social commentary – Tyler B. Humphries

On August 19, 2020 I saw a Facebook post featuring the original Netflix poster for the Cuties film. I’m going to insert a screenshot of my original reaction.

At first, I thought it was fake or altered like a lot of incendiary posts on the internet are but nope, it was real.

I moved from shock to denial and then rationalization within the span of a few minutes because I was trying to make sense of why Netflix would showcase a film that blatantly sexualizes children. And as I looked further into the situation, I realized it was not a Netflix original, it was a French film that had recently premiered at Sundance. I hadn’t heard anything outrageous about the film when it was shown at Sundance so I dug a little deeper and realized that the problem wasn’t with the film, it was with Netflix. Well, sort of. Give me a minute to explain.

The movie was written and directed by Maimouna Doucouré, a Black French filmmaker who is also a woman. She said she created the film to, “highlight how social media pushes girls to mimic sexualized imagery without fully understanding what lies behind it or the dangers involved.” The film follows an eleven-year-old who decides to join a dance crew that enters a twerking competition. There are a few other things that happen but that’s the basic plot.

Netflix decided to run with the idea that sex sells. And normally it does. Sex used to sell cigarettes and now it sells e-cigarettes and vaping. It also sells soap, burgers, perfumes, razors etc. Sex sells everything….except for movies about children. Even if those movies are about children in grownup situations intended for a mature audience.

After I watched the trailer for the film I got the feeling that this was going to be a racier film because the subject matter is provocative. From the trailer, I got the sense that the film had a very strong message of girls coming of age in a world that sexualizes them at a young age. I could also see from the trailer that this film was going to talk a lot about cultural beliefs, growing to know one’s self, and the influences of western identity and the clash of cultural norms. But the trailer also made me feel like this was going to be an inspirational story about a young girl owning her identity, her womanhood, and her sexuality. And I was not here for that because the protagonist is eleven. If the protagonist was fifteen or sixteen I don’t think anyone would have really batted an eye because the topic of teenagers being overly sexualized is commonplace. There may have still been some push back about the poster but nowhere near the storm we have now.

This is why I applaud the writer/director of this film. She boldly went where a lot of people would not dare to go but now she and her award-winning film is facing a lot of public backlash. We live in a shock-value world and a mixture of her subject matter and Netflix’s poor choice of film description and poster has probably stained her film. I know it surely dissuaded me from watching, although, I feel like I was never part of her target audience, to begin with. I’m well aware that sexualization doesn’t start at the quasi-socially acceptable ages of 15 and 16. No, it starts as soon as a child is born in some cases. I recently read an article about a father who sexually assaulted his own daughter who wasn’t even 1 yet.

Doucouré’s film probably has merit but it’s a film I’m choosing not to watch. Not because I want to hide from the content but because I’m more than aware of how children are sexualized and how our hyper-connectivity to the internet is also playing a role in it. When “WAP” by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion came out and there was backlash from that and I stood by the song even though it’s not typically what I listen to. I stood by it because most of the claims against the song were baseless, in my opinion, in regards to children. Half the issues we have with our children now is because we’re allowing the internet to raise them instead of actually paying attention to what our children like, what they idolize, and what they consume. That song wasn’t for kids in the same way this movie isn’t for kids. But there are tons of people who would hand their kids an iPad without parental controls engaged and be outraged when they realize their kids are watching this film and then get on social media and tell everyone that this movie is promoting sexualization of kids and pedophilia.

You can also say that even if she wasn’t intending to, she created pornographic images of children for pedophiles to desire. And I would simply say, again, this film isn’t for me because I don’t want to sit through a film about eleven-year-olds twerking but the images still exist elsewhere. Where do you think she got her inspiration from?

This sentiment also brings to mind a well-known book titled Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It was published in the 1950s and is well known for its subject matter as well as the amazing narrative devices it used. Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged man who is “seduced” by his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. I was forced to read it in college and I found the book to be amazing but disturbing and at some points physically sickening because the story is written from Humbert’s point of view and he’s an unreliable narrator who doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. You have to read the text as well as what isn’t there in order to understand what’s really happening.

