User:Cheska1234/sandbox

The 2020 French movie film entitled Cuties directed by Maimouna Doucoure revolves around a young Senegalese French girl who is caught between her traditional upbringing values and social media trends. The intention behind this movie according to the director was to highlight and criticize the hyper-sexualization of adolescent girls. Netflix released this movie on its streaming platform on September 9th, 2020, and received a backlash of promoting the sexualization and exploitation of young girls. In response, Netflix stood with Cuties and defended the film, and urged viewers to watch the film to gain a better understanding of the sexualization of young children.

Scholars have argued that sexualizations promotes a mechanistic and passive constriction of children and " fails to acknowledge the complexity and multiplicity of reader response and ignores how children might submit to as well as subvert particular cultural messages as well as forms of fashion and commodification". They argue that the sexualization of young girls begins with forms of "sexy toys, clothes and cartons". Numerous marketers who try to promote and sell the enhancement of girls physical appearances only to promote cultural trends. An article by Gill states that's social media serves different kinds of representations portrayal to young girls and young women, in which they increasingly participate as producers as well as consumers. Graff et al said "the sexual objectification of women can involve basing women’s primary value on their sexual appeal to men, and defining appeal based on narrow standards of attractiveness". They argue that the cultural encouragement of the sexualization of young girls brings negative development traits within them as they mature.

They conducted a study of research by presenting to a sample test of US male and female undergraduate students images of sexualized pre-teen girls and young women to determine the effect of the sexualization of adolescents girls.