#but she doesn’t necessarily love the hyper femme look

[itstomowo]

the detective princess🪷🥞

[allthighsnolies]

Spoilers for Cuties

Alright Tumblr I'm gonna make two Cuties posts and the first one is going to be that I loved the movie and I think a lot of women will also love it

I feel like any writer who doesn't write y-7 and G rated shows kinda hates tweens? Like they're always portrayed as annoying and cringey and mean? And I feel like Maïmouna Doucouré is the only writer I've ever seen who doesn't hate tween girls and write them with malice.

Like anyone who was afab/femme presenting as a tween has most likely acted like the girls in the film do, or has at least seen girls who act like that. Tweens are promiscuous. They're loud, they're giggly. They try to act older than they are because they're in an awkward stage of development where they're still children emotionally and physically, but certain people (*cough* older men, older women) treat them like adult women. Grown women in a tween's life will often give tweens way more responsibility (afab tweens especially are expected to start helping with housekeeping and childrearing, and even moreso in more conservative cultures). Periods really ARE seen as "women's things" even though they start in childhood. Men are often extremely sexually presumptuous with tweens, and young girls don't know that it isn't a good thing for older men to act interested. They also don't know how to say no, how to respond, or how to express discomfort. I, for one, was catcalled, sexualized, and sexually harassed by strangers (and men I'd known) FAR more when I was 11-14 than I am now, at 21.

I feel like the movie really met tweens on their level. The girls were good dancers but it was so clear that they were mimicking the dance moves that they saw older girls/women doing without fully understanding what the motions were supposed to represent/accentuate. It was uncomfortable to watch, and a less respectful film would have portrayed this as cringey and dorky instead of portraying it as the deeply unsettling response to pop culture and the sick social pressure to be "sexy" and "act older."

It makes me sad that my first thought when Angelica was introduced was "oh my God, this is what so many women want to look like. This is what models and women in magazines look like. The prepubescent body is the social ideal for adult women." The girls in the movie are undeniably beautiful, but the fact that we see cookie cutter images of bodies like theirs being sexualized in pop culture calls into question how much choicebyoyng girls really have in the sexualization of their bodies. Of course, women and girls have always been sexualized regardless of their appearance and behaviors, but even if the girls actively take steps to mimick sexualized pop culture images, can they really be blamed? Cuties seems to say no, they can't be. If we look at Labelling theory, the idea that the way society classifies and labels people affects their behavior, we see an almost cyclical effect where young bodies being portrayed and viewed as sexual pushes them to conform to those ideals, allowing adults to make excuses to view them as sexual/adult beings, which then reinforces the idea that young girls making attempts at sexualizing/adultifying themselves is expected and normal. That makes me uncomfortable.

Throughout the movie I found myself wanting to compare my body to the bodies of literal children, because the petite body of a CHILD is what we've been told is perfect. Yet throughout the movie, we see the girls comparing their bodies to the mature bodies of adult women and criticizing one another for being "flat" in different areas, despite all of them having immature bodies. It just goes to reinforce the idea that they really don't know what they're "supposed" to look like, and are simply mimicking behaviors that they see in adults. This shines so much light on rape culture, in that highly sexualized bodies are often not bodies that are able to consent to sexual advances, much less understand them.

And yet for all the talk about sexuality in the film, friendship and family were the main focus. The protagonist (Amy) didn't necessarily want to be sexualized, she wanted friends. She wanted to fit in. She wanted to get to be a child and escape the adult pressures of having to help raise her brothers, and the twisted irony is that she found that escape and acceptance in sexual promiscuity- trading in one model of hyper-womanhood for another.

One of the most important scenes in the film is when Amy and Angelica (Amy's friend, the one who introduces her to this style of dancing) are laying in bed, and Angelica says that she hopes that her family will see her dancing and be proud of her. Angelica says that her parents don't know that she has a "gift." This is such a completely tragic and wonderful scene, because it perfectly exemplifies the way that the tween girls understand sensual dancing. They know that it's a skill that takes practice, that they can mimick the aesthetics of the dance form, and they know that it gets attention from adults. They really do not understand the implications of what they're doing. Because they're children. It isn't cringey or pervy, it's just very very sad.