On Cuties, child sexuality and a resurgent homophobia; or, The New Reactionaries

I'm not a morning person - so, when my children wake me up at 6:53 of a weekend, I have contrived a ritual of tea and biscuits and books in bed, which buys me some slumber time and crucially delays running-after-them-while-pretending-to-be-a-hungry-monster time until, ooh, 8:15? The boys are at their most cherubic at this hour, and often when I return to the bedroom from the kitchen with my tray of biscuits and incredibly strong tea, I catch them having a cuddle and a natter together (what can they be talking about? They don't know anything yet!) under a great heap of covers, propped up against a bank of pillows. 

On Sunday of last week I left them together under the duvets, blearily checked my phone, put a teabag in my cup, and reported some tweets I had received overnight, calling me a paedophile. I returned to the bedroom, dug out a book to read with my sons, bid them budge up in bed, and deleted another message I had received, which was simply a picture of a woodchipper. 

A quick recap of the previous 48 hours is in order. On the Friday two days beforehand, 11th September, the film Cuties had been released on Netflix. The movie is a feature-length debut by Maïmouna Doucouré, a French director, whose pre-release had already caused a brouhaha online when Netflix (which bought the movie at Sundance Film Festival off the back of it winning a Best Director award) put out a trailer and some artwork that depicted the film's four children performing 'sexy' poses as part of a dance routine. The film is about Amy, an 11-year-old girl from a strict Muslim background, who joins a group of fun and rebellious schoolmates, and practices with them for a dance contest. As the movie progresses, the young girls' dance routine becomes dispiritingly more sexualised, with twerking and pouting galore, as these children quite naturally mimic the imagery they see surrounding them. This is seen with an extremely critical eye by Doucouré, providing a quite disquieting experience for the viewer; arguably, the film ultimately falls down in fairly conservative territory. Cuties is about much more than the dance contest, however: it presents, with great flair, a lovely eye for detail, propulsive imagery and a wicked ear for dialogue, an argument about female identity within a crushingly patriarchal world. Amy finds herself torn between, on the one hand, a group of girls who rebel and proclaim their independence while lusting after boys and turning their little innocent bodies into almost a parody of male-friendly eroticism; and on the other hand the world of her Senegalese elders, who wish to prepare her for a life of marital servitude. Doucouré is terrific on the similarities between these two 'alternate' paths: in a scene where Amy witnesses Senegalese women in traditional garb dancing in a hall, we note the patriarchal ritual; we see that seduction of a man, and dependence on him, is the common experience of both factions. So the film, in my view, is pointed in showing how patriarchy circumscribes the female experience; it's all the more potent for the way the film barely dwells on boys and men at all, but leaves them to be felt through the actions and emotions of its female characters. Side-note: it is notable, and not coincidental, that Doucouré is a black woman and her film focuses on a black girl. What treatment the film would have received if it had been made by a white director and centred on a white middle-class girl is an interesting thought exercise. 

Back to our timeline. On Friday 11th September Tim Robey, the Daily Telegraph film critic (who is a friend), gave Cuties a positive review in the paper, and tweeted his article out with the observation that the film had "upset all the right people". For this, overnight on the 11th (when America woke up), he was brutalised online by a sustained Twitter attack, with people calling him a paedophile, creating mock-ups of his face and new Twitter accounts with his name in the handle; a barrage of hideous vitriol, that could be linked back to several very high-profile accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. This is an important bit, so pay attention: somewhere along the way, the movie's release got entangled with a rightwing alliance of conspiracists and serial fantasists: this is when criticism of the film totally lost touch with reality, and became not so much a valid debate about its depiction of pre-pubescent sexuality, but about carpet-bombing a film in the name of an ongoing culture war. Breitbart got involved; so did Alex Jones; QAnon types were whipped into a foaming rage. An account called 'EyesonQ", which is followed by over 200,000 people, tweeted a mad-ass conspiracy-laden 'article' about the Obamas (who work with Netflix) and Susan Rice (please note the ethnicities of certain key players; it's far from immaterial) refusing to condemn the platform. 

These were the people who were going after a young and talented black female director, and who Tim was fending off on the night of Friday 11th. Their hate-mail was insistent and repeated; almost none of them, quite clearly, had seen the film at the heart of the 'debate', which had only been released that day. On Saturday 12th, infuriated by the aggression my friend had been subjected to, and dismayed at the way a film had been held hostage by this culture war, I tweeted a few messages of support to my friend; this is what earned me a small share (two or three dozens of tweets) of the abuse he had been receiving on the regular. 

