Question about pedophila, prompted by the furor over Cuties

[conuly]

So you know how people are all talking about this movie and the messages, marketing, and/or filming thereof.

Several people known to me have expressed the opinion that showing children, tweens, or teens doing things which adults know look "sexual" is clearly something "designed to appeal to pedophiles".

But what I want to know is - is it? Obviously everybody is different, even people who are sexually attracted to children, but is it the case that people with those desires are, in general, more interested in this sort of scene than pictures of kids acting less overtly "sexual"?

I don't even know how to find this out without ending up on some sort of watch list or, worse, seeing things I actually don't want to see.

Note: this is a separate question from "are those scenes appropriate in this, or any movie" and "whether or not they'd be appropriate in some movies, are they appropriate when acted out by actual children" and anything of that sort. Those are all good questions which people are arguing strenuously over everywhere.

Comments

[silveradept]

Best as I can tell, although I don't have any solid data to back this assertion, is that a movie like Cuties is meant to push hard on the idea of making young people appear and act as adult as possible once they've gone over the line between innocence and knowledge. Which, at least in a US context, happens at a much faster rate for non-dominant youth and especially quickly for children of color, who are treated and punished in more adult ways right from the get go.

I don't know how that maps to people who are attracted to children or who commit child sexual abuse, but this sort of thing seems much more likely to want to appeal to a culture that is willing to think of them as more adult for doing this, rather than being concerned about what kinds of cultural values are being reinforced.