Elizabeth Johnston Ministries has worked hard over the years to expose the disturbing, pervasive sexualization of children in today’s popular culture.
Nonetheless, the blatant, perverse nature of the piece of child pornography that was “Cuties,” a French coming-of-age film carried by Netflix that sparked massive backlash for its jaw-dropping content.
The film, if you are yet aware, is the story of an 11-year-old girl who joins a twerking team. It involves several scenes showing the girls gyrating and imitating highly graphic sexual acts, including one of their bare breasts, and a reference to the young protagonist’s genitalia.
It is absolutely disgusting smut at best, criminal child exploitation in reality.
Well, it is just this degree of godlessness that has always motivated Elizabeth to equip parents with the tools they need to stand up to our desperately wayward culture and in the case of “Cuties,” it was grassroots social media activism that targeted and attacked Netflix for carrying this abhorrent film.
And they have sustained some serious battle wounds.
The New York Post reports that Netflix has seen subscription cancelations spike by 800% following the #CancelNetflix boycott sparked by the film’s release and a Change.org petition with hundreds of thousands of signatures.
The Post reports that Netflix’s chief financial officer Spence Neumann did not mention “Cuties” during a third-quarter earnings call this week, focusing instead of the first half of the year during which nationwide lockdowns had driven an increase in subscriptions.
He told the company’s investors that they “came pretty close” to their worldwide membership goal of 195 million.
The “Cuties” boycott began in September, and in the three months that ended on September 30th, the streaming service gained 2.2 million subscribers.
This was, however, down from the first two quarters, which saw membership additions of 16 million and 10 million, respectively.
Also, data analyzed by New York firms Antenna and YipitData, the boycott seems to have done some damage to subscriptions.
According to Antenna, in the first two weeks of September alone, when the boycott was first launched, Netflix lost five times as many subscribers as they’d lost in all of August.
Yikes.
YipitData, meanwhile, calculated September’s cancellations at a rate 8 times higher than that in August. They characterized this drop as “a multi-year high.”
The numbers don’t lie, folks. You don’t have to roll over and play dead while billion-dollar companies exploit and sexualize young children. In fact, if you don’t stand up and push back, who will?
It’s time for the righteous to make their voices heard. We can make an impact. But we have to make the right choice. Stay silent and watch our culture — and our children’s virtue — fall away, or take a stand and make a difference.
By Elizabeth Johnston, author of Not on My Watch: How to Win the Fight for Family, Faith and Freedom