It’s very provocative and it sparked outrage, publication and book bans as well as several film and stage adaptations. And it’s where the term Lolita, a young girl who is sexually promiscuous, comes from. The author wrote the book to try to give a glimpse into the mind of a pedophile. The plot is assumed to be loosely based on two child abductions and rapes that had taken place within a ten-year span of Nabokov writing the book. The only special request he ever made in regards to the book was for the book to never have a little girl on the cover. Never. Skip forward seventy-ish years later and almost all of the covers have little girls on them. And a lot of the covers with little girls on them are little girls in sexually suggestive poses. As the book has been reprinted new covers have been made. You can take a look at 60 versions of the book’s cover here.

I brought it up just to say that the author wanted to talk about an important but sickening subject matter but he also didn’t want to objectify the real victim of his story but people did it anyway.

If you want to learn more about this or at least hear the film’s creator talk about the controversy, you should read the BBC article that sparked me to write this post.

Tiny disclaimer: Everyone has natural hair if you have not chemically altered the texture of your hair but for the purpose of this article, I’m focusing on being part of the Natural Hair Movement which was created mainly for Black people but includes other POC because we have been historically (and currently) discriminated against due to our natural hair textures and forced to assimilate to a more Eurocentric beauty standard.

Introduction

Legend has it, I was born with so much hair that the doctors had to cut it in order to see my face. I was born back in 1995 to two loving Black parents. When I was growing up little girls still wore puffs, beads, and barrettes but it was the 90s so a lot of us also wore braids. Some of the braided styles used our own hair and some used synthetic extensions but the styles were still child-friendly.

Me as a baby

When I was around 6 or 7 my mom found out she had leukemia and she became very ill and was hospitalized. During her hospital stay, my dad had to do my hair and let’s just say things didn’t go so well. He was trying his best, but every morning we’d have to wake up early to press (thermally straighten with a pressing comb, very similar to flat ironing) my hair in order to get it into the styles that he was used to seeing. After a few months both him and I were tired of him accidentally burning me and yanking my hair out. So, after talking it over with my mom and cousin, he decided it was time to relax (chemically straighten) my hair to make things easier on all of us.

My parents on their wedding day

Childhood

Because I was so young when all of this happened and we didn’t take a lot of photos back then, I started to forget what my natural hair texture looked like. And as time went on, I never thought too hard about the whole thing either, but that’s a discussion for a different post. By the time I was in middle school relaxing my hair was normal and it was a normal process for all the Black girls and parents around me. In fact, it was very rare to see someone with free-flowing natural hair. I was used to seeing people with dreads/dreadlocks/locs and even older people with the “scholarly” short, grey/salt and pepper ‘Fro but I didn’t see many people with Natural hair the way I see them today.

From the time my hair was relaxed, all the way up to high school, I didn’t have any major problems with my hair. It was thick (for relaxed hair) and it was a decent length. The only thing that upset me was that it wouldn’t grow past my shoulders. I was the girl who always had her hair braided; that’s probably why I never experienced any real hair problems with relaxing my hair. But while my hair was braided, my hair would grow about 2 inches but I would never retain that length when we relaxed my hair again.

My relaxed hair

My hair in braids

Transition

Fast forward a bit; the year is 2013 and I just graduated from high school. During that summer, my parents and I were getting me ready to move onto campus and everything was going fantastic until my mom asked me what I’m was going to do with my hair. What she really meant by that was, “Who is going to relax your hair?” I had never relaxed my own hair; my mom usually did it and on a rare occasion my Aunt Nykyta would pay for me to spend the day at a beauty salon she favored. Something as simple as styling my hair sent us into a tiny panic although it seemed minor, it really wasn’t. It was more than a beauty/cosmetic problem, it was a cultural problem. We were already aware that Webster Groves was a really White county (I ended up finding out it was close to 98% White during a school project) and we knew there would be no shops, stores, or salons that catered to Black beauty needs and it would probably be hard to find a Black student I trusted enough to relax my hair. In retrospect, I now know that wouldn’t have worked either because during my freshman year I had classes in which I was the only person of color in the room. Let that sink in a bit.

Summer Before College

First college hairstyle

So I spent my summer before college trying to figure out a way to solve my problem. I ended up joining Tumblr that summer as well and I can honestly say it changed my life. When I got on there, I kept seeing beautiful Black women with really long hair. Some of it was straight and some of it was puffy Afros. At first, I thought they were wigs until I started clicking on the tags and following links. That’s how I discovered the Natural Hair Movement. I was intrigued by it and I’ll be honest with myself and you all, I really wanted to know more about it because I kept seeing all of these Black women with beautiful, healthy, LONG hair. I discovered Curly Nikki and then I took my search to Youtube and that’s what solidified it for me. I knew I was going to go Natural. That was it. I was done. My radical college change had already started. It wasn’t a radical body change, religious awakening or debunking, or personality swap. For me, the biggest change I underwent was my hair and that did influence my overall personality, but that is a discussion for a different post.

