperienced people starstruck by Hollywood. pic.twitter.com/8hXBrVVvE0
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) September 11, 2020
Lila Rose, founder and president of the pro-life group Live Action, has posted a series of tweets making the case that the filmmakers have broken U.S. law on “child porn” because the film “blatantly zooms in on sexual parts of little girls as they dance suggestively, partially clothed, for adult audiences, as explicit sexual ‘exploration.’”
1. Whether the focal point of the visual depiction is on the child’s genitalia or pubic area;
2. Whether the setting of the depiction is sexually suggestive, that is, in a place or pose associated with sexual activity;
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) September 10, 2020
6. Whether the depiction is designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer.
The #netflix film blatantly zooms in on sexual parts of little girls as they dance suggestively, partially clothed, for adult audiences, as explicit sexual “exploration.” It fails the Dost test.
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) September 10, 2020
Writing earlier today for LifeSiteNews, Dr. Joseph Shaw, an Oxford University philosophy teacher and father of eight children, argued that the “producers of the series are themselves sexualizing and exploiting the child actors, and serving up their sexualized performances for consumption by male critics like themselves.”
“If there is a power dynamic going on here, the consumers are at the top, Netflix as pimp or enabler is in the middle, and these poor children are at the bottom,” Shaw writes.
“The real story here is not about girls spontaneously organizing a twerking troupe in order to stick to ‘the man’; no, that is a made-up story. What is happening in the real world is ‘the man’ corralling girls into a twerking troupe to tickle the jaded appetites of Netflix subscribers.”