To our timeline once more: also on Saturday 12th September, the Times columnist Janice Turner published a column titled "There's no bigotry in trying to protect children", which I can only describe as homophobic in the hints it drops about queer people's attitude to children. In the piece, Turner quotes the Tim's tweet about the movie, has a dig at him, and then uses Cuties as a jumping-off point to take a pop at Stonewall for their work with queer children and teens. Does Turner know that Tim Robey is a gay man? I can't say - but saying that his tweet about the film's investigation of child sexuality causes "clanging alarm bells" to ring out, is absolutely heinous. Writing this sort of article just after a colleague had been dragged through the mud, in an article headlined "no bigotry", would be a sufficiently abject failure of journalistic integrity on its own, but Turner perseveres. The parallels she needs to make between this film's depiction of prepubescent sexuality and the efforts of Stonewall to work with queer youth, require her to rob Doucouré (a straight cis-woman) of her agency. "Whatever her moral intent," Turner writes, letting it be implied that Doucouré's intent might be anything other than condemning the sexualisation of young girls, "the film was undeniably created by getting real young girls to spread their legs, hump the stage and caress their vulvas before cast and crew." It is not undeniably so at all: the girls are most often filmed in close-up, so they are not before other cast members; and they certainly do not caress their vulvas. This is untrue and defamatory; film sets are bound by child protection laws. Doucouré's careful framing and editing lets it be implied that this is what the characters are doing; this is disturbing, but clearly from viewing the film the director has gone a long way to protect her child actors. Alleging - I've re-read the passage and I can't quite believe my eyes - child abuse in the making of this film is quite the take. Perhaps Turner would like to belatedly catch up with The Squid and the Whale, which depicts a young boy masturbating in a library, and have a go at Noah Baumbach for his work with the young actor Owen Kline. It's never too late! 

But Doucouré has to be robbed of her own independent thinking, and indeed stigmatised as a potential abuser of the children under her custody as director, for Turner to move on to Stonewall, because it does not fit her narrative for a straight cis woman to recognise and describe pre-pubescent sexuality in nuanced terms. This is because Turner (whom I would be tempted to surmise had only watched the dance routine scene at time of writing, and not the whole film) needs to link the idea of youthful sexuality with harm, and specifically the damage wrought by queer organisations or people. "Didn't they know most gay people's sexuality is apparent by 12?" Turner ironises, discrediting the legions of direct testimonials of queer people who say that they knew of their difference at the age of 12, such as a friend of mine who wrote to me at the time of Stonewall's latest campaign, to talk about his crush on a schoolmate at that age. The gist of this article is to hint that queer people cannot be trusted with children, while doth-protest-too-much-ing that the most toxic homophobic myth of Section 28 era bigots is that queer people cannot be trusted with children. Far be it from her! 

It is plum in the midst of this set-to that I, a queer parent of two, received messages calling me a paedophile. Passing over my rage and disgust, it's worth pausing to explain what is happening here, as it seems to me that we are plainly at a crossroads where opinions I would characterise as homophobic are starting to make themselves heard, perhaps taking heart from how well transphobia has gone down in this nation's opinion columns. What happened here is that the virulent, foaming, violently-minded maniacs of the American rightwing were joined by a columnist in the newspaper of note in expressing bigoted views. The weapons of the former are tweets, hashtags, threats and a concerted online campaign based in misinformation, and the weapons of the latter are a newspaper column and a politely raised eyebrow. This is the new reactionary movement. 

We've been there for a while: at the heart of trans-exclusionary thinking are columnists who call Owen Jones 'childless' as an insult, or who complain about the provision of LGBTQ education as part of new measures to make sex education more inclusive. (This was around the time of the boycott of, and attacks on, Parkfield community school in Birmingham after it had started educating children about homosexuality) But I think it's possible to notice an uptick of late. Just yesterday, the publisher Benjamin Cohen, who heads up Pink News, was lambasted by many on Twitter for suggesting that "medical services" (by which he meant blood and semen tests) should be made available to him and his partner on the NHS, as part of the process of having a child via a surrogate, as they are to straight couples seeking pregnancy via IVF. These are fairly benign comments, as would not merit a moment's thought, but certain writers chose to interpret these comments as him suggesting he had the 'right' to be provided with a surrogate. This is homophobia too, which seeks to misread the comments of a gay man, and rubbish him online, for his temerity in asking for equal treatment in helping him and his partner become parents. Asking "why not adopt", if you would not ask it of straight parents, is also homophobia. 

What this new agenda serves, and why it has erupted into what I would really rather not call 'the discourse' at this time, I do not entirely know. I am merely a queer film critic and parent observing the intersection of this 'debate' with my own concerns for a few fun days, like a lunar eclipse where the thing occluding earth's view of the great orb is another planet made of shit. I think it's worth noting the emergence of these ways of thinking and talking, and it's worth, too, deciding where you stand, and, if you stand with us, staying vigilant, and speaking out.