00:00:23.080and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:28.600I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:00:32.200Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:00:39.740These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:00:43.580Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:00:51.200If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:56.880Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:05.580Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:02:43.400even though they might be out of the headlines.
00:02:46.280Yeah, I've done a whole couple of shows about that.
00:02:51.480Yeah, you know all about it, the ways that it can be so insidious and the ways that things can really be taken out of context to become evidence of this grand conspiracy around QAnon and child predators.
00:03:06.420So I really think the situation around the movie Cuties is kind of a case study of all the different ways that online rhetoric can become weaponized because it has so many of the textbook hallmarks of bad actors hijacking a conversation.
00:03:20.160And I think it reveals a lot about how messed up our online discourse has gotten and the ways that it can be weaponized against marginalized people specifically to undermine and exploit the very thing that it is supposedly championing, in this case, protecting children.
00:03:35.000Something to keep in mind is that a common tactic of bad actors is to hijack a sensitive conversation,
00:03:40.840you know, one that takes a little bit of nuance or thoughtfulness to discuss properly
00:03:45.200and create an uproar around it that conveniently aligns with some kind of preconceived political grievance.
00:03:52.240And that is exactly what happened with the movie Cuties.
00:03:56.320I also think it's one of those things where, you know, I guess I would be willing to bet
00:04:01.360that the majority of people raising an issue about the film
00:04:04.800have not actually even sat down and watched it
00:04:08.340to know exactly what they're raising an objection over.
00:04:32.620You know, I think that they're counting on people doing that.
00:04:34.420Do you remember that phase of Twitter when they were like, do you want to read the article before you share it?
00:04:42.840I will say I remember when Twitter rolled that out.
00:04:45.980And it did get me a few times where I'm like, damn, I probably should read it, right?
00:04:49.300Like, even as somebody who makes content about mis and disinformation, I am not immune to sharing something quickly before I've really given it a read through.
00:04:59.540And so it's a good reminder that we could we could all be a little bit better about the source material before commenting on the source material that we're that we're responding to.
00:05:33.440I love French cinema specifically and specifically French Senegalese cinema.
00:05:38.080I have a thing for, I am a sucker for any kind of coming of age film about girlhood.
00:05:43.600You know, your Crooklands, your fish tanks, your 13, love them all.
00:05:48.240If it's a movie about a young girl figuring out girlhood or young adulthood, I am in.
00:05:55.540And I also grew up doing dance squads and dance teams, which I have to say, growing up in the South, sometimes those dance squads were a little bit questionable.
00:06:06.800And so when Cuties premiered, which is a movie about a young French Senegalese girl coming of age who was involved in dance, I was super, super excited to see it.
00:06:25.520I will try to warn folks beforehand if you're planning on watching Cuties, which I think that you should because I do think it's a worthwhile movie.
00:06:31.520But I want to get into the conversation about what exactly happened with the uproar and backlash around this film.
00:06:39.960Cuties is a French film by director Mimona Dussere.
00:06:43.300it tells the story of a coming-of-age story of Amy, a Muslim Senegalese 11-year-old in France.
00:06:49.540It opened at the 2020 Sundance Festival to rave reviews, accolades, and awards before being
00:06:54.680acquired by Netflix. The plot revolves around an 11-year-old girl named Amy. Amy's mom and aunt
00:07:00.560want her to be sort of chaste and modest and girlish, but she ends up meeting this group of
00:07:06.080cool girls who are all on a dance team together. So Amy finds herself kind of caught between these
00:07:11.240two worlds. The traditional, chaste world, represented by her mother and aunt and Islam,0.98
00:07:17.340and this cool, secular, grown-up world, represented by these cool girls on the dance
00:07:22.840team at her new school. So Cuties explores these common themes that most coming-of-age films deal
00:07:29.240with. You know, family drama, feeling alienated from your family, wanting to fit in and be cool
00:07:34.280and grown up, your first period, vying for likes on social media and sexuality. This was the director
00:07:40.940Ducere's first film. And she said that she saw a bunch of young girls dancing on stage in Paris,
00:07:47.200scantily clad and revealing clothing, who were dancing in front of a crowd. And it got her
00:07:51.160curious about the way that society confronts and deals with the budding sexuality of girls.