I told my mom and dad what I wanted to do and they were sort of on board. Remember, this was 2013, and although the Natural Hair Movement started gaining steam in 2009 a) I was in the Midwest and b) it hadn’t hit its saturation point yet so at the time we still had people who were very unaware of it. There were no commercials with Black families rocking Natural hair, there weren’t as many Natural hair products available as there is now, and there were no discussions on who was part of the movement and who was being excluded. This was 2013, there were things available to us, but we were all still fumbling around.

Transition hairstyle 1

transition hairstyle 2

I went to college rocking some very large and heavy box braids with the intent to grow my hair out and cut the relaxed ends, little by little, over the course of a year. During the first seven months of school, I struggled to maintain both textures of my hair. I wore my hair in semi-curly styles using Flexi rods and braid outs. My hair looked a hot mess but at least I was happy. My mom faked the happiness but my dad flat out told me the truth but at the time I couldn’t see the truth because of the way he’d stated it. During my trips back home, I had to flat iron my hair straight in order to avoid conversations I didn’t want to have, and even straightening my hair looked bad because my roots would puff up so quickly and I wasn’t used to styling my own hair. But at least it was growing, that’s all that mattered to me.

The longest my hair grew while transiting from relaxed to natural

Eventually, though, my mom grew fed-up with it and decided to “help” me out. She offered to trim my ends to even it out because I’d started experiencing split ends due to the constant flat-ironing and the two textures. Instead of just trimming my ends or evening out my hair, my mom gave me a big chop. She cut off my relaxed ends and left me with about 4 inches of Afro-textured hair so it looked like it was about 2 inches of hair. I cried like a baby. But this was a teachable moment because since she cut my hair back in 2014, no one else has cut my hair. I learned how to cut my own hair because of that incident. But anyway, back to the story. After she cut it she braided my hair up into a bun with some braiding hair and the next weekend, I used my paycheck to get my hair professionally braided. I was natural.

Natural

My natural curl pattern

After about two and a half months, I took my braids down and my hair had grown out a bit. I started styling it but found that I had a different hair texture than what I thought I did. At first, I was disappointed but within a month or two, I was fine, and a few months later, I loved my hair. For my dad’s funeral, I straightened my hair but halfway through the process, I stopped because something didn’t feel right. I washed my hair and thought everything was fine. I even styled it in a curly style and thought it looked fine. But as my hair started to grow more, I realized I had heat damage right around my right temple. It wasn’t extreme but it was noticeable when my hair was down so I started styling my hair in more pinned up styles.

Processed with Rookie

During these months, I also discovered that I’m protein sensitive. That means I can’t use products that are high in protein because it makes my hair dry like straw and my hair starts to break off. Discovering this made me simplify my hair routine. Instead of using products that said things like “made with olive oil” or “made with shea butter” I just started using the actual thing that enticed me to buy it in the first place. For example, I now use olive oil in my hair care routine. It caused me to stop buying so many products and it made the whole process cheaper. In fact, on a standard wash day, I now only use about 4 hair products. 5 if you count water as a product.

Over the course of my sophomore year, I was slowly cutting my hair to cut out the damaged parts. During the winter is when I stopped cutting and my hair finally started to visibly grow. In some of my photos it almost looks like I’m a chia pet because the growth seemed so sudden but in reality, I just stopped cutting my hair. This is really when my healthy hair journey started and I started to see growth, both in myself and in my hair. Over the years, I’ve done blowouts to show progress and I’ve learned how to style my hair a lot of different ways but I haven’t tried straightening it since the heat damage incident. And I haven’t tried to dye it either, out of fear of damaging it. I’m hoping that 2018 will be the year that I become fearless.

My Natural Hair Timeline

I transitioned from August 2013–March 2014
Big chopped March 2014
Heat damage by June of 2014
My second transition starts June 2014–January 2015
Healthy Hair January 2015–Now
I’ve been Natural for 3 years and 9 months and I’m about 4 inches away from meeting my goal of waist-length hair.

What is your Natural hair story?