Thursday was a bad day for Netflix, one of the largest video content providers in the world, as well as being a left-leaning organization that partners with the Obamas and other well known Democrats.  Thursday was the day when thousands of people got upset that Netflix was screening and promoting a new French film about tweens twerking as a form of liberation.

The obvious problem is that what Netflix did is catnip for pedophiles.  It also degrades our culture and encourages young children to sexualize themselves.  Beyond the obvious, Netflix’s terrible decision points to a more serious problem in Western culture, which is that sexualizing children is a precursor of state control over the individual.

A tweet on Wednesday first identified the problem:

The pedophiles at Netflix are releasing a movie sexualizing children called 'Cuties.' The description claims it's about an 11 year old girl that becomes "fascinated with twerking" and "exploring her feminity." pic.twitter.com/mh4MKftEPt

— Jaden McNeil (@JadenPMcNeil) August 19, 2020

A Variety article from January promoting the movie when the producer had entered into an agreement for it to open nationwide on Netflix described the film this way:

"Cuties" is about the hyper-sexualization of pre-adolescent girls. It follows an 11-year-old girl of Senegalese [Muslim] origin, living in one of Paris' poorest neighborhoods, who is raised in a pious tradition, but joins a group of young dancers who hope to twerk their way to stardom. 

The movie may indeed be about culture clashes in modern Paris or about pressure on immigrant children (which is what the producer seemed to say), but it still sounds like pedophile porn — and that's certainly how Americans understood Netflix's promotional campaign.

In response to Thursday's outcry, Netflix lowered the sexual heat in its promotion:

Amy, 11 years old, tries to escape family dysfunction by joining a free-spirited dance clique called "Cuties," as they build self confidence through dance.

It later lowered the heat again.  As of this writing, the description sounds like a wholesome Disney tween comedy:

Eleven-year-old Amy starts to rebel against her conservative family's traditions when she becomes fascinated with a free-spirited dance crew.

The people pictured on the movie's Netflix page in dance poses are no longer disturbingly sexualized little girls but are, instead, older teenagers, including boys.

On his Thursday night show, Tucker asked the right question: why?

The obvious answer is that our cultural arbiters are debauched people with pedophile tendencies.  After all, stories about Hollywood's pedophilia and pederasty problem are everywhere.

It goes deeper, though. Since the 1960s, the left has focused on pedophilia as a way to diminish children's sense of self and make them easier to subdue.  It's a form of grooming, of the type Epstein and Maxwell did, but on a national scale.

Children are born with a strong sense of self ("Me! Mine!"), but it's instinctive, not intellectual.  The intellectual knowledge of oneself as a unique and inviolate individual develops in later childhood and continues through the tweens and teens.

Leftism isn't about the individual; it's about the collective.  If leftists are to take over a society, they need to break the connection between a person's body and his sense of self.

German leftism was at the forefront of this movement.  Typically for leftists, they promised that sexualizing children would promote, not destroy, individuality.  For example, Der Spiegel wrote about Revolution der Erziehung (The Revolution in Education), published in 1971, which insisted that bourgeois morals dehumanize children:

The de-eroticization of family life, from the prohibition of sexual activity among children to the taboo of incest, serves as preparation for total assimilation — as preparation for the hostile treatment of sexual pleasure in school and voluntary subjugation to a dehumanizing labor system.

The same Spiegel article then offered chapter and verse about the German left's active efforts to sexualize children — and the damage it did to those children's development.

In West Berlin, beginning in the 1970s and continuing for thirty years, a psychology professor convinced the authorities to place homeless children with known pedophile men on the theory that they'd make "loving" parents.  In Belgium, the leftist Catholic diocese actively promoted pedophilia.  In Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis, Obama's communist mentor, along with promoting disturbing sexual practices such as bondage, simulated rape, and undinism, also encouraged pedophilia (or, at the very least, pederasty).

In America, using the vehicle of the LGBT movement, leftists relentlessly pressure schools to expose children to graphic sexual practices.  In California, a sex ed curriculum ostensibly intended to help kids have safe sex exposes fifth-graders not only to traditional male-female sex but also to...well, everything, including extreme and dangerous sexual practices.

What statists have always understood is that our bodies are the first line in the battle between statism and individualism.  If a person is allowed to develop a sense that his body is his own to control, he will never willingly yield to the demands of the state.  Only by convincing its citizens that they have no personal autonomy, beginning with control over their bodies, can a state completely subsume the individual to the bureaucracy.

Image: Student_ipad_school – 138 by Brad Flickinger; CC 2.0 Generic.