00:07:57.400So she spent a year researching and interviewing preteen girls about their experiences
00:08:01.320and how they felt in society. And that became the movie Cuties. She wrote a version of herself as
00:08:07.460an 11-year-old, to be a kind of stand-in for the main character, Amy. The film premiered at Sundance
00:08:13.740in 2020 with zero controversy until it was acquired by Netflix. Before Cuties was even
00:08:21.260released for American streaming audiences on Netflix, Cuties first generated controversy
00:08:26.200when Netflix put out a poster for the film. So something to keep in mind is that it is a textbook
00:08:31.320staple of things like conspiracy theories or malinformation where it will be based on an
00:08:39.660actual nugget of truth. And so what is absolutely true here is that Netflix made a very, very bad
00:08:47.520decision about the poster for the film Cuties. The poster that they released shows the girls
00:08:53.000who are all like 11 or 12 posing provocatively in their very skimpy dance team outfits.
00:08:59.720And honestly, like that image is not even really representative of the entirety of like what the film is about.
00:09:07.480And it needs to be said that the poster that Netflix used is very different from the one that was used when it first premiered at Sundance before being bought by Netflix.
00:09:17.500So Bridget has a screenshot of the two different film posters.
00:09:21.780I thought you were showing me two different movies.
00:09:23.900Like I thought they were two different films.0.97
00:09:25.900um they look you you they're not even there's no correlation exactly right and so the french
00:09:34.520version that that they used when the movie first came out on sundance has these girls they're
00:09:40.060shopping they're like wearing age-appropriate regular clothes and they're like they look like
00:09:45.340little girls right like it's like it's like yeah an age-appropriate cover one one reads like fun
00:09:51.620coming of age and one reads like dance moms toddlers and tiaras yes and I think like the
00:10:01.060the Netflix poster the girls who are quite young are in these provocative poses it's very dance
00:10:08.540moms like as I said I mean for better for for whatever it's worth growing up doing dance team
00:10:17.540and dance groups these are outfits that we would have worn like i'm not i'm not gonna act like
00:10:22.720this is like beyond the pale for what little girls will will sometimes wear in dance teams or
00:10:28.480pageants whether or not it's like good or bad or right or wrong like that it's it's fairly common
00:10:34.160it's not something that is totally beyond the pale in our culture no absolutely not but the freeze
00:10:38.560frame uh of of the dance moves that i think they're doing they're like like they're mid move
00:10:45.180The poses are very mature, is what I'll say.
00:10:51.840And so right away, people had the exact same response that you just had.
00:10:56.260And they seized on this film that wasn't even out yet because of this pretty gross poster that was not really representative of the film.
00:11:04.420I believe that had Netflix not made such a big error in how they promoted and marketed this movie, we wouldn't even be making this episode, I don't think.
00:11:12.740Like, I don't think that if they had used the original French movie that's like, girls coming of age, like totally normal, that we would even have seen the kind of controversy that accompanied the film.
00:11:24.600So Netflix apologized for the poster and, importantly, to the filmmaker.
00:11:28.900And I actually have to give Netflix the tiniest bit of credit here.
00:11:33.080Amidst the backlash around the poster, Netflix made it clear that that poster was entirely their bad.
00:11:40.340You know, they could have made a big show of cutting ties with the filmmaker publicly and, like, blaming her.0.96
00:11:47.360We've seen, we've certainly seen brands do that before where they're just like, oh, controversy, better blame this black woman.0.98
00:12:36.600So Cuties is a film that I believe is trying to present like a complex portrait of the pressures that young girls feel around facing their own kind of budding sexuality.
00:12:50.180But because of that poster, the internet hate machine fueled by a combination of right-wing grifters, shitty elected officials, and Instagram QAnon influencers that target women, that whole thing that Ducere was trying to do was completely lost.0.83
00:13:05.960And instead, the film was branded as Netflix's attempt to groom children, normalize pedophilia, and in some cases said that the film was actually child sexual abuse material or like child pornography.0.95
00:13:19.560And people weren't just saying that Netflix was harming children.
00:13:49.300I discovered the poster at the same time as the American public.
00:13:52.880I didn't understand what was going on.
00:13:55.200That was when I went and saw what the poster looked like.
00:13:57.520I received numerous attacks on my character from people who had not seen the film, who thought I was actually making a film that was apologetic about hypersexualization of children.
00:14:12.160But whether or not you like this film or whether or not you think it accomplishes its goals of exploring the dangers of the hypersexualization of children and girls, I think it's pretty clear what she was trying to do with this film.
