Netflix is at it again. It says a lot about us that we allow them to get away with it

 

Readers will doubtless remember the scandal over the movie "Cuties" on Netflix back in September.  It portrayed young, pre-teen girls in blatant, highly sexualized acts and attitudes.  At the time, I wrote:

This is nothing more or less than an entertainment industry-sanctioned depiction of pedophile fantasies.  It can't possibly be labeled as anything else, despite vigorous efforts by those promoting it to claim that the movie has redeeming values.  If it does, then monkeys picking excrement out of their butts and flinging it at each other is also morally uplifting.

. . .

I've been particularly sickened by Netflix's call for us to watch the movie before we judge it.  Their arguments are self-serving and specious.  Friends, if I want to judge the efficiency and effectiveness of our city's sewage plant, why would I swim in the raw effluent to do so?  So, too, this movie.  It's entertainment sewage.  Why should I let it splash all over me?  I have more self-respect than that.

This is yet another example of the entertainment industry trying to condition our minds to accept the unacceptable:  to move the "Overton window" of social and cultural acceptability from where it is, to where they want it to be.  It's the latest in a long, long line of such developments.  In the past century we've seen it move from eugenics, to birth control, to abortion, to pornography, to homosexuality, to transsexuality, and now to the legitimization of pedophilia.

If, after becoming aware of this movie and what it portrays and seeks to normalize, you still have a Netflix subscription (or are considering getting one), you're either so deaf, dumb and blind to reality that you deserve pity, or you've allowed yourself to be conditioned for so long that your conscience is no longer functional.

Why has Netflix not already been forced to withdraw this movie by its outraged customers canceling their subscriptions?

And what does that say about our society?

There's more at the link.

Well, it says even more about our society that after such a movie, Netflix is still a major force in the entertainment industry.  Now they're doing it again.

Netflix’s “Tiny Pretty Things” viewers have branded its explicit sex scenes “soft porn.”

The more people tune in to see what all the fuss is about, the more Twitter has been flooded with comments about how explicit the show is.

One even tweeted: “Maybe it’s me, but there is no need for Tiny Pretty Things to literally be softcore porn.

“There is no need for these actors/actresses to be naked all the time or for all the explicit sex scenes, especially while portraying teenagers.”

Another added: “Tiny Pretty Things by @Netflix had so much potential for a story about a Black woman striving to succeed in a white, privileged sport.

“But instead it’s just a show about sex. Why is Netflix so obsessed with sexualizing minors and pushing student-teacher affairs.”

Again, more at the link.

I understand I'm speaking from a perspective - traditional Christian ethics and morals - that is not widely shared these days, even among Christians.  I also admit that I didn't always live up to that perspective myself when I was younger.  Hormones have always been with us, and teens are particularly subject to hormonal drives, as we all remember.

Nevertheless, what Netflix appears to be doing is deliberately pushing the edges of the envelope, trying to accustom people to a radically de-moralized view of society and humanity.  If anything goes, and everybody's doing it, how can we possibly object to Netflix (and others) portraying it?  The answer, of course, is that everybody's not doing it - but Netflix would like them to be, because that way it'll make more money.  Hence, the push to normalize what is most emphatically not normal at all.

If you doubt that, look at any society that isn't being hyper-sexualized by its entertainment industry and social media.  In such parts of the world, teenagers and children have to exist among the realities of life;  hard work to earn a living, struggling to make ends meet, working together as a family to put food on the table and keep a roof over everyone's heads.  There's simply not enough time in the day - or enough energy, after everyone's worked hard all day long - to get up to such antics in the evenings.  Neither is there sufficient privacy.  There's also the fact that birth control is not exactly ubiquitous in such societies, so the risk of pregnancy is always very real.  Netflix never mentions any of those realities, because most of its target audience is cut off from them, insulated by birth control pills and a society that's lost its moral roots and ethical foundations.

Personally, I'd be more than happy to see every Hollywood studio and every TV giant - including Netflix, Disney and all the others - driven out of business.  They won't be, of course.  Too many people simply don't care what they produce.  They'll watch it anyway, and call it "entertainment".  I call it moral sewage.  I'd hate my children to be brought up on a diet of that dreck.  It would make my job as a parent far too difficult to have to counter such insidious propaganda, day in and day out - but I'd have to, because if I loved my children, I wouldn't dream of abandoning them to such hedonistic nonsense.

If you still have a Netflix subscription, may I suggest that says quite a lot about you as a person?  You're enabling this moral degradation to be foisted on our society with every dollar you spend there.  You're voting with your wallet.

I don't care how many other "good" programs may be on Netflix.  It's like the old saying warns us:

If you add a glass of wine to a barrel of sewage, you've got a barrel of sewage.  If you add a glass of sewage to a barrel of wine, you've got a barrel of sewage.

Netflix is moral sewage, IMHO.

Peter