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Originally Posted by Nyah
Children should never be permitted/encouraged to perform highly sexualized content, full stop. Especially on film where it'll be distributed to the masses. It's not the audience that's missing the point, it's whoever thought that gratuitously showing kids doing just that was an acceptable way of telling a story. It's not and most of us recognize that, it's objectively not an overreaction.
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I see and appreciate where you're coming from. I too don't believe this was the medium for this message, and I'm actually not a proponent at all for it being made, but I'm also not calling for the producers or distributors heads or delving into QAnon theories. That's where the objection towards overreaction for me lies. There were many other ways to call attention to this, and I'm of the mind we shouldn't have needed this controversy to do so.
These competitions are already being shown to large audiences, even through large distributors on network TV. I think we're on the same page of that being problematic.
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I would argue that it's disingenuous of you to assume that these 11 year old girls recognize the risk they're being put in. That they know exactly how their scenes will be used by the grosses of people. You say that pedos won't pay attention to stuff like this, but it's a hell of way to fly under the radar way to get their preferred content (I literally can't even type out the detail of the content because it grosses me out so much). It's fully promoted and endorsed by Netflix.
Abuse and exploitation are different, i'll give you that. But when you have a handful of young kids sexually exploited on film it's hard to see that line. They were made to perform and be sexual for entertainment. I'd argue that's abusive.
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I would just give more credit to the child performers and the hundreds of personnel working on the film. There are measures to ensure people are not exploited in making film, plus children are a lot smarter than we want to believe. I, however, don't believe they fully understand the subtleties of consumption, but I don't believe that's clearly indicative of exploitation or abuse. It's not a decision I would have made.
To me this isn't abusive, and it's exploitative in the same sense (though not degree) as sexploitation and blaxploitation. Apart from a poor choice of platform probably the biggest mistake the producers made were in trusting the critical thought of the audience. Either that or they were oblivious. Like Cecil, I'm confused why they thought this was a good idea and/or would be universally appreciated the way they intended.
That's a critical cinematic POV, and not an endorsement of this film. Personally, I don't think it should have seen the light of day.