00:14:25.840Maybe you think she didn't accomplish that. Maybe you think it didn't meet its goals. Fine. But, like, to say that she was making this film to exploit and harm girls is just not correct.
00:14:37.640No, it's just another example of, like, the worst people on the Internet pointing the finger and putting blame on a black woman.0.90
00:14:48.500Like, I don't, I guess we'll never know, but I don't think had she been a white woman from Ohio, that there would have been the same level of scrutiny and controversy from this movie.
00:15:01.220Like, I think that something about her was inherently other and made it really easy for folks to jump on the bandwagon of, you know, attacking her for being somebody who puts children at risk.
00:15:12.640So she published a piece in The Washington Post about the film, and she writes,
00:15:17.260the stories that the girls that I spoke to that they shared with me were remarkably similar.
00:15:21.840They saw that the sexier a woman is on Instagram or TikTok, the more likes she gets.0.51
00:15:25.980They tried to imitate that sexuality in the beliefs that it would make them more popular.0.55
00:15:30.340Spend an hour on social media, and you'll see preteens, often in makeup,
00:15:34.100pouting their lips, strutting their stuff as if they were grown women.
00:15:37.220The problem, of course, is they are not grown women, and they don't realize what they're doing.0.98
00:15:41.300They construct their self-esteem based on social media likes and the number of followers they have.
00:15:46.640Some people have found certain scenes in my film uncomfortable to watch.
00:15:50.220But if one really listens to 11-year-old girls, their lives are uncomfortable.
00:15:55.540Here's the director talking about it for a segment called Why I Made Cuties from Netflix.0.99
00:16:00.640Our girls see that the more a woman is overly sexualized on social media, the more she is successful.0.99
00:16:08.220And the children just imitate what they see,0.91
00:16:10.820trying to achieve the same result without understanding the meaning.
00:19:19.900Even though Netflix publicly did stick by douce array when this was all happening,
00:19:25.060there are reports that they suppressed the film on their own platform as a result of this controversy.
00:19:31.600According to an interesting report by The Verge,
00:19:34.080Netflix removed cuties from its coming soon and popular searches categories
00:19:37.960and that it was excluded from searches that include the words cute.
00:19:41.460This is actually probably a responsible tweak that they made to their algorithm.
00:19:44.860The Verge report also says that Netflix adjusted its algorithm so that search queries such as steamy or sexual movies did not surface any children's films and that Netflix also made sure that problematic search terms such as pedo did not surface cuties because their algorithm actually takes into account behavioral data.
00:20:05.080So if you're somebody who was like, I want to watch this movie that everyone is saying is like a pedophile movie, if you type in pedo, ordinarily it would have brought up the movie that everyone is typing in pedo and then clicking cuties for, but that they tweaked their algorithm so that wasn't the case.
00:20:20.720So in that instance, I actually feel like that might have been a responsible choice.
00:20:24.760But it does seem clear from this report, though, that Netflix did seek to suppress promotion and related search queries for cuties.
00:20:33.520And I just feel like it's pretty shitty for this first-time filmmaker that her debut film was suppressed on the platform that acquired it for reasons that were entirely not her fault.
00:20:45.100Like a whole campaign around her film that she had nothing to do with.
00:20:49.720And I think that her and this project seem like they both personally took the fall for Netflix's bad marketing with that poster.
00:20:58.420And this completely disingenuous campaign built on a lot of lies and half-truths about her and her film.
00:22:11.280If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:22:17.600This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:22:30.000I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:22:37.180I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:22:40.360From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:22:47.100It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:22:54.260Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:23:03.800Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:23:16.620So I actually have a really hard time believing that anybody who was making claims about the film being, you know, exploitative to children actually watched it all the way through.
00:23:28.420Because much of what is floating around the Internet about the film are either outright just lies or completely out of context.
00:23:36.540So I want to talk about what actually does go down in this movie versus how that was represented online.
00:23:43.800So there's going to be a spoiler here.
00:23:45.800So if you are planning on watching this movie and you don't want it spoiled, there's a spoiler here.
00:23:51.640So social media accounts with pretty big followings posted like parents warnings and parents guides that got a lot of traction online that contain lies or that take some of the scenes out of context.
00:24:03.900For instance, one viral parent's guide that I think Dinesh D'Souza reposted says the film contains nudity of a minor, and that is just not correct.
00:24:15.060The only nudity in this film is a very brief scene of a bare breast, and it's the bare breast of someone who is meant to be an opposing dance team member as she's getting changed.
00:24:25.320Within the universe of the film, my sense is that the audience is, like, meant to understand this particular woman whose bare breast is shown as a bit older.
00:24:36.000Like, it's not like she is meant to be a very young, like, an obviously very young character.
00:24:42.400There's a scene where, like, someone is changing and they see part of her bare breast and it's meant to be, like, a cool older girl, not a child.
00:24:49.660And the actor herself was 18 at the time the movie was filmed.
00:24:54.240And so it's just a lie. The actor whose bare breast is shown for a second in that movie, not only is she in the film meant to be older, she herself, the actor, is also of age.
00:25:07.680And so there is no child nudity in this film of any kind. I saw so many viral posts online suggesting otherwise.
00:25:16.420Another pretty obvious misrepresentation in the film is that in A Parent's Guide,
00:25:21.820they say there's this salacious scene in the film that an 11-year-old girl in tight leather pants0.97
00:25:27.060has her pants pulled down and the camera zooms in on her butt.0.83
00:25:31.740And so this is a really interesting one because it really shows how bad actors will take0.96
00:25:37.460this nugget of truth and completely explode it and take it out of context.
00:25:43.720What actually happened is my question, because I just know they're out here.
00:28:16.140I think that people are really uncomfortable around that.
00:28:20.660And, like, these things, like, there are things in the movie that ring so true to me.
00:28:24.500If you had gotten pantsed in elementary school or, like, middle school, someone saying, like, oh, that was, like, a sexually charged moment.
00:28:31.300you're like actually it was really embarrassing exactly you're like you're no i was come on people
00:28:38.360like it's no i was pe class i was in the sixth grade um i was wearing the wrong day of the week
00:28:46.500underwear and clearly clearly still still embarrassed by that part yeah like it's like
00:28:56.000there's another scene in the movie where she finds a condom on the ground and she doesn't
00:29:00.120know what it is and she blows it up like a balloon and again normal yeah so normal describing that
00:29:07.560as like a sexually charged scene like i would argue that like that's actually the weird thing
00:29:12.580to be like oh little kids exploring these things they don't totally understand like that's normal
00:29:19.760and showing that on screen is probably normal and good and fine adding some sort of nefarious0.98
00:29:24.940intent to it to something that most little kids go through that i think is a little bit fucked up0.97
00:29:30.100Yeah. So I think that a lot of the sharing of inaccurate content about cuties online really came from like low information folks who haven't seen the film but are interested in standing up against material that harms kids.
00:29:43.320something about those posts is that they always make it seem like no reasonable person would not
00:29:49.620agree that this is exploitation of minors. Right. And so they say, like, obviously having showing a
00:29:56.480child naked in a Netflix movie is not good. And most people would say, like, oh, I agree. That's1.00
00:30:02.780not good. But the fact of the matter is they didn't do that. And so they just traffic in these
00:30:07.720inaccurate or misconstrued out-of-context statements when that just isn't the case.
00:30:12.980And in reality, Duceret says that a trained counselor was present on set during the filming
00:30:18.880of the movie, and that the project was approved by the French government's child protection
00:30:22.880authorities, and that the actors, they had their parents on set too.
00:30:26.820And the film does contain a few scenes of young girls, like, twerking and dancing in
00:31:26.940You know, the main character, Amy, when the audience has this negative reaction, she runs away crying. And at the end of the movie, she has clearly decided that this this world of like dancing is not for her. At the end of the movie, she's living a much more modest life and like playing age appropriate games.
00:31:45.620And it's clear that like, oh, I had this little interlude with dancing and it was not great for me and now I'm not doing it anymore.
00:31:52.280And so it's interesting that people say that this movie, like, how can I put this?
00:31:59.820There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made about this film and the way that it handles girlhood sexuality.
00:32:05.620Like, I've seen criticisms that say that the dancing scenes with the girls are gratuitous.
00:32:10.380I've seen some arguments that seem to be suggesting that the film, which is pretty clearly making an argument against the sexualization of children, is actually attempting to do that by engaging in the very thing it is critiquing.
00:32:21.840Like if you've seen the movie Kids, when Kids first came out, it was accused of the exact same thing, right?
00:32:28.060That like, oh, it's a movie that's supposed to be critiquing child drug use by showing child drug use.
00:32:34.200So this is like a well-worn film criticism.
00:32:37.880Those are all, you know, fair arguments, but they're very different than accusing this filmmaker of breaking the law and being a child pornographer, which is exactly what happened.
00:32:51.000And so Cuties became this, like, very popular thing to bash online.
00:32:56.260I saw a few big-name people standing up for the filmmaker,0.84
00:32:59.760but I really recall there was a climate that this French Black woman
00:33:03.980made this racy film involving children,
00:33:06.240and people just did not want to take the risk of wading into that controversy.
00:33:11.480This is actually a tactic called a reputational smear,
00:33:14.260where people make your personal brand so toxic
00:33:17.680that other people don't want to take any kind of risk in being associated with you.
00:33:21.940And I think Ducere being a Black woman and also Senegalese and also French0.52
00:33:27.500probably is part of why that kind of attack was so effective.0.99
00:33:33.680Because I think when you're a Black woman and you're visible, I just think it's different.0.95
00:33:38.220People are going to be less likely to stick their neck out and defend you
00:33:43.140when you're being attacked in this, like, very, very inflammatory way.
00:34:12.480And, you know, I think it really contributed to this climate of silence where people who see what's going on and they see like, oh, this person is being hung out to dry are also afraid to speak up.
00:34:25.440I think that's part of the way that these attacks work.
00:34:28.040And I recall a lot of bad actors making and spreading content based on lies and misrepresentations that made it seem like calling this movie a crime, calling this movie child pornography was reasonable, even for folks who had not seen it for themselves.
00:34:45.340And it created the condition for a climate where elected officials were condemning this movie and also urging for the government to take action against it.
00:34:53.920But here's a brief roundup of all the different electeds that came out against this movie.
00:34:59.140U.S. Senator Mike Lee sent a letter directly to Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, asking for, quote,
00:35:05.660an explanation on Hastings's views as to whether or not the potential exploitation of minors in the film constitutes criminal behavior.
00:35:14.920Cool. Mr. Anti-Democracy himself, Mike Lee. Got it.
00:35:53.200He sent a letter to the Department of Justice to, quote, investigate whether Netflix, its executive or the filmmakers violated any federal laws against the production and distribution of child pornography.
00:36:05.320Tom Cotton and Representative Jim Banks also called for the DOJ to take legal action against Netflix.
00:36:11.360Cotton explicitly accused Netflix and Deuxerre of a crime, saying, quote,
00:36:16.440There's no excuse for the sexualization of children.
00:36:19.180And Netflix's decision to promote the film Cuties is disgusting at best and a serious crime at worst.
00:36:25.680None of these people watch the movie. Continue.
00:36:29.120You think fucking Ted Cruz is sitting through a two-hour movie about fucking French Senegalese girlhood?1.00
00:36:36.040No, he was probably on a plane to Cancun.1.00
00:36:38.960representatives ken buck and andy biggs of arizona called for the doj to investigate
00:36:47.540and the state attorneys general by the way i didn't know that the pluralization of attorney
00:36:52.340general is attorneys general so that is it's gonna it sounds incorrect but it is correct
00:36:57.600the state attorney i was like good to know noted um cool yeah if you ever have to pluralize
00:37:05.300attorney general it's state attorneys general state attorneys general state i don't like it
00:37:10.460very ghoulish continue it sounds it sounds i'm like i support you um don't love it i don't like
00:37:15.500it i don't like it uh but the attorneys general of ohio florida louisiana and texas also asked
00:37:21.440for netflix to remove the film also isn't it funny how nobody talked about like free speech cancel
00:37:28.180culture these things that that people on the right are supposed to be so aggrieved by didn't
00:37:33.960even come up government officials asking for netflix to take down a film didn't need free
00:37:38.840speech didn't even free speech who we don't know her it didn't even come up in true truly incredible
00:37:45.060what they what they think is important exactly so like you said i would be willing to bet my
00:37:53.780entire life savings that that whole list that i read of election officials responding did not0.87
00:38:00.260watch the film not a single one bet my fucking life savings on it and eventually this you know0.93
00:38:08.060went from i guess like grandstanding and puffery to a grand jury in tyler texas indicting netflix0.98
00:38:16.760on the charge of promoting lewd visual material depicting a child the indictment claims that cuties
00:38:23.720holds no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
00:38:28.880And what is wild is that this attempt of an indictment is still going on.
00:38:34.620In November, a federal judge issued an injunction that blocks that Texas prosecutor
00:38:39.220from bringing child pornography charges against Netflix for distributing the film.
00:38:44.620And just two days ago, December 5th, the prosecutor, Tyler County District Attorney Lucas Babin,
00:38:50.040filed a notice indicating that he will appeal the ruling to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:38:55.900And so this guy is like, no, I'm not dropping this. I am going to continue to pursue charges
00:39:03.600against this film. And what's interesting to me is that most of the elected officials who,
00:39:10.960you know, had a problem with this film and tried to pursue the Department of Justice to look into
00:39:16.160it, they've mostly all dropped this, right? And part of me wonders, why is it that someone like
00:39:25.980Ted Cruz can be so loud and vocal about attacking a film that I bet he hasn't seen, but then it can
00:39:35.100just be quietly dropped, right? I think it's a mark against the way that right-wing elected
00:39:43.240officials use these cultural flashpoints as like little stunts where they want to like speak up
00:39:50.500about them and then they just drop it like i would be curious to know like do you still think that
00:39:54.540this movie is child pornography do you still think the doj should investigate do you still believe
00:39:59.340that was an effective use of your time in terms of you know your duty to your reference your your
00:40:04.740the people that got you in office like the way that no i i'm confident in saying they forgot they
00:40:09.880They tweeted about it and have moved on to bullying some other marginalized group of people.0.74
00:40:15.980Yeah, I would be I would totally agree.
00:40:18.240And the way that they're able to evoke these things loudly and just move on doesn't sit right with me because there's real people on the other end of them.
00:40:26.960And, like, Deuce Ray is a real person with a real career that she's trying to build.
00:40:31.020That they can just evoke her name and her work, misrepresent it and lie about it and vocally accuse her of a crime and then just move on really does not sit right with me.
00:41:48.460If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:41:54.780This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:42:07.180I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:42:14.360I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:42:17.540From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:42:24.280It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
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00:42:40.980Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:42:53.600Something that I think is kind of interesting here is like, you might be thinking, why would all of these right-wing shitheads be interested in attacking Netflix and this like kind of obscure French film?
00:43:05.420And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that culture is by and large seen as the domain of the left.
00:43:12.180And so these right-wing extremists, they have to attack purveyors of culture, right?
00:43:18.020These attacks are highly politically charged.
00:43:20.880So on Tucker Carlson's segment about the film and the controversy around it, first, he framed it as an attack on what he calls, quote, the media elite.
00:43:31.700I'll begin this segment with a warning, something we never do, but the footage we're about to show you comes from a film that was released yesterday on the streaming service Netflix.
00:43:41.180we've edited it to obscure the most sexual parts because we have no choice, but it's still over
00:43:46.120the top and disturbing. As you watch it, remember that our media class, the gatekeepers of
00:43:51.320entertainment, have no problem with it. In fact, they love it, a sure sign the civilization is in
00:43:58.380trouble. The New Yorker magazine, which after almost 100 years has become truly a garbage0.98
00:44:02.200publication, unfortunately, called this film, quote, extraordinary and said that only evangelicals0.98
00:44:08.000don't like it. The Telegraph newspaper said it's an important film, quote, in an age terrified of
00:44:13.680child sexuality. Late Rome, for real. We're not going to show you a portion of what...
00:44:20.100Okay, you can stop it there. So it's interesting how Tucker Carlson frames this film,
00:44:28.080the controversy around it as an attack on the New Yorker, the media elite, the Telegraph, right?
00:44:34.180It's so weird. I think it really reveals how these attacks are just kind of proxy wars for this larger culture wars, highly politicized thing that they're trying to wage here.
00:44:48.720And it doesn't matter that a first-time filmmaker gets sort of like caught in the crossfire.
00:44:54.060Again, here's – later into that segment, here's how his guest talks about the people that she says are, quote, staying silent and allowing this film to exploit children.
00:45:06.620And yet curiously silent, Tucker, are the Obamas, Susan Rice, who's involved also, she's on the Netflix board, Obama is, the deal with Harry and Meghan, Harry of England and Meghan Markle, they are, they've got like an over, reportedly a $100 million deal with Netflix, a word from any of these people could stop this in its tracks.
00:45:34.360Can I just say that in a court of law, Fox won a lawsuit by saying that they couldn't they couldn't imagine anybody to take Tucker Carlson seriously as an actual news person, because clearly he's doing a character that that first of all. Second of all. Yeah. These people are such fucking ghouls. None of you watch the movie. All of you are just ridiculous. Yeah. Let's ask Harry and Meghan. It's like any chance to pick on Meghan Markle.
00:46:03.780um cool um exactly like the way that they effectively like pull make this an attack on
00:46:11.440megan markle they're like oh my god another black person i can point the finger at um oh cool like
00:46:19.380let's take let's take the opportunity for to blame them for a movie we have not seen
00:46:24.220exactly and so yeah they they use this film to take aim at the obamas the obamas at the time
00:46:31.680had a high profile deal with Netflix to produce documentaries, Fox News' Rachel Campos Duffy
00:46:36.560wrote in a piece for The Federalists called Michelle Obama is complicit in Netflix child0.95
00:46:42.540porn film Cuties. She writes, quote, at a time when the left has declared that silence is violence,
00:46:48.360Michelle Obama's silence on the Netflix's controversial movie Cuties has not gone
00:46:53.300unnoticed. And again, it's such a disingenuous way to use this film to attack people that they
00:47:02.100clearly already have a pre-established grievance against. And so it's interesting how culture
00:47:07.640becomes a stand-in for these political grievances that clearly, it's like they're barely
00:47:13.160able to mask it when they talk about it. It's embarrassing for them.
00:47:19.560it should be embarrassing and i guess all of this is to say that like the sad part to me about this
00:47:27.900is the way that bad actors are so good at you know a good part of it is that like it all comes
00:47:36.940back to this grain of truth and the reality is is that we actually do live in a world where
00:47:43.080far too many young people are survivors and victims of sexual abuse and violence and things
00:47:48.100like grooming. And we don't have a society that offers those folks a ton of support. And bad
00:47:54.300actors, they seize on this heartbreaking reality. And in lieu of support, they offer dangerous
00:48:00.320conspiracy theories and the smearing of regular people as predators and threats to children.
00:48:06.360And my real question is like, because all of those elected officials were too busy
00:48:39.760But next time, they could have been actually speaking to what we know actually pose real threats to children.
00:48:47.320And I think turning something as important as protecting the survivors of childhood sexual abuse into just another way of scoring cheap political points is a symptom of the fact that our society really has a problem.
00:49:02.000Like, we're not talking about anything that can actually be of use to vulnerable people.
00:49:07.740were only interested in partisan attacks0.99
00:49:11.580and fucking grandstanding and stunts.1.00
00:50:53.880They just take all the air and the oxygen out of the room.
00:50:57.060And so we don't really have the space to have a real conversation about the actual threats to the people and to kids because so much room is taken out of it.
00:51:08.660Like, when was the last time you saw an article, a news article about an actual threat to children?
00:51:14.220It's all these days. It's all completely made up threats, right?
00:51:18.940And what's really scary to me is how baselessly accusing someone of being a child predator or a pedophile or a child pornographer or a groomer or a threat to children has made this real comeback as a solid way to attack somebody that you don't like, just like what happened to the filmmaker Deuce Array.
00:51:42.620I would be remiss to not mention the fact that just last week,0.94
00:51:45.440Elon Musk smeared Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, who is gay,0.98
00:51:50.920baselessly insinuating that he is a child predator.0.93
00:51:53.840And of course, a few days later, CNN reported that Roth had to flee his home for his own safety.
00:51:59.900We should really be afraid that baselessly attacking anybody that you don't like as a child predator
00:52:04.240is now a go-to strategy for extremists.
00:52:07.340And so that's my big thing is like when we have a culture where made up threats based on conspiracy theories, lies and attacks on people's identity are able to take up a lot of room.
00:52:19.760It endangers us all because we're not able to make room for the conversation about how we keep people safe that we need to be having.
00:52:27.500And so, yeah, this is my this is my plea to be better.
00:55:22.660and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:55:28.120I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:55:31.720Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:55:39.260These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:55:43.100Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:55:50.720If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:55:56.440Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:56:05.100Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:56:15.120Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:56:20.500I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not.
00:56:27.400That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind.
00:56:37.640It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko.
00:56:40.560So if you're trying to get out of your own head and into someone else's, this is the podcast for you.
00:56:45.340Listen to